Some 50 people, including four Berkeley city councilmembers, rallied at the Maudelle Shirek Building Tuesday, demanding that federal drug agents and the Los Angeles Police Department stay out of Berkeley and that the city become a sanctuary for distributors of medical marijuana. 

Either—or both—the Drug Enforcement Agency or the LAPD was responsible for freezing the Berkeley Patients Group’s account at the Bank of America, according to BPD administrator Debby Goldsberry, who discovered the funds were frozen when she went to make a withdrawal on Monday. 

This comes on the heels of a DEA /LAPD raid July 25 on 10 medical marijuana distributors in Los Angeles, in which agents entered the medical marijuana dispensaries and seized medicine and equipment. 

Among the L.A. dispensaries targeted was the California Patients’ Group that has ties to the BPG. 

Wednesday, a DEA spokesperson in Los Angeles said she could not confirm or deny whether the DEA had a hand in freezing the account.  

“From what I hear, [the BPA] is associated with the dispensary down here,” Sarah Pullen, DEA-Los Angeles spokesperson told the Daily Planet. The federal search warrant is under seal, she said. 

William Panzer, the Oakland attorney representing the BPG, however, said he thinks the LAPD froze the account. He said he is waiting to see an affidavit from them and believes that whatever reason was given on it would not be credible.  

“If police don’t like the law [Proposition 215], they won’t follow it,” Panzer said. An LAPD spokesperson told the Daily Plant on Wednesday that he would research the question. 

“I hope we can adopt a resolution calling for Berkeley to be a sanctuary city where patients can be safe from disruption from the Nazi tactics of the federal government,” said Councilmember Darryl Moore, who spoke at the rally, along with Councilmembers Kriss Worthington, Max Anderson and Linda Maio.  

“The federal government should stop messing with sick people here and in the state,” Moore added. 

Berkeley Patients’ Group’s claims that the Drug Enforcement Agency had federal Drug Enforcement Agency froze the bank account Monday of the Berkeley Patients’ Group, an eight-year-old medical marijuana distributor. 

1996's Proposition 215, which allows residents of the state to use marijuana for treatment of chronic pain, anorexia, cancer and other serious illness 

The restaurant remodel and mixed-use development of the historic Fidelity Bank Building on Shattuck Avenue was postponed by the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) Thursday to investigate ways to alleviate the project’s loss of parking. 

While the board agreed that they were in favor of the proposed preservation and reuse of this historic structure at 2323 Shattuck Ave., they voted 5-2 to request the city manager to look into instituting a fee to offset the project’s elimination of eight parking spots. The fee would be applied toward creating more downtown parking. 

Architect Jim Novosel has proposed a project which would preserve the existing 4,000-square-foot structure and convert the two-story bank space into a restaurant and a dwelling unit. 

The project includes a new five-story building, to be built in place of the existing three-story building adjacent to the Fidelity Building, which would have 2,609 square feet of commercial floor area and 15 dwelling units. The permit request includes beer and wine services at the restaurant and sidewalk cafe seating. 

The proposal, already approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, would keep the exterior of the Fidelity building intact. 

Located between the Mechanics Bank and the Union Bank on Shattuck Avenue, the Fidelity Bank Building was designed by architect Walter Ratcliff in 1925. 

It was last occupied by Citibank Corporation but now sits empty. In recent years, it has been used as a venue for the Berkeley Arts Festival. 

“We are thrilled to be doing this building,” Novosel told the board Thursday. 

“It’s going to be saved in its entirety when we could have demolished everything except for the facade.” 

“Parking is the main issue in the project,” zoning staff told board members.  

“We support the concept of the proposed mixed-use infill nature of the project, but we cannot recommend approval of this project due to the proposal to eliminate on-site parking, which requires a variance.” 

Novosel proposes to remove all of the eight existing on-site spaces without providing any new parking based on the explanation that the additional costs to provide onsite spaces would reduce the project’s economic viability. 

Novosel also contends that the downtown location of the project site made preservation of the existing on-site parking lot and driveway inappropriate.  

“One of the principles of the Downtown Area Planning Committee (DAPAC) is mixed-used development that would result in the restoration of the downtown,” said ZAB board member Jesse Arreguin. “This project meets some of those goals. It’s taking a beautiful building and turning it into something that will help Shattuck Avenue. I am personally happy with the decrease of residential parking spaces and the increase in commercial parking. But car share opportunities and transit passes should be offered.” 

The current zoning ordinance strictly prohibits new developments from removing existing on-site parking spaces. 

Rauly Butler, senior vice president of Mechanics Bank, opposed the project at the hearing. 

“I am very pro-development in downtown,” he said. “I like the fact that housing will go in. But the parking is ridiculously low. It all comes down to public benefit.” 

In a letter to ZAB, Butler stated that “alternatives had not been explored in good faith” and that the project density was designed for income and not public benefit. 

“This lack of effort to explore workable alternatives clearly indicates a single focus on the part of the developer and does not warrant the granting of variances as a result.” 

Maurice Segerberg, who operated a retail bicycle store at 2301 Shattuck Ave. for 40 years, expressed concerns about parking and called the project an “eyesore” in his letter to the ZAB.  

“Not only does this project provide no additional parking, it eliminates eight existing off-street parking spots. Eight spots may not seem like a lot but consider that each spot may have from five to 10 hits a day. That could mean as many as 80 individual consumer usages a day.” 

Novosel told board members that the restaurant would provide valet parking for its customers and arrange for 10 parking spaces in one of the two parking lots in the neighborhood. 

“The property owner will also buy transit passes and membership in ride share programs for its residents,” he said.  

“In order for that to happen, would you have leases that said residents cannot have cars?” board member Sara Shumer asked. 

“The loss of parking is critical,” said board member Terry Doran. “These eight spaces are used by people who are doing business in the area, going to Venus restaurant and the banks.” 

Boardmember Bob Allen spoke in favor of approving the project without the parking spaces. 

“This board blew off a hundred parking spaces at the Brower Center,” he said. “And we are sitting here worrying about eight parking spaces. None of the mixed-use developments and theaters on Shattuck provides parking. If we don’t allow this project without parking, we are going to lose a really good building without the facade.” 

Board vice-chair Rick Judd echoed his thoughts. 

“Eight parking spaces won’t make or break downtown,” he said. “But we do need parking downtown. As a city we need to get off our butts and do something about the parking fee ... We could ask the city manager to report back to us what it would take to collect an annual fee from this project. We should convey to them that we do want to approve this project but we are struggling badly.” 

The hearing was continued to Aug. 9.

Rent Stabilization Board Member Chris Kavanagh, a Green Party member first elected to the board in 2002, may not live in Berkeley, a requirement for all elected officials in Berkeley.  

The question was raised in a piece by Matier & Ross in Monday’s San Francisco Chronicle. It’s not the first time the question was asked. 

In late 2002 or 2003, the city attorney turned a question of Kavanagh’s residency over to the Alameda County District Attorney’s office, according to City Clerk Pamyla Means. It appears that the DA declined to file charges at the time. Neither the DA’s office nor Means could confirm that as a fact, however. 

Kavanagh did not return numerous calls for comment. 

At issue is a cottage at 338 63rd St., Oakland, for which Kavanagh signed a lease in 2001.  

H. Wayne Goodroe, an attorney working on behalf of new owners of the cottage and the house in front of it, says he is trying to evict Kavanagh from the property and provided the Daily Planet with a copy of the 2001 lease. He said Kavanagh is the only person named in the eviction proceedings for the cottage. A woman who answered the door at the cottage Monday afternoon said she had no comment.  

A review of Kavanagh’s voter registration filings shows him living at that Oakland address for a brief time when running for his first seat on the rent board, but not during the time he has been serving on the board. 

It appears that he was registered to vote in early 2002 at 2828 College Ave., then on May 10, 2002, moved his registration to the Oakland address. Following that, on Aug. 19, 2002 he moved his registration to 22 Tunnel Road in Berkeley. He was elected in November 2002 and took office Dec. 10.  

On Jan. 9, 2003, he moved his registration to the 2709 Dwight Way Apt. 16 address, where he has told fellow rent commissioners he now lives. 

“In light of today’s allegations, we will try to determine his residency,” Means told the Daily Planet on Monday.  

Glen Kohler, manager of the apartment building at 2709 Dwight Way, responded to the Planet’s inquiry, saying: “No, he doesn’t” live at that address. 

Questioned about how long the elected official had been “gone,” Kohler answered: “I don’t know if ‘gone’ is the correct word,” explaining he meant that during the two and one-half years that he had been managing the apartment, Kavanagh had, to his knowledge, never lived there. 

A postal worker delivering mail while the Daily Planet was at the Dwight Way apartment house said Kavanagh had previously received mail there, but hadn’t for more than a year and a half. 

The mailbox at apartment No. 16, where Kavanagh has said he lives, bears no name. 

Asked if he knows where Kavanagh lives, Rent Board Executive Director Jay Kelekian told the Daily Planet on Monday, “To my knowledge he resides in Berkeley.”  

Kelekian said that Kavanagh had informed the rent board of a change of address to 2705 Webster one time, but had informed Kelekian that address is actually a box at the Elmwood Post Office and that he continued to live at the Dwight Way apartment. 

Kelekian said Kavanagh picks up his rent board materials at the rent board office. 

If it is determined that Kavanagh doesn’t meet the residency requirements of the City Charter, Kelekian said he thinks the rent board would agree that he should step down.  

Determining residency is not the rent board’s call, he said, explaining it is up to the city clerk’s office to investigate. 

Rent Board Chair Jesse Arreguin said he is aware that this is not the first time the question has been raised. Reporting a conversation with Kavanagh on the topic, Arreguin said, “He assured us that he rents an apartment in Berkeley and stays with his girlfriend in Oakland.” 

Apparently the question of Kavanagh’s residence has not come before the city’s Fair Campaign Practices Commission. “It’s never been drawn to our attention,” said Eric Weaver, FCPC chair. 

“We looked at the fact that he is the most chronic late filer,” Weaver added. 

Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums won a large measure of vindication over charges in some media outlets that he was missing in action in the Waste Management workers lockout dispute, when representatives of both Waste Management and Teamsters workers told a Friday afternoon City Hall press conference that a settlement of the month-long lockout would not have been possible without the mayor’s intervention. 

Members of Teamsters Local 70 ratified the new contract on Saturday, ending a dispute that began two days before the July 4 holiday when Waste Management officials locked out close to 500 trash workers several days after their contract ended. The company brought in replacement workers to try to fill in, but the lockout disrupted trash pickup in several East Bay cities that have contracts with Waste Management services to pick up garbage, recycling, and yard clippings. By far the largest city affected was Oakland. 

Details of the contract were not available, but both sides called them fair. 

Dellums was specifically asked by the federal mediator in charge of the negotiations to participate in the meetings to help resolve the dispute. 

On Thursday morning, while Teamsters and Waste Management negotiators were meeting with Dellums and Dellums’ Budget Director Dan Lindheim in a federal mediator’s office in Oakland, working out the final details in the contract settlement, the San Francisco Chronicle was publishing an article by reporter Christopher Heredia saying that “next to the uncollected garbage, the biggest stink in Oakland right now might be the dispute over how Mayor Ron Dellums has handled his first major crisis, the lockout of trash haulers.” 

The Chronicle article quoted one Oakland resident who spoke favorably of Dellums’ actions, but three other individuals quoted, including an anonymous city official, were critical of what they said was the mayor’s failure to intervene quickly enough in the dispute. 

Typical of the critical comments was one from Barbara Richardson of East Oakland, who said “I think it’s pitiful. I forgot he was mayor. This has gone on for four weeks. He should not have waited so long before he stepped in. All these mediators didn’t work. I’ve heard nothing from him. I look at the news every morning and I didn’t hear his name anywhere, not until the second week.” 

But at Friday’s press conference announcing the proposed settlement, Waste Management Area Vice President James Devlin said he was “stunned” during the course of the contract negotiations to read articles alleging that Dellums was either totally inactive in the dispute or had been tardy in intervening. 

“It could have been easy for the mayor to step back and hysterically criticize us, but he didn’t,” Devlin said. “He was one of the few people to stick his neck out to find a resolution. Mayor Dellums has a reputation of working both sides of the [political] aisle, and he personified that in the contract discussions. He worked both sides in this issue. We might not have even been talking at all without his intervention.” 

That position was echoed by Chuck Mack, Teamsters Local 70 secretary-treasurer. 

“A lot of people believed that when Ron Dellums decided to come back to Oakland to run for mayor,” Mack said, “he was not of a mind to get his hands dirty or to get down in the nitty-gritty and grunge of running a city.” 

Mack, whose union supported Oakland City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente in last summer’s Oakland mayoral election, paused with a sheepish look on his face, and then said, “I might have said that myself.”  

The reporters in the upstairs reception area at City Hall outside of the mayor’s office erupted in laughter. “But Mayor Dellums’ actions in these negotiations changed my mind completely,” Mack went on. “I don’t think we would have had this agreement without his persuasion, his coercion, his intimidation, at times, and his cajoling.” 

Oakland City Attorney John Russo, who filed an injunction against Waste Management in Superior Court for the company’s failure to pick up all the trash in Oakland along its routes during the lockout, also disputed the contention that the city had failed to intervene early.  

Russo said that by July 5, which he noted was two business days after the lockout began, the city’s Public Works Department was already taking the legal steps under the city’s contract with Waste Management that would make the later injunction possible, as well as possible action by Mayor Dellums to declare that Waste Management had broken its contract with Oakland. That declaration would have allowed the city to hire a replacement firm to pick up the city’s uncollected trash. 

Dellums said he chose not to exercise that option because he believed a settlement between Waste Management and the Teamsters was in the best long-term interests of the city. 

Dellums refused to get into a discussion about whether the Waste Management settlement also settled the discussion over his role in settling the lockout. 

“I’ll allow history to determine whether my actions were appropriate,” he said.

Nearly a month after the U.S. Supreme Court severely restricted the use of race to bring about diversity in schools, a group of legal scholars and education officials gathered at a recent panel discussion on the issue and said Berkeley’s integration strategy is likely to withstand challenges based on the recent 5-4 decision, and may become a model for other districts that are struggling to integrate their schools without triggering legal barriers. 

“We are very optimistic that the Berkeley plan will be a model adopted by others in other parts of the country,” said Michele Lawrence, superintendent of the Berkeley Unified School District and one of four panel members at the forum, which was held last Tuesday at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Law School. 

Under Berkeley’s school assignment policy, which was developed five years ago by a community advisory group charged with coming up with a race-neutral integration strategy, students are categorized by geographic zones, which are determined by parent education level, parent income, and race. Students are assigned to schools based on personal preference and on the geographic zones in which they live, rather than on their race alone. 

BUSD has thwarted challenges to its integration policy by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a Sacramento-based nonprofit which sued the district twice, alleging that Berkeley’s plan violated Proposition 209, a 1996 California law banning racial preferences in public education.  

PLF attorney Paul Beard praised the recent ruling, saying it would open up another way to challenge BUSD’s and other districts’ racial integration policies. “We only brought 209 cases because of its stricter equal protection standard,” said Beard. “But we may use federal means in the future, depending on what the facts of the case are.”  

But legal scholars at the forum seemed to agree with Lawrence’s belief that Berkeley’s policies will stand up against any new attacks by PLF or any other group. Goodwin Liu, an assistant law professor at Boalt who filed a friend-of-the-court brief earlier this year in favor of race-conscious school integration plans, said the Berkeley system is more coherent and comprehensive than those implemented in Louisville and Seattle, the two cities whose districts were sued in the cases recently decided by the court. He said that in Seattle the court’s majority determined that the district failed to prove that its plan passed the “compelling interest” test cited in the court ruling. 

“The Seattle case was considered ‘incoherent’ because the district only considered white and black students, even though the school district had more ethnicities,” said Liu. “So it was not coherent with the stated compelling interest” of fostering racial diversity. 

The court also found fault with the two districts because of their failure to show necessity, a standard that requires districts to exhaust all non-racial strategies to achieve integration. But David Campos, general counsel for the San Francisco Unified School District, said experience suggests that racial integration cannot be achieved without focusing on race. 

“San Francisco proves that these other strategies don’t work,” said Campos. 

SFUSD was put under a consent decree in 1983 to racially integrate its schools. In 1994, a group of Chinese American students sued the district, claiming that its integration policy discriminated against them. From 1999 to 2001, the district abandoned the use of race as a factor in integration and adopted a random assignment process, which increased segregation. After the 2002 settlement with the group, the district adopted a system which takes into account various socio-economic factors. But under that policy, Campos said, “schools continue to desegregate severely.” 

Christopher Edley, dean of Boalt Law School, wondered aloud whether the Supreme Court, in laying out a requirement of “necessity,” was compelling every district seeking to achieve diversity to exhaust every means imaginable, regardless of how many times it had been attempted elsewhere. 

“I fear that the scenario you are describing Chris is what the court intends,” said Liu. “I don’t think the justices are approaching this from a reality-based perspective.” 

After more than a year of delays, Pacific Steel Casting released its Health Risk Assessment report to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District last week.  

The report—which is yet to be released to the public—is intended to help determine whether the country’s third largest steel foundry poses a health risk to Berkeley residents, as neighbors of the Second Street plant have long maintained. 

“It will go through a series of reviews,” said Elisabeth Jewel, of Aroner, Jewel & Ellis Partners, the public relations firm representing Pacific Steel. “It could even be changed. But it’s important information for the neighbors that may help them better understand what kind of impact Pacific Steel has on the community.” 

The neighbors, however, aren’t so sure. Most called the process of how the report was put together “deeply flawed.” 

Although the air district initially told community members in an e-mail that the HRA would be made public by the end of July, agency spokesperson Karen Schkolnick told the Planet Monday that air district engineers were currently doing a preliminary review of the report. 

“We just received it on July 23,” Schkolnick said. “Once we complete our preliminary review of the emissions impact and modeling data, we will send it to the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. After completing the preliminary review, we will provide a 90-day public review period.” 

Schkolnick added that feedback from the public, the city and the air district engineers would be incorporated into the approval process for the report. 

“We fully expect the so-called Health Risk Assessment to be a whitewash of the ongoing problems and ongoing threat to public health from Pacific Steel's pollution,” said Bradley Angel, executive director of Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice. “Residents continue to complain of noxious odors and there is a disturbing pattern of cancer in the surrounding community that is coming to light. The fight to stop PSC's pollution problem will continue.” 

Based in the predominantly industrial neighborhood of West Berkeley, Pacific Steel has been the target of public outcry claiming that the steel mill pollutes the environment and contributes to asthma and respiratory diseases. 

Although Pacific Steel installed a carbon adsorption system at Plant 3 in October, odor complaints continue to be made by community members to the Air District. 

According to the California Environmental Protection Agency, risk assessments are geared toward helping scientists and regulators “determine serious health hazards and set realistic goals for reducing exposure to toxins so that there is no significant health threat to the public.” 

West Berkeley Alliance for Clean Air and Safe Jobs volunteer Janice Schroeder said she was concerned that Pacific Steel Casting’s report may do little more than provide “risk number mumbo-jumbo” without compelling cleanup.  

In an e-mail to the Planet, Schroeder said that the Alliance wanted Pacific Steel to implement a Toxic Use Reduction program. 

“The Toxic Use Reduction program requires the industry to become fully transparent and accountable to the community, to use the best housekeeping practices in all operations, and to modernize the facility,” said Schroeder.  

“It’s time for cleanup, not just guesstimates.” 

According to Dr. Michael Wilson of UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health, the Health Risk Assessment is not an effective tool whereas Toxic Use Reduction has been proved to be much more promising. 

Jewel maintains that PSC has complied with the law. 

“This is the tool they have through state law to gain information,” she said. “It’s through the California EPA, which is a much higher standard then the USEPA. The kind of information that is provided to neighbors is more through CEPA than federal law.” 

Environmental groups continue to call the model flawed. 

“There is so much that goes into the report that’s heavily biased that it can never be taken seriously,” said Martin Bourque of the Ecology Center. “The results are biased to make it seem that there is no health risk ... Their assumption is that it’s okay for one person in a million to get cancer. We don’t think it’s okay. The results are not going to convince members of the affected public in any way.” 

Philip Huang, attorney for the non-profit Communities for Better Environment, said that a toxic use reduction program was a more comprehensive and health-protective method than the HRA. 

“We welcome the HRA,” he said. “At the same time the state legislature is considering a bill called the Toxic Use Reduction Act which requires industries to examine their industrial processes and determine how they can reduce the risk of toxic chemicals.” 

Bourque added that the fact that the HRA was being paid for by Pacific Steel was another reason not to rely on it. 

“Even though the consultants are a third party, they know where their pay checks are coming from,” he said. “I doubt that the HRA will produce any significant negative results and PSC will just turn around and say ‘we told you so.’”

The California Supreme Court Monday upheld a death penalty for a former Berkeley waterfront commissioner who brutally beat a university professor and his wife and then murdered and dismembered a fellow commissioner who would have testified against him. 

Enrique Zambrano, 63, a contractor who also served on the Berkeley Waterfront Commission, was given the death penalty in Alameda County Superior Court in 1993 for murdering fellow commissioner Luis Reyna in July 1988.  

Reyna’s body, missing head and hands, was found in the Lafayette hills. Prosecutors said the murder motive was to prevent Reyna from testifying that Zambrano told him he had brutally bludgeoned Robert and Barbara Mishell six months earlier, on Jan. 31, 1988. 

Robert Mishell, a University of California immunology professor, and Barbara Mishell, who managed her husband’s laboratory, were severely injured in the attack at their Berkeley home but survived.  

Prosecutors said Zambrano, who had done remodeling work for the couple, believed they had made anonymous phone calls revealing he was having an extramarital affair with a girlfriend. He was convicted of their attempted murder.  

Zambrano admitted during his trial that he attacked the Mishells, but said he had “lost control,” and admitted he was present at Reyna’s death and later decapitated and hid the body. But he contended Reyna was accidentally killed during a struggle over a gun. 

The state high court, in a ruling issued in San Francisco, rejected a series of claims in which Zambrano challenged jury selection, jury instructions and prosecution closing arguments at his trial and argued that a death sentence was disproportionate to his crimes. 

Justice Marvin Baxter wrote, “We reject the claim” of a disproportionate sentence. 

“He was a successful contractor and public official who brutally assaulted Robert and Barbara Mishell, leaving both with permanent disabilities, because he believed they had exposed his extramarital affair,” Baxter wrote for the court. 

“After admitting this assault to his friend and fellow official, Luis Reyna, he murdered Reyna to prevent Reyna’s testimony against him in the Mishell matter, then decapitated and dismembered Reyna’s body and dumped it in a remote location in order to hamper the body’s identification,” the court said.  

“Under these circumstances, defendant’s death sentence is not so disproportionate as to ... offend fundamental notions of human dignity,” Baxter said.  

All seven justices upheld Zambrano’s convictions for attempted murder and first-degree murder with a special circumstance of witness killing.  

Six of the judges upheld the death sentence, but Justice Joyce Kennard said in a partial dissent that Zambrano should be given a new penalty trial because of errors in jury selection and prosecution arguments.  

Today’s ruling on Zambrano’s direct appeal from the trial court is the first step in the lengthy appeal process in California death penalty cases.  

Zambrano also has a habeas corpus petition pending before the state high court and if he loses that appeal, he can file a similar petition in federal court. 

Reyna was initially silent, but gave police a taped statement on April 15, 1988, saying that Zambrano had confessed to him. Two days later, Zambrano was arrested. 

After Zambrano posted bail in the Mishell assault case on July 15, he arranged a July 18 meeting with Reyna. Reyna left his home for the meeting and was never seen alive again. 

Zambrano then fled to Mexico with his girlfriend, Linda “Celebration” Oberman, and was arrested on a visit to Palm Springs in 1989.

Berkeley may be getting $330,000 more for mental heath services, in addition to the nearly $1 million already allocated under the state Mental Health Services Act (MHSA). 

The city asked Berkeley residents last week to submit recommendations for using the cash. To receive the additional money, the city must give the state an outline of how the funds would be used and give the public 30 days to comment on the recommendations. The window for public comment closes Aug. 20. 

The MHSA Steering Committee—comprised of staff, consumers and other stakeholders—has recommendations that include allocations for the Homeless Action Center and the Youth Emergency and Assistance Hostel (YEAH!). 

California voters approved the Mental Health Services Act in November 2004. The act places a 1 percent tax on every dollar of personal income over $1 million.  

“The state allocates these revenues to local mental health departments for the purpose of transforming and expanding mental health services,” said Kathy Cramer, program supervisor. “State income tax revenues have exceeded projections and according to the new law, the state is required to release these additional funds to local governments.  

Berkeley Mental Health commissioner Michael Diehl said he was pleased that the additional funds would focus on mental health housing. 

“The steering committee has come up with a plan for the $330,000 which includes a heavy focus on permanent housing, which in my opinion was somewhat slighted in the plan for the $1.1 million, due to the existence of preexisting state funding under AB2034 for mental health housing for those defined as both seriously mentally ill and homeless,” he said. “One of my key goals is to get the homeless off the streets. As a result, this is the part of the MHSA funding I am particularly interested in.” 

The MHSA provides a combination of permanent as well as temporary housing through the Russell Street Residence and the Martin Luther King House. 

Under the additional funding, housing services have been allocated a total of $182,227, which includes housing coordinators, benefits advocacy and additional housing supports. 

YEAH! will receive $20,000 for a clinician to help transition-aged youth; additional peer counselors will also be funded. 

Kramer added that the MHSA strives to employ peer counselors who had once taken advantage of mental health services. 

“The advice is unique since it’s coming from a person who has been in the same shoes,” she said. “Peer counselors give tips to mental patients about what it takes to be a good tenant and what it takes to get back to work in the real world. They make the entire transition a lot less fearful.” 

“When we first put out the plan, people were happy that the money was being used to help the homeless, but they didn’t think there was enough money allocated for housing,” Kramer said. “They were also concerned that we didn’t address the issue of substance abuse. We hope things will get better with time.”  

Community outreach is being done through the city website and the press to make people aware of the public comment period. 

“It’s extremely important to get the recommendations out to the public,” she said. “In fact, the MHSA wanted to make sure that the community is involved rather than just leave it to the Mental Health Services.” 

After the review period for the recommendations end, a final proposal would be submitted to the State Department of Mental Health.  

The Mental Health Commission will review the MHSA in the fall. 

Residents can download and review the recommendations at www.CityOf 

Berkeley.info/mentalhealth/prop63.html and follow the directions to respond, or call 981-7698 for other options for viewing the city’s recommendations. 

The Berkeley City Council will meet briefly today (Tuesday) to hold a public hearing on the Elmwood Theater Business Improvement Area, required for the business improvement district to continue its operations, and to formally adopt findings that B-Town Dollar at 2973 Sacramento St. is a nuisance and should be shut down. 

Before the open meeting, which begins at 7 p.m. in the City Council Chambers, the council will hold a closed meeting to discuss labor negotiations with its police officers union. 

This is the last council meeting before its summer break. The next meeting will be Sept. 11. 

The California Supreme Court ruled on Thursday against California ordinances allowing the seizure and forfeiture of vehicles used in picking up prostitutes or buying drugs, thus effectively ending the City of Oakland’s 10-year experiment in the practice. 

In a 4-3 vote in O’Connell v. City of Stockton, the court ruled on the narrow grounds that the city could not enact enforcement laws in areas that had already been addressed by the state. “The illicit commercial activities—prostitution and trafficking in controlled substances—that are the focus of the city’s vehicle forfeiture ordinance,” the court’s ruling read, “are matters of statewide concern that our Legislature has comprehensively addressed through various provisions of this state’s Penal and Vehicle Codes, leaving no room for further regulation at the local level.” 

The ruling invalidates similar drug-prostitution car seizure ordinances in 28 California cities, including Oakland. The ruling does not prevent police from towing automobiles involved in picking up prostitutes or drugs, however, but only the forfeiture. Automobile towings are covered under the state’s Vehicle Code. 

But according to the Santa Rosa attorney who represented the plaintiff in the City of Stockton lawsuit, the narrow grounds on which the Supreme Court made its decision leaves a large loophole for the auto confiscation to be reinstated at the state level. 

“The court said that the cities could not preempt state law in passing such ordinances,” attorney Mark Clausen said by telephone. “Unfortunately, that is just an invitation for the legislature to step in and pass a law allowing such ordinances. It’s a victory for now. Hopefully, the legislature won’t give the cities more authority.” 

Although the court asked attorneys involved in the case to submit briefs on whether the seizures themselves violated state or federal constitutional due process guarantees, the ruling noted that “because we conclude here that state law preempts the provisions of the Stockton Municipal Code pertaining to seizure and forfeiture of nuisance vehicles, thus invalidating those provisions and rendering them unenforceable, we need not address [those] issues.” 

That leaves unsettled whether the court considers seizure and holding of vehicles prior to a court hearing a violation of the state or federal constitution. The California legislature is currently considering legislation which would reinstate such non-hearing automobile seizures aimed at stopping illegal “sideshows”—provisions which allow for 30-day confiscation and not complete forfeiture as called for in the Stockton ordinance—and Thursday’s ruling would not affect that legislation. 

Stockton’s “Seizure and Forfeiture of Nuisance Vehicles” Municipal code provision that was the subject of Thursday’s ruling is virtually identical to Oakland’s so-called Beat Feet ordinance, which allows for the forfeiture of “any vehicle used to agree to or engage in an act of prostitution, or procure another person for the purpose of prostitution (pandering), or derive financial support or maintenance from the earnings or proceeds of prostitution (pimping) or illegally acquire or attempt to illegally acquire any controlled substance.” Oakland city officials had been closely following the O’Connell case, and the Oakland city attorney’s office said the Oakland Police Department had suspended enforcement of the city’s “beat feet” laws pending the court decision. 

In 2000, the California Supreme Court had validated Oakland’s “beat feet” ordinance in the Horton v. City of Oakland case. Thursday’s ruling effectively overturns the Horton ruling. 

Last Tuesday, on the recommendation of City Attorney John Russo, the Oakland City Council approved a $70,000 settlement in the case of Aram Sohigan v. The City of Oakland rising out of an auto seizure based on Oakland’s “beat feet” laws. In that case, Sohigan and two other plaintiffs were represented by Santa Rosa attorney Mark T. Clausen, the same attorney who represented the plaintiff in the Stockton case. 

Erica Harrold, public information officer for Russo, said that the court ruling means Oakland can no longer enforce the controversial “beat feet” ordinance. Harrold said that when the Oakland City Council returns from its summer break, it will have the option of either amending the “beat feet” ordinance to conform to the Supreme Court’s rulings or to eliminate the ordinance altogether. She said that the city attorney’s office would be prepared to present the council with its options at that time. 

Harrold noted that Russo had been on the City Council in 1997 when the “beat feet” ordinance was passed, and opposed it “because he thought it was unconstitutional.” Harrold said, however, that Russo “dutifully enforced the law” after he became city attorney “although he didn’t agree with it.” 

UC Berkeley development officials will meet this morning (Tuesday) with builders eager for the chance to build an $8 million guest house at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 

University of California Regents unanimously approved the project July 19, along with the lab’s Long Range Development Plan 2025. 

According to the university’s call for bids, three construction companies have gone through the qualification process: B.B.I. Construction, Inc., of Oakland; C. Overaa & Co. of Richmond; and W.E. Lyons Construction Co. of Oakland. 

Anticipated guests are visiting faculty, graduate students and others visiting or working on projects at the lab. 

Final bids are due on Sept. 5 and will be opened when evaluation scores of individual proposals are announced a week later. 

The 22,500-square-foot, three-story building will house 44 “standard” bedrooms, 12 larger rooms and four “studio suites.” Construction is required to meet the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating “silver” standard. 

That ranking falls below the gold and platinum ratings, requiring between 33 and 38 points compared to the 52 to 69 points awarded the highest, platinum certification—the ranking awarded the California Environmental Protection Agency’s 25-story Sacramento headquarters. 

Developers of the David Brower Center office building now under construction in downtown Berkeley are also aiming for the highest certification.

An organization affiliated with National Public Radio will be coming to Oakland and Richmond for six weeks beginning Aug. 9, collecting historical stories by Bay Area African-Americans for possible later broadcast on NPR. 

A spokesperson for Mayor Ron Dellums called the announcement “exciting news.” 

With NPR’s StoryCorps Griot Initiative saying that it will “place a special emphasis on the stories of World War II veterans and men and women involved in the Civil Rights struggle,” the broadcasters are expected to find a rich source of material in the East Bay. Much of the area’s African-American population migrated from the South to Oakland, Berkeley, and Richmond during World War II to work in the wartime industries, particularly Richmond’s Kaiser shipyards. 

In addition, the East Bay was one of the national action centers during the civil rights and Black Power periods, with, among other things, Oakland serving as the birthplace of the Black Panther Party.  

NPR’s StoryCorps Griot asks participants to record 40-minute interviews in pairs, with the two people knowing each other, either swapping stories back and forth or with one participant interviewing the other. All participants receive copies of their recorded interviews, with additional copies sent to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and the National Museum of African-American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., with excerpts of selected interviews to be broadcast on NPR. 

According to the organization, participation is open to anyone “who considers her/himself of African heritage and lives in the United States” and who has stories to tell, but participants are encouraged to register in advance at www.storycorps.net/griot/#reservations or at (800) 850-4406 to ensure there is available time. Participants are also encouraged to contribute a tax-deductible $10 donation or more to help defray costs for the effort. 

StoryCorps Griot had originally planned to do all of its interviews from a bus parked at Frank Ogawa Plaza in front of City Hall, but has scheduled two days in Richmond after learning of that city’s recent efforts in archiving African-American history, including aspects of the Rosie the Riveter National Park and the Memories of MacDonald Avenue project. 

The East Bay stop is one of six urban areas to be visited in the initiative’s one-year effort, with other stops in Atlanta, Newark, Detroit, Chicago, Memphis, Harlem, New York Clarksdale, Mississippi, and Selma and Montgomery, Alabama. 

On Thursday the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) will discuss the landmarking of a 19th-century dwelling at 3100 Shattuck Ave., which is proposed to be demolished for the construction of a new three-story mixed-use building . 

The meeting will take place at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave., at 7:30 p.m. 

According to a report from the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA), the site is located in the vicinity of an area known as “Ashby Station” which “could be potentially eligible for a historic district nomination to the National Register of Historic Places.” 

An example of a 20th-century American streetcar suburb, Ashby Station is now a transportation hub, serving the greater bay region with the BART Richmond Line and AC Transit. 

The BAHA report states that although several blocks of the historic Ashby Station district were removed in the 1960s due to the construction of BART, “a distinct historic context is still visible today within the ‘Area of Potential Effect’ surrounding the Ed Roberts Campus project site.” 

Although the original construction date, owner, architect and builder of the building remain unknown, the building’s construction date canbe estimated at 1904 or 1906 from city and county records. 

According to Berkeley planning department staff reports, the building possesses no special cultural, educational or cultural value and is not an example of exceptional Victorian architecture. The staff report concludes that the building is not eligible for landmark status and that the proposed demolition would not “cause a substantial adverse change in the significance of any historical resources in the vicinity.” 

In a letter to the LPC, Berkeley resident Robert Lauriston contends that the staff report misinterprets BAHA’s survey map of the neigborhood, which graphically displays the evolution of the streetcar suburb from “its beginnings in the 19th century, through the peak period 1900-1910, and up to the decline of the streetcars in the mid-20th century.” 

According to Lauriston, the map includes 3100 Shattuck in the list of contributing structures in the National Register of Historic Places Form, which neighbors plan to submit to the California Office of Historic Preservation next year. 

“The neighborhood’s remaining 19th-century structures are important both because they show its development from a small cluster of houses centered around the post office at Shattuck and Ashby into the later densely populated streetcar suburb, and because they were residences of landowners, builders, and others involved in the subdivision, annexation, and development of the neighborhood,” he states, and adds that the demolition of 3100 Shattuck would bring about an adverse change in the significance of a historic resource. 

Marin Circle Fountain Walk 

The LPC will also discuss the possible repair of the locally landmarked Marin Circle Fountain Walk which was damaged when a truck crashed into the area surrounding the fountain in May, damaging both public and private property. 

Built in 1908, when Berkeley lobbied to be the State Capital, the Marin Circle Area was planned and built as the entrance to the proposed Capital building. 

With its surrounding balustrades, piers and 22 terra cotta pots, the Fountain Walk is one of Berkeley’s pedestrian avenues. 

The restoration calls for the repair of the balustrades, piers, the handrail and terra cotta pots. The city is in charge of the repair process, which includes assessing the damage, recovering money from the trucking company and selecting staff and contractors to guide and carry out the restoration project. 

In my gilded youth I went on a skiing trip to Austria. In those carefree days one traveled by boat and train in a leisurely, comfortable, civilized way, with none of the overcrowded panic that mars voyaging today. The train had sleeping berths and we woke gasping at the proximity of massive Alps rearing skywards almost close enough to touch, or so it seemed. Our destination was a picture postcard-perfect village, Obergurgl. 

I managed to enjoy falling about on the nursery slopes. Once a whole line of us keeled over, like dominoes, destabilized by hilarity perhaps. But although the apres-ski hot chocolate mit schlagzahne was divine, dinner fare tended to be faintly, even strongly, repellent. I had never before eaten turnip fritters, and I have made a point of never doing so since. 

Still, there is no good reason to avoid turnips altogether. Delicately treated rather than manhandled, they can be toothsome. The key to their flavor and texture is how they are grown and when they are harvested. 

Turnips in my vegetable plot are part of my four-year rotation plan. After potatoes are dug, the earth is friable, just right for root vegetables: beets, carrots, onions and turnips. For the latter, the name of the game is speed, from sowing to harvest. Turnip seed germinates days sooner than that of the other roots. It’s as though like modern travelers it hits the ground running. All these vegetables need modest but regular amounts of water for their roots to become plump, every three or four days. Deep watering once a week and letting the ground dry in between will produce tough, skinny turnips. 

I try to spray the seed bed lightly, so that the seeds are not dislodged. When leaves appear, I gently trickle the hose around the roots, to avoid knocking the plants over. Although the leaves enjoy a little moisture, this is best left to dew. Wet leaves can scorch in hot sun. 

When the seedlings have their second pair of leaves, the true ones, I thin the plants to four inches apart, and put the thinnings into salads or a sandwich. At this point they don’t amount to much. The seedlings look spindly without their siblings, so I sprinkle the earth around them with potting soil, building it up to the first leaves, the cotyledons. This provides a stabilizing and nourishing matrix in which the turnips can readily form their bulbs, as well as augmenting the planting bed, which is already a raised one. 

When four true leaves have appeared, I give their roots a drink of fish emulsion, diluted to palest tea. From then on, they receive only water. I thin them once more, steaming the tiny bulbs and leaves together, leaving the remainder with plenty of room for full growth. If I have calculated correctly, even a small area, let us say 18 by 24 inches, will yield over two dozen turnips, enough to satisfy a small household if not an Obergurgl chef. 

There is a root maggot that will ruin with its tracery of brown tunnels an entire crop of turnips if a defensive strategy is not deployed. These maggots are the offspring of a winged creature, probably a moth. Sowing turnips in late summer eliminates this problem, since moths lay their eggs in spring. So does covering the bed with black plastic netting stretched over a cage of garden wire, since the moth can not get through the small net openings. I cover all seed beds with such cages, since soft earth is a magnet for cats. 

The turnip, Brassica rapa, is, confusingly enough, not the same as rape, Brassica napus, which produces the oil now politely called canola. Both are in the Cruciferae family, so named because the four flower petals of every family member are in the form of a cross. Unfortunately, clumsily, and unpoetically, taxonomists have now changed the family name to Brassicaceae. Another relative, the rutabaga or swede, a yellow-rooted hybrid crossed between B. napus and B. oleracea, is bigger and hardier than the turnip. It overwinters very well and is delicious when peeled, boiled and mashed with plenty of butter. But one large rutabaga goes a long way, whereas a young turnip takes up much less room in the garden and is more versatile in the kitchen, so I do not grow rutabagas. 

Turnips on the other hand are delicious harvested at golf ball size, steamed or boiled briefly. Like so many home-grown vegetables, they take very few minutes to cook, five at the most, and barely need to be peeled. They are delicious simmered in broths or stews, taking on some of the flavor of the stock without losing their own. They can be mashed into carrots or potatoes, but that always seems to me to be a way of disguising the taste of old, bitter ones. Better to caramelize them, adding a little sugar and butter to the cooking water. They can be eaten raw, grated into salads, too. 

Still, since turnips seem more appropriately eaten in cool weather, one wonders whether in terms of yin and yang the turnip is a “hot” vegetable, promoting the circulation of the blood. Cold weather at an altitude is all very invigorating if one is warmly clad and the sun is shining, and when it goes down early, behind the mountains, if there’s a crackling fire and gluhwein to come indoors for, and after dinner and dancing, if that is the correct term for schulplattlern, which involves much slapping of body and soles of boots, sleep that descends rapidly under a billowy down-filled duvet, while crisp snow lies inches deep on the sill outside. In spite of all this one still needs inner fuel. I suppose this is why Obergurgl is the turnip fritter’s home.

The California Supreme Court ruled on Thursday against California enacting ordinances allowing the seizure and forfeiture of vehicles used in picking up prostitutes or buying drugs, thus effectively ending the City of Oakland’s 10-year experiment in the practice. 

In a 4-3 vote in O’Connell v City of Stockton, the court ruled on the narrow grounds that the city could not enact enforcement laws in areas that had already been addressed by the state. “The illicit commercial activities—prostitution and trafficking in controlled substances—that are the focus of the city’s vehicle forfeiture ordinance,” the court’s ruling read, “are matters of statewide concern that our Legislature has comprehensively addressed through various provisions of this state’s Penal and Vehicle Codes, leaving no room for further regulation at the local level.” 

The ruling does not prevent police from towing automobiles involved in picking up prostitutes or drugs but only the forfeiture. Automobile towings are covered under the state’s Vehicle Code.  

Although the court asked attorneys involved in the case to submit briefs on whether the seizures themselves violated state or federal constitutional due process guarantees, the ruling noted that “because we conclude here that state law preempts the provisions of the Stockton Municipal Code pertaining to seizure and forfeiture of nuisance vehicles, thus invalidating those provisions and rendering them unenforceable, we need not address [those] issues.” 

That leaves unsettled whether the court considers seizure and holding of vehicles prior to a court hearing is a violation of the state or federal constitution. The California legislature is currently considering legislation that would reinstate such non-hearing automobile seizures aimed at stopping illegal “sideshows”—provisions which allow for 30-day confiscation and not complete forfeiture as called for in the Stockton ordinance—and Thursday’s ruling would not affect that legislation. 

Stockton’s “Seizure and Forfeiture of Nuisance Vehicles.” Municipal code provision that was the subject of Thursday’s ruling is virtually identical to Oakland’s so-called Beat Feet ordinance, which allows for the forfeiture of “any vehicle used to agree to or engage in an act of prostitution, or procure another person for the purpose of prostitution (pandering), or derive financial support or maintenance from the earnings or proceeds of prostitution (pimping) or illegally acquire or attempt to illegally acquire any controlled substance.” Oakland city officials had been closely following the O’Connell case, and the Oakland City Attorney’s office said the Oakland Police Department had suspended enforcement of the city’s “beat feet” laws pending the court decision.  

In 2000, the California Supreme Court had validated Oakland’s “beat feet” ordinance in the Horton v. City of Oakland case. Thursday’s ruling effectively overturns the Horton ruling. 

Last Tuesday, on the recommendation of City Attorney John Russo, City Council approved a $70,000 settlement in the case of Aram Sohigan v. The City of Oakland rising out of an auto seizure based on Oakland’s “beat feet” laws. In that case, Sohigan and two other plaintiffs were represented by Santa Rosa attorney Mark T. Clausen, the same attorney who represented the plaintiff in the Stockton case. 

Erica Harrold, public information officer for Russo, said that the court ruling means Oakland can no longer enforce the controversial “beat feet” ordinance. Harrold said that when Oakland City Council returns from its summer break, it will have the option of either amending the “beat feet” ordinance to conform to the Supreme Court’s rulings or to eliminate the ordinance altogether. She said that the City Attorneys office would be prepared to present Council with its options at that time. 

Harrold noted that Russo had been on the City Council in 1997 when the “beat feet” ordinance was passed, and opposed it “because he thought it was unconstitutional.” Harrold said, however, that Russo “dutifully enforced the law” while after he became City Attorney “although he didn’t agree with it.”

The Berkeley Transportation Commission’s transit subcommittee debated Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) on the Southside with Berkeley residents Wednesday. 

While BRT proponents emphasized the need for an improved transit service to better accommodate the high existing ridership, Southside neighbors dubbed it a “showpiece project” that would be catastrophic for the neighborhood. 

Proposed by AC Transit in cooperation with the Federal Transit Administration, the Bus Rapid Transit project promises to provide fast and frequent express bus service along an approximately 17-mile-long corridor extending from downtown Berkeley and UC Berkeley at the northern end, through downtown Oakland, and to San Leandro at the southern end. 

“When we envision Berkeley in 2030 and beyond we think Berkeley residents are going to get around in a very different way,” said Sarah Syed, Transportation Commission chair. “Berkeley residents are driving more often as the reliability of the bus has slowly declined. BRT is just one element of a city’s overall urban development.” 

According to the Bus Rapid Transit project draft environmental impact report, the project corridor is home to 260,000 residents and has some of the highest employment and residential densities in the East Bay. 

BRT changes would include dedicated transit lanes, stations with canopies and passenger amenities, advanced traffic signal priority for buses, and modern safety, security and communications systems. 

Overall, four BRT variations are under consideration through the Berkeley Southside area, which consists of Oxford/Fulton Street to Telegraph Avenue and Dwight Way. These alignments would connect downtown Berk-eley to Telegraph Avenue south of the UC Berkeley campus: 

• Two-way via Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue; 

• Two-way via Bancroft Way and one-way via Telegraph Avenue-Dana Street; 

• One-way via Bancroft Way-Durant Avenue and two-way via Telegraph Avenue; and 

• One-way via Bancroft Way-Durant Avenue and Telegraph Avenue-Dana Street. 

“What two-way does is give you a better balance.” said Peter Eakland, the city’s associate traffic engineer. “It will help increase mobility for people within the area.” 

Features welcomed by some in the small discussion groups included self-service, proof-of-payment fare collection as well as low-floor articulated buses which would stop at raised-platform stations. 

Some residents preferred the “No-Build Alternative” that includes “low-cost enhancements to bus services currently in operation in the study corridor and represents the best that can be done to meet the basic project purpose without a major investment.” 

Estimated to cost between $310 million and $400 million to design and construct, the BRT project has so far $102.03 million in committed funding. 

Some workshop participants said the project was not cost effective and demanded information on its funding sources. 

“At some point BRT is going to have a successfully passed EIR, yet the project is less than half-funded,” said Roland Peterson, executive director of the Telegraph Business Improvement District. “We want to know more about the construction schedules and the impacts.” 

Many objected that public participation in the project was being limited and called for a more transparent process. 

“We were treated like 4-year-olds at the workshop,” said Berkeley resident Doug Buckwald. “We were scolded for expressing our opinions. This meeting is a perfect example of social engineering. BRT is a package of many different features. We have to take all of them or none of them. We should be able to make choices that are decent instead of wasting thousands of dollars on needless transit infrastructure.” 

“The whole workshop has been designed to allow public participation,” contended Syed. “We want to hear from the people.” 

Syed added that the final environmental document would be released by spring 2008. If approved, construction is scheduled to take place between 2009 and 2011. 

Some neighbors were worried that the service would result in loss of parking for merchants and increase traffic on congested streets. 

“We were given a lot of facts and figures on ridership, but I want to know how many parking spaces disappear on the Berkeley route,” said Berkeley Architectectural Heritage Association President Carrie Olson. “Parking removal will hurt businesses. Will AC transit mitigate any loss of parking?” 

Berkeley resident Steve Finacom asked whether AC Transit would provide any guarantees for its service. 

“I have lived in the neighborhood for many years and I commute by walking on Telegraph,” he said. “I have noticed that there is no congestion on Telegraph. The buses are moving fine.” 

Disabled People Outside Project activist Dan McMullen asked if AC Transit was doing a count on the number of people currently using rapid buses. 

“I have yet to see one blocked in traffic or one being full with people,” he said. 

“I want to know who will pay for the maintenance of the transit only lanes,” said Finacom. “Who will police them? Will there be any pedestrian amenities in a pedestrian transit zone?” 

Len Conly, a Berkeley resident, said that his group had come to the conclusion that congestion problems would not be solved by a temporary fix. 

“Congestion is going to increase no matter what,” he said. “We have to look at the future.” 

Calls for a transit system that would loop together AC Transit, BART and other Bay Area transit providers became a familiar refrain during the meeting. 

Syed said that the Transportation Commission was planning to return in September and hold two more workshops. After being reviewed by the Transportation Commission, the project would be handed over to the Planning Commission. The City Council would have final say on its approval.

Flanked by high-priced consultants tasked with bolstering a “troubled” housing authority suffering from years of neglect, and facing a new board apparently ready to work through volumes of (sometimes contradictory, some say) HUD regulations, Berkeley Housing Authority (BHA) Executive Director Tia Ingram reported at the Monday BHA board meeting on the progress of the newly indepen-dent agency. 

Several Housing Authority residents were also there. The time and place of the meeting had been posted at the housing authority and at City Hall at least 24 hours before, as required by law for a “special” meeting—one not held on a regularly scheduled night.  

They had come to tell the BHA board and staff about problems they face as housing authority clients. One woman spoke about lax management at the apartment building she lives in, where drug dealers are free to ply their trade, and another complained about problematic personal questions she was asked by a worker recertifying her subsidized housing eligibility. 

Rose Flippia, president of the Council of Residents in Public Housing, asked the board to visit the public housing units. “Come out and assess the property—really look at the issues and the way people are living,” she said. “It’s only fair; we’ve been suffering for the last four years. A lot of residents have lost confidence in management.” 

Carole Norris, chair of the newly constituted board, promised the residents that staff would follow up on issues raised. 

BHA, which subsidizes some 1,800 units of federally-subsidized privately-owned Section 8 units and 75 BHA-owned public housing units, was placed on “troubled” status by the Housing and Urban Development Department and has gone through a recent shake-up aimed at avoiding the agency’s being placed in receivership.  

The City Council plus two tenants, which had served as the board overseeing the agency, typically spent less than an hour per month tackling BHA issues, and voluntarily gave up its role as the housing authority board in favor of a new seven-member panel appointed by the mayor. 

As part of the overhaul, and after a stinging city attorney report blaming staff for BHA problems, the city manager announced that all BHA staff except manager Tia Ingram would be laid off at the end of June.  

The eight union members were able to apply for their old jobs. At least two former BHA employees are now working at BHA. Others, according to a confidential source, were asked to return, but opted to work elsewhere in the city. 

City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque’s widely-publicized condemnation of BHA staff included charges of inaccurately determining eligibility, failing to obtain verification for live-in aides or income, paying rent where occupants were deceased and blocking the manager’s attempts to solve problems.  

Workers responded in anger, lining up at a City Council meeting in June to say they were scapegoated for problems that included inadequate staffing, lack of training and a faulty computer system. Tenant advocates have told the Daily Planet that shocking headlines about BHA renting to dead tenants can be explained by the units’ being occupied by a dead person’s spouse or dependents. 

The city attorney has denied the Daily Planet’s Freedom of Information request for the list of landlords of supposedly deceased tenants; the new BHA staff is considering the resubmitted request. 

In other personnel shifts, Steve Barton, the city’s housing director—popular among the city’s low-income housing advocates—responsible for BHA as well as three other divisions in the housing department, was forced to resign. Consultants specializing in “saving” troubled housing authorities, were hired. In order to fund these efforts, the city has transferred $1 million from its general fund to the agency.  

Panos Kyrpianou of Cleveland-based CGI started work in June on a $20,000 contract for that month. The contract has been increased to about $50,000/month, beginning in July, to include four members of the CGI staff and running for three months, Kyrpianou told the Daily Planet. 

Eugene Jones, an independent specialist in HUD finances, has also been hired on a temporary contract to assist the executive director. BHA did not make information on his contract available to the Daily Planet. 

The centerpiece of the board’s Monday meeting was Ingram’s report on the agency’s corrective work. 

Problems include issues of “overhoused” people, such as “empty nesters” who once had a right to an apartment with more bedrooms than they currently need. There is an attempt in some cases to get the landlords to voluntarily reduce the rent on these units.  

The agency has uncovered some overpayment. “Some of the payments that went to landlords seem to be questionable—five figure payments that were significant. We have not found the paperwork to support those transactions,” Ingram told the board. 

“Where there are overpayments we’ve held landlords accountable in terms of collection efforts,” she said, noting that names of workers responsible for the transactions would be forwarded to the city manager and to the HUD inspector. 

Ingram addressed computer issues, noting the CGI consultant confirmed that BHA’s computer system “does not meet our needs as it is currently configured.” 

She also addressed staff issues, saying, “Some of them did a stellar job in terms of stepping up and transitioning [to new jobs with the city], leaving information on where we can find certain things.” Other staff made it difficult to find various pieces of information, she told the board. 

While the city attorney had painted a grim picture of the BHA staff in her May 22 report, Ingram has expressed a more positive view. In a June 6 email to the old BHA staff—sent to the Daily Planet by a person who asked for anonymity—Ingram wrote: “In spite of the fact that I continue to learn about existing problems … I continue to defend YOU … reiterating that I do not believe any BHA staff member is a criminal, or that any of the actions taken (or not taken) were with the intent of some personal gain. I have shared this with the press and with the various city officials—you can quote me on it if you like.” 

At Monday’s meeting, Ingram publicly complimented staff rehired by the agency, saying: “It’s important to recognize those who have labored long in the Housing Authority and demonstrated that we are true public servants.” 

After the scathing reports by the city attorney of May 22 and June 6, City Manager Phil Kamlarz—then the executive director of the agency and also faulted by the city attorney for his role in housing authority problems—announced that the HUD inspector general’s (IG) office would be coming to the city to do a thorough investigation of the concerns alleged by the city attorney. 

However, Ingram said Monday that an investigation has yet to be done. 

“There’s been a lot of talk about the investigation and some of the issues that we identified,” Ingram told the board. “The IG’s office has come out for an initial visit for about half a day. We’ve continued to identify issues; that information has been provided to the investigator who is scheduled to come back in August to resume his research.” 

Ingram praised the consultants’ work. CGI is half way through a complete audit of the computer and hard-copy files for the 140 people up for recertification in September, she said, noting that when the 140 people have been audited, that will be almost 10 percent of the Section 8 voucher holders.  

She also told the board she was proud of the staff’s success at two informal hearings “where both our proposed terminations were upheld.” She added, “It was refreshing to see that staff could really do a better job in servicing our clients.”  

Ingram addressed the importance of being on good terms with HUD. “The last six to nine months we’ve really enjoyed positive relations with HUD,” she said, noting that the regional director has been willing to grant BHA waivers, move deadlines and lend their staff to help. 

In other board business, interim BHA attorney Cheryl Carlson promised she was “not going to bore you to tears” in her review of the Brown Act, the state’s open meeting laws, and gave a five-minute overview, cautioning the board to conduct business in public and to address only items properly placed on the agenda. 

Some of the information presented in acronyms by Ingram and the consultants was difficult for board members to grasp—they will hold trainings to become familiar with the volumes of HUD rules. Board member Marjorie Cox called on fellow members to hold two regular meetings per month, to get up to speed. “I don’t want to provide inadequate oversight,” she said. 

Board member Wise Allen, however, said that more meetings means that the staff spends too much time preparing for the sessions. 

“You’ve got to give staff time to do their jobs,” he said. “Our work is policy. We’re not micromanaging.” 

The next meeting is tentatively set for Aug. 22 at 6 p.m. at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 

A proposal to rezone parts of West Berkeley for car dealerships drew massive, vocal public opposition at Berkeley’s Plan-ning Commission Wednesday night. 

While only one speaker from the audience supported the project—as a means of freeing up dealer sites on Shattuck Avenue for housing projects—none of the West Berkeley business owners and workers who spoke had anything good to say of the notion. 

By the time the meeting ended, commissioners had decided to delay action on the West Berkeley Plan and zoning law changes until September, and commissioner Chair James Samuels asked city staff to bring dealers to the next session to support the reasons they want the change. 

One common theme running through many of the critiques focused on the irony of rezoning to accommodate car sales at the very moment the city has embarked on a program to reduce car use as a key step in slowing global warming. 

Another theme was the irony of rezoning the very recycling sites that are critical to the city’s companion Zero Waste mandate. 

During the two hours preceding the commission’s regular session, members had listened to an intense discussion of the city’s greenhouse gas reduction efforts under the programs launched by Measure G, passed overwhelmingly by Berkeley voters last November. 

“How do you reconcile this with the workshop you just held?” asked Steve Lautze, a West Berkeley resident who administers the Oakland/Berkeley Recycling Development Zone. 

The proposal calls for rezoning two areas of West Berkeley, one along the southern side of Ashby Avenue between Bay Street and San Pablo Avenue and the Emeryville border, the other along the freeway between Virginia Street and Codornices Creek, at depths varying between two and four blocks. 

The reason cited by city officials for adopting the controversial plan is to keep the sales tax dollars generated by Berkeley car dealers from leaving if the dealership are pressured by carmakers to relocate closer to the freeway. 

Dave Fogarty, of the city manager’s Economic Development staff, said Berkeley’s car dealers bring well over a million dollars to city coffers through the 9.8 percent of the city’s sales tax revenues they generate. 

The main purpose of the rezoning, he said, was to keep the four existing dealers from leaving along with their well-paying union jobs, rather than to attract new car sellers. 

Two of the city’s four current dealerships—Honda of Berkeley and McKevitt Volvo/Nissan—are located on recently sold sites on Shattuck Avenue which new owners are planning to develop when current leases expire, he said. 

Carmakers are pressuring dealers to relocate adjacent to freeways, so the West Berkeley rezoning was proposed. 

Fogarty also dismissed the notion that discouraging dealerships would discourage Berkeleyans from sliding behind the wheel and stepping on the gas—though he personally doesn’t own a car. 

Ashby blowback 

The two largest sites in the small parcel along Ashby that the city proposes to allow for dealerships in addition to the existing Mixed Use Light Industrial uses are those of Ashby Lumber and Urban Ore. 

The environmental documents required by the land use policy change use as a prototypical site the land now occupied mostly by Ashby Lumber. 

“I am appalled. I am offended,” said Jeff Hogan, an owner of the thriving business at 824 Ashby Ave.  

The business is listed as one of the city’s top 25 sales tax generators and provides 65 jobs. 

“Next year we’re celebrating out 40th anniversary in the City of Berkeley,” he said. “What a wonderful way to celebrate.” 

Hogan said that when he met with Mayor Tom Bates six months ago, the city’s top elected official told him, “We really have a need for your kind of business.”  

Ashby Lumber, the neighboring Urban Ore and MacBeath’s lumber work together, he said. Others described the business as a hub for the city’s builders and do-it-yourselfers. 

“Here I am up here defending myself,” Hogan said. “When I see what they are trying to accomplish, I think maybe there’s a neighboring city that would more appreciate my business.” 

But even if he moved, Hogan said, “I would never sell it to an auto dealership.” 

Applause followed. 

Urban Ore cofounders Mary Lou Van De Venter and Dan Knapp added their voices to the opposition. 

“We’ve been in Berkeley for 27 years in the recycling business,” said Knapp. “We started with zero at the Berkeley landfill,” and put more than a $1 million in the present location at 900 Murray St. “We are threatened by this auto (zoning) overlay.” 

Speaking in her role as president of the Northern California Recycling Association, Van De Venter asked the city for a full environmental impact report rather than the abbreviated statement and mitigated negative declaration produced by city staff.  

Even Steve Moran, whose German car repair shop at 751 Folger Ave. is listed as one of the beneficiaries of the Ashby portion of the proposed zoning, said the rezoning “doesn’t make sense” and said that the issuance of a zoning variance rather than a rezoning would meet his needs. 

M zone  

The largest parcel listed as an example of a potential dealership site in the large M zoned district—the 4.8 acre site of the old Flint Ink plant—didn’t even attract any bidders when it went on the auction block last month, said Mark Rhoades, the city planning manager who was attending his last commission meeting before his departure for the private sector. 

The M zone also contains another key component of the city’s recycling program, the Community Conservation Center at Second and Gilman street. 

David Tam, who serves on the city’s Zero Waste Commission, charged that the environment documents were legally deficient and ignored impacts on community services, including the city’s growing recycling program. He also spoke as a director of SPRAWLDEF (the Sustainabilty, Parks, Recycling and Wildlife Legal Defense Fund). 

The city’s Community Recycling Center is located in the heart of the M zone rezoning sector at 669 Gilman St., a key element in the city’s Zero Waste program goals. 

Van De Venter said the environment documents failed to address impacts on the city’s goals for reducing waste to a minimum, and Tam agreed. 

Delayed decision  

At the request of city staff, Commissioner Susan Wengraf moved to delay action on the proposals and continue the hearing until the panel’s next meeting on Sept. 5. 

Commissioners Helen Burke, Gene Poschman and Patti Dacey—filling a vacancy for the seat appointed by City Councilmember Kriss Worthington—all expressed reservations about the proposals. 

Burke cited the conflict between one policy to discourage car use and another seeking to profit from car sales, while Poschman said he was concerned about city actions to “fiscalize land-use policies,” rezoning land in hopes of gaining more tax revenues for the city. 

Dacey said she was concerned with policies designed to replace existing dealerships with high density housing projects—what she called “housewashing” in the spirit of the “greenwashing” label used to describe seemingly eco-friendly policies of polluting corporations. 

Roia Ferrazares said one solution might be creating a means to make granting variances easier instead of rezoning, or, failing that, to create spot zones for specific dealers—which was greeted by nearly unanimous concern from her colleagues. Chair Samuels said he was torn between the perceived threats to existing West Berkeley businesses and the loss of tax revenues—but said he didn’t think the existing businesses were seriously threatened. 

Commissioner Larry Gurley was the only member who expressed the view that the rezoning policies weren’t problematic. 

The city is taking comments on the environmental documents through Aug. 10, while the Planning Commission will take up the rezoning proposals in September.  

At Samuels’ request, Fogarty said he would invite the dealers to attend.

Greenhouse gases and Bus Rapid Transit dominated the first half of Wednesday night’s Berkeley Planning Commission meeting which drew a packed house to the North Berkeley Senior Center. 

While public transit plays a central role in the city’s effort to radically curtail Berkeley’s  

global-warming-inducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, AC Transit’s plans for Bus Rapid Transit running down Telegraph Avenue has hit a major speed bump in the opposition from residents of the nearby neighborhoods. 

Wednesday night’s commission meeting began with a two-hour presentation on Measure G measures, resulting from the resounding 81 percent victory scored by the proposal to cut the city’s GHG output by 80 percent in the next 43 years. 

Timothy Burroughs, the city’s climate action coordinator, opened the meeting, which included presentations by Greenbelt Alliance Senior Policy Advocate Stephanie Reyes, Berkeley Green Building Coordinator Billi Romain and Matt Taecker, the planner hired to help draft the city’s new Downtown Area Plan. 

The themes emerging from the presentations were familiar to Commissioners James Samuels, Gene Poschman, Helen Burke and Patti Dacey from their service on the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee (DAPAC), the city council-appointed body that is developing the guidelines for the downtown plan. 

With sustainabilty as the designated theme of the new plan, they were familiar with the calls from Reyes and Taecker for denser “infill” development on transit corridors to reduce reliance on the passenger car, the single greatest source of GHGs. 

Looking at the existing city General Plan “is almost like reading a climate action plan,” said Burroughs, “geared toward erecting a more livable compact community” with an emphasis on transit-oriented development. 

While improved technology promises to make cars less polluting, Reyes said the city couldn’t meet its GHG reduction targets without cutting back car use. One key measure, bringing jobs and housing closer together while creating walkable neighborhoods with nearby services, will cut car use about 30 percent. 

The next major piece, she said, is bringing housing and transit together, with near-transit housing resulting in a ten-fold increase in transit use, she said.  

“The good news for Berkeley is that if you want to be on this downward path, just keep doing more of what you’re already doing,” she said. 

Romain said green building strategies are as much about building locations as they are about the technology of building. New projects of significant size are required to fill out use permit applications that contain green building checklists, and programs from the city and Pacific Gas & Electric offer strategies for increasing the efficiency of building design. 

Taecker presented the same Power Point presentation he’d offered to DAPAC members during their most recent meeting, citing massive carbon savings he said would accrue from creating more high-density development in the city center. 

He contended that “over 15 years with the densest alternative,” residents of the higher, denser downtown would save 112,000 barrels of oil and cut their carbon emissions by 60,600 tons. 

After Taecker, the audience began posing their questions. 

Questions fly 

What about UC? asked Zelda Bronstein, who opposed Mayor Tom Bates in the 2006 mayoral election. 

With 21,000 employees, many of them commuters, the university was also a major source of greenhouse gas, yet, she said, it is exempt from Burroughs’ program—though Bronstein, a former Planning Commission chair, said the current plan’s transportation element does deal with the university. 

She also pointed to the 2,000 new parking spaces the university’s Long Range Development Plan contains. 

“The idea that you’re going to ignore UC is absurd,” she said, but Burroughs said that his project has no purview over what happens on university property. 

High housing prices also mean that many university service workers commute from outside the city, Taecker acknowledged, adding that the more the city accommodates blue collar workers, “the better it will be.” 

Other questions focused on the conflict between the need for neighborhood serving merchants and high commercial rents. One man said commercial rent control was needed. 

BRT worries  

Foes of Bus Rapid Transit—at least a system which would restrict or close traffic on Telegraph Avenue—outnumbered supporters at Wednesday night’s meeting. 

As soon as the workshop ended, BRT rose to the fore, with speaker after speaker from the Telegraph area denouncing the AC Transit project, while a lesser number of BRT advocates spoke in defense of the proposed $400 million system. 

The most commonly heard concern was that plans that would close or restrict Telegraph Avenue would divert frustrated drivers onto nearby streets, particularly Hillegass Avenue, the main north-south roadway between College and Telegraph Avenues. 

Others said they were concerned that proposals to eliminate parking on Telegraph to make way for dedicated bus lanes would harm merchants such as Looking Glass Photo & Camera, at 2848 Telegraph Ave. 

Several Hillegass residents said they feared for the safety of their children if traffic grows any more intense. 

Wednesday’s meeting followed by a day a tempestuous Transportation Commission subcommittee meeting where tempers flared when worried neighbors confronted BRT-boosting commissioners. 

BRT forms a major element in discussions of the downtown plan now taking shape with Taecker’s help, and more heated discussions can be expected. 

The only formal action the commission took was to reaffirm an earlier vote about the choice of bus alternatives to be considered in the Southside Plan environmental impact reports. 

The final decision will be up to the city, and is certain to spark more controversy. 

Condos Okayed 

Commissioners gave their unanimous approval to transforming the 21 offices in the building at 2000 Hearst Ave. into individual commercial condos.

The state’s Brown Act and the Public Records Act aim to maximize the ability of citizens to participate in community affairs. 

But in a July 24 complaint filed with the mayor’s office, the watchdog group SuperBOLD (Berkeleyans Organizing for Library Defense) said the City Council violated the Brown Act and its own rules in three separate instances: allowing a presentation on drought issues that was not placed on the agenda; not making information on items discussed by the council adequately available to the public; and placing on the agenda an old item of business under a “new” business rubric. 

In a written response, City Clerk Pamyla Means said the complaints are invalid.  

At issue in the first complaint was a presentation at the July 17 City Council meeting by East Bay Municipal Utility District Director Andy Katz, accompanied by EBMUD Manager of Water Conservation Richard W. Harris. The 20-minute presentation, followed by five minutes of council questions, did not appear on the agenda and there was no time allotted for the public to comment on the issue. 

Mayor Tom Bates invited Katz to speak under the agenda rubric “ceremonial items,” a time generally reserved for occasions such as celebrating a Berkeley citizen’s 100th birthday or honoring a local hero. 

“Water conservation is an important issue,” Gene Bernardi of SuperBOLD told the Daily Planet on Thursday. The item should have been noted on the agenda to give the public notice that the issue would be aired, she said. Further, Bernardi argued, the public should have been allowed to address the item publicly.  

“This sets a precedent that you can permit things at City Council meetings that are not on the agenda,” Bernardi said. 

The Brown Act section cited by SuperBOLD says that each item to be discussed by a public agency should be clearly noted on the agenda and the council rules cited by SuperBOLD say: “Any request for a presentation to the Council will be submitted as an agenda item and follow the timelines for submittal of agenda reports.” 

Addressing council rules, City Clerk Means wrote: the council rules “define an agenda item as an item placed on the agenda for a vote of the council,” and therefore, since no vote was required, the non-agendaed presentation was proper. 

Further, Means wrote: “It is customary that public officials from other public agencies that are present at a given council meeting are invited to address the council at the onset of the meeting as a courtesy.” 

In a Thursday morning interview, Means said she was personally unable to name public officials who had been accorded this courtesy, but had been told that it was true.  

In a Thursday interview, Counclmember Kriss Worthington said he recalled that when former State Sen. Tom Hayden was present in the council audience, it was only by vote of the council that he was permitted to speak. Moreover, he said, other councilmembers are asked to go through a complex agenda-committee process to bring formal presentations to the council. 

Worthington said the drought issue should have been on the agenda. “We need to know how much money we’re wasting” on ill-advised water use. he said. 

A second SuperBOLD complaint concerned the inability of the public to get materials distributed to councilmembers. The complaint says a public speaker at the July 17 council meeting had referred to a “communication #2” and when a SuperBOLD member asked a city clerk assistant to see a copy of it, she “was told this communication was available on-line.”  

The complaint quoted the Brown Act saying “…writings, when distributed to all, or a majority of all of the members of a legislative body…are disclosable public records under the California Public Record Act…and shall be made available on request without delay.”  

Worthington noted that in the past such materials were made accessible to the public and press, but access to them has been problematic more recently. He said he often goes into the back room and makes copies for the public himself. 

Means said she puts a copy of the materials in the public binder and places a copy on the table outside the Council Chambers “for public viewing.” However, she noted in her written response, “On occasion, items that are set out for public viewing at the meeting are taken by persons at the meeting and not returned.”  

“There’s a difference between taking responsibility and making excuses,” Worthington said. 

SuperBOLD’s third complaint was about an item that had been removed from an earlier meeting agenda and placed on the July 17 agenda. SuperBOLD said, according to council rules, that it should have been considered old rather than new business, but Means said placement on the agenda is up to the Agenda Committee.  

The agenda committee meets mid-day on various Mondays when the council is in session. It is scheduled as a full council meeting, although only the mayor and two councilmembers are voting participants. Calling it a council meeting permits the participation of a council majority. Agenda committee meetings are not recorded.

A community meeting which officials said they called Tuesday evening to assess general library needs was part Berkeley Library lovefest, part rally to save the South Berkeley Branch Library. 

While notices of the community meeting at the Over 60s Health Clinic on Sacramento Street and Alcatraz Avenue, posted around town and on the city website, called for people to come to the meeting to “tell us what you want from your Berkeley Public Library,” other notices posted by a group organizing to Save the South Berkeley Branch Library asked for supporters to turn out to the meeting. 

There has been a plan afoot, which the Library Board of Trustees has been discussing for more than a year, to move the small South Berkeley library at Martin Luther King Jr., Way and Russell Street a few blocks southeast to the planned Ed Roberts Campus, slated to house mostly non-profit organizations serving disabled people.  

The project, to be located where the Ashby BART Station east parking lot is now, has yet to raise the funds it needs to break ground. 

The first community meeting to introduce the possible library move was held last month at St. Paul’s AME Church, while there is support for the proposal, opposition has also begun to congeal.  

The trustees have commissioned architectural drawings of the project and, while speaking favorably of it, they are quick to say they have made no decision about the move. 

The architects will speak about the project at a public meeting at 7 p.m. August 1 at the Central Library third-floor meeting room. At the same meeting there will be interviews for a new trustee and selection of the trustee by the board.  

When the 30 or so people attending the Tuesday evening meeting were asked what they like about the library, people did not hesitate to speak up: “It’s rare that I’m looking for a book I can’t find in the library,” said one person.  

“I go to the West Branch and I like it because they’ll send me a book from another branch,” said another. 

People said they like the reference staff, the fact that they can get newspapers online or go to the Central Library to look at paper copies, the children’s programs, the way homeless people visiting the library are treated with respect and much more. 

The discussion turned to the possible move of the South Berkeley branch.  

“I’d like to know why you want to relocate it,” said one person, “It’s right next to a park and in a residential setting.”  

While South Branch Supervisor Jeri Ewart underscored how small the library is, one person responded that is a plus: “You don’t need a map to move around in it,” she said. 

A woman identifying herself as a teacher at the adult school said her students told her they feel more comfortable in the small setting. “They feel intimidated in the Central Library,” she said. 

Yolanda Huang, a Parks and Recreation Commission member, said the South Branch Library is on a trajectory for kids walking down from Willard Middle School, up from Longfellow School and is next to a recreation center. “It’s part of their world,” she said, suggesting that the recreation center ought to be better integrated with the library. 

“The South Branch is a safe place for kids in the afternoon,” Huang said.  

Elaine Green, a candidate for the Board of Trustees, said the proposed site south of Ashby and east of Adeline poses safety concerns for children crossing the wide streets.  

A member of the group is forming to keep the South Branch where it is; Green said they have collected signatures of 300 people who oppose the move. 

Winston Burton suggested spending funds to improve South Branch rather than moving it, using the meeting room for homework help, showing films and hosting art and music programs. “It can become so much more than a place to read books,” he said. 

One person suggested moving the adult books to a new site at the Ed Roberts Campus and leaving the children’s and youth component where it is, and another said the tool library should move, leaving space for expansion of the rest of the library. 

Library Trustee Terry Powell pointed out some of the negatives of the present South Branch site. “We know that the South Branch is very crowded,” she said, noting that the space limits the number of books there.  

“It has limited accessibility [for disabled people],” and a limited number of computers, she said, underscoring, however, “We have made no decision, no commitment.” 

But Huang was not convinced that South Branch versus Ed Roberts was the correct discussion to be having. “The needs of the South Branch need to be unhinged from Ed Roberts” and considered in their own right, she said.

A 22-year-old homeless woman was arrested early Thursday for the sexual abuse of a 14-year-old Berkeley boy, six weeks after she was caught with the same youth along an Oregon highway. 

An alert patrol officer, Amber Phillips, discovered the pair at 12:23 a.m. as she was walking her nightly foot patrol along Hearst Avenue by Ohlone Park. 

Looking into the park from near the corner of Bonita Avenue, she saw Melissa Danielle Cullen and a partially clad boy, said Berkeley Police spokesperson Sgt. Mary Kusmiss. 

“She detained them because the boy seemed young and she felt the situation warranted further investigation,” said the sergeant. 

Under questioning, the pair revealed that they had been sexually involved for some time. Prior to coming to Ohlone Park, the couple had also spent time in Tilden Park, said Sgt. Kusmiss. 

“The items they had in the park gave the appearance that they had been sleeping on the streets or in parks for some time,” she said. 

A call to the boy’s father brought him to the scene, where the youth was handed over to his custody and Cullen was transported to the police station. 

The officer learned that Cullen was already facing nearly identical sexual abuse charges involving the same boy, stemming from a June 15 arrest in Lincoln County, Ore., Kusmiss said. 

An officer with the department’s sex crimes detail continued the investigation during the day. 

Cullen is now being held in custody on three felony charges—lewd and lascivious acts with a minor, statutory rape and child stealing—as well as a misdemeanor count of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. 

The charges are virtually the same as those Cullen still faces from her arrest in Oregon.  

According to the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department, Deputy Abby Dorsey was on patrol along U.S. Highway 101 near Yachats, Ore., at 8:47 a.m. June 15. Spotting a vehicle parked along the roadway, she looked inside—allegedly discovering Cullen and the boy in the midst of having sex. 

Further investigation revealed that the couple had driven north from Berkeley without the knowledge of the boy’s parents, according to Dorsey’s report.  

Cullen was arrested for statutory rape, sex abuse, contributing to the sexual delinquency of a minor and custodial interference and booked into Lincoln County Jail, pending pre-trial release on $90,000 bail. 

Sgt. Kusmiss said Lincoln County District Attorney’s office is preparing the paperwork to seek Cullen’s extradition to stand trial for the charges there. 

Though Lincoln County authorities listed Cullen as a Berkeley resident, Sgt. Kusmiss said, “She said she originally came from Massachusetts, and she said she’s been homeless for some time. She’s been traveling.” 

Cullen told officers she had originally met the youth on the street in Berkeley, and the investigation began. According to police, the couple reconnected in Berkeley following the Oregon arrest. 

The sergeant praised Officer Phillips for taking the initiative in launching the investigation. 

“It’s quite an unusual case for us. If she hadn’t been alert, we probably wouldn’t have made the case,” said Sgt. Kusmiss.

Oakland Unified School District officials and at least some board members were keeping close-mouthed at the end of this week about allegations of possible improper relations between a male school board member and a 17-year-old female Oakland area high school student. 

The allegations involved board member Chris Dobbins, who was elected to the 6th district seat last November to replace the retiring Dan Siegel. The allegations included email messages, conversations, and meetings between Dobbins and the student, who Dobbins told the Oakland Tribune he was mentoring. 

“This is still under investigation by the district and the police department,” board president David Kakishiba said by telephone, saying that any further statement or possible board action would have to wait “until we have the full story.” 

None of the sources involved revealed the identity of the student, who reportedly graduated from a high school in Oakland last month. 

There appear to be two questions at issue right now. The first is whether the allegations against Dobbins amount to anything that might be in violation of California law, enough for the Alameda County District Attorney’s office to bring charges. The second is whether the allegations, even if not involving criminal activity or unproven, are enough to either seriously damage Dobbins’ rising political career or force him to resign from the board. In addition to any possible criminal charges, the board itself has the power to censure Dobbins, an act that would carry no penalties but would have political implications. 

Kakishiba refused to speculate on any possible future board action. 

The next scheduled OUSD board meeting is August 8. 

At least one board member, Noel Gallo, has publicly called on Dobbins to resign because of the accusations. Dobbins himself was taking the California Bar examination this week and was not commenting, but sources on the board said that he had told board members he would provide them with a decision on Friday as to whether or not he would resign. 

If Dobbins were to resign, the California Education Code allows the board to either select Dobbins’ replacement or call for a new election. If the board were to choose a replacement themselves, District 6 voters could petition for a replacement election. 

Interest in the District 6 school board race was low last November because Oakland Unified was still under full state control at that time, with the board holding no powers. With a small measure of local control restored to the board earlier this month and widespread belief that more powers will be returned in the near future, any new election may spark a fierce campaign for the 6th District seat, including candidates with an eye for a possible run against 6th District Oakland City Councilmember Desley Brooks in three years. 

Dobbins left an upbeat voicemail message referring all questions to his attorney, Scott Newbold of San Mateo, who said that Oakland police “are concluding their investigation. Based upon what I know about the situation, I don’t think they are going to find anything.” 

OUSD Public Information Officer Troy Flint said by telephone that sometime last week district officials “received information about a relationship that needed to be explored.”  

Flint said that OUSD state administrator Kimberly Statham “reviewed the relationship between Dobbins and a student and decided it needed to be referred to child protective services and the Oakland Police Department.” 

Flint said that an Oakland Tribune article which claimed that Statham had called on Dobbins to resign was incorrect. “We are monitoring the situation and reserving judgment until we receive a final report from the police department.” 

Lt. Kevin Wiley of the OPD Youth and Family Services Division did not return telephone calls by press time.

Elephant Pharmacy is hosting an electronic recycling drop-off day on Saturday. The pharmacy, at 1607 Shattuck Ave., will be accepting computers, TVs, stereos, and all other electronic equipment from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. 

Computers & Education will reuse as much as possible and the Computer Recycling Center will environmentally recycle the rest. CRC is registered with the California Integrated Waste Management Board and the Department of Toxic Substance Control. 

Elephant Pharmacy will also be handing out 10 percent-off coupons (for purchases that day) to everyone recycling electronics. 

“We put computers into the hands of foster kids and home-bound disabled elderly, and in most cases this is their very first computer,” says Lynn Goodison of Computers & Education. Computers & Education overwrites all hard drives to destroy all personal data. 

An estimated 5 million computers become obsolete in the United States each month. Computers and electronic products may also contain hazardous materials that harm the environment.

By Cynthia Johnson 

Had he lived, John Lennon would have been 67 years of age today (Friday). On Saturday at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar St. in Berkeley, there will be a party and film to remember musical genius and peace icon John Lennon and honor beloved local activist Hal Carlstad. 

We will show the outstanding 2006 film by David Leaf and John Schenfeld The U.S. vs. John Lennon. 

The Lennon documentary shows the vivid history of Vietnam-era resistance and John’s evolution from Beatle to inspiring peace activist and threat to the national security establishment. Yoko Ono Lennon said “Of all the documentaries made about John, this is the one he would have loved.” 

The present day interviews with Yoko in the film are priceless and a sad reminder of the current brutal situation in Iraq where so many innocents are dying. Many may have not realized the intense efforts of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover and Congress (specifically Strom Thurmond) to neutralize John’s impact for peace by trying to deport Lennon before the 1972 presidential election when 18-21 year olds could vote for the first time. John was assassinated Dec. 6, 1980 just after Reagan had been “elected” and we can only speculate on what his profound ongoing impact might have been had John lived. The last years showing the family and John with his son Sean, who was also born on July 27, are very touching.  

We will remember Hal by finishing raising the funds for the state of the art sound system begun at his memorial July 15. 

There was an SRO crowd of hundreds at the St. Joseph the Worker Church July 15, including family and friends from his teaching, beekeeping, winemaking, activism and other diverse circles, including Country Joe, who sang “Remember Me and Carry On.” 

Cindy Sheehan, who became the face of the current U.S. antiwar movement, called him her” activist father” as Hal encouraged her to speak her truth just months after her son Casey died in Iraq and before she became a national figure. She co-founded the Gold Star Families for Peace at the Berkeley Fellowship in February 2005 with Hal’s encouragement, and now is leading protests for impeachment and keeping constitutional government alive. Cindy and Hal were truly connected on an energetic level as so many were.  

Some of Hal’s other peacemaking friends thought a very appropriate legacy for a man arrested so many times—almost as many as his other late friend, Father Bill O’Donnell—would be a state of the art sound system, the Hal Carlstad Wireless Portable Sound System, for all social justice groups to use in their ongoing demos, protests and street theater. Many peace groups have been sponsoring a monthly Die-In at the San Francisco Federal Building, 450 Golden Gate, the first Thursday of every month until the Iraq Occupation Ends. The next one Thursday, Aug. 2 at 1 p.m. will be dedicated to Hal and will have the new system for sound in place. 

“Hal was a man of action who loved to see creative action to educate people and the media” said an Earth First friend. A fitting closing at the Memorial was the huge white Bird of Peace puppet that gracefully circled around the church support by members of the Art and Revolution Collective. 

The UU Social Justice Committee hopes to raise the money needed for the Sound System on Saturday night and anything over will go for a scholarship for youth to go to Cuba with Pastors for Peace Caravan. Hal loved Cuba and went there many times challenging the embargo. A health professional who visited Hal often at the Intensive Care Unit stated, “Hal might well have survived had he the benefit of a Cuban health care system. He would have loved Michael Moore’s Sicko too. Hal was not denied a costly operation due to his Medicare, but a health care system based on greed is not adequate.” 

Obviously the past is over but not hard to imagine that these two heros would want a government and system based on caring for all living things and would want us to be happy, love more and keep moving for change knowing we all have different roles at different times of our life. 

The doors to the Fellowship Hall will open at 6pm on Saturday and there will be tasty, healthy treats to celebrate John’s Birthday and Hal’s ongoing legacy. The program will start with joyful musical offerings by Maxina Ventura including the great Pat Humphries song “Great Spirits will Live Forever—We’re All Swimming to the Other Side” and the film will start right after, with a discussion & party to follow the film. All are welcome and no one will be turned away.  

For further information on these events call 528-5403. 

Talk about abrupt transitions: We spent a long weekend in the Santa Cruz mountains with some of the grandchildren, with no newspaper delivery and recreational attractions out-competing Internet and radio news updates. So listening to the latest news on NPR on Monday morning was the classic rude awakening, with a featured report on the secretary of state’s announcement that she’s proposing to drop more weapons, to the tune of close to $30 billion or more, into the steaming cauldron which is the Middle East today. A big hunk of the new money, $20 billion, would go to Saudi Arabia, theoretically to balance a perceived threat from Iran, but in addition, to allay Israeli fears about the Saudis, Israel’s already huge weapons funding would be increased to at least $30 billion. And there’s another $13 billion for Egypt. 

Such news is hard to square with the well-known information that the 9-11 plotters and today’s al Qaeda, wherever and whoever they are at the moment, are mainly drawn from the Saudi ruling class. Iran poses a theoretical threat because of its nuclear activities, but in what passes for reality these days, the Saudis seem to be the real threat, and yet their country continues to be the beneficiary of lavish U.S. aid. And the real dangers, to Americans, Iraqis and Israelis alike, are on the ground, from weapons so common they need an acronym: IEDs (improvised explosive devices). That means homemade bombs, and what good will the fighter jets being handed out like popcorn to Saudi Arabia, Israel and Egypt do against homemade bombs thrown by amateur fanatics? 

But as we listened to the Monday news, it sounded strangely familiar. One feature of our long weekend was listening to stories of conflicts in exotic locales among people with unusual names over powerful weapons which promised fantastic results. Our 11-year-old granddaughter had spent the early part of the week at Lawrence Hall of Science’s backpacking camp, where she lugged along an extra five pounds or so. That was because she’d stayed up until midnight on Saturday night to acquire the most essential status item for her peer group: not the latest hoodie, not an iPhone—a book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Backpacking doesn’t provide a lot of extra time or artificial light for reading, so by the time we picked her up on Thursday to drive her home, she’d only managed to read about half of it. That meant that a major feature of last weekend was a Harry Potter marathon, including a lot of reading aloud by her and her mother so that the 6-year-old sister, an avid reader but not quite at the Harry Potter level, could share in the excitement.  

I confess that I haven’t really read much Harry Potter myself: occasional bedtime chapters of various volumes is about all. But the genre is quite familiar to any comparative literature major and opera fan like me: heroes and villains with fancy names who change places and shapes and motivations and struggle endlessly over possession of weapons perceived to have magic powers. Beowulf, the Arthurian legends, Wagner, Superman comics, the Wizard of Oz, even the Judeo-Christian bible...Harry Potter draws heavily on many story cycles with similar content. It’s all part of our human inheritance, which is why the news from the Middle East sounds so familiar, depressingly familiar in fact.  

Condoleezza Rice, like all too many secretaries of state who preceded her, is trying to sell the story that possession of the latest fantastic weapons by the forces of good, whoever they are this week, will assure that good will triumph over evil at the end of the chapter. The readiness of most Americans, even Americans in Congress, to buy this version of reality might be attributed to its similarities to familiar stories which are part of the culture, and which have been told over and over again. During the Cold War, Russians and other Communists played the part of the monsters, and now that they’ve seemingly vanished in a puff of smoke the narrative is being reconstituted with Middle Eastern characters. But keep your eye on the Russians; under Putin they seem poised to reappear as villains at any moment.  

Pursuit of treasure, another classic ingredient of legends, is the real world motivation behind arms funding, of course. While the clash between good and evil is being enacted in the foreground, Halliburton and other profiteering corporations play the role of the greedy monster sneaking up behind the combatants to make away with the treasure while they’re distracted.  

A couple of members of Congress, people identified with support of Israel, complained about the new funding for Saudi Arabia when it first surfaced on Saturday. Whether the increase in weaponry for Israel will mollify them remains to be seen. So far no one else in Congress has had much to say on the subject. 

In the meantime, while the administration is preoccupied with mythical future battles to be fought by shifting heroes with fantasy tools, on the ground in Iraq live people are dying. It’s not just soldiers in opposing forces who are suffering, it’s non-combatants and especially children as well. Also in Monday’s news was an Oxfam report which says that “as many as four million Iraqis are in dire need of help getting food, many of them children; 70 percent of the country now lacks access to adequate water supplies, up from 50 percent in 2003, and 90 percent of the country’s hospitals lack basic medical and surgical supplies.....”  

Is it too much to ask that in the second millennium since the death of Christ we humans might finally figure out that magic weapons and morphing evildoers are the stuff of children’s stories, but real children in the real world have real problems which need better solutions? Is it possible, even, that putting twenty or thirty or sixty-three billion dollars into repairing the damage we’ve done in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East might make the United States safer in the long run than providing Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel with more tools for mutually assured destruction? Can we at least talk about it? 

Once again I’m exercising my editorial privilege of previewing opinion contributions and responding to them the same day they’re printed. I’ve read the comments from Jean Damu and Alona Clifton in this issue, and I both agree and disagree with the points they raise. 

Let’s get one out of the way first. I don’t think the way Dave Lindorff and others on the left bank of the Internet stream have been bashing John Conyers is racism, exactly. Even though I’m white myself I’m usually no apologist for the average white person, including the average leftist white person. I’m fully aware of spoken and unspoken assumptions that can affect the way persons of European-only descent treat those who have some ancestors who came from other continents, even when the intentions are benign. But in this case it’s more complicated than that. 

Background: some people, with Cindy Sheehan and Medea Benjamin the big names out front, think that the main agenda for activists against the Iraq War is impeaching the responsible parties right now, from Bush on down. On Saturday a group of such people went to the Washington office of John Conyers, chair of the House judiciary committee, to press their point of view, and when he declined to agree with them instantaneously, saying he didn’t have the votes, they announced that they wouldn’t leave his office until he complied with their demands.  

This was all planned in advance—anyone can track the planning on the Internet, on the Daily Kos site among others. And surprise, surprise, when their plans were carried out, the sitters-in were arrested. Now they, or some of their friends, are whining about it. 

You know what? It’s called civil disobedience. Getting arrested, if you choose to disobey the law, is part of the program. We always told our daughters not to get arrested by accident, but getting arrested on purpose for a good cause is an honorable tactic in some circumstances. Whining after the fact ruins the whole point of the protest.  

The subsequent personal attacks on Conyers, a brave man doing his best, are outrageous. One lamebrain web-site, supposedly pro-impeachment but probably hosted by the contemporary equivalent of Cointelpro or perhaps the Republican National Committee, shows his picture with a big X across his face, and calls for defeating him in the next election because the protesters were arrested in his office. Evidently they don’t realize that if Conyers were actually to be defeated, his successor would not be chair of the Judiciary Committee, and its discussion of impeachment would come to a grinding halt. Oh, and of course Bush would also be out of office by then, wouldn’t he? And succeeded by whom? 

Lindorff, a prolific polemicist, has another such attack posted in all the usual places. I haven’t bothered to find out what his previous history is, but one of his barbs caught my attention: “As one angry activist in the hallway remarked, ‘Where is today’s (Rep. Allard) Lowenstein or Father Drinan. There is none!’ ”  

As it happens, I have in my desk drawer this very day a fading copy of a bill of impeachment introduced against Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War, authored by priest and congressman Robert Drinan and—John Conyers, then as now U.S. Congressman from Detroit’s First District. And as it happens, I knew Al Lowenstein, even before he was in Congress, in the mid sixties when he toured the country looking for a candidate to run against Johnson, long before Lindorff was out of high school.  

Drinan and Lowenstein are both dead now, but Conyers was their good friend and is the worthy inheritor of their pragmatic tradition. If they were alive today, they’d certainly support his decisions.  

Lindorff and others also compare Conyers negatively to Rosa Parks, whom I met many times when she was a field representative for Conyers’ Detroit office. Perhaps he doesn’t know that when she sat down on the bus she wasn’t just a spontaneous protester, but was the carefully chosen “respectable” and well-trained representative of a tightly organized and coordinated long-term game plan. And she never whined about being arrested. 

So why is this not exactly conventional racism? Well, for one thing the same crowd is also attacking the white Rep. Nancy Pelosi. (Cindy Sheehan has announced that she’s running against Pelosi, wasting her own time and ours.) That’s not conclusive, of course, because as long as both African-Americans and women as groups are in less-powerful positions in American society (i.e. they’re not White Males) they are both easy targets for attackers. But this particular incident looks like it’s just another case of the deplorable historic tendency of leftists to prefer internecine warfare to engaging the real enemy on his own turf, more than it’s about race. 

As a genetic WASP, I can’t remember many jokes and I tell them poorly. But one I do know and tell often is about the guy who’s crawling around on his knees one dark night under the streetlight outside his house. A neighbor lady asks him what he’s doing. He says he’s looking for his car keys, which he dropped as he was getting out of the car.  

“But the car’s over there at the curb!” she says. “Why aren’t you looking there?” “The light’s better here,” he answers. 

Ray McGovern, one of those arrested in DC, spent 27 years in the CIA, proving that some people are mighty slow to get the word. Now he has a web post reprinted on Commons Dreams which is headed “John Conyers Is No Martin Luther King,” wherein he also accuses Conyers of having Alzheimer’s.  

Well, some of us around here do remember Martin Luther King, and Conyers surely does too. We remember that he loved to quote the words of an old spiritual: “Keep your eyes on the prize, move on!”  

It’s much more convenient for Lindorff, McGovern, Sheehan, Benjamin and their cohorts to attack their friends, but it’s much less effective. When John Conyers says he just doesn’t have the votes to do what you want, believe him, don’t go for his throat. Instead, keep your eye on the many real bad actors, or on the possible swing votes in Congress—don’t start organizing one more circular firing squad. 

LAUFER’S KPFA  

PROGRAM 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Like you, I’m disappointed with Peter Laufer’s Sunday program. After Larry Bensky’s hard-hitting, relevant, and intelligent political discussions with experts, Laufer’s program is Marin-lite. He seems to want to please everyone; there is no anger or indignation at current politics, which even Robbie Osman evinces in his folk music program Across the Great Divide, which follows Laufer’s. Instead of dealing with very urgent political issues like: To impeach or not to impeach, Gonzalez’s obfuscation and lying, the sham peace conference called by Bush, the overdevelopment of Berkeley (and our mayor’s complicity in it), on and on, Laufer gives us tepid commentary in the name of egalitarianism: an hour on the English language, murals, food, etc., etc. Bensky may have offended lots of people with his strong opinions and arrogant personality, but he also challenged our critical thinking. Give me Bensky any day! 

Estelle Jelinek 

• 

REP. CONYERS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I’m sorry that the authors saw our deep disappointment with Congressman Conyers as racist. One of the three people who met with Rep. John Conyers on July 23 was Reverend Lennox Yearwood, who has worked with Conyers for years and calls the congressman his mentor. Rev. Yearwood emerged from the meeting with a heavy heart and extreme disappointment at Conyers’ refusal to endorse impeachment. 

Days later, when hearing that the action at Conyers’ office was considered racist, Rev. Yearwood wrote:  

“To my African-American counterparts who take issue with the white progressive anti-war movement, I understand your criticism of our recent action in Mr. Conyers office, but I do not agree. It was extremely difficult to challenge a man that means so much to African-Americans, but impeaching Bush is critical to the future of our country.  

Impeachment begins in the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary, which Rep. John Conyers chairs. He is in the position to begin the impeachment process or keep it from happening, and no other human being is in that position. If Rep. Conyers does not put forth impeachment then we have no recourse and the Democrats will have failed us. 

This moment is not about race, it is about our future as a country.” 

While we are disappointed with Conyers on impeachment, we continue to respect him for his lifelong achievements and to have a good working relationship with him. Moreover, our closest allies in Congress in this anti-war work are, without a doubt, members of the Black Caucus. We work, on almost a daily basis, with Maxine Waters, Barbara Lee and Diane Watson. We have had yearly events on women and peace with Eddie Bernice Johnson. Both Cindy and I went to Georgia to work on the congressional campaign of Cynthia McKinney. Cong. Carrie Meek from Florida and his wife, both African-American, are great fans of Code Pink (and our neighbors here in D.C.). We work very closely with newly-elected African-American Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison, who is very concerned about the war and working with us to stop a new war with Iran, as is Cong. Gregory Meeks. We have a very close relationship with civil rights veteran and staunch anti-war Congressman John Lewis, and work closely with Sheila Jackson Lee from Texas. On issues related to Africa, we look to Donald Payne for leadership and have a close working relationship. 

Medea Benjamin 

P.S.: I also support reparations.  

• 

PLAYING THE RACE CARD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

A segregated world of white liberal activists and media personalities revealed itself when it played the race card against Congressman John Conyers. Understandably angry at being arrested at Conyers’ office after he refused to push an impeachment resolution in the U.S. Congress, their anger turned “stupid,” to use Becky O’Malley’s term from her July 27 editorial. 

Perhaps “ignorant” applies. Only people in a white cocoon would add to the legitimate gripe about Congressman Conyers’ decision racially divisive jibes that Conyers was a poor representative of the Congressional Black Caucus, was “no Martin Luther King,” had forgotten the meaning of Selma, Alabama, and was a living insult to his former co-worker, Rosa Parks. 

The derision is spewed upon Conyers by three writers on Commondreams.org, where a fourth writer, Rev Lennox Yearwood, Jr. defends the sit-in but avoids mention of the slurs. Of 72 writers contributing to the issue, Yearwood is the only black (excluding a 1974 statement by Barbara Jordan), and there are no Latinos. A consistent exponent of white liberal aloofness is Air America radio. The network currently features nine radio hosts, all whites. The local 960 Quake radio affiliate has four independent hosts, all whites. In a number of cities the network got on the air by purchasing African American or Latino stations. Old staffs were dumped, according to an article in ColorLines. 

An exemplary Air America host is Thom Hartmann, who quotes heavy tomes about the constitution, damns the war in Iraq, but cuts off callers about immigration with his quip, “We don’t have an immigration problem, we have an employer problem.” O.K., but what about the U.S. policies driving millions North, and what about the migra raids that tear apart families? Hartmann’s understanding of Hispanics shows in his pronunciations of towns with Hispanic names. A few weeks ago, his screen flashed that he had a caller from what he called, “Lay Joel La,” that coastal town near San Diego. 

The cocooned white libs may pronounce black names correctly, but they show their true colors when they pick on John Conyers for his race. 

Ted Vincent 

• 

UNFORTUNATE DETOUR 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It’s not easy to decide that persons I honor and respect, like the “Code Pink” activists, have taken an unfortunate detour from the very goal that I have also honored—to immediately end our crimes in Iraq, and to return our military. I was also convinced that demanding Bush’s impeachment seemed like a no-brainer-route to that end! But now, I’ve heard persons who I honor and respect just as much, like Representatives Conyers and Kucinich, who question this path. They fear impeachment proceedings will involve Congress far too long. Every day that our best minds and energies are used for this litigation, there will be simultaneous daily horrors continuing in Iraq.  

Impeachment of a president was probably never more justified, but has, I now believe, become an unwise diversion, as has any issue of racism, such as in this attack of frustration on Conyers. We are embarrassed and grieved by this seemingly endless waste of humanity—American, Iraq, and others! But to unwisely split our view of the correct path to peace, we may only prolong the chaos.  

Gerta Farber 

• 

MAYOR BATES AND  

THE HOMELESS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Becky O’Malley’s editorial “all about attitude” reports on a KPFA interview by Larry Bensky’s replacement person of Mayor Tom Bates. 

He provided Bates with ample opportunity to express his well-known distaste with individuals to be found on our Berkeley streets. Clearly Becky has touched the pulse of the community. However “all about attitude” doesn’t hit the complexity as I’m acquainted with it. When we did the April Coalition in 1971, one thing that happened was Tom got involved with Loni. But there was also politics, and the “center” was that—in the name of coalition between the “hippies” and the “politicos”—the idea of putting people in their place for “attitude” was replaced by an agenda of “listen.” Now Tom is presenting the so-called “Commons” initiative with attitude, as indeed the quote above indicates. What’s changed, however, is the dialogue structure. Instead of accommodating “attitude,” it is becoming increasingly important to hear the advocacy of those abused and—if next month’s San Francisco American Psychological Association demo http://ethicalapa.com is relevant—yes, tortured. The way to do that is not just “listen” because that’s a way of taking in .. raw pain. It requires taking people’s advocacy more seriously than the mere civility of “listen.” 

Tom quotes Berkeley Mental Health that “40 percent of the folks on the street” are ‘hardcore resistant’ to services, “treatment,” and the like. His choice, and that of Mental Health here, is “behavior management by compassion (if possible) by force (if necessary).” The alternative politics is to promote a “culture of responsibility.” It’s to see that those “40 percent” do have a point. Since the time of Gus Newport, such an alternative has not been policy. Wendy Georges—heroic advocate of the “culture of responsibility” with the Food Project—was herself “behavior managed.” 

Psychologically, the editorial does what it rails against, sitting “passively by while guests pitched the inevitability of unbridled capitalism.” We need to go beyond the “better yuppies” model, to speak more to the social change level where the advocacy of the “culture of responsibility” will be the center of discourse and activism. 

Andrew Phelps 

Former Chair, Berkeley Mental Health Advisory Board 

Former organizer, April Coalition 

• 

HOUSING AUTHORITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

After reading all of the scandal concerning the Berkeley Housing Authority and knowing from experiencing what went on, I am not surprised at the way the Housing Authority protects their own…after all, we have heard the, “ put up or shut up” and “cover your ass” excuses by the elite of Berkeley. The untouchable well paid fired SEIU workers got to come back…get better jobs at City Hall.  

No one needs to see the film City Hall, with Al Pacino in the staring role. All we need to see are the returned former BHA employees who got hired back in spite of what went on at the Housing Authority. Many of us know from first hand that favors were made and deals were made behind the backs of the people who pay the salaries of city employees including Mayor Bates who I understand has enough to give away his small check. 

Does anyone care? Is it more important to protect city jobs and Section 8 status and keeping the Section 8 program in Berkeley? Many people are calling me and telling me sad stories, and it continues to bother me. “Favorite landlord status” and separate and unequal acts by BHA employees to oust a tenant who does not bow down to them is not new news, it is old news. A housing director who misplaced $400,000 of funds that were to go to disabled poor people is, I realize, old news. But so is the hanging of Christ who died on the cross for the poorest of the poor. 

Diane Villanueva 

• 

A FEW PLEASANT THINGS ABOUT BERKELEY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Since the City of Berkeley comes in for a great deal of “dissing” these days, I’d like to come to their defense and mention a few very pleasant events they offer our community. I had business in downtown Berkeley this afternoon and so just happened to run across the Thursday Noon Concert, sponsored by the Downtown Berkeley Association. Today’s program featured the Koz George Quartet, a group of young, very talented musicians, probably none older than 16. These concerts, given Thursdays in July and August, are located at the Berkeley Bart Station. Seats, under a canopy, are provided, making for a relaxed, very enjoyable lunch hour for office workers and shoppers. 

Another, equally pleasant event, is the Friday Afternoon Movie at the Main Berkeley Library. I saw a splendid film there last week, a powerful Danish movie Brothers. The next movie will be Sunset Boulevard, a picture well worth viewing a second time.  

Need I add, this sure beats forking over $7.50 at commercial theaters. Granted that the above are hardly earthshaking events, I think we should give Berkeley credit where credit is due! 

Dorothy Snodgrass 

• 

BIG BOX VS. WALKABLE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The stuff we need and like is so distant from us, so difficult to access because it’s so far away—big box instead of local. Health care, groceries, schools—what happened to local, to walk-to locations? They’ve been overcome by corporate conquests of the small business. They’ve been undone by theft our taxes that used to pay for local services. These are abetted by ruler-ship of the automobile and fuel makers: no reasonable public transportation!  

Community has been undone in favor of creating us slaves marching to service to big money: waged slavery. Meanwhile corporate control mandated by our state, federal and local governments prevent us caring for us and Earth. Talk about a planned economy! Not planned in our favor, but in favor of The Owners. Is that why we struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat? 

Norma J. F. Harrison 

• 

ACCESS AWARD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In response to an April 6 letter to the editor, submitted by a commission chairman crowing over an award given to our city for its accessibility to disabled citizens, I have been paralyzed by irony. It has taken me months to recover from a conflict of not knowing whether to laugh or cry. 

Ask our mobile, disabled community of wheelchair users and blind pedestrians how often our lives are threatened by misleading apex curbcuts, broken sidewalks and traffic circles with high-growing vegetation that obscures drivers’ view of human traffic. 

The Transportation Commission, without first notifying commissions on aging and disability, removed pedestrian refuge areas from a busy thoroughfare, and say they plan to do another. 

It would seem to me that, considering the many broken sidewalks in Berkeley inaccessible to people in wheelchairs, which necessitates users having to move into busy streets, the treacherously tilted walkways, and the uneven concrete surfaces permitted by Public Works to accommodate developers for new construction, the mind of anyone would boggle at the idea of accepting an award for either accessibility or safety in Berkeley.  

Arlene Merryman 

• 

PACIFIC STEEL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I work a few days a month at an office in the Tannery, at the foot of Gilman Street, and I’m glad I don’t have to go there more often. It’s too near Pacific Steel Casting and I smell that unmistakable burnt-pot smell the neighbors complain of. I have even smelled it on occasion outside my house on Channing near McGee, miles away from the plant. It’s not the smell that’s the main problem, however, it’s the chemicals and particulates that are aggravating asthma among the neighbors of the plant. I had asthma as a child, and I know how scary it is to wake up in the night unable to draw a full enough breath to call out for help. I also just lost a sister-in-law to asthma. She lived in the none-too-clean air of lower Manhattan. 

Instead of quibbling about whether Pacific Steel Casting’s emissions are the 12th worst for health in the Bay Area, or the 14th, or the 18th, we need a health survey that will show what effect the emissions are having on actual people. The city needs to hold a public hearing where people’s concerns can be addressed. Ironically, the office where I work deals with the songs and recordings of my mother, Malvina Reynolds, who wrote “What Have They Done to the Rain,” a song about nuclear testing that has also been applied to acid rain, and could easily be applied to PSC: “Just a little breeze with some smoke in its eye...”  

Nancy Schimmel 

• 

ASSESSMENT TAX 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am extremely concerned with the proposed assessment tax in regard to the West Berkeley Community Benefits District. It appears to be funded and supported by big Berkeley developers. I wonder how something like this happens behind the backs of all the small people who will be affected. I am an artist, recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts Grants. I own a studio in this district and have lived here since January of 1999. I also own a house on Allston Way. I am very distressed about another tax, which I see will only benefit the already affluent few. It is not what any of us need in this neighborhood. Our taxes are already exorbitantly high. My combined taxes for house and studio are roughly $16,000.00 a year. 

The big issue they claim to want to address, people demonstrating aggressive and disturbing behavior, is a sham. It reminds me of our current administration using terrorist threat and homeland security to keep us in a state of panic. I have never witnessed aggressive or disturbing behavior in my area, but seen it near the Fourth Street shopping area; a few people, probably schizophrenic, battling their demons; a few blind people, who the merchants would like to see gone. Is this not something for social services to address? How in the world do they think they are going to get these people off the streets with a private security system? These people need help, and have no power and no resources. 

Street cleaning, zoning issues, parking and transportation don’t seem like things we residents need to pay more taxes for. With all the taxes we pay why don’t we have regular street cleaning down here? 

I have spoken with a number of my neighbors about this and we are in the process of gathering names for a petition wanting to opt out of this net we are presently caught in. We are aware that large residential areas in this proposed special assessment district have already been excluded. However some of us who happen to live in this mixed use area are being thrown in with the big land owners and developers and being asked to pay for their personal agendas. The vote is weighted on money, property ownership and power. It is un-democratic and taxation without representation. 

Judy Dater 

• 

LENNON CORRECTION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I recently read an on-line Berkeley Daily Planet story by Cynthia Johnson concerning John Lennon and the event planned for last Saturday of which I am planning on attending. 

She stated that both John Lennon and his son Sean were born on the same day, July 27. This is in error, both father and son Lennon’s were born on Oct. 9. I am assuming that she may had been thinking of the date that her story was to appear in the Daily Planet at the time of the writing of the article, and that date remained with her. 

I do not consider this to be an important issue, unless Saturday’s events were scheduled near to the date that was thought to be Lennon’s birth date. Many attendees may be confused. 

M. C. Lanham 

• 

RIGID CURRICULUM 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

We have burdened our classrooms with a rigid curriculum. Real education is built on the spark of self-discovery. Are we prepared to devise a curriculum in which music and art and dance are primary? I believe many students become low achievers because they have not experienced the excitement of discovering something for themselves. It is time to restore the vitality of learning by providing students numerous opportunities for self-expression. 

Romila Khanna 

Albany 

• 

CHENEY’S SHENANIGANS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

For over two hours on July 21, Vice President Cheney held presidential power while Bush underwent a medical procedure. What executive orders did Acting President Cheney sign that might have given additional powers to the vice president? What secret “findings” did Cheney sign that might have authorized extra-legal activities by covert agencies? What pardons might Cheney have signed to free his convicted aid, Lewis Libby, or perhaps to shield Cheney’s accomplice, Donald Rumsfeld? 

How many investigative reporters has your news organization assigned to look for answers? 

Bruce Joffe 

Piedmont 

• 

IMPEACHMENT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Impeachment of the Bush administration would take no time at all if Congress just got right to it. As long as the short-sighted, callous, irresponsible rich boy and his evil masters are in the White House, veto power is in force. They have taken their stand on bringing the troops home (not?), all the while constructing American headquarters in Baghdad the size of several football fields, complete with electricity and running water—potable and for washing—in full view of Iraqi who have had neither since this unnecessary war started over five years ago. 

Just imagine what else they are thinking up to secretly instigate before November, 2008! 

Nancy Chirich 

• 

ENOUGH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Oh, how the tangled web of deceit practiced by the Bush administration becomes ever more tightly knotted! 

The Bush team has come up with a clever plan to sell to Peter and give the proceeds to Paul. It will ask congressional approval to sell $20 billion worth of high tech military stuff to Saudi Arabia, with smaller amounts for five other gulf states.  

Bush hopes that friendly King Abdullah, a Sunni Muslim, will use his enhanced military as a forceful counterbalance to Iran’s growing Shiite influence. But because the Saudis and their Arab neighbors are hostile towards Israel the sale is sure to invite opposition. In order to assuage opponents’ anxiety, the Bush administration intends to give $30 billion to Israel’s military and $13 billion to Egypt for defense.  

It has been said that the Soviet Union lost the Cold War by spending itself into bankruptcy. Will we lose the war on terror from similar profligacy—trying to purchase victory?  

The disturbing part of this is not that it takes a lot of money to buy hearts and minds but that this plan, if approved, will extend our global entanglements far into the future.  

We need a president and a Congress with the courage and foresight to hold the line against further entanglements. Enough is enough! 

Marvin Chachere  

San Pablo 

• 

LEAVING REALISM BEHIND 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

If Bush and his war buddies are considered sane, we should all pursue insanity. George W. has left realism far behind; Iraq has become a bloody quagmire. There was no rhyme or reason for the invasion of Iraq except a faulty ideology and a GOP penchant to play the 9/11 card to the hilt. 

This is a Republican war, have no doubt about it. President Bush is undermining Congress’ attempts to end the Iraq war; Republican hard-liners filibuster any attempt to end it; and Bush core supporters cheer from the sidelines. 

The war in Iraq will not end until funding is cut off, the American public’s clamor reaches a fever pitch or the ‘I” word (impeachment) is impressed firmly on Bush’s mind. 

Ron Lowe  

Grass Valley

I am writing given your recent editorial comment about KPFA’s new Sunday Morning talk show host, Peter Laufer and his reply. Some history is important. Right after Larry Bensky announced that he was leaving the Sunday Morning show I approached Sasha Lilley, the recently appointed interim program director, while at an event at the Berkeley Unitarian-Universalists Hall at Cedar and Bonita. I suggested that they should consider breaking up the two-hour block and getting some diversity in that time slot: Women, people of color, and political diversity. Having the same politics controlling the questions and direction of the interviews every Sunday can get tiresome and redundant. Having different expressions from diverse people with diverse politics could reach more people and be much more interesting.  

With eight hours a month there were lots of possibilities. Four hosts rotating each week, two hours a week or one hour each week, or eight hosts with one hour per month. The possibilities were numerous. I also pointed out that they could all help during fund raising and thus reach a much larger audience. Also, with them all being volunteers it would cut down the payroll expenses. As I recall KPFA has the highest payroll expense of the five Pacifica stations and the highest percentage of payroll to funds raised in the network. 

What did we get? Two hours a week from a reasonable facsimile of what we have had for several years. No women, no people of color and no political diversity. I raised this issue with Lemlem Rijio, the interim general manager, and suggested that we had local folks that have developed political analyses and that it would be interesting to have them on the air one hour a month, someone like Michael Parenti. She sent back an e-mail race baiting me for suggesting a white male. Mind you, I suggested him as part of widening political diversity and as part of breaking up the Sunday segment and including people of color and women on Sunday morning. Her decision was to give the entire two hours every week to an older white male with politics very similar to the older white male he replaced, as far as I can tell.  

The Program Council was not included in the process of deciding how to fill the time. As far as I know the Local Station Board (LSB) was not consulted about this decision, not that it is required and yet a meet and confer on such important issues would be helpful toward better communications and transparency. Perhaps some of the LSB members that support anything the current management does were consulted. I wouldn’t know since I am not part of that group. My allegiance is to the Pacifica Mission, transparency, accountability and democratic process.  

As to my thoughts about the new host. I find him boring, arrogant and rude to our listeners, the people who pay his salary. Peter Laufer interrupts every guest and almost every person that calls in. Perhaps we have a different perspective on talk shows. I think they are to bring on interesting people to see what they have to say and to invite our listeners to participate. I see the host as a facilitator to allow the guests and the listeners to dialogue and debate on important issues. Mr. Laufer seems to feel that he needs to overly control the process and constantly interject his views. Sure sometimes one needs to bring the program back to the topic and that doesn’t require constant interruption. Here is an example of what I am talking about: Sunday July 8 at 1:44.10 on the archive recording Mr. Laufer interrupted an articulate African-American woman caller, Dee, who was trying to make a point about the lack of anti-war activity in the communities where most of the youth that are going to Iraq come from. When he interrupted her, less than one minute into her comment, she asked if she could finish her thought and he responded as follows: “Yeh, yeh, I have a propensity to know where someone is going and to get on to the next point because I just watch the clock tick, Dee, and I know how long you waited and I want to get on the other Dees out there.”  

On a personal level I found this offensive. On a political level, for a white male host of a station that is supposed to be working toward racial harmony and diversity, to tell an African-American Woman caller that he knows what she is going to say and must interrupt her is beyond belief. Perhaps if he knew this woman or she sounded like a nut case his conduct could possibly be justified. If you listen to the archive you will see that neither apply. He doesn’t have to agree with her point and he should at least let her finish it without telling her he knows all and must interrupt her. This is no way to build an audience or increase subscribers on a station like KPFA.  

I am not talking off the top of my head, I worked as a radio announcer for five-plus years both AM and FM in my young adult years and I have hosted several LSB Shows with call-ins on KPFA. I have been a listener/subscriber for 33 years and an LSB member for two-plus years, and I spent 14 months as chair of the LSB. I have also participated on several LSB and Pacifica National Board committees.  

Richard Phelps is an Oakland attorney  

and mediator.

As a long-time listener and volunteer at KPFA, I have been following the issue of Larry Bensky’s replacement with great interest. Even though there continues to be infighting over station management issues, the hosts on KPFA generally maintain a high level of respect for their audience, and do their level best to allow people to express their views on the air. I hoped, at a minimum, that the new host of the Sunday morning show, Peter Laufer, would embrace these ideals.  

After listening to several of Mr. Laufer’s shows, I felt a growing discomfort with his approach. I didn’t think his interviews were very enlightening, and I did not like his approach to callers. I thought he did a particularly poor job on the July 22 show that featured Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates as a guest. I was sure he would get criticism for that broadcast, and he did. An editorial in this paper took him to task for, among other things, showing excessive deference to Mayor Bates and cutting off callers who were trying to ask questions. I agreed wholeheartedly with the criticisms that were presented in that editorial. 

Then something happened to give me an even worse impression of Peter Laufer’s journalistic skills. I read his commentary in the Planet! (“KPFA Talk Show Host Talks Back,” July 27). It was so astonishing that I had a hard time believing he was really serious. I had to read the piece over again several times to be absolutely sure. What made it difficult to tell is that the commentary contains all the elements of a comedic parody of an egotistical talk show host: a pervasive condescending tone, disingenuous assertions, arrogant self-promotion, inexplicable logic, mean-spirited comments, and just plain nuttiness. It was difficult to believe that such a piece could have been written in earnest by an experienced journalist, but it eventually dawned on me that this must be the case. And if this is any indication of Mr. Laufer’s thought processes and analytical skills, we should all be on notice that we need to take his opinions and conclusions with a good dose of skepticism. 

The most revealing aspect of Mr. Laufer’s commentary is that he fails to admit even the possibility that he did anything inappropriate. In spite of the fact that he received some stinging criticism from several different quarters about the show, he seems to believe that his critics are 100 percent wrong about everything. That is not a good sign. 

Equally troubling, Mr. Laufer seems to believe he can resolve the whole matter by leveling a personal attack against the executive editor of the Daily Planet, Becky O’Malley. And it’s even a poor quality personal attack at that, because it is so ridiculous. Mr. Laufer writes, “I’m convinced that I speak for all of us when I say that it is you who are the problem here.” Mr. Laufer should have been embarrassed to write such a thing. He obviously doesn’t speak for all of us, and it would not have taken him more than a few minutes to find somebody else besides Becky O’Malley who would have been happy to point that out to him. The utter arrogance of Mr. Laufer’s perspective is breathtaking. And then there’s his statement about the content of the Planet: “Unlike your newspaper which has only one point of view, my radio show serves the entire community and all points of view.” Regular readers of the Planet know that this paper publishes viewpoints from across the political spectrum on local issues. Vigorous debates play out in its pages every week on a wide range of topics. Mr. Laufer really ought to be encouraged to read a bit more before he makes such generalizations. 

During the show with Bates, it was particularly striking that Mr. Laufer openly admitted he was unfamiliar with many of the issues being discussed—yet this did not cause him the slightest hesitation in supporting the mayor’s assertions on just about everything. He reiterated his unequivocal support of Bates in his commentary, even mentioning some friends of his who also support the Mayor. In this context, Mr. Laufer felt it appropriate to declare: “If they and the mayor are part of the problem, sign me up on their team.” Well, so much for maintaining an unbiased perspective for all your listeners, Peter.  

Reading Mr. Laufer’s mixed bag of accusatory and often baffling comments did not quite prepare me for the jarring juxtapositions in the final paragraph of his commentary. In a few short sentences, he manages to combine an expression of gratitude, a sneering critique of the work Becky O’Malley does, and a taunting invitation for her to appear on his show. How exactly does one respond to such an “invitation”? Should Ms. O’Malley arrange to bring a professional mediator along? A playground supervisor from a local elementary school? Thich Nhat Hanh? One thing we know is true: Mayor Bates certainly did not receive an invitation as disrespectful as this before his appearance on the show.  

Finally, what are we to make of Mr. Laufer’s bizarre extrapolation from the simple fact that Becky O’Malley sorts her socks? He opines, “That’s strange: Disorder is OK outdoors but not in? Sounds like symptoms of a closet conservative to me.” Um…what? Peter, allow me to let you in on a little secret: Many of us sort our socks, and we also perform a number of other household chores, too. This is certainly not aberrant behavior, and it does not indicate anything about one’s political outlook. But this highly-contrived invention of yours does indicate something to me: you seem quite willing to bend the facts to suit your own pre-conceived notions. I think many would agree with me when I say that habit, more than anything else, is the mark of a bad journalist. And that may be the underlying reason why you produced a commentary that is so very far removed from reality. 

That is, unless you ‘fess up and admit that the whole thing was just a practical joke. If so, I am ready to read your commentary yet again, and enjoy the refreshing, self-deprecating humor. Taken in that way, your piece really is laugh-out-loud funny. 

Doug Buckwald is a Berkeley activist.

What a cheap shot by columnist Becky O’Malley, backhandedly saying that my criticism of Rep. John Conyers for having 45 people who came to demand that he act on the impeachment bill for Dick Cheney that he has let sit in his committee for three months arrested was “not quite racism.” Why does the white Becky mention the race word? Because the chair of the Judiciary Committee is black? 

Sorry, I would have said exactly the same thing if Conyers was white. But besides that, Becky deceptively fails to note that one of the three people who went in to speak with Conyers, and who came out to say that he was really disturbed at the chairman’s attitude—including the decision not to let protesters stay in his office, but to call in the Capital Cops immediately and have the petitioners all hauled out in cuffs—was Lennox Yearwood, the black Air Force chaplin who is head of HipHop Caucus. He expressed genuine sadness at Conyers’ handling of the whole affair. My reference to Rosa Parks was appropriate because Conyers has chosen to eulogize her and highlight his having hired her as a staffer in his office. He has called her—appropriately—the mother of the Civil Rights movement. But by ejecting people from his office, and having them cuffed, hauled out of Congress, jailed and fined, he has shamed himself, for Parks certainly would not have endorsed that action. 

Becky O’Malley says we can’t criticize Conyers firstly because he has a formidable history as a civil rights hero. That is surely true, but his history doesn’t immunize him against criticism, any more than John Kerry’s heroic stance against the Vietnam War immunizes him against criticism for his later unconscionable Iraq War position. O’Malley then says that Conyers can’t be criticized because when Sheehan, Yearwood, Ray McGovern and 300 other people marched from Arlington Cemetery to Conyers’ office, they wanted to be arrested. 

Not. 

What they said was that they wanted Conyers to stop stalling, and to stop buckling under to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s opposition to impeachment. Conyers, O’Malley failed to mention, in 2005-6 was calling for impeachment hearings. He even wrote a book, “Constitution in Crisis,” which made an eloquent case for impeaching the president. Then he suddenly backed down. Caved. What the marchers were hoping for was a return of the old Conyers. They were not hoping to be, or even expecting to be arrested. They were willing to be arrested, and prepared to be arrested, but that is not the same thing. I don’t think anyone thought it would play out the way it did. 

And it’s not correct to say people who climbed onto the front of segregated busses, or pushed their way into segregated schools, or sat in segregated restaurants expecting to be arrested are the same as those who go and sit in a progressive congressman’s office. You don’t expect the black and progressive chair of the House Judiciary Committee to act like a 1960s deep south mayor. 

And saying Conyers should be ashamed of himself for buckling under to Pelosi, and for arresting people coming to petition him for action is in no way racism. What garbage! 

In response to my article, I received a letter from former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, a representative who never buckled under to conservative leadership. She said she couldn’t believe the arrests had happened, and that she had called to check and confirm the arrests. Her conclusion, “You know, Glen Ford and Bruce Dixon and Leutisha Stills of the BlackAgendaReport.com, formerly all of the BlackCommentator.com have consistently written about the loss of consciousness by the “Conscience of the Congress.” Thanks so much for putting out that call-to-arms. Another sad day in the life of our democracy. “ 

So Becky, spare me your condescending comments. By the way, I’m happy you knew Allard Lowenstein “when I was in high school.” I at least know that he wouldn’t have carried water for the kind of gutless Democratic Congressional leaders we have today, which is why I thought he was such a great guy when I was watching him “back in highschool,” whatever that dig was supposed to mean. 

Your tired, liberal defense of Conyers and your back-handed charge of racism are both beneath contempt. 

Dave Lindorff is the author of The Case for Impeachment.

I am very torn about the Bus Rapid Transit project. I want transit to work and will take the bus more often if it does happen. Still, after reading the articles and letters pro/con-BRT, I remain unconvinced that BRT will be successful. While ridership will grow, such growth can be had with gentler, incremental and cheaper measures that have not been considered, and that in some combination, could increase ridership just as much without having to resort to tearing up Telegraph: i.e., proof of payment system, Bay Area transit pass, security, better shelters, NextBus, lower fares, free rides in downtown areas, increased gas tax, WiFi, more buses/shorter headway, better neighborhood parking programs and enforcement, employee TDM, etc. 

BRT is billed as a connector to BART. At $1.75, it is expensive for those short rides, even with a transfer. Any transit trip from one Bay Area location to another should cost roughly the same regardless of how many transfers and transit providers are involved. The balkanized transit system of the Bay Area is to blame. 

BRT boosters wistfully conjure images of Denver, Portland, Europe and other areas. But the comparison is incongruent as these other systems are free or cheap in downtown areas, and the employment and household densities are much higher.  

The draft environmental impact report (DEIR) attributes anticipated ridership increase to expected growth along the alignment. However, constant debates on individual development projects provide evidence that Berkeley stakeholders are conflicted even on a modest density increase along the Berkeley portion of the “growth area.”  

Land is being shifted from shared use to exclusive bus use. The DEIR does not explain if the land value taken for the travelway in Berkeley (~$24M = 2 miles x 23 feet average travelway width x $100/sf of land) is included in $400 million tab. Or if any proceeds will be used to mitigate project impacts upon those most hurt by the gridlock, loss of parking, etc. How can one blame those along the alignment for opposing the project? To them, the benefits are a myth, the impacts will be real. 

The 40,000 BRT riders will benefit during a short portion of their day—during their commute. However, BRT will hurt constantly for those affected. Assuming that residents 1?4 mile on each side of the alignment are impacted by the project, at about an average of 10,000 persons per sq. mile along the alignment, an equivalent number of persons will be impacted for longer periods—commute and business hours, and worse on weekends. That estimate does not include those affected residents and commuters along other major arterials (Ashby, Alcatraz, College, and Shattuck). Lost opportunity costs to those impacted by BRT are ignored in the DEIR.  

Finally, no single transit system will succeed without the cooperation of the state, cities, employers, other transit agencies, etc. Unfortunately, AC Transit has no control over their bureaucrat brethren. If all transit is to work, it can be done only with related land use, parking, tax and fiscal policies and practices. Any stand-alone transportation project will have limited success. AC Transit should fix what they can for now and continue to work with state and local government to promote policies and regulations that will be supportive not just of BRT, but all transit. Before any major surgery is performed on Telegraph, other remedies should be given a chance.  

Ignacio Dayrit is a Berkeley resident.

I mailed a few letters this past Saturday, getting to the post office just before pickup at 4:30 in the afternoon. The post office is on the corner of College and Webster in the Elmwood. I live on Prince Street and was alarmed that every parking spot on the street was taken; it is the longest uninterrupted street in the city, between College and Claremont avenues. Traffic on College was backed up beyond Woolsey, almost to Alcatraz Avenue as a result of the red traffic light at Ashby. Alcatraz is four blocks south of Ashby. After I mailed my letters, I walked to the corner of Ashby and College, and as a result of the red light there, traffic was backed up on Ashby several blocks east as well as west. I wondered: has the city ever commissioned an environmental report for auto exhausts in my neighborhood, especially on the corner of Ashby and College on a Saturday afternoon?  

There is a church with a Chinese congregation on Prince near College, and when there is activity there, its members occupy many parking spaces on the street. However, there was no activity there when I mailed my letters; it was obvious that people who live elsewhere were parking on the street so they could take the short walk to businesses in the Elmwood.  

I often wonder what motivates politicians like those on the Berkeley City Council to approve projects like Wright’s Garage. Neither the mayor nor council members who approved the project, as well as those who sit on the ZAB commission, live in the Elmwood neighborhood. Obviously, they will not be impacted by the problems it will generate. I understand that my council representative lives up in the Hotel Claremont area, considerably east of the Elmwood neighborhood, so he could easily detour the congestion already prevalent at Ashby and College.  

Campus activity, its employees, sport and cultural events, generate enormous traffic on the North/South College corridor. Employees from San Francisco generate as much or more traffic on the east/west Ashby corridor. This corridor is also backed up by drivers from outside of town who are going to events or an evening on the town in San Francisco. Of course, the mayor and his allies on the city council have no reason to concern themselves about the impact these conditions have on Elmwood residents. By virtue of where they live, they are spared being exposed to it daily. 

There are several scientific studies that apply directly to the traffic problem of the Elmwood. One done by Lippincott Williams and Wilkins, examined the association between traffic-related pollution and childhood asthma. It found that children developed “asthma from exposure to high concentrations of auto pollution.” Another study by researchers from the California Environmental Protection Agency, Cal Department of Health Sciences, and Lawrence National Laboratory, confirm the above findings that “traffic-related pollution is associated with respiratory symptoms in children.” A third study comes from the Netherlands and it finds that older folks, 55-69 years of age, suffer from “cardiopulmonary disease when living near a major road.” 

Imagine the harm being done to residents of the Elmwood from thousands of cars, many of which stop at a red light and stand idling on four major streets in Berkeley, seven days a week. 

I fear greatly the pollution that is being generated by all the traffic, for the elderly who live in the Elmwood. There are many on my street who are over 65 years of age, and not a few with cancer, as with myself, and other blood diseases. I fear for the children in the Elmwood. There has been a large increase of children on my street alone, from toddlers to ten years old, who are taken to the businesses in the Elmwood daily. All are unknowingly exposed to the numerous, disease induced pollutants.  

I fear for all of us who live in the Elmwood, for we have a mayor and members of the City Council who are reckless with our lives, having no interest in our “general welfare,” no curiosity about protecting us. Rather, they are defiantly assaulting the young and the old with their approval of the Wright’s Garage—their mindless decision to approve an increase in traffic in an environmentally overburdened neighborhood.  

I urge all residents of the Elmwood to press the city, as well as our council member Wozniak, to demand that an environmental impact report be made for the Elmwood neighborhood. The monitoring of the pollution should be done especially at Ashby and College on a Saturday afternoon, on a windless day, during game day at the campus, as well as at five in the afternoon on weekdays, when the overwhelming traffic, representing thousands of residents living outside of Berkeley, unwittingly overwhelm the neighborhood with crippling, poisonous exhausts. 

The report should be conducted by a respected, independent scientist who has no ties to members of ZAB and members on the Berkeley City Council. Such an appeal should not prevent concerned citizens from commissioning a scientist to also do the work. Once findings are made, they should be shared with the public and California’s Environmental Protection Agency. Elmwood residents, upon learning of the invisible destroyer in our midst, can act to turn around the irresponsible votes of ZAB and the city council.  

R.J. Schwendinger is an Elmwood  

resident. 

Berkeley’s process to begin implementing Measure G, the greenhouse-gas reduction initiative passed by 81 percent of Berkeley voters last November, is off to a good start. Community workshops held in collaboration with city commissions have been well-attended and lively, and have produced long lists of helpful ideas for action. It seems that the city council will have more than enough raw material from which to decide on policies and incentives after it receives the staff report in December. And many of us citizens will then gladly line up to sign a pledge to do our own bit to help further reduce the greenhouse gases we help to produce in Berkeley every day. However, we’re still taking too narrow a view, and that phrase “produce in Berkeley” explains why. City staff report that about a quarter of our greenhouse gases are produced by automobiles as they drive our city streets (freeway traffic, for which we’re not primarily responsible, is excluded). But there’s an even larger contribution to greenhouse gases that we’re also responsible for—the hundreds of thousands of vehicle miles traveled every work day by commuters into and out of town. According to the evolving Measure G implementation plan, if the miles aren’t traveled in Berkeley they simply don’t count. And that’s leading us to an ostrich-eye view of what we need to do. 

According to a 2005 study by the Bay Area Council, a workforce housing advocacy group, Berkeley provides about 71,000 private- and public-sector jobs—or approximately one current job for every adult Berkeley resident. However, 66.9 percent of those jobs—about 47,600—are held by people who live out of town and commute in to work. In addition, 56.7 percent of our 54,400 “working residents” commute out of town to their jobs—a total of about 30,800. 

Put those two numbers together and we get a truly astonishing statistic: every working day about 78,400 people commute into or out of Berkeley to get to work. Since the average Berkeley commute has been estimated at 28 minutes, we can be sure that many of those commuters are not just tiptoeing across the border from north Oakland or Albany. And we also know that many (and probably most) of our inbound and outbound commuters do so by private automobile, with an average occupancy of 1.2 people per car. 

So here’s the unfortunate reality for our current Measure G planning: Every working day Berkeley is responsible for something like half a million GHG-generating auto miles that are not being targeted for reduction—and not even being counted in the year-2000 baseline. That’s more far GHGs than everything we produce by car trips within our city borders. How environmentally responsible is it to ignore this “half-million-mile gorilla” in the middle of our Measure G planning space? 

The root problem, of course, is that many Berkeley workers who’d love to live here can’t afford to do so. Between now and Measure G’s 2050 endpoint, truly fixing this problem would involve not just personal actions (recycling and walking more and buying compact fluorescents) but structural changes to our housing mix and transportation systems. And that, if we take the charge seriously, would require significantly changing many of our current assumptions about acceptable urban density, the desirability of larger-scale workplaces and the greater availability of affordable workforce housing. It’s all too tempting to ignore today’s unfortunate highly-polluting pattern of living and commuting in our Measure G implementation, even though it’s our worst single GHG offender. But Measure G should require us to take a more responsible global view—and “out of Berkeley, out of mind” is an attitude that falls well short of that. 

Alan Tobey has lived in Berkeley since 1970, and avoided car commuting for all but four months of his working life.

When it comes to food, “everything in moderation,” is how my grandmother would have said it. And that includes knowledge.  

I have always been health-conscious. I would stay away from the sugar, drink the green tea and slurp the pomegranate seeds. I even bought some wheatgrass once, though it remained buried in the crisper drawer, as I wasn’t sure what to do with it. 

But I was still an omnivore with dilemmas. I was confused about cholesterol, mystified by meat and afraid of fat. More knowledge, I decided, was the answer. Picturing lean body mass for life, strong bones, a glowing complexion and vitality radiating from my every extremity, I enrolled in weekly nutrition classes and began devouring articles and books by food journalists. 

Looking back, there should have been a disclaimer: Warning: Too much nutritional knowledge can lead to anxiety and stress. What followed was a year-long journey to Destination Health in which I routinely found myself turning mid-step and looking longingly back at the blissful place called Ignorance that I had left. Faster than I could say “high fructose corn syrup,” the holistic world began to take over my life.  

I became concerned with LDL, HDL, organic, local, seasonal, grass-fed, happy cows not Happy Meals, raw milk, antibiotics, probiotics, growth hormones, lactose intolerance, trans fats, rancid oils, enriched and fortified, glass or plastic, slow-cooked or fast food, mercury levels, heavy metals, artificial sweeteners, GMO, refined carbohydrates, empty calories, top soil, feed lots, soy, pasteurized, homogenized, irradiated, microwaves, and pesticides. 

I learned that we must wash everything we eat because of the chemicals but not too much because we need the healthy bacteria. I stopped drinking out of plastic and cooking with Teflon. I began planning every meal and inputting the ingredients into a computer program to check that we were getting not just our RDA but ODA. (O is for Optimum. I was all about the Optimum.) I learned that my body was always trying to tell me something. Ridges on my nails, brain fog, cravings and the little wart on my right foot were obvious signs of nutritional imbalance and impending doom.  

So, I had my hair tested for heavy metals. I took a food allergy test, kept a food diary, recorded my daily basal body temperature every morning and fed-exed my stool to be analyzed in a laboratory in North Carolina.  

And the strange thing was, the more I learned, the worse I began to feel. What is the opposite of the placebo effect? Paranoia, hypochondria and an alarmed husband. Ah. Enter sanity again. My sweetie had been living his life just as always, taking care of his health in a general, old-fashioned sort of way—you know, exercising and eating lots of fruit and veggies and he was doing great, he was never sick. Meanwhile I was changing everything about my diet and lifestyle in view of my newly acquired knowledge and was feeling crummy. 

I couldn’t understand it but I was sure that his relaxed attitude would catch up with him in the end. After I had once more informed him that his liver was probably about to implode and that he was most certainly deficient in zinc and addicted to gluten, meanwhile I was in a state of near permanent anxiety and was having trouble sleeping, he told me that maybe, just maybe, I was getting a little too stressed out about this health thing. 

“You’re like Woody Allen on wheatgrass,” he muttered. I looked up from where I was attempting to force-feed kelp supplements to the dog. “And we all know that stress is one of the worse things for you.”  

How had my passion for health turned into an unhealthy obsession?  

Knowledge is in general a good thing after all and for much of it, I am grateful. But my grandmother, who passed away peacefully at the age of 94, probably thinking that a nitrate was something to do with the cost of a hotel room, was actually right. Though we are correct to ask questions and consume consciously, the attitude with which we raise our fork to our mouths can be as important as what is on the fork. Worry is bad for our health. And boy did I worry? The odd refined carb can be good for you occasionally if that’s the only time you eat with reckless abandon.  

Right now, I haven’t taken my vitamins in several days. I forgot. Oops. Also, I didn’t have a teaspoon of flax seed oil this morning, I ate wheat for breakfast two days in a row and I didn’t have a spirulina and bee pollen smoothie this afternoon. I’m still alive, I no longer become neurotic if I go out to eat and there is no organic food available (for which my husband is very relieved), I’m more laid back about it all and I feel great. 

New research comes out everyday, dispelling myths about health and creating new ones. I’ve just learned that the healthiest way is to take them with a big pinch of salt. Just as long as it’s not too much salt. And it’s probably best if it’s gray, Himalayan sea salt, rich in trace minerals such as iodine, potassium... 

BOUNCE-GYMS IN THE PARK 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Does the city of Berkeley care about global warming? Does it make sense to sanction the use of gas-powered electricity generators in our public parks for private functions? 

Does the city of Berkeley care about protecting the commons? Do we have so much park lands that we should allow them to be used for the business of providing “amusement-park” entertainment? 

This is a no-brainer. There is no reason to allow the city’s scarce park resources to be compromised by noise, air-pollution and encroaching privatization. 

Bruce Loeb 

• 

MISLEADING INFORMATION ABOUT UCB 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The Daily Planet has recently run a series of articles which present misleading and inaccurate information about the University of California’s program to clean up contaminants left by historic industries on and near what is now the UC Berkeley Richmond Field Station (RFS). I am writing on behalf of the university to address a few of the many misrepresentations. 

One claim is that the university has not properly communicated to its employees about the clean up at RFS and nearby properties. On the contrary, UC has held many meetings with RFS employees and maintains a website (http://rfs.berkeley.edu) specifically to provide technical information and current news to our employees and the community about conditions at RFS.  

Another claim is that the university has retaliated, or threatened to retaliate, against employees who may have expressed workplace health concerns. This is simply not true. Employees are made aware of the university’s “Policy for Protection of Whistleblowers from Retaliation,” which specifically allows employees to express their concerns without fear of reprisal. Further, UC Berkeley labor relations representatives have asked repeatedly for information on the alleged retaliations, but the unions have failed to provide any details. 

The Daily Planet states that the university “devised its own cleanup” at RFS, when the fact is that our remediation plans were developed by experienced environmental consultants, and reviewed and approved by the lead regulatory agency and numerous other government agencies. 

DTSC has recently alleged that part of the RFS remediation work conducted between 2002 and 2004 lacked proper permits. DTSC has emphasized that these alleged violations are not based on any increased health risk at or near the RFS. 

Since the beginning of our cleanup efforts, the university has worked in a fully cooperative manner, first under the Regional Water Quality Control Board, and now under DTSC’s Coastal Cleanup Operations Branch. That the same agency we have been cooperating with since 2005 would now initiate an enforcement action against us is a surprise and disappointment, and we disagree with the agency’s position. We are eager to meet with DTSC so that we can understand their concerns and resolve this issue. As always, the university is committed to completing the site cleanup and restoration in a safe and efficient manner for the benefit of the entire community.  

Mark Freiberg 

Director, Environment, Health and Safety 

University of California, Berkeley 

• 

TRADER JOE’S 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I share Stephen Wollmer’s concern that the City Council’s recent approval of the Trader Joe’s project undermines the integrity of the city’s land use planning process and sets a bad precedent. As he wrote in last Friday’s Daily Planet, the council majority has taken the view that they have wide latitude in allowing a project to exceed zoning regulations if it appears necessary to make the project economically feasible.  

The zoning regulations exist in part so residents and developers know the “rules of the game” for any given parcel of land. The requirements to include affordable housing and to provide “bonuses” (license to exceed what the zoning allows) for developers already complicate matters. But when the City Council claims the right to award additional bonuses on a case-by-case basis, as it did with the Trader Joe’s project, it’s essentially saying it reserves the right to bend the rules. To be sure, it makes sense to allow a degree of discretion, but awarding an arbitrary number of bonuses to make a project “economically feasible” puts the council in the position of judging project economics, and invites developers to game the system (even more than they do now).  

Where I disagree with Mr. Wollmer is in his disparagement of developers’ complaints that complying with Berkeley’s development standards and affordable housing inclusion requirements is expensive. That these policies increase costs and reduce revenues is obvious. Whether they render a given project too risky with respect to its likely profitability is very hard for outsiders to judge, since both costs and revenues are subject to uncertainty. 

Requiring developers to provide a large number of apartments that will yield below-market rent in perpetuity is a sacred cow that no one (except developers) wants to criticize. But it doesn’t come for free, and all too often it’s the neighborhood around a pumped-up project that bears the cost (in terms of livability and land values). I like low rents as much as the next person, but to me it seems unfair when new residents of a neighborhood (the future tenants in the below-market units) benefit at the expense of those who already live there. It may be that having “smart” AND “neighborhood-friendly” growth requires new ways of providing housing that’s affordable for those of modest income. 

Steve Meyers 

• 

WE’LL SURVIVE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Mayor Tom Bates came across as your standard collectivist-statist during the KPFA interview on Sunday. He was blaming everything on the feds for not supplying the loot fast enough and the capitalist system for the personal failure of every street bum in Berkeley. 

Bates properly drew the line at some of the more outrageous lumpen around the so-called People’s Park. By the way, Becky O’Malley, you don’t have to live in Marin to realize the deterioration of Telegraph Avenue, you just have to have your head not lodged up your anal cavity. 

As far as KPFA goes they have been losing listeners for decades and fell quite short on their last marathon. Laufer, while still insufferably PC, is almost a breath of fresh air after the intolerable and totally predictable Bensky. Maybe your ilk doesn’t run things around here anymore, Becky. Tough but we’ll survive. 

Michael P. Hardesty 

Oakland 

• 

MAYOR’S REMARKS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thank you for running the deeply heartfelt July 24 commentary by Susan Chacin in regards to local Street Spirit vendors of Berkeley, and Mayor Tom Bates recent on-air KPFA radio comments that were casting dirt upon the homeless population in Berkeley. 

As I listened in to KPFA’s July 22 Sunday Salon morning program, I too was hurt by the insensitive nature of Mayor Bates’ comments as he publicly bragged about avoiding Street Spirit vendors in Berkeley, so that he could avoid giving a contribution. These rantings sounded more like the behavior of Scrooge in the old Dickens Christmas classic, rather than the mayor of a so-called progressive city who should inspire us all with good will and deeds. Mayor Bates made it clear on KPFA that he is no friend of the homeless when he implied that the community should not assist the poor with monetary contributions, even if they are selling Street Spirit. Mr. Mayor, if you read this in the near future please be advised that when the community makes contributions to Street Spirit vendors for the newspapers they sell, it is for a noble cause, and not something the community should be ashamed of or avoid. Street Spirit newspapers are expertly published on a monthly basis by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and it’s founding editor, Terry Messman. 

Even during troubled times, Terry Messman has managed to make the newspaper freely available to it’s vendors on a monthly basis, so that they have something to sell that is of value to the community at large. For the asking price of $1 dollar, the newspaper offers stability, an income and some meaning to the lives of the homeless involved in the program, which is much more love than the mayor is offering to the homeless lately. 

Street Spirit newspapers go way beyond being informative, and are loaded with great poetry and artwork by the community contributors. Each issue is a collectors edition in it’s own right, and a deep reflection of who we are. 

I support the Street Spirit vendor program, and am grateful that many others support this community effort to offer the homeless a position in our society as our friends and neighbors. 

Lynda Carson 

Street Spirit contributor 

• 

KUDOS TO DELLUMS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Horray and bravo to the Oakland’s newest, the Honorable Mayor Ronald Dellums, my hero for decades for his tireless efforts in the recent lockout of Oakland’s Union/Teamsters who work for Waste-Management, and who safely drove the huge garbage trucks.  

I am a dues-paying, retired teacher from Berkeley and Oakland. I always honor labor’s picket lines; this situation is not a strike. We need more and stronger labor unions for all working people. My fear is that this same company may lock out their workers in Southern California in an attempt to break their union, thereby cutting wages and working conditions for many hard working men and women who deserve good pensions, health care, safety conditions, a living-wage, and of course the time-honored traditions which were won by blood, sweat and tears—withholding their labor, a strike which is now one of the company’s demands.  

We teachers were threatened with firing if we did not return to work during the six-week teachers’ strike in Berkeley in the fall of 1976. As with many settlements, amnesty was granted and all teachers went back to work with no repercussions. In today’s situation the company, Waste Management, Inc., has locked out the workers for more than 20 days; families undoubtedly feel the strain financially and personally. WM recently raised their rates and obviously are making enough of a profit to settle the labor dispute and agree on a good contract. It has been reported on TV and in newspapers that the trash in our poorer Oakland neighborhoods hasn’t been getting picked up in a timely/regular fashion, which is a health hazard.  

Former President Reagan broke the air traffic controllers union which I consider a tragedy. I urge all readers who value labor and respect working people who are union members or not to remember it is labor unions who have brought you the 40-hour work week, no child labor, the weekend (my own mother used to work Saturdays, a 48-hour work week), safer working conditions for men and women, the right to organize and have representation in unfair labor practices among many other benefits. “Solidarity Forever...and the union makes us strong!” as the old working class song goes.  

Sylvia P. Scherzer 

Albany 

• 

EAT CROW 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

With cancellation of Oakland’s July Fourth fireworks display and the Waste Management lockout, the answer’s in on whether our new mayor was on the job, or just enjoying junkets around the country. It was no secret that the trash labor contract was coming to an end with trouble looming. The mayor should have gotten a court order for the company and union to fulfill their contract with the city. The city’s health is, after all, the most basic government duty after fire and police. Will your columnist Allen-Taylor eat crow?  

Jim Young 

Oakland 

• 

TUITION INCREASES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am outraged at the proposed tuition increases at the University of California. The tuition at our public universities is already much too high. If Canada, England, Cuba and Venezuela can provide free university education for their people, why can’t we do it here in the United States? The high cost of education here in the United States makes it very hard for middle class and low-income people to attend university. And when kids leave college, they owe a bundle. 

Here, tuition increases at the state universities and community colleges have increased steadily, until now the UC deans want to charge $43,000 a year to go to a public professional school, like law or business.  

While we are raising barriers to education here in the United States, we are importing professional people educated at free or low cost universities in India, China, the Philippines and elsewhere to fill our professional jobs here. There is something wrong with this picture.  

Who benefits? Big business hiring cheap foreign labor? 

Those greedy deans and regents—instead of comparing their salaries with industry, they should be comparing them with school teachers. These deans and regents are employed in the public sector, and should be loyal to the people they educate, not to their business buddies. 

Margot Smith 

• 

DENVER VS. BERKELEY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I just returned from Denver, where I rode RTD’s wonderful light rail system. That kind of thing may be too expensive for the East Bay, but it sure is a beautiful dream. The most amazing thing was the Free Shuttle Bus on 16th Street Mall. It carried happy shoppers and restaurant patrons through 20 blocks of Denver’s downtown, on lanes without cars. There is no parking whatever on the mall. The mall buses are special units, built in Denver. They have four doors. They are hybrid diesel-electric, using natural gas. Everyone rides the mall buses—tourists, business suits, cattlemen there for a convention, students, and workers. Downtown Denver is indeed, as I read on the back of a city worker’s shirt, “clean, safe and vibrant.” 

It was quite a come-down to return to Berkeley and attend the Southside BRT meeting. The same reactionaries were still claiming that bus-only lanes on Telegraph will be bad for business and that any reduction in parking on Telegraph will kill off what commerce remains. Downtown Denver shows what can happen with good, far-sighted city planning. The lanes on Denver’s 16th Street Mall are reserved for the mall buses. Evenings and weekends, the lanes are used by horse-drawn carriages and pedicabs, but never any cars—not even regular city buses. The mall buses, sidewalks and stores were crowded and business was booming. The light rail crossed the mall and regular city buses were available on the other streets. Berkeley could have a mall bus and a business boom, if some of us were not so reactionary about public transportation, or so fixated on cars and parking. Where were the cars in Denver? Oh, there were plenty of them; many times, I watched congestion from the sidewalk or a bus, or as I sped along in a light rail train. There are plenty of parking lots, and metered on-street parking is available on the streets feeding the mall. But on the mall itself, pedestrians strolled car-free or rode the Free Mall Bus, getting off when they saw an interesting store or restaurant. Denver’s downtown business was booming, even with bus-only lanes. 

Steve Geller 

• 

POPULATION CONNECTION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The danger posed by environmental degradation is on the forefront of many people’s minds. Thankfully, many of these same people are quickly finding ways to combat the problems. Most advocate for conservation and improved technology. I certainly agree that these are promising steps toward environmental sustainability. However, without addressing an essential component of the environmental crisis—population sustainability—the Earth will continue to be overstressed, which threatens our collective flourishing. 

Each of us can personally combat rapid population growth and the consequent environmental degradation by making educated, informed choices about the number and spacing of one’s children. When people receive adequate family planning education and have the ability to choose and implement their decisions, they tend to have fewer children. This leads to a reduction in environmental degradation, which raises the quality of each child’s life.  

Comprehensive sex education and international family planning services provide a useful education on the environmental consequences of one’s reproductive choices. Please ask your representatives to do two things to further this cause: 1) Vote for the Responsible Education About Life (REAL) Act, would require federal funding for domestic comprehensive sex education, and 2) Secure more funding for international family planning.  

Georgia Gann 

Population Connection 

• 

MORE ON TRADER JOE’S 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am not happy letter writer James Sayre is getting a Trader Joe’s in his neighborhood. I am surprised that he somehow has created the imaginary and fantastic idea in his head that Trader Joe’s can be compared with a supermarket. Consider the wide array of products at a supermarket, such as the Andronico’s in the Willard neighborhood in Berkeley. Customers there are given a choice of products. There are premium brand fava beans in salty water and there are private brand fava beans in salty water; there are regular’ bananas and there are organic bananas; there are more brands of wheat bread than you would ever buy. But at Trader Joe’s, this is not the case. Trader Joe’s sells it own labeled products made for them by other manufacturers. Less choice for the consumer, higher prices overall and a bad tradeoff for those who think they are getting a supermarket. Certainly, Berkeley has reached the point where a luxury market is in demand. I remember the day Andronico’s started carrying Krispy Kream donuts, but even one donut was not a value for money.  

James Sayre and other supporters of Trader Joe’s might call those who oppose this store “Marxists” and “Communists”; but I challenge the strength of his argument. I challenge James Sayre to shop at Trader Joe’s with only the average weekly shopping budget of a low-income single man and promise to only eat on that budget for a month. In the end tell us, for the common good, whether the community needs the choice of a supermarket or the dictate of Trader Joe’s. The average weekly August thrifty food budget of a low-income single man in California (according to the USDA, who sets the standard) is $31.10. Can James Sayre prove Trader Joe’s is not harmful to families on a budget? I await his results in one month’s time in the letter column of this newspaper. 

John Parman 

Washington, DC (and Berkeley) 

• 

TRUSTEES CAN’T BE TRUSTED 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The Berkeley Board of Library Trustees (BOLT), at the July 18 meeting, voted to approve acceptance of an application for the upcoming trustee vacancy from a person whose application was received after the submission deadline of July 1. Four candidates who managed to apply during the short window of opportunity were interviewed by BOLT at the July 18 meeting. Another special meeting, originally to interview one more presumably timely applying candidate, will be held on Wednesday, Aug. 1 at the Central Berkeley Library. 

The work of the ad hoc Committee to Sunshine the Trustee Selection Process, set up by City Council recommendation, and designated to establish qualification criteria and timelines for the application process was ignored, and its’ further progress stagnated by the unavailability of committee member, BOLT Chair Susan Kupfer, whose work and social schedules were too full for her to allow scheduling of an ad hoc committee meeting for more than four weeks. Yet Chair Kupfer was able to schedule two special BOLT meetings in July mainly for the purpose of interviewing candidates for the October, 2007 trustee vacancy. Now that BOLT has replaced Kupfer with Laura Anderson on the ad hoc committee, hopefully it will meet and recommend the application process be reopened so that other candidates who did not apply by the July 1 deadline may now have the opportunity to apply and compete with the candidate whose application was received late on July 3. 

Gene Bernardi 

Berkeleyans Organizing for Library Defense (SuperBOLD) 

* 

DICTATORSHIP 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

So the Bush administration is inept? That’s what I keep hearing. Too inept to pull off any kind of 9/11 conspiracy, too befuddled to have planned for and even encouraged the lethal dysfunction now occurring in Iraq. 

But apparently not too inept or befuddled to give us what may be our first American dictatorship. For we find ourselves with a president who first prevents members of his staff and the Justice Department from testifying at a congressional hearing, and then vows to repudiate any contempt citations that may result from this hubris. 

Furthermore, he may get away with it! He has packed the Justice Department with neocons. If Congress does vote to issue the contempt citations now being considered against Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten, the court (U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.) may well side with Bush. 

The fact that we must even worry about such a scenario tells us much about how far we have already traveled down the path towards authoritarianism. Congress and the courts will soon decide if we have, in fact, already arrived at that appalling destination. 

Judy Shelton 

• 

PARAMEDIC RESPONSE 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

3 p.m., Wednesday July 25: I just witnessed a narrowly averted tragedy in north Oakland that makes me question the willingness of the Oakland Fire Department and the 911 system to do their job in flatland neighborhoods. Working at my desk, I noticed a young woman on the ground in the OHA parking lot across the street, surrounded by spilled purses and jackets, her friends attempting to revive her. I crossed the street to see if immediate assistance was needed while calling 911. The girl was flat on her face, out cold, snot draining from her nose, her friends prodding and tugging her to wake her up. One said don’t call 911, my mom will kill me. 

It took Oakland Fire Department paramedics eight or nine minutes to arrive after my call, which may have not been the first 911 alert. When the fire fighter paramedic unit arrived, they exited the truck at a stroll and though I cannot for the life of me explain their attitude, but the nonchalance with which they approached the body in the parking lot made me particularly angry, their casual approach incongruous to an emergency situation. 

Sitting on my porch I yelled “Hurry up, go do your job,” and rather than take it as a prod to get on the hustle, one of the firefighters, the one with the big biceps, stared me down like he wanted to kick my ass while the girl remained sprawled on the ground, unmoving. This child could have aspirated vomit and would have been brain dead or completely dead in the time it took them to show up. 

Another fireman yelled calm down and said that they had encountered a similar scene around the corner and their assistance had been refused. But I’ve got to ask, if this was the same young woman, who would allow a minor to refuse obviously needed medical attention? 

The girl was taken away in an ambulance and Fireman Biceps stared me down again as he strode back to the fire truck. All I could do was curse him under my breath and ask, how long is the response time in Montclair or Rockridge? 

Hank Chapot 

Oakland 

• 

LAUGHABLE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Let’s review the facts behind Sharon Hudson’s latest letter, so readers can decide for themselves whether she is spreading misinformation. In a 2003 opinion piece, Ms. Hudson opposed a development in the seminary neighborhood by writing “The seminary neighborhood is a classic walking neighborhood. The Urban Land Institute, a smart growth group, states that buildings need not exceed three stories to accommodate compact development,’ and that ‘primary buildings in walkable neighborhoods shall not exceed 35 feet...’” 

I was surprised to hear this, since the ULI usually often supports high-density development (much higher density than I would like), and I wrote a letter to the editor saying that their website featured an award for a 35-story building. 

Martha Nicoloff responded by giving a reference for the study that Ms. Hudson quoted (Urban Land Institute, “Smart Growth in the San Francisco Bay Area: Effective Local Approaches”) and Ms. Hudson repeated this reference in her latest letter. 

But if readers look up this reference, they will find that that the statement Ms. Hudson quoted is not in the body of this study, where the ULI states its own position. It is in Appendix E, where they summarize a model zoning ordinance created by a group in Utah, which they give as an example of one possible model ordinance promoting compact growth. The study includes a number of other examples of compact growth, such as infill development in San Jose that varies from 19 to 205 dwelling units per acre. 

The ULI promotes smart growth and walkable neighborhoods at a variety of densities—sometimes as low-density as three stories but usually much higher density. Ms. Hudson was clearly spreading misinformation in her original opinion piece, where she claimed that the ULI generally opposes development over 35 feet in walkable neighborhoods. 

Anyone who has a background in planning issues and knows the record of the ULI will find her claim laughable. 

Charles Siegel 

• 

EXXON PROFITS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Exxon Mobil is reporting yet another quarter of staggering profits near $10 billion. While we pay the high gas prices that pump up Exxon’s profits, we are also paying for Exxon’s campaign to block action on global warming. 

Studies used by Congress show that if we increase our use of homegrown renewable energy resources like wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass, then consumer energy prices will drop and new high-paying jobs will be created. ExxonMobil is the only oil giant still refusing to invest in renewable energy. 

Sarah Rodriguez 

• 

SMUG SMILE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

On this morning’s news Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was shown praising the valor of a soldier killed in Iraq. (I didn’t get the soldier’s name.) Gates was so moved, his voice broke and his face was contorted with grief. Moments later, on the same news broadcast, George W. Bush was shown sprinting across the White House lawn waving cheerily at reporters. I asked myself, does this man feel any remorse or guilt for the thousands of young men whose lives have been snuffed out thanks to his immoral war? I look for some sign of anxiety, perhaps circles under his eyes, deep lines in his face—as was evidenced on Lyndon Johnson’s countenance during the Vietnam War. But no—there’s nothing there but that smug, self-satisfied smile! 

Dorothy Snodgrass 

• 

PET BREEDING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Let’s get one thing straight about Assemblyman Lloyd Levine’s hugely controversial (and recently dropped) spay/neuter bill, AB 1634: There’s no such thing as a “responsible pet breeder.” An estimated 25-30 percent of the animals in our shelters are pure-breds, and pet breeders, “responsible” or not, are an integral part of the problem, however vehemently they deny it. So long as one healthy dog or cat remains unadopted in the shelter, there should be no intentional breeding of dogs or cats allowed, period. 

Want a new pet? Then save a life. Go to your local shelter or a pet rescue, not a breeder. 

Eric Mills 

Action for Animals 

Oakland 

• 

PUBLIC TRANSIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am so disappointed that the Assembly balanced their budget by cutting $1 billion that should be invested in public transit. The cuts are even more upsetting because the Assembly simultaneously voted for tax breaks for powerful corporate interests, including Hollywood, airlines, and the oil companies.  

We need world-class transportation for California’s future, including clean buses and fast subways connecting neighborhoods, and high speed rail connecting our cities. Especially with 60 million people in California by 2050, cutting more than $1 billion from public transit will only make it harder to avoid gridlock on our roads, reduce our oil dependence and meet our global warming commitments.  

The Senate should reject the Assembly’s cuts, and instead dedicate a larger percentage of the revenue from the sales tax on gasoline to public transit for future years. Keeping California mobile depends on it. 

Michelle Denney 

• 

ARE WE SAFER? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In the remaining 548 days of the Bush II presidency what to do about Iraq will dominate all discussions of foreign policy and will be accompanied by this contextual question, stated or implied: “Are we safer?”  

For the Republican Party and its presidential hopefuls it’s a tricky question which they will be forced to interpret rhetorically or risk contradicting themselves. They want to take credit for having kept the nation free from attack but they must keep alive the fear that an attack is possible, probable or imminent. This would tell us we’re safer but we’re not safe, yet. 

Democratic Party leaders and presidential hopefuls will have to handle the question differently because for them it’s a trap. They cannot agree without surrendering to the opposition and they can’t disagree—there’s no denying six years with no terrorist attacks on the homeland —so they’ll respond evasively by citing weaknesses in intelligence gathering and in security mechanisms.  

If one recognizes the emotional fraud embedded in the question, one can handle it this way:  

Q: Are we safer?  

A: Of course, we are. We’re safe in the sense that a terrorist attack, even one as catastrophic as 9/11, cannot destroy the world’s only super power, unless we let it. Furthermore, it is easy to be safer but difficult to be safe enough.  

Marvin Chachere 

San Pablo 

• 

MIDDLE EAST 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

True to its tradition as an outlet for every manner of hysterical anti-Israelism, the Daily Planet ran as a serious op-ed a condemnation of Israel for a traffic accident in the West Bank in which a Bedouin child was run over by a garbage truck. The accident is labeled a “crime” and all of Israel indicted, tried, and found guilty. But the author gives the reader not one scintilla of corroborating evidence. We do not learn whether the child recklessly ran in front of the truck or whether the truck was driving recklessly. All we learn is that the villagers soon arrived on the scene and set the truck on fire. We do not learn whether the driver was a Jew or an Arab.  

The writer wants us to believe that he or she was a Jew, since the word “Israeli” is used all over the article. But, in fact, it is very unlikely that Jews drive garbage trucks though Arab villages in the West Bank. I don’t care so much about the writer, Heide Basche. The East Bay has no lack of Palestinian propagandists. My concern is that The Daily Planet persists in publishing every manner of provocative propaganda without taking the slightest journalistic care to do even rudimentary fact checking. For all we know, and for all that we can rely upon The Daily Planet, the whole incident might be just an Internet hoax. 

John Gertz 

• 

IMPEACHMENT IS TOO GOOD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The current administration has squandered both our tax dollars and our reputation around the world. Our Bill of Rights has been decimated, our Constitution, not worth the animal skin it’s written on. To paraphrase James Madison, “Pardon power should not to be used as a blank check to break the law of the land.” If I had leaked Valerie Plame’s name to the press, I would be tried for treason and we all know the penalty for treason. Impeachment is too good for these Anti-American Corporate Croanies. 

Robyn Linder 

Orinda 

• 

FRED THOMPSON 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Good lord a mighty! Perhaps with the “hep” of TV, narcissism, and just plain ignorance, Fred Thompson, the frog/toad star of Law and Order, could be our next right-wing president! Arnold got in, Ronald got in, and now, to continue the great horror of media influence on our glued-to-the-set citizenry, good ol’ Fred could lead us on into the early, tragic years of the 21st century.  

America, have you no shame?  

Robert Blau 

Did you know that your neighbors can get together and decide that it is in your best interest to pay a supplemental property tax, all without your input or a fair voting process? Well, welcome to Berkeley. Year: 2007. This is what is happening right now in South/West Berkeley under the interestingly named proposed Community Benefits District (CBD). 

The biggest land owners on this side of town (in order: Bayer, Wareham Corporation and the City of Berkeley, along with developers Denny Abrams, Dennis Cohen, Steven Goldin, Doug Herst and Steven Donaldson) have decided that we need to “beautify and bring order” to our mixed use neighborhood of residences and businesses. They list their priorities as: street cleaning, sidewalk repair, graffiti abatement, homeless/encampment removal, 24-hour security (meaning two men in pickup trucks with walkie talkies? cell phones? guns?), and additional transit services.  

I am a resident in Potter Creek (Heinz Street to Dwight/San Pablo to the train tracks) and went, uninvited, to a meeting of these developers last week. I asked why the corridor of Sixth Street (between University and Dwight)—almost entirely single family homes—was being red-lined out of this district. Their response: it is a residential neighborhood and this doesn’t apply to them. Hmmm. Exactly what we think. This district does not apply to us. Second, why the “weighted” vote? Meaning, if the above developers are for this district, because they own more land, they win. Our votes don’t count. This is a done deal before there is even a single vote cast. So please, let’s not call this a vote, shall we? 

When asked about the allocation of funds, I was told by Marco Li Mandri (who makes a living selling this idea to communities) to read the mission statement. It is all about beautification, safety, cleanliness and mobility. Hey, who is against that? Not me. He said that 75% of the budget was for just that. And the other 25 percent? Well, he said for the running of the CBD office. Ahhh. 

In reading the fine print, after I got home, I see that the much of that 25 percent is for land use issues. Of course. Politics. They want to hire consultants, lawyers, and meet with city officials and rework that pesky document called the West Berkeley Plan to suit the “weighted” voters of the CDB. Them!  

In other fine print we learn that the largest landowner, Bayer, has cut a special deal with the CBD planners. They will not have to pay their equal share of this tax as they will not have to pay the percentages on their taxable building square footage. Why? Because it would cost too much. 

And the City of Berkeley’s stance? Well, they are sitting at the same table. Why not get the people to pay an extra tax? What a dream concept for them. The thing is, City of Berkeley, I already pay you to clean my street, and pick up the occasional dropped mattress, arrange for city buses to pass by, and for the police to come when called and I think you do a commendable job of it. You know this, you get my check twice a year and cash it. And sidewalks? We just bought them 2 years ago, thank you. Graffiti? Never had it in my 15 years here. And, the buses run on time.  

But, you say you want flowers? Call us. Trees, bushes? Call us. We would love to partner up with you and plant flowers and pick up trash on a regular basis. “Welcome to Berkeley” signs would be nice. The first freeway exit to Berkeley, in Potter Creek, at Ashby could look so much better. It is awful. Let’s call the City. I’m sure, together we could come up with many good ideas. 

My only remaining question is this: are you sure you have the right name for your group? Doesn’t “Developer Benefits District” (DBD) have a nicer ring? 

Sarah Klise is a West Berkeley resident. 

The jaw-dropping attacks on Michigan Congressman John Conyers this week by members of the white, leftist sector of this nation’s antiwar movement have proven how deeply racism exists. 

Conyers was picketed and attacked by leading activists and spokespeople of the anti-war movement because he, as chair of the House Judiciary Committee, determined that there did not exist enough votes to move to the floor of the House of Representatives a discussion of the impeachment of president George Bush for creating the war in Iraq.  

“Conyers has betrayed the American people,” bawled Global Exchange and Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin. “Conyers is no Martin Luther King,” wailed former analyst of the CIA, Ray McGovern. Lefty journalist David Lindorf scribbled, “The shame of John Conyers.” All three articles appeared on the July 24 version of the progressive website Commondreams. In addition, Cindy Sheehan, anti-war mom, had herself arrested sitting in at Conyers’ office.  

Give us a break! 

What does impeaching George Bush have to do with ending the war in Iraq? And what gives white, anti-war activists the right to call into question the moral and humanistic motivations of John Conyers because he determined the political will did not exist within Congress to impeach the president? 

From our point of view (and speaking as progressive African Americans) Conyers is the outstanding member of Congress, who has been most outspoken in support of the anti-war movement and against the Bush Administration.  

But here is something else. Year after year, actually every year since 1989, John Conyers has introduced into congress HR 40, the African American Reparations Study Bill. It is a bill that is likely the lowest common denominator of the Black reparations movement in the U.S. To date Conyers has never had the votes to get it out of committee, onto the floor of the House. But each year he re-introduces the bill, constantly searching for more endorsers. He has never given up on this issue that is supported by the vast majority of African Americans.  

To the best of our knowledge neither Medea Benjamin, Ray McGovern, David Lindorf and certainly not Cindy Sheehan or few of the other “leading lights” of the white left in the anti-war movement (with the notable exception of Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich) have ever lifted a finger or raised their voice in support of African Americans cry for repair from the legacy of the Atlantic Slave Trade.  

But yet, how ironic that these normally progressive whites feel perfectly comfortable labeling John Conyers “a betrayer of the American people.”  

Here is another irony. If white Americans had voted against George Bush by half the percentage points that Black Americans voted against George Bush, Dubya would have never gotten near the White House.  

As for McGovern’s claim that Conyers is no Martin Luther King, we say, who is some white guy to tell us who is and who is not our leader or leaders? That is what J. Edgar Hoover tried to do to us with regards to the Black Panther Party. Also, who is to say, if Martin Luther King were alive today, what he would or would not say?  

Some white sectors of the anti-war movement need to re-focus themselves and try to build allies in the streets and in the halls of government to end the war, rather than engaging in mindless racism and alienating the most progressive and anti-George Bush communities in America, namely Black America.  

Jean Damu is active within the Reparations Movement and Alona Clifton is a former member of the Peralta Community College board and a long-time political activist in Oakland. Both are members of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration Steering Committee.

Your July 24 editorial (“It’s All About Attitude in the End”) was deeply insulting to me, to Rush Limbaugh and to our myriad broadcast brethren. Reducing public discourse to an “us versus them” formula denigrates the very notion of free speech. I’m convinced that I speak for all of us when I say that it is you who are the problem here. More on that, as we say on the radio, in a moment. 

First, let me express thanks for complimenting my credentials as being “up-to-code” as you put it. Yes, a cursory Internet search does confirm the decades of journalism and talk radio. But you undoubtedly don’t know about my lifelong commitment the very philosophy upon which Pacifica Radio was built. Space and modesty prohibit me from detailing those efforts. Suffice to say that KPFA is my home, too. So, I must take exception to your diagnosis that I am in need of an attitude adjustment. (Get thee to a cranium chiropractor? Hello re-education camps!)  

You criticize me for having “sat passively by while guests pitched the inevitability of unbridled capitalism.” But if you had listened attentively to last Sunday’s program, you would have heard that every single call vehemently criticized Mayor Bates. There was no need for me to pile on, and in this context that would have accomplished nothing. Besides, it is not necessarily my job to attack my guests, be they public servants or the citizens they serve. 

Moreover, it is completely appropriate for the city’s chief executive to express his position. That’s why we invited him. Unlike you, I do not assume that all listeners (or even most listeners) know everything about everything. My show is a public information service for the masses, not just a limited forum for the narrow-minded few. That’s why it’s called broadcasting. 

It’s too bad you’ve based your judgment on only one program. Had you bothered to listen to any previous broadcast, you would have heard what many criticize as me being too aggressive. Some see me as too hard, some as too soft. We professionals call it journalism. (To quote radical songwriter Ricky Nelson: “You see, ya can’t please everyone, so ya got to please yourself.”) 

You criticize me for “dissing listeners who call in, while rolling over for neo-liberal politicians.” Listening to the mayor hardly constitutes “rolling over,” and animated discourse is not “dissing.” Besides, since when did members of my sophisticated audience lose their taste and tolerance for verbal sparring? Really, let’s be grown-ups here. A spirited exchange is an essential part of the public forum. 

I wish to emphasize that I did not hang up on any callers. My personal policy is to provide everyone with a reasonable opportunity to speak. I do occasionally tell people to get to the point. There is a clock on the wall and no callers have the right to monopolize the microphone. I am here to serve all my listeners. 

Moreover, my audience is not passive. An important part of my job is to motivate listeners to do more than simply complain. I hope I can act as a catalyst for change. As an example, I assigned one caller who expressed dissatisfaction with park policy to engage the system, attempt to change what bothers him and report back to me and the audience. (Maybe you missed that part of the program, too.) 

Let me digress by immodestly pointing out that, unlike you, the challenges of broadcast programs like this one are not theoretical for me. I literally wrote the book on this subject (“Inside Talk Radio”). If you would like, I’d be pleased to send you a copy; it’s a harsh critique of the medium…Rush Limbaugh included. 

You criticize me for being out of touch with the Berkeley point of view. Unlike your newspaper which has only one point of view, my radio show serves the entire community and all points of view. As anchor of this program, my job (despite what you might wish it to be) is to facilitate the free exchange of ideas. 

You criticize me for being a Marin County carpetbagger. Since when did Berkeley cease to be a part of the Bay Area—or of the world? In fact, it is you who have cocooned yourself in a mindset that everyone who bathes is somehow suspect. That homeowners must be oppressors of the masses. That only lifelong residents of (on?) the streets of Berkeley have the right to an opinion about this community’s public issues. Good grief! You are the problem! 

In addition, as I made clear when I introduced the mayor, KPFA listeners are worldwide. We talked about Berkeley, both from the point of view of those of us who live and work here, and as a laboratory that produces lessons for the rest of the audience to take advantage of. 

After the Sunday show with Mayor Bates I went to the renovated South Berkeley home of a couple of friends for a leisurely lunch on that gorgeous sunny afternoon. The husband is a Telegraph Avenue merchant, has been for a couple of decades. The wife is about to open her own shop down on San Pablo. They’ve lived in the neighborhood for more than 10 years. First, they regaled me with horror stories about my old Dwight and Telegraph neighborhood and how important it is to the quality of life for all Berkleyans to clean up those blocks leading to Sather Gate. Then they corroborated the stories the mayor told on the air about the businesses the city is closing in South Berkeley because they constitute a menace. If they and the mayor are part of the problem, sign me up on their team. 

Finally, apropos of nothing, it’s interesting that you don’t find Telegraph too seedy for your taste, but you wrote in your hit piece on me that you do sort your socks. That’s strange: Disorder is OK outdoors but not in? Sounds like symptoms of a closet conservative to me. 

And now this post script: You’ve been gracious enough to print this unedited response in your newspaper. Consider this an invitation to join me one day soon on my radio show. You’ll find an environment shockingly different from the pages of your paper: a place where all points of view are truly welcome. 

It was a hot summer’s day in Philadelphia, 100 degrees in the street with 98 percent humidity. I came home with chocolate syrup and strawberries all over my white uniform after another stressful day of driving a Mr. Softee’s ice cream truck in the hood.  

My father looked at me and said, “Son, how’d it go today.” I told him, “I spent half the day arguing with people who were trying to cheat me over a 25 cent ice cream cone and the rest, trying to stop them from stealing the whole truck! In a way I can’t blame them we were all hot and miserable. I think I’m going to quit.” 

My father looked at me and said, “Son, I understand—you don’t know the secret of life!” “What’s that,” I said excitedly. He said, “Make money and prosper doing what you like and pay others to do the things you don’t.”  

“What’s so secret about that?” I responded. “Most people I know,” he answered “make their living continuing to doing things that they did before, went to school for, or pays them the most money, but it’s rarely what they love. They end up marking time until they get to retirement to do what they truly want. The secret is don’t wait! How many people went to school to learn what they thought was an exciting profession, but now find themselves spending most of their time in a cubicle banging away on a computer keyboard? Or how many people do you know who spend their money on music, art and being out in nature but make their living doing mundane things that have nothing to do with what they love?” 

“You’ve got to pay your bills,” I said. “Yes, yes,” he responded. “But that’s the secret of life! You can have it both ways. If you do what you like you’ll do it often and enjoy doing it. If you do something often you can get good at it and eventually you’ll get paid. The responsibility of paying your bills is always there, but why not enjoy yourself? After all this is the only life you have.”  

My father’s conversation floated around in the back of my brain for years. I became a career counselor for a jobs program and one day it all came into view. I realized that yes, there are bills and the fear of failure, but the biggest obstacle was that most of the people I was counseling never knew what they really liked to do. They were always driven by the three forces that my father had described years before: what they did for a living, what they knew how to do, and the need for money. So I developed an exercise to help people discover what they like.  

I asked the class, “How may of you have ever spent eight full hours just thinking about what you like? (Out of 25 people one hand went up). I want you to spend the next three hours making three lists, no matter how long, wishful, trivial or mundane, of what you like, what you don’t like, and what you did, do or know how to do for a living. We’ll take an hour for lunch where you can share what you wrote with each other, if you choose to do so. After lunch I want you to draw a line connecting what you like, what you don’t and what you did or do for a living, and we’ll discuss the results.” 

It was amazing how few people were really connected with what they like. Most people in every class had more lines connecting what they did to what they didn’t like, than to what they liked and wanted to do. 

The next step was obvious. I told them, “Now that you’re closer to knowing what you like you need to plan your work and work your plan. If you know what you like to do and you’re not doing it find some place to volunteer—someone will be glad to have you and you’ll get better. If you are doing what you like but it can’t support you—go to school, improve yourself. If you’re doing what you don’t like and it doesn’t pay well—find another job.” 

Some of the people I counseled did go on to have successful careers (one of them picked me up in a new car when I was hitchhiking) and told me they enjoyed their work. Any time I’d run into a past student I would always ask, “Are you doing what you love?” Many said yes. I realized that the secret of life is about the journey not just the destination. For myself, I realized I enjoyed a lifestyle of just walking and talking, and recently I discovered writing an occasional story. Hey Pop, I think I’m close!  

OPEN CALL FOR ESSAYS 

Healthy Living 

As part of an ongoing effort to print stories by East Bay residents, the Daily Planet invites readers to write about their experiences and perspectives on living healthy. Please e-mail your essays, no more than 800 words, to firstperson@berkeleydailyplanet.com. We will publish the best essays in upcoming issues.

About the time of year the robins wind down and the naked ladies begin to bloom, we start seeing the garden spiders. They’re orbweavers, probably Araneus diadematus, and at this stage they’re just little orange-and-black specks with legs. Between now and Halloween they’ll get a lot bigger, and plumper. 

The garden spiders take over the garden, of course, but they don’t confine themselves to it. Most years we have a clutch of them on the front porch, anchoring their webs to the railings. They often get into the car, and have to be delicately removed. Once we woke up to find a sizable web across the back door. Some might find that ominous. I live with an arachnophile, though, and I’ve come to terms with them. 

The large conspicuous spiders are females. The males would be smaller and more furtive. It’s not clear what arrangements the garden spiders make, but males of a related species, the black-and-yellow agriope, spin their own webs at a safe distance from the females’. The males’ webs are shoddily constructed and often littered with beer cans and pizza boxes. 

But a female garden spider’s web is an architectural marvel—all those precisely arranged spokes and spiral struts. A typical web has 25 to 30 radial threads forming regular 12-to-15-degree angles. The younger the spider, the more threads. The center of the web is stickier and has closer-spaced spirals. From that hub she monitors the web for tremors that announce an arriving insect, holding on to a signal thread.  

Webs are delicate things, subject to damage from struggling prey. Rather than patching up the old web, a spider begins her day by eating whatever’s left of it—thus conserving the silk proteins—and spinning a new one. 

Webmaking is a complex act, and it’s hard to see how a spider’s minuscule brain can hold all the necessary programming. A spider’s central nervous system consists of a pair of ganglia—clusters of neurons—that are wired to its muscles and sensory systems. You wouldn’t expect a lot of bandwidth there. 

What about a really small spider? William Eberhard of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the University of Costa Rica was interested in the tradeoffs that a miniaturized spider brain would require. Brains are metabolically expensive to run, and Eberhard expected that small-brained organisms would have to jettison some of their behavioral repertoire. Webmaking precision seemed a likely candidate. 

So Eberhard chose five Costa Rican orbweaver species, ranging in weight from the 50-milligram Leucage mariana to the tiny Anapisona simoni that tips the scales at .005 milligrams. That’s five orders of magnitude’s difference. The smaller species, he says, had descended from larger ancestors, downsizing their brains along the way. 

He measured the webs of each species, expecting the smaller spiders to be sloppier webcrafters. To the contrary, there was no loss in precision with decreasing size. Eberhard speculated to a New York Times reporter that the smallest spiders “have done something subtle or special with the neurons in their brain to be able to do the same behavior that larger ones can.” 

That’s an almost heretical thought. We all know big brains are best, right? Primates, cetaceans, corvids all have higher brain-to-body mass ratios than other mammals and birds. Even octopi and squids, arguably the most intelligent invertebrates, are large-brained for mollusks.  

I can think of only a few other instances of brain shrinkage in the evolutionary process. Slender salamanders, wormlike creatures that are probably hiding under the leaf litter in your back yard, have smaller and less complex brains than their ancestors. But the lifestyle of these sedentary amphibians doesn’t require complex behavior. A slender salamander that travels more than ten feet in its entire lifetime would be exceptional. 

Somehow, though, arachnids have found a way of shrinking the brain (along with the body) without losing key behavior capabilities: some kind of compromise between size and connectivity. Whatever they’ve done, it’s one of the neater evolutionary tricks. 

Photograph by Ron Sullivan: A female garden spider waits for visitors. 

Joe Eaton’s “Wild Neighbors” column appears every other Tuesday in the Berkeley Daily Planet, alternating with Ron Sullivan’s “Green Neighbors” column on East Bay trees.

One of the great attractions of the herd—or of the mob, it’s more dangerous younger cousin—is that once joined, it relieves the individual of having to make many individual investigations and decisions. That was always the case, from the dawn of time, but it is increasingly appealing in a world that is growing both more complicated and more illusion-driven, simultaneously. When every line of every speech or presentation or newspaper article must be closely searched and scrutinized for both accuracy and hidden agenda, the mind wearies, and the soul longs for a safe haven where there is a comfort that everyone around you is moving along with the same assumptions, right or wrong. Thus, the herd is joined, and followed. 

While there are some people in and around Oakland who are taking careful and thoughtful looks at the administration of Mayor Ron Dellums and coming out with insights and criticisms that help us all understand what the mayor is doing and where the city may be heading, that appears to be the minority. Discussion is being currently dominated by a group of folks—how large, who knows—who decided somewhere along the line that Mr. Dellums was and is wrong for Oakland, and everything he is doing or planning on doing, with no exceptions, only proves that point. 

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Chip Johnson gets paid to make periodic observations of the East Bay, and so you have his recent “Dellums Still Not Talking To Council Or To Voters” in which he asserts, in part, that “last week, Dellums became a party to negotiations aimed at ending the [Waste Management workers] lockout, but outside the closed doors he has said little to reassure the public that the dispute will be resolved soon.” Based upon the 33 comments that currently appear online in the Chronicle in response, a large number of those commenting agree. 

“It’s not surprising that Dellums doesn’t know what to do with the garbage strike,” a reader signed “opinyonated” (all of the commenters used pseudonyms) writes. “On the basic, ‘Simcity’ issues that run a city, he’s helpless. … It’s a disgrace that a city is drowning in garbage because of complacency.” From “concernedoaklan”: “The garbage strike is symptomatic of how little clout [Dellums] has. Its amazing that the mayor of the biggest city in the East Bay cannot whip the Teamsters and Waste Management into shape. I bet that Dellums just doesn’t want to step on Teamsters’ toes and WM is hell-bent on punishing Oakland for electing this anti-business mayor.” And from “GetMeOut”: “Ahhh poor people that live in the areas that have not had their trash picked up. Serves you all right. You voted in a Mayor that cannot and will not do anything about it.” 

Respectfully, I disagree. 

The error in these judgments about Mr. Dellums’ role in the Waste Management lockout comes, I believe, from a fundamental misunderstanding both of who Mr. Dellums actually is—as opposed to what folks’ perceptions of who they believe him to be—and the role needed to be taken in successfully mediating a dispute. 

To explain, a little history. 

I met Ron Dellums 41 years ago, in the fall of 1966. That summer, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Chairman Stokely Carmichael had made his famous “Black Power” speech during a march across Mississippi, virtually exploding Mr. Carmichael into the spotlight as the new, young national black leader. In the fall, a group at UC Berkeley—perhaps the associated student union, but memory fails me—invited Carmichael to speak at the Greek Theater. That upset the chairperson of the Black Student Union at Cal—his name escapes me, too—on the theory that in those racially polarized times, it appeared an affront to the African American community to have Mr. Carmichael come to the Bay Area in his first trip as the new national black leader to talk to white students at UC, as opposed to a gathering of the people he had been annointed to lead. A number of local black college students and activists, myself included, agreed with the UC BSU, and there were threats of a black boycott of the Carmichael Greek Theater speech, along with a possible picket line. 

Someone called a meeting of the young black activists to try to settle the dispute. It might have been Mr. Dellums himself, who was a Berkeley City Councilmember at the time. He was certainly in attendance at the meeting, looking very different from the rest of us—10 years older, for one (which makes considerable difference in temperament and maturity when you are 18 or 19), and notably wearing a suit and tie even in those more relaxed-dress days. 

We youngsters spent the first half of the meeting ranting—and oh, Mary!, could we rant in those days—and Mr. Dellums listened patiently, as was his way. Only when we were finished did he begin speaking, agreeing with us that it appeared disrespectful and belittling for Mr. Carmichael to skip the African American community on his trip to the East Bay. He said he thought that we—the student activists—might be able to raise enough of a stir to force Mr. Carmichael to cancel the trip altogether, but he wondered if that might be wasting an opportunity. Why not let ASUC pay for Mr. Carmichael’s trip to California and allow him to speak at UC, Mr. Dellums tactfully suggested, but ask him to first speak to an African American audience after he got here. That way, Mr. Dellums explained, we would get the respect we were asking for and deserved and, in the bargain, white folks would be paying for it. We considered it a moment, and agreed, and Mr. Carmichael later came and spoke at UC and at a black venue as well and, if I remember correctly, also took a tour of San Francisco’s Fillmore District, which was then a largely African American community. It was a historic and highly successful tour all around, by all accounts. 

It was, of course, a brilliant suggestion Mr. Dellums had made, more brilliant as I considered it years later, and realized that Mr. Dellums had fashioned a classic compromise, one that satisfied the needs and wishes of both sides. But there was one more element—perhaps the critical element—that helped make it possible. Had Mr. Dellums called a press conference and made the suggestion himself, without calling in the black student activists, we almost certainly would have rejected it out of hand, because it would have been imposing a solution upon us, making it appear as if we were backing down on our demands, settling for less. By making the suggestion in a private meeting, and then letting us make the announcement, it made us look like we had come up with the idea ourselves and were not backing down, but were being reasonable and trying to work with all sides.  

That’s how successful mediation works, trying to find a solution that both sides can live with, and then letting the two sides take the credit. 

But that, of course, is how Mr. Dellums has consistently worked. While his national reputation was forged in the Vietnam War era as a shouting, fist-shaking, dashiki-wearing radical, that was more a product of the media—you know how we in the media tend to distort—and his real work was quiet persuasion and compromise behind closed doors, trying to stick to his core principles while figuring out ways to get his opponents to bend in the direction he wanted. It is why he was able to eventually become chair of the House Armed Services Committee—hardly the spot for a wild radical—and why he retains to this day the respect of conservative members of Congress who served with him, who almost universally say that while they often disagreed with his positions and goals, they could not find fault with the means he used to go about trying to accomplish them. 

One needs to take this history into account in trying to figure out, and judge, what Mr. Dellums has been trying to accomplish in the Waste Management workers lockout, even if one disagrees with those methods. 

When I first heard about the lockout, my assumption was that Mr. Dellums was involving himself in quiet mediation to try to solve the labor dispute, and even a non-careful reading of news items from the first days of the lockout shows that he was. But when some citizens—and some of my media colleagues—applauded Mr. Dellums’ tough statements against Waste Management after a week or two of garbage had been piling up, and the subsequent filing for an injunction against the company by Oakland City Attorney John Russo, I saw that as a bad sign rather than a good one. It was an indication that the earlier attempts at quiet mediation had not been working, there was considerable distance between the two sides, the lockout might drag out longer than any of us hoped, and the mayor needed to apply public pressure. 

The Waste Management lockout has left Mr. Dellums in the classic no-win political situation. While some critics are clamoring that the mayor should have taken a tougher public stance earlier, there is no evidence that this would have forced Waste Management or the Teamsters into an earlier settlement, and there is every reason to believe that it might have delayed such a settlement. And had the mayor come out earlier and demanded a settlement, and no settlement thereafter immediately came forth, how many of the commenters to the Chronicle do you think would have then told us about how toothless and ineffective they believed the old mayor had become?  

Meanwhile, when and if the settlement comes, almost no-one will give Mr. Dellums credit for pulling it off. To paraphrase the Confederate spy and former actor Harrison said in Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, the best of such work is done in the dark, with no audience present to applaud. 

There is certainly much room for criticism of Mr. Dellums, both in general and in his actions concerning the ongoing Waste Management lockout. I would tend to take those criticisms more seriously, however, were they based upon what the Oakland mayor is actually doing or, at least, trying to do. 

The north fork of Strawberry Creek, which runs in its natural open channel along a block and a half of Le Conte Avenue west of La Loma Ave., is home to a number of distinctive historic structures, including the landmarks Weltevreden (1896), Allenoke Manor (1903), and Theta Xi Chapter House (1914). Among these remarkable buildings, one of the most distinctive is the smallish Oscar Maurer photography studio, whose north elevation descends steeply to the creek bank. 

On July 24, 1907, the Oakland Tribune announced, “Oscar Maurer, the local artist […] is having a studio built on Le Roy Avenue opposite his home and next to the studio of his brother, Fred Maurer, the musician. The structure is unique in design, with cement exterior and tiled roof.” 

Five weeks later, on September 1, the Tribune reported that Maurer “has recently taken possession of his new studio which has just been completed. It is one of the finest hereabouts, being built and furnished in the Spanish style of architecture.” 

Designed by Bernard Maybeck, the studio foreshadows the architect’s eclectic design for the First Church of Christ, Scientist (1910). The elements assembled here include Mediterranean, Mission Revival, Neoclassical, and Modern. 

At the entrance, a delicate Corinthian column embedded in a large plate-glass display window contrasts with the unpainted walls and a beamed ceiling stained in Maybeck’s signature red and blue. The creekside elevation is broken up to resemble a cliffside village with multiple cascading gable roofs. Toward the rear, a tall leaded-glass window displays a double fleur-de-lys motif under a “broken pediment” executed in Spanish roof tiles. 

Unlike the wood-shingle houses Maybeck was designing in the 1890s and the early 1900s, the Maurer studio was built in concrete. As in the Lawson house at 1515 La Loma Ave., the choice of material reflects the impact of the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, in which Maurer lost his previous studio. 

Oscar Maurer (1870 –1965) was born in New York City. His father, Frederick C. Maurer, a manufacturing chemist, immigrated from Germany as a child. Frederick’s eldest brother was the famed lithographer Louis Maurer. It was Louis who advised Oscar to take up photography, the coming great medium with artistic possibilities. 

In 1886, the Maurers moved to San Francisco, where Oscar’s father became associated with the Bass-Hueter Paint Co. and San Francisco Pioneer Varnish and Glycerine Works, eventually rising to corporate secretary. The family resided on Potrero Hill. 

The teenaged Oscar got hold of a box camera, set up a darkroom in the basement, and was soon selling a line of San Francisco scenes to local art stores (framed prints were popular as home decoration at that time). He studied chemistry and physics at the University of California but didn’t pursue a scientific career. Between 1891 and 1898, he worked as a salesman for Bass-Hueter. By 1897 he had become a member of the California Camera Club, to whose board of directors he would be elected in 1900. In 1898 Maurer traveled to Mexico, where he made his photograph “The Storm,” exhibited at the Chicago Salon of 1900. Alfred Stieglitz, one of the exhibition’s three jurors, commented on this print: 

While the Chicago Salon is honored by the presence of much of the best work by the acknowledged leaders, it is also distinguished by the exceptionally fine work bearing names that we will certainly hear more of in the future. One of these names is Oscar Maurer of San Francisco. He sends “The Storm,” and it is one of the big things of the exhibition. The picture possesses rare feeling, exquisite tones, and the best of composition. All visitors seem to notice it. 

The critical success may have given Maurer the courage to become a full-time professional photographer. In 1899, he was listed in the San Francisco directory as a photographer at 220 Sutter Street, which was the address of the Wetherbee Photo Company. In late 1900, Maurer and William E. Dassonville opened a portrait studio on a second-floor balcony in the rear of Lassen & Bien’s photographic supply house on Stockton Street. 

Working in the Pictorialist tradition, Maurer shot primarily landscapes and seascapes. In early 1901 he entered ten prints in the First San Francisco Photographic Salon, then left for Europe with Dassonville. His travels in France and Holland resulted in a portfolio titled Life Under Foreign Skies, which was published in Camera Craft. 

Having returned from Europe in time for the Second Photographic Salon, Maurer entered “about twenty studies,” reported the San Francisco Call on January 10, 1902, “one especially standing out prominently—‘On the Maas’—a Dutch scene.” Reviewing the same exhibition a week later, the Call opined that “the best individual collection of photographs is shown by Maurer.” Also in 1902, Maurer’s work was presented in Charles H. Caffin’s article “The New Photography” in Munsey’s Magazine. The following year, it was on display in Vol. VII of the journal The Camera. In an article for Camera Craft, Maurer wrote, ”Not until the present day has the camera been recognized as a legitimate means for the production of pictures that may be termed works of art.” 

Maurer did not confine himself to nature subjects but pursued documentary urban photography as well. His pre-1906 work perished in the San Francisco post-earthquake fire, but a few published examples remain. Volume 22 (1900) of the San Francisco periodical The Wave included his Chinatown camera study “For Ways That Are Dark.” The July 1903 issue of Everybody’s Magazine carried the article “The Kindergarten of the Streets” by Edith Davids. Documenting the activities of children in New York’s Lower East Side, the article was illustrated with fifteen photographs by Maurer. It was republished in the book Tales of Gaslight New York. 

In 1903, Oscar Maurer married Margaret (Madge) Robinson, an elegant, cultivated, and socially prominent woman who co-founded the Hillside Club. Two years later, the couple traveled to Europe, where Oscar shot the photographs that illustrated Madge’s article “Old World Friendliness Between Man and Nature” (The Craftsman Vol. 8, 1905). Also in 1905, the Maurers moved into Weltevreden, the showcase Berkeley home of Madge’s mother, Mary Moody, at 1725 (now 1755) Le Roy Ave. 

Oscar’s parents moved to Berkeley the following year, in the wake of the San Francisco earthquake, settling into a new Mission Revival house at 1726 (now 1776) Le Roy Ave., across the street from Weltevreden. The house was built in 1905, apparently by F.E. Armstrong, for Margaret Marx, who continued to own it for a number of years but never lived in it. Oscar’s brother, Frederick Jr., a respected pianist and music teacher, lived in this house until his death in 1947. The house remains largely unaltered to this day. Oscar photographed it for a Sunset magazine article titled “Berkeley, the Beautiful,” which featured several Northside landmarks, including Weltevreden, Allenoke Manor, the Beta Theta Pi chapter house, and Charles Keeler’s house. 

Oscar continued to work in San Francisco. He and Arnold Genthe are said to have used a studio space at the George H. Knight gallery on Sutter Street in rotation. It is not clear whether this is the location mentioned in an Oakland Tribune society column dated August 12, 1905, which announced “a studio tea to be given by Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Maurer at their studio on Sutter Street.” The column described the studio as “delightfully artistic” and furnished with “rare and wonderful old things” the couple had brought back from Europe. 

As his workload increased, Maurer took a studio of his own in the California Academy of Sciences building at 819 Market Street, where he remained until the building (containing his entire body of work) was destroyed in the 1906 fire. Remaining from that period are his post-earthquake images of the devastation, taken with a No. 1 Folding Kodak camera. 

After 1906, Maurer continued to exhibit his photographs in prestigious venues such as the Photo-Secession Gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue, New York. Many of his images were published in the American Journal of Photography over the next two decades. He also wrote technical articles and essays on his photographic excursions, sometimes publishing in Sunset magazine. 

In 1911, several of Maurer’s photographs were included in California—The Beautiful, a portfolio of camera studies and poetry published by Paul Elder. Two years later, he showed a collection of photographs taken in Mexico and Southern California at a group exhibition mounted in the California School of Arts and Crafts, 2119 Allston Way, Berkeley. “These are done on fine Japanese tissue paper, entirely a new medium used in photography,” reported the Oakland Tribune on April 6, 1913. 

While his exhibition and published photographs often depicted nature and street scenes, Maurer derived his income mostly from portrait photography. 

Following the destruction of his San Francisco studio, Maurer bought a new Aristo arc light and set up shop in Berkeley—first at Weltevreden, then in his new studio across the street. 

During the first decade of their married life, Oscar and Madge Maurer were luminaries of the Berkeley artistic social scene, which was closely tied to the Hillside Club. Around 1914, they left Berkeley for Del Mar, and the studio was occupied by portrait photographer Maude Stinson, who worked there until 1949. 

Already in the 1930s and possibly for a considerable time before, the studio was no longer the property of any Maurer. In 1941 it was purchased as an investment by Lorena Sauer, wife of the geographer Carl Ortwin Sauer. Used as a voice studio for a while, in the 1950s it was rented by the interior design firm of Ruth Dibble and Elsie Semrau, who had a hand in decorating the Sauers’ home at 1340 Arch Street and who purchased the studio toward the end of the decade. They remained there until the early 1980s. 

Oscar and Madge, who almost drowned in the great San Diego flood of 1916, moved from Del Mar to Los Angeles. They divorced in the early ‘20s, and both soon remarried. Oscar’s second wife was Elizabeth Baker Robinson, a performance artist. They eventually moved to Berkeley, and from the late 1920s until the early ‘40s lived with Fred at 1776 Le Roy Avenue. Oscar then established a studio in Santa Monica but returned to Berkeley by 1950, now living at 2418 Ashby Avenue. 

With the illness of his wife (she died in 1957), Maurer withdrew little by little from the grind of portraiture work. As a widower, he lived alone at 2646 Telegraph Avenue. In 1965, the Oakland Museum exhibited his 1906 earthquake photographs. He died the same year, aged 94. 

Daniella Thompson publishes berkeleyheritage.com for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA). 

Photograph: The Oscar Maurer studio, 1772 Le Roy Avenue (Daniella Thompson) 

In both print and web issues: 

• Recent Home Sales -- includes not only the recent sale prices of the listed addresses but also the previous sale price and date. Readers can see how prices are rising or falling in the neighborhood they live in or where they hope to move. Partial listings will be in weekend print issues, with full data plus an interactive map on the web. 

• Open Homes -- a complete list of all the homes open for view each weekend. Basic listings are always free to sellers, who should ask their listing agent to make sure their home is included. Even more information can be found on the web, including an interactive map.  

On the Web: 

• Zoning application listings with interactive map -- the interactive map shows all zoning permit applications for Berkeley and provides a graphical look at development hot spots.  

• Recent Home Sales -- The only easily accessed data on recent East Bay home sales on the web; the only such listing that includes the previous sale price and date of sale. Includes data on sales for the previous month, not just the previous week; the only web site that presents this information on an interactive map. 

• Open Homes --- the most easily accessed data on weekend open homes in the East Bay. The only site organized so that it can easily be printed at home. The most complete and accurate map of East Bay open homes available on the web.

Sebastopol is not exactly next door, but the Apple Capital of Sonoma County is a great excuse for a day trip. The Gravenstein Highway (Route 116) between US101 and the town is lined with roadside attractions, botanical and otherwise, although there seems to have been a sudden wave of mortality among the local antique stores. 

Peacock Horticultural Nursery is the new kid on the block. Robert Peacock and Marty Waldron opened it two years ago, after moving up from San Leandro three years before that. Peacock, a landscape designer, also did plant merchandising for the flagship Smith & Hawken in Mill Valley, until the company decided it had grown beyond mere plants.  

The place they found in Sonoma, just down the road a piece from California Carnivores, had a history as a nursery: the previous owner grew violets for sale at a roadside stand. “There’s a fantastic legacy of camellias, old roses, old landscape,” Waldron said. It’s bracketed by huge old oaks where red-shouldered hawks yodel and acorn woodpeckers yammer. 

Peacock’s (“PeaHort” to its friends) may be small, but it’s densely packed with plants. There’s a bit of everything: succulents, cycads, aroids, bonsai, grasslike things. “We love the restios,” admits Waldron. The owners describe the place as “dedicated to providing unusual, obscure and hard to find plant choices for the collector as well as the home gardener,” and it shows. 

“Robert is always looking for unusual stuff,” Waldron continues. “We’re trying to find a niche, something little and unusual. And no tchotchkes.” They’ll try to propagate anything, like the mystery Miscanthus, maybe South African in origin, they picked up at a UC Botanical Garden sale a while back.  

With all that variety, Peacock’s twin (and overlapping) strengths would be shade plants and variegated-foliage specimens. Waldron touts an Acer ‘Eskimo Sunset’ as “plant of the month,” and it really is a stunner: cream and green patterned leaves with a strong blush of burgundy on their undersides. Other things you wouldn’t think came in variegated varieties pop up: violets, ceanothus, hydrangea, a little cactus, elderberry. 

The pride of resident cats—one of whom, a gray tabby, rejoices in the name Hortus Third—adds to the nursery’s atmosphere. Waldron calls them “our marketing directors,” all domesticated from feral families. 

We stopped at Peacock’s mainly to pick up a Sonoma Farm Trails map, since our road atlas didn’t do justice to the county’s back roads, and left with a whole flat of stuff for our shady spots. Peacock and Waldron are finding more than one niche to fill, and their establishment deserves more than a casual look. 

In fact, it requires more than a casual look. The sign pops up suddenly on the busy road, and like all those nurseries on the road to Half Moon Bay it’s an invitation to a rear-end collision. Take it slow and resist the road’s importunate tailgaters. Peacock Nursery is too good to miss. 

Sebastopol field trip: a new nursery among the antiques and apple orchards 

Sebastopol is not exactly next door, but the Apple Capital of Sonoma County is a great excuse for a day trip. The Gravenstein Highway (Route 116) between US101 and the town is lined with roadside attractions, botanical and otherwise, although there seems to have been a sudden wave of mortality among the local antique stores. 

Peacock Horticultural Nursery is the new kid on the block. Robert Peacock and Marty Waldron opened it two years ago, after moving up from San Leandro three years before that. Peacock, a landscape designer, also did plant merchandising for the flagship Smith & Hawken in Mill Valley, until the company decided it had grown beyond mere plants.  

The place they found in Sonoma, just down the road a piece from California Carnivores, had a history as a nursery: the previous owner grew violets for sale at a roadside stand. “There’s a fantastic legacy of camellias, old roses, old landscape,” Waldron said. It’s bracketed by huge old oaks where red-shouldered hawks yodel and acorn woodpeckers yammer. 

Peacock’s (“PeaHort” to its friends) may be small, but it’s densely packed with plants. There’s a bit of everything: succulents, cycads, aroids, bonsai, grasslike things. “We love the restios,” admits Waldron. The owners describe the place as “dedicated to providing unusual, obscure and hard to find plant choices for the collector as well as the home gardener,” and it shows. 

“Robert is always looking for unusual stuff,” Waldron continues. “We’re trying to find a niche, something little and unusual. And no tchotchkes.” They’ll try to propagate anything, like the mystery Miscanthus, maybe South African in origin, they picked up at a UC Botanical Garden sale a while back.  

With all that variety, Peacock’s twin (and overlapping) strengths would be shade plants and variegated-foliage specimens. Waldron touts an Acer ‘Eskimo Sunset’ as “plant of the month,” and it really is a stunner: cream and green patterned leaves with a strong blush of burgundy on their undersides. Other things you wouldn’t think came in variegated varieties pop up: violets, ceanothus, hydrangea, a little cactus, elderberry. 

The pride of resident cats—one of whom, a gray tabby, rejoices in the name Hortus Third—adds to the nursery’s atmosphere. Waldron calls them “our marketing directors,” all domesticated from feral families. 

We stopped at Peacock’s mainly to pick up a Sonoma Farm Trails map, since our road atlas didn’t do justice to the county’s back roads, and left with a whole flat of stuff for our shady spots. Peacock and Waldron are finding more than one niche to fill, and their establishment deserves more than a casual look. 

In fact, it requires more than a casual look. The sign pops up suddenly on the busy road, and like all those nurseries on the road to Half Moon Bay it’s an invitation to a rear-end collision. Take it slow and resist the road’s importunate tailgaters. Peacock Nursery is too good to miss. 

Peacock Horticultural Nursery 

4296 Gravenstein Highway South 

(Highway 116), Sebastopol 

(707) 291-0547 

9 a.m.–5 p.m. Wed.–Sun. or by appointment 

www.peacockhorticulturalnursery.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.

Before I proceed to plagiarize, I like to, at least, pay homage to the memory and, in this case, their extraordinary creativity and insight of the oracle. 

In 1975, the musician Brian Eno (and the painter Peter Schmidt) published a set of flash-cards called Oblique Strategies. They still sell through a British supply house for £30.00 and are designed to help musicians (and other artists) break through blocks and expand their creativity. 

An example of one card (there are roughly 100 in the set) is “You can only make one dot at a time.” 

Now, on the face if it, this seems like a silly statement. What dots? Are they musical notes? Paint dots? Pixels in a digital art work? 

The point is for you to see how you might apply these cryptograms to your situation. They are often broad and intentionally incongruous. They are designed to throw you off balance and knock you out of the box you’ve been stuck in. 

Here’s another one that I just love: “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.” 

This is a little easier to wrap once mind around. Basically, it says, don’t jump to fixing your mistake. Take a good healthy look at it. Was there something in it that you can learn from or use? Sometimes our mistakes are actually just the right action but so out of step with our current image that they just look wrong at first glance. Take a minute to look carefully at them and you may decide that this is exactly where you should be heading. Isn’t this fun? 

Years ago, my wife and I used to throw the I Ching when we felt stuck or on the horns of something (dilemma or opportunity). The OS cards are similar but they’re also designed specifically to get you to try something new in the interest of the creative process. 

I’ve thought for some time that remodeling or architectural design could make good use of these cards (which are really designed for artists and most specifically for musicians) but I’d like to do one better by suggesting a set just for the housing design professional (or the amateur equivalent). 

So here are a few possible cards one might find in a deck of Oblique Space-Design Strategies: 

“Put inside things outside. Put outside things inside.” 

This one could be interpreted as putting the NFL in your living room on a giant flat screen TV and taking a nap in the back yard, but we can do a little better than that. If one meditates on this mantra, one might put a creek through the hallway and a clawfoot tub on the back porch. 

The first go around with one of these things might be all wrong but once you’re out of the box, you can play with the things you find and put them together in a way that you can live with. The real trick is getting out of the damned box. 

Here are some more suggested cards: 

• Use something wobbly that is safe and fun. 

• Install it upside down. Does it work? 

• Consider the sound the room (floor, ceiling, etc.) will make. Give it a song. Make it very quiet. Make it scream. 

• Use color to help people doing something in the room. What are they doing? Is it a plum activity or a vermillion ones. 

• What happens if it’s very wide? Short? Long? Round? 

• Make it taller than any you’ve seen. 

• What animal is the space (Furry? Fast? Hibernating?) 

• If the house is a cell? Where are the vacuoles? Mitochondria? Nucleus? 

• Devote the design of a room/house/lamp/lawn to a person you love deeply. Let things you love about them manifest in your choices. 

• Make one space that you can feel completely safe in. One you can sleep in for 10 hours. One that feels like a cup of coffee. 

• Have the electrician design the plumbing. Have the gardener design the electrical system. Now compare to the drawings. What did you learn? 

• Try making the square thing round and the round thing square. 

• Take a poem you like and use each of the first 10 words as your overriding design constraints for 10 systems or 10 rooms. 

• Make something really dangerous but exciting. Now work backward to where it’s safe but still feels exciting. 

• Make some portion of the built environment suited to hosting a wild animal (mouse, moose, elephant). 

Try making up a set for yourself. You can make cards based on throwing the I Ching and interpret them for yourself. In fact you can base cards on a randomly selected page from a psychology text, a romance novel, a book on Feng Shui or a guide on resoling shoes. Our brains have an extraordinary ability to pick patterns out of one set of activities or studies and apply them to grossly dissimilar circumstances. Employing this deep skill (or oblique strategy) is one of the great secrets of creative individuals. 

A great resource that has some less wild-haired directives is the not-sufficiently-famous A Pattern Language by the Christopher Alexander and members of the Center for Environmental Structure here at Berkeley. 

A pattern language is similar in that each mantra/fortune/edict can be expressed initially as a single line of text, a single phrase, such as “Thick Walls” (pattern # 197. They all have numbers). Each pattern speaks about the way things in buildings feel or work when various features ( or patterns) are manifested and also presents alternatives that change the feeling or function. These patterns far exceed building design and range beyond to design an entire globe. It’s a fun idea, designing a world based on a set of principles culled from previous successes (most patterns are simple observations about what worked well in the past … often the distant past). 

If these various methodologies don’t work for you, try anything. That’s the real message here. Don’t do what everyone else is doing. The architectural world and particularly the remodeling world seen locally is doing just what William Morris observed it to be doing in the 1870s when he was developing the Arts and Crafts movement as a rebellion against industrialization. We’re all being sold our pre-designed dream homes (do we all dream alike?) either whole or in one slab of granite after another. 

A common fear that I hear or see in the nascent remodeler is that what they do will be too different from what everyone else is doing. Professional and homeowners alike seem to lack the bravery to do something even a little different than their neighbors. I guess the advertisements are working. We’re all so afraid of not fitting in. Now, here’s the funny part about this dilemma and it’s not a warm fuzzy lifestyle piece: 

Years ago, I remember inspecting a house that someone brave had rehabbed. Each room had different colors and they were terrific, vibrant, strong and emotional. The rooms were rich and had character and voice. The lighting was good (not fancy, just good) and the furnishings were fun and often loud. It was hard not to smile walking through the place. When this place hit the market it went WAY over the typical asking price for a house of this size and location.  

It is clear that it turned people on. Not just one or two odd folks but everyone. The lesson is that individual expression is more widely understood than a dull mass message and that this will be more welcome than most of us fear it will. 

Goethe said “Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.” Goethe was speaking to the designer or poet just as much as he was to the conqueror. Go boldly. 

Got a question about home repairs and inspections? Send them to Matt Cantor, in care of East Bay Real Estate, at mgcantor@pacbell.net.

A Quakelet With a Vertical Twist 

The 4.2 quake early Friday, July 20, which originated near Butters Drive in the Oakland hills, gave Berkeley some serious shaking. The energy moved northwest along the Hayward fault and, by the time it rose to the ground in Berkeley, it was vertical, so Berkeley felt it more than other places. Shaking was felt near Point Reyes, and as far as Napa. 

The entire Hayward Fault is due for a large quake. The last major quake on that fault was 139 years ago. Did the July 20 quake release some of that strain that’s been building up over the years? Unfortunately no, says Steve Walter, USGS seismologist. What does he suggest? “Be prepared.” Get your emergency kit up to snuff, secure that furniture, get an automatic gas shut-off valve installed, and have your retrofit checked. 

Here’s to making your home secure and your family safe. 

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

TUESDAY, JULY 31 

CHILDREN 

Dan Chan the Magic Man and Kat at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext 17. 

Voice of the Wood “How the Jackrabbit Got His Very Long Ears” at 3 p.m. at the West Branch of the Berkeley Public Library. 981-6270. 

FILM 

Jewish Film Festival from 1:45 to 8:45 p.m. at The Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. 925-275-9490. www.sfjff.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES  

Deborah Davis introduces “Not Like You at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Randy Craig Trio at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Wally Schnalle at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $6-$10. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 1 

CHILDREN 

Zun Zun plays “Music of the Americas” in Spanish, English and Portuguese at 3:30 p.m. at the CLaremont Branch od the Berkeley Public Library. 981-6280. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“The Telegraph 3 p.m. Project” Photographs by Robert Eliason and poetry by Owen Hill opens at the Gaia Arts Center, 2120 Allston Way with a reception at 7:30 p.m. exhibition runs to Jan. 31. 665-0305.  

“Glimpses in Time” Photography exhibition in honor of Gordon Parks opens at the Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th St., Oakland, and runs to Aug. 31. 465-8928. 

FILM 

Jewish Film Festival from 2 to 8:30 p.m. at The Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. For information on tickets call 925-275-9490. www.sfjff.org 

Eco-Amok: An Inconvenient Film Fest “Prophecy” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Ian Jackman describes “Eat This!: 1,001 Things to Eat Before You Diet” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Ann Channin, jazz, at 1:15 p.m. at North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. 981-5190. 

Johnny Bones and the Palace of Jazz at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Saul Kaye “A Taste of Paradise” at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Tri Tip Trio at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun/Zydeco dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Orquestra Universal at 8 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159. www.shattuckdownlow.com 

The Mundaze Acoustic at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Tenth Annual East Bay Blues Revue at 7:30 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $20. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, AUGUST 2 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Shaped by Water” Abstract landscape paintings by Jane Norling. Reception for the artists at 11:30 a.m. at the EBMUD Gallery, 375 11th St., Oakland. 287-0138. 

“New Visions” Group show of work by Bay Area artists. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Pro Arts Gallery, 550 Second St., Oakland. 763-9425. 

FILM 

“2nd Verse” A documentary exploring teen life in the Bay Area and the popularity of Spoken Word, at 8 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5-$6. 849-2568.  

Jewish Film Festival from 1:45 to 8:30 p.m. at The Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. For information on tickets call 925-275-9490. www.sfjff.org 

A Theater Near You “White Light/Black Rain” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Roberta Spear Retrospective “A Sweetness Rising” with Pholip Levine, Peter Everwine and Sandra Hoben at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 559-9500. 

“Conversations on Art” with Faith Powell on the female subjects in Man Ray’s work at 6:30 p.m. at the Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St. Cost is $6-$8. 549-6950.  

Larry Kearney reads his poetry at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Steve Carter Trio at noon at the downtown Berkeley BART station. info@downtownberkeley.org 

“Once More, For the First Time” students of the Ailey Camp perform at 7 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Free tickets available from 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Dgin, Mad Maggies at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $8. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Tangria Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $9. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Iwori, Raya Nova, Sugar Shack at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082 . 

Claudia Russell at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Vortex Tribe at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Pete Escovedo at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $18-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

FRIDAY, AUGUST 3 

THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley “All in the Timing” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. at Berryman, through Aug. 11. Tickets are $12. 525-1620. www.aeofberkeley.org  

Altarena Playhouse “Oh My Godmother” Fri and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at 1409 High St., Alameda, through Aug. 11. Tickets are $17-$20. 523-1553. www.altarena.org 

Contra Costa Civic Theater “Meet Me in St. Louis” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. in July at 951 Pomona Ave., at Moeser, El Cerrito, through Aug. 4. 524-9132. 

Stage Door Conservatory “Urinetown” A Teens On Stage Production, Fri. at 7 p.m., Sat. and Sun. at 5 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$20. 521-6250. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Colors of the American West” Pein-air paintings by Deborah Diamond. OPening reception at 7 p.m. at The Gallery, 5751 Horton St., Emeryville. 428-2384. 

“Glimpses in Time” Photography exhibition in honor of Gordon Parks. Opening reception at 4 p.m. at Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th St., Oakland. 465-8928. 

“Inscibere” A group show of works related to the act of writing. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, 25 Grand Ave., upper level. www.chandracerrito.com 

“The Locals” Group show of artists using photography, metal, lichen and sound. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Rhythmix Cultural Works, K Gallery, 2513 Blanding Ave., Alameda. 845-5060. www.rhythmix.org 

FILM 

Max Ophuls: Motion and Emotion “Happy Heirs” at 7 p.m. and “Lola Montes” at 8:35 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“Gumby Dharma” the story of Art Clokey and his cartoon legend at 8:45 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak at 10th St. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Art Shapiro and Tim Manolis discuss their new book “Butterflies of the SF Bay Region” at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way, just below Telegraph. The authors will lead a nature walk in Claremont Canyon before their talk, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. For informration and reservations for the walk email Bill McClung at wmcclung@ren.com  

William Poy Lee reads from his new book “The Eighth Promise” at 7:30 p.m. at Oakland Musuem of California, 1000 Oak at 10th St. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. w 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Ross Hammond’s “No Do” at 8 p.m. at Free-Jazz Fridays at the Jazz House, 1510 8th St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$15. 415-846-9432. 

Saed Muhssin, part of The Arab Cultural Initiative, at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $8-$12. 849-2568.  

The Brama Sukarma Ensemble at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373.  

Judy Wexler & Anton Schwartz Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ.  

Bayonics, 40 Watt Hype at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

YBSC, jazz fusion, at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

The Hobbyists, indie folk duo, at 9 p.m. at Downtown Restaurant & Bar 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

Midnite, roots reggae from St. Croix, at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $25-$30. 548-1159.  

Bryan Harrison and Abel Mouton at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. 

The Blind, Everest at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082.  

Born/Dead. A.N.S., Cross Examination, Resist the Right 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. 

The Wayward Sway at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Midnite, roots reggae, at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $25-$30. 548-1159.  

SATURDAY, AUGUST 4 

CHILDREN 

Pinocchio: The Hip-Hopera, Sat. and Sun. at 12:30 and 3:30 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave. 452-2259. 

THEATER 

Shotgun Players “The Three Musketeers” Sat. and Sun. at 4 p.m. at John Hinkle Park, Southampton Ave., off The Arlington, through Sept. 9. Free. 841-6500. 

EXHIBITIONS 

Berkeley’s “Other” Revolution: Celebrating 35 Years of Independent Living, Disability Access, and Disability Rights. Photographs by Ken Stein on display in the windows of Rasputin Music, 2401 Telegraph Ave., between Channing Way and Haste. 525-2325. 

“Interiors/Exteriors” Works by Tracy Wes, Vivian Prinsloo and Scott Courtenay-Smith. Artist reception at 6 p.m. at Esteban Sabar Gallery, 480 23rd St., Oakland. 444-7411. 

FILM 

Jewish Film Festival from 12:30 to 9:15 p.m. at The Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. For information on tickets call 925-275-9490. www.sfjff.org 

Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker “And Life Goes On” at 6:30 p.m. and “Through the Olive Trees” at 8:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“At the Med ... Were You There?” Thirty years of sketches from Telegraph Ave.’s Mediterranean Coffee House by Doyl Haley. Lecture on Doyl Hayley’s work by John McNamara at 2 p.m.at the Berkeley Public Library, in the 3rd flr Community Meeting Room, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6100. 

Bay Area Poets Coalition open reading from 3 to 5 p.m. at Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison St. Park on the street. 527-9905.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Erik Friedlander at 8 p.m. at the Jazz House, 1510 8th St., Oakland. Cost is $15. 415-846-9432. 

Roy Zimmerman “Faulty Intellegence” songs about ignorance, war and greed at 8 p.m., reception at 6:30 p.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. Tickets are $10-$30. www.brownpapertickets.com 

Saul Kaye “A Taste of Paradise” in a benefit for missing woman Lynn Ruth Connes, at 9:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Mal Sharpe and Big Money in Gumbo at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ.  

Lavay Smith & Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Sotaque Baiano, Brazilian, at 8 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

The Cannery and Nomi at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

“The Q is Silent” with Dan Marschak and Friends at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Le Jazz Hot at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

5 Dollar Suit, The Mission Players, San Pablo Project at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

Ceremony, Blacklisted, Shipwreck Said Radio at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

Pete Escovedo at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $18-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SUNDAY, AUGUST 5 

THEATER 

“Nature vs Merger” a Sci-Fi fairy tale for all ages at 3 p.m. at 1631 Bonita Ave. Rehearsal and set building on Sat. at 2 p.m. Call to claim a role. 266-2069. 

EXHIBITIONS 

Paintings by Yoni G. Opening reception at 4 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

FILM 

Max Ophuls: Motion and Emotion “La signora di tutti” at 5 p.m. and “The Exile” at 7 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Museum Dialogs” A panel discussion on culturally-specific museums in the Bay Area at 2 p.m. at the Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St. Cost is $10-$12. 549-6950.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Trumpet and Organ Concert with James Tindsly, trumpet and Ron McKean, organ, at 3 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church of Oakland, 2619 Broadway, Oakland. Suggested donation $10. 444-3555. 

Oakland Municipal Band Concert with jazz, big band, marches and showtunes from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Edoff Memorial Bandstand, Lakeside Park and Lake Merritt, Oakland.  

Dred Scott Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Trick Kernan Combo at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe. 595-5344.  

Julian Pollack Three-O at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373.  

Lion of Judah, Ability at 5 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

MONDAY, AUGUST 6 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Actors Reading Writers“Forces of Nature,” stories by Alice Munro and Wallace Stegner, at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. 932-0214.  

“Landscapes for Politics” A panel discussion with Jake Kosek, author of “Understories,” Marina Sitrin, author of “Storming the Gates of Paradise,” and moderated by Ed Yuen, editor of Confronting Capitalism, at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Jessica Bruder describes “Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Danubius, Hungarian Gypsy music, at 7 p.m. at Le Bateau Ivre, 2629 Telegraph Ave. 849-1100. www.lebateauivre.net 

Trovatore, traditional Italian music, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

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

The Telegraph 3 p.m. Project, a collection of scores of photographs by Robert Eliason with matching poems by Owen Hill captioning text that chronicles in an upbeat fashion streetlife on the avenue, will be on exhibit at the Gaia Building, 2120 Allston Way (near Shattuck) through Jan. 31. 

There will be a reception with the artists, who refer to the exhibit as “going downtown,” at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 1. Refreshments will be served; admission is free. 

The project, named after the hour of Eliason’s lunchbreak at Moe’s Books (where both artists are longtime booksellers) when most of the photographs have been taken, will be represented by 161 photos, about a third of the project’s total so far, many of the images newer than those shown in two previous exhibits, in larger format and higher quality prints. 

“The goal has always been to show Telegraph in a much better light than that in the public’s perception,” said Eliason. “And I think this is the best of the three shows of the work. For one thing, there’s more room to breathe at the Gaia Building. And the size and quality of the prints are so much better. They’re just gorgeous—they sparkle on the walls. It’s as positive a look at Berkeley as you could possibly get. It should make a lot of people happy.” 

The project oiginally began several years back when Eliason, who’d shown Hill his photos, “began e-mailing me hundreds,” Hill recalled, “I’d shoot unrevised texts back on some. We’d negotiate between the two a little—not much.” 

Soon they had scores of photos with short poems captioning them. The first public showing was sponsored by the Telegraph BID, facilitated by Doris Moskowitz, owner of Moe’s. 

“We went up and down the Avenue, asking if business owners were interested in displaying them in windows,” said Hill. “I was surprised how many there were. We were proud and enthused, as hundreds were shown and some were kept up long after the show was supposed to be over.” 

A later exhibit at the YWCA updated the original showing with new work. The new show at the Gaia Building will feature even newer work, as well as some photos of other spots in the Bay Area. 

Hill reflected on the differences seen in the photos of Telegraph over just a few years: “Some look necessarily more deserted than the earlier ones, after Cody’s closed—‘the specter of the Cody’s building,’ Robert calls it—and other businesses went down, leaving empty storefronts. But there’s been an upswing this summer, whether from Peet’s moving in on the corner of Dwight, or the Berkeley World Music Festival bringing people down who realized the avenue’s a good place to go. But the energy doesn’t necessarily change overall. 20-plus years at Moe’s, and living around the corner, watching the avenue, is like watching the stock market. There are terrible months, then everybody comes back.” 

The impetus for applying to the Gaia Building for an exhibit originally came from a resident of the Gaia, also a customer at Moe’s, “somebody who was in one of the first photos,” Eliason recalled, “and wasn’t thrilled about it at first. Then he talked to us, become sort of a fan of the project, and told us they were looking for exhibitors at the Gaia, that we should pull something together. We mailed it off—and heard from them the day it was received.” 

Eliason plans to rotate some of the photos about halfway through the run. “There’s a lot of work that wouldn’t get displayed otherwise.” 

Hill, a bookseller who’s had seven books of poetry and two of fiction, one (The Chandler Apartments) a detective novel set in the neighborhood, published—hopes the new exhibition and the longevity of the project will also result in a book. “It’ll certainly sell off the Moe’s counter!” 

For more information about the Telegraph 3 p.m. Project, see www.lostinthestars.com. 

Photograph: The photographs of Robert Eliason, accompanied by poems by Owen Hill, make up the Telegraph 3 p.m. Project, on display at the Gaia Building through Jan. 31.

“Not fair, roaring without telling,” Decca would warn as I read—and roared—over some bit from her latest book or letter. I was nursing a sherry in her Oakland kitchen, and reading hugely funny and provocative items from some of the experiences we’d shared during the ‘40s and ‘50s. 

Such as the times we faked interest in a white-owned home for sale, in Oakland, running interference for a black couple not allowed to bid for it for themselves. (Racial Restrictive Covenants prevailed then —eventually to be tossed by the U.S. Supreme Court.) Such as producing Lifeitselfmanship: or How to Become a Precisely Because Man, the send-up of Left language, illustrations by me. It was home-mimeographed, stapled and sold to benefit The People’s World, although the satire rubbed some Comrades the wrong way. 

Then Decca became a proper Writer with the publication of her autobiography, Hons and Rebels, in the U.K. in 1959 under her proper name, Jessica Mitford. By that time her Committee—composed of five or six friends and two husbands: Bob Treuhaft and Steve Murdock (my second)—had become a kind of editorial board while roaring over her bizarre family history. Hard to believe that Lord and Lady Redesdale’s next to youngest daughter would become an American Communist married to a Jewish lawyer while two of her older sisters were raging, notorious Fascists. 

Decca went on to write The American Way of Death, the best-seller which dealt a mortal blow to some of the more nefarious practices of the funeral industry. We all enjoyed reading house organs like Casket & Sunnyside, for their grisly ads. 

She was a hero to me for her bravery in confronting racist mobs; e.g. rounding up defense for a black couple who had moved in to a formerly all-white community in San Pablo; being in a black church in Montgomery, Ala. to hear Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., as rioters raged outside and burned her borrowed car. 

She became “Queen of the Muckrakers,” an investigative reporter who could skewer her subject with the politest of voices, all wide-eyed and relentless. I recall her quizzing a coffin-maker about his wholesale prices to the “trade.” But he was an artful dodger. “Hm, I see you are not going to tell me,” Decca decided. A collection of her essays, Poison Penmanship, is must reading for aspiring journalists.  

Decca’s second autobiography, A Fine Old Conflict, deals with her life as head of the East Bay Civil Rights Congress and membership in the Communist Party. (The title is a “mondegreen,” a mishearing of “’tis the final conflict...” from The Internationale.) And a fine old conflict it was in the McCarthy ‘50s—raising children, going to endless meetings and bucking the racist Oakland police. In Decca’s case, bearding racism in the heart of the South, when she and a group of white women went to Mississippi to try to forestall the execution of an innocent black man, Willie McGee. 

Our lives ran along similar lines. Our lawyer husbands, Bob Treuhaft and Bert Edises, were continually harassed by the police and occasional investigative bodies—HUAC, etc. for their defense of unionists and black people. The Treuhaft house was abuzz with activity in 1966 when Bob ran for District Attorney in an effort to unseat “loathsome” J. Frank Coakley. Bert had made the run in 1950; also lost. But they remained Coakley’s worst nightmare in court. 

Not long after I met Decca, in 1943, we became friends and neighbors. She was never one to hug, but you knew she liked you and was on your side, whenever push came to shove. She and Bob gave great cause parties; one, I vividly remember because you were not only charged for entrance but for napkins, glasses, toiletpaper—and to leave! Anything to keep the CRC afloat.  

Since Decca arrived from England she’d been fascinated by American slang. On our way out to lunch, she would say in her perfect British accent, “I am so longing for grub!” Whereas, when British journalist Claude Cockburn arrived to observe the United Nations Decca was called upon to translate his indecipherable English. She began to sound more like a Brit as she made many trips back to “Jolly Old.” 

It’s such a good read, these letters, and so beautifully stitched together by Peter Sussman. He makes it easy to follow the chronology and the tumultuous ‘50s and ‘60s. He did a massive job of pulling together Decca’s family relationships, the political times (and the curious punctuation). 

The Letters reveal a witty, courageous, hugely funny woman in her own words, from the inside out. It’s a great chronicle of those times. How I miss—and long for Decca’s take on these parlous times. 

DECCA: THE LETTERS OF  

JESSICA MITFORD 

Edited by Peter Y. Sussman. 

Alfred A. Knopf. 745 pages. $35.

Are you interested in little old white lady, self-supporting, spinster-librarians? Do you assume much doesn’t go on in their lives beyond the spectacles and reading all those books? Well, meet “Miss Breed.” She took chances, risked her career and income by taking an activist stance during World War II.  

“Miss Breed” was the San Diego Public Library’s first Children’s Librarian. She worked in the branch used by the city’s Japanese American children. Within four months of Dec. 7, 1941, San Diego Nikkei were forced to leave their homes, schools, jobs, and public libraries.  

At the train station “Miss Breed” distributed self-addressed post cards to “her children” and sent them packages of books and other necessities that she purchased as she came to know their locations. She wrote about their condition and struggled to get published in library literature. And more. 

I learned of “Miss Breed” because recently I happened to tune into Book-TV when Joanne Oppenheim related her experiences writing Dear Miss Breed: True Stories of the Japanese American Incarceration During World War II and a Librarian Who Made a Difference to an audience that included many of Miss Breed’s children and their children at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles (www.janm.org). All of the above describes this wonderfully illustrated and written book in the barest terms. 

One of the subject headings suggested by the U.S. Library of Congress catalogers is “Juvenile Literature,” but it should be read by every one. It is in the Berkeley Public Library collections.  

DEAR MISS BREED: TRUE  

STORIES OF THE JAPANESE AMERICAN INCARCERATION  

DURING WORLD WAR II AND A LIBRARIAN WHO MADE A  

DIFFERENCE 

By Joanne Oppenheim. Foreword by Elizabeth Kikuchi Yamada. Afterword by Snowden Becker Scholastic Nonfiction, 2006. 

About the time of year the robins wind down and the naked ladies begin to bloom, we start seeing the garden spiders. They’re orbweavers, probably Araneus diadematus, and at this stage they’re just little orange-and-black specks with legs. Between now and Halloween they’ll get a lot bigger, and plumper. 

The garden spiders take over the garden, of course, but they don’t confine themselves to it. Most years we have a clutch of them on the front porch, anchoring their webs to the railings. They often get into the car, and have to be delicately removed. Once we woke up to find a sizable web across the back door. Some might find that ominous. I live with an arachnophile, though, and I’ve come to terms with them. 

The large conspicuous spiders are females. The males would be smaller and more furtive. It’s not clear what arrangements the garden spiders make, but males of a related species, the black-and-yellow agriope, spin their own webs at a safe distance from the females’. The males’ webs are shoddily constructed and often littered with beer cans and pizza boxes. 

But a female garden spider’s web is an architectural marvel—all those precisely arranged spokes and spiral struts. A typical web has 25 to 30 radial threads forming regular 12-to-15-degree angles. The younger the spider, the more threads. The center of the web is stickier and has closer-spaced spirals. From that hub she monitors the web for tremors that announce an arriving insect, holding on to a signal thread.  

Webs are delicate things, subject to damage from struggling prey. Rather than patching up the old web, a spider begins her day by eating whatever’s left of it—thus conserving the silk proteins—and spinning a new one. 

Webmaking is a complex act, and it’s hard to see how a spider’s minuscule brain can hold all the necessary programming. A spider’s central nervous system consists of a pair of ganglia—clusters of neurons—that are wired to its muscles and sensory systems. You wouldn’t expect a lot of bandwidth there. 

What about a really small spider? William Eberhard of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the University of Costa Rica was interested in the tradeoffs that a miniaturized spider brain would require. Brains are metabolically expensive to run, and Eberhard expected that small-brained organisms would have to jettison some of their behavioral repertoire. Webmaking precision seemed a likely candidate. 

So Eberhard chose five Costa Rican orbweaver species, ranging in weight from the 50-milligram Leucage mariana to the tiny Anapisona simoni that tips the scales at .005 milligrams. That’s five orders of magnitude’s difference. The smaller species, he says, had descended from larger ancestors, downsizing their brains along the way. 

He measured the webs of each species, expecting the smaller spiders to be sloppier webcrafters. To the contrary, there was no loss in precision with decreasing size. Eberhard speculated to a New York Times reporter that the smallest spiders “have done something subtle or special with the neurons in their brain to be able to do the same behavior that larger ones can.” 

That’s an almost heretical thought. We all know big brains are best, right? Primates, cetaceans, corvids all have higher brain-to-body mass ratios than other mammals and birds. Even octopi and squids, arguably the most intelligent invertebrates, are large-brained for mollusks.  

I can think of only a few other instances of brain shrinkage in the evolutionary process. Slender salamanders, wormlike creatures that are probably hiding under the leaf litter in your back yard, have smaller and less complex brains than their ancestors. But the lifestyle of these sedentary amphibians doesn’t require complex behavior. A slender salamander that travels more than ten feet in its entire lifetime would be exceptional. 

Somehow, though, arachnids have found a way of shrinking the brain (along with the body) without losing key behavior capabilities: some kind of compromise between size and connectivity. Whatever they’ve done, it’s one of the neater evolutionary tricks. 

Photograph by Ron Sullivan: A female garden spider waits for visitors. 

Joe Eaton’s “Wild Neighbors” column appears every other Tuesday in the Berkeley Daily Planet, alternating with Ron Sullivan’s “Green Neighbors” column on East Bay trees.

TUESDAY, JULY 31 

Tuesdays for the Birds Tranquil bird walks in local parklands, led by Bethany Facendini, from 7 to 9:30 a.m. Today we will visit Berkeley Meadow in the East Shore State Park. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233. 

“Elevating the Sparks of Peace: Stories of Hope and Reconciliation from the Holy Land” with Eliyahu McLean of Jerusalem Peacemakers at 8:30 p.m. at Chochamat HaLev Maggid Conference, 2215 Prince St. 704-9687. www.chochmat.org 

Tuesday Documentaries at 7 p.m. at the Gaia Arts Center, 2120 Allston Way. Donation of $5 benefits the Berkeley Food and Housing Project. 665-0305. 

Bayswater Book Club meets to discuss “The Secret History of the American Empire” by John Perkins at 6:30 p.m. Call for location 433-2911.  

Community Sing-a-Long every Tues, at 2 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. 524-9122.  

Family Storytime for preschoolers and up at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704.  

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 1 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around Preservation Park to see Victorian architecture. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of Preservation Park at 13th St. and MLK, Jr. Way. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234.  

South Berkeley Library Presentation with Noll & Tam Architects who have been hired to investigate possible spaces for the library at the Ed Roberts Campus, at Board of Library Trustees meeting at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 3rd flr. Community Meeting Room, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6107. 

“Richmond Shoreline and its Resources” A talk by Rich Walkling and a showing of the documentary “Rheem Creek and Breuner Marsh: A Promised Land” at 7 p.m. at 4191 Appian Way, El Sobrante. 665-3538. www.spawners.org 

American Red Cross Blood Services Volunteer Orientation from 10 a.m. to noon at 6230 Claremont Ave., Oakland. To register call 594-5165.  

CSI at Your Library A crime solving presentation by the Berkeley Police for children 10 and up at 2 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6223. 

Family Math and Science Night at 6 p.m. at the West Branch of the Berkeley Public Library. A bilingual program for children ages 7-10 and their families. 981-6270. 

Skin Cancer Screening at the Markstein Cancer Education Center, Summit Campus, Oakland. Appointments reuired. 869-8833, option 2. 

Pax Nomada Bike Ride Meet at 6 p.m. at Nomad Cafe for a 15-25 mile ride up to through the Berkeley hills. All levels of cyclists welcome. 595-5344. 

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. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at 6:30 p.m. at the Berkeley BART Station. www.geocities.com/ 

vigil4peace/vigil 

Stitch ‘n Bitch at 6:30 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

THURSDAY, AUGUST 2 

El Sabor de Fruitvale Farmers market with activities for children, information on community services and music, from 3 to 7 p.m. at Fruitvale Village Plaza, 3411 East 12th St., near the Fruitvale BART. www.unitycouncil.org 

Summer Family Film Series at 3 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Main Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6223. 

“The White Rose” A film about a group of courageous youth in Nazi Germany at 7 p.m. at Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way. 848-1196. www.revolutionbooks.org 

Healing Yoga for Cancer at 7:30 p.m. at Elephant Pahrmacy, 1607 Shattuck Ave. Suggested donation $10. 549-9200. 

Cope with Creativity Workshop on “Healing Touch for Self-Care” at 6:30 p.m. at 4401 Howe St., Oakland. To register call 888-755-7855, ext. 4241. 

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Club meets at 6:45 p.m. at Spud’s Pizza, 3290 Adeline. namaste@avatar.freetoasthost.info  

FRIDAY, AUGUST 3 

East Bay Vivarium vists the South Branch of the Berkeley Public Library at 2 p.m. to show off reptiles and amphibians. 981-6260. 

“Butterflies of the SF Bay Region” with Art Shapiro and Tim Manolis discussing their new field guide at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way, just below Telegraph. The authors will lead a nature walk in Claremont Canyon before their talk, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. For information and reservations for the walk email wmcclung@ren.com  

“Yosemite” with scientific illustrator Andie Thrams on Yosemite flora, Ranger Yenyen Chan on Chinese labor in the construction of park roads, and a screening of “Discover Hetch Hetchy” from 6 to 8 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak at 10th St. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

“Daily Realities of Living under Occupation” with Hisham Ahmad Ph.D, formerly of Bir Zeit University in the West Bank at 7 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Free. 499-0537. 

Foreclosures in the Changing Real Estate Market: How does it Affect the Albany/Berkeley Area? at 5:30 p.m. at 1302 Solano Ave., Albany. Cost is $3-$5. Sponsored by the Albany Chamber of Commerce. RSVP to 525-1771. 

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310. 

SATURDAY, AUGUST 4 

“Container Gardening for Renters or Those with Limited Space” with strategies on growing in various vessels with information on compost, soils, compost teas, seasonal planting, and more. From 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Cost is $10-$15, no one turned away. Please call to register. 548-2220, ext.233. 

Oakland Heritage Alliance Walking Tour Preservation Park to Pardee Mansion Meet at 10 a.m. at 13th St. and Preservation Park Way for a walk through Oakland’s 19th Century. Bring a picnic lunch for the end of the tour. 763-9218. www.oaklandheritage.org 

Birding Bike Trip at Quarry Lakes An easy 24-mile trip to see birdsin riparian, marsh and bayside habitats. Meet at 8:20 a.m. on the east side of the Fremont BART station. Bring helment, bike lock, luch and liquids. For information email Kathy_Jarrett@yahoo.com 

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

Rally in Support of Universal Health Care (SB 840) at 1:30 p.m. at Oakland City Hall Plaza. Speakers include Sandre Swanson, Richard Quint, MD, Sara Rogers and many others. 832-8683. 

Fun With Bubbles for ages 3 and up at 2 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave, Kensington. 524-3043. 

Fast Pitch Softball for Adults at noon on Saturdays in Oakland. 204-9500. 

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 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

SUNDAY, AUGUST 5 

Green Home Expo from noon to 5 p.m. at the Berkeley Marina, with electronics and old medicine disposal, and information on reducing your global carbon footprint. 981-5435. 

Walking-Pole Workshop in celebration of the opening of the new Glendale Path at 9:45 a.m. Registration required. Email info@berkeleypaths.org  

Oakland Heritage Alliance Walking Tour of Chinatown Meet at 10 a.m. at the fountain of Pacific Renaissance Plaza, Ninth St., between Webster and Frainklin. 763-9218. www.oaklandheritage.org 

Home Graywater Systems A workshop on safely irrigating with shower, bathroom sink, and laundry waste water from 10 a.m. to noon at EcoHouse, 1305 Hopkins St. Cost is $15 sliding scale. Registration required. 548-2220 ext. 242. 

Free Hands-on Bicycle Clinic Learn how to keep your bike in excellent working condition through safety inspections, from 10 to 11 a.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Red Cross Blood Drive from 1 to 5 p.m. at 7th Heaven Yoga Studio, 2820 7th St. To schedule an appointment see www.BeADonor.com (Code: 7YOGA) 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

MONDAY, AUGUST 6 

Peace Day Crane Folding with the film “Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes” followed by a crane folding program, from 3 to 6 p.m. at the Children’s Story Room, Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6223. 

“Landscapes for Politics” A panel discussion with Jake Kosek, author of “Understories,” Marina Sitrin, author of “Storming the Gates of Paradise,” and moderated by Ed Yuen, editor of Confronting Capitalism, at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Help Plan the Peoples Park Paace Rally in Sept., at an organizational meeting at 7 p.m. at Cafe Med, Telegraph Ave. 658-1451. 

“Hormone Disrupting Chemicals in the Environment” with Jennifer Jackson of EBMUD and Rebecca Sutton of Environmental Working Group at 7 p.m. at Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin, at Masonic. Sponsored by Friends of Five Creeks. www.fivecreeks.org 

Red Cross Blood Drive from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at West Pauley Ballroom MLK Student Union, UC Campus. To schedule an appointment go to www.BeADonor.com  

Family Sing-Along at 6:45 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6223. 

FRIDAY, JULY 27 

THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley “All in the Timing” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. at Berryman, through Aug. 11. Tickets are $12. 525-1620. www.aeofberkeley.org  

Altarena Playhouse “Oh My Godmother” Fri and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at 1409 High St., Alameda, through Aug. 11. Tickets are $17-$20. 523-1553. www.altarena.org 

Central Works “Bird in the Hand” Thurs-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., through July 29. Tickets are $9-$25. 558-1381. 

Contra Costa Civic Theater “Meet Me in St. Louis” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. in July at 951 Pomona Ave., at Moeser, El Cerrito, through Aug. 4. 524-9132. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“A New Home, A New Life” Photographs by Refugee Youth in Oakland, Wed.-Sat., to Aug. 8 at Oakland Art Gallery, 199 Kahn’s Alley, Frank Ogawa Plaza, Oakland. Exhibit co-sponsored by the International Rescue Committee who helped to resettle the youth in Oakland. www.oaklandartgallery.org 

FILM 

Movies About Movies “Sunset Boulevard” at 3:30 p.m. in the Community Meeting Room, Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6139. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Youth Writing Festival Participants read from their works at 6 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com  

Eli Gordon and Andrew Joron read their poetry at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Opera “Aïda” at 8 p.m. and SUn. at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $15-$40. 925-798-1300. 

“La Dolce Vita dei Flauti” Recorder consort music at 8 p.m. at St. Albert’s Priory, 5890 Birch Ct. off College Ave., Oakland. Cost is $10-$15. 528-1725. 

M.I.A., Sri Lankan singer at 2 p.m. at Amoeba, 2455 Telegraph Ave. www.amoeba.com 

Warner Ellenberg Trio at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Peru Canta y Baila! A celebration of Peruvian independence day at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

The Collective at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Nawal, music from the Comoros, at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12-$15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

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

Robbie Fulks at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Steven Gary and Laura Zucker at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Diablo’s Dust, The Morning Line, Fainting Goats at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

Christ on Parade, Final Conflict, Look Back and Laugh at 7 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

The Mundaze at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Kapakahi at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

A Christian McBride Situation at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$24. 238-9200.  

SATURDAY, JULY 28 

THEATER 

Big City Improv, in Berkeley for one night only, at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Statge, 1901 Asby Ave. Tickets are $15-$20. 595-5597. www.bigcityimprov.com 

Shotgun Players “The Three Musketeers” Sat. and Sun. at 4 p.m. at John Hinkle Park, Southampton Ave., off The Arlington, through Sept. 9. Free. 841-6500. 

FILM 

Jewish Film Festival from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. at The Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. For information on tickets call 925-275-9490. www.sfjff.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Rhythm & Muse Reading and Open Mic featuring poet Marc Hofstader at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. between Eunice and Rose Sts. 527-9753. 

“Transparent Passions” Performances, spoken word and art installation from 1 to 3:30 p.m. at Peralta Park, corner of Solano Ave. and Peralta St. 528-9038. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Familia Cepeda, Afro-Puerto Rican, at 8 and 10 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12-$15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Babatunde Lea Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Najite, Bass Culture Review, Afrobeat from Los Angeles, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Amy Obenski and Kristin Lagasse at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

The Soul Burners at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Neydavood Ensemble at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761.  

Autumn Sara, High Like Five, Seconds Left at 6 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $10. 763-1146. www.oaklandmetro.org 

Maya Kronfeld Group at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Fred Randolph Jazz Group at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $5. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Nicole McRory at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

The Altered Egos, Bunny Numpkins and the Kill Blow-up Reaction at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082.  

Christ on Parade, Attitude Adjustment, El Dopa at 7 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, JULY 29 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Color & Light” Photographic art by Bill Hannapple. Reception for the artist at 1 p.m. at The LightRoom Gallery, 2263 Fifth St., through Aug. 24. 649-8111. www.lightroom.com 

“First Exposures: Bay Area Youth Photography” Reception at 2 p.m. at Mills College Art Museum, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland. www.sfcamerawork.org 

FILM 

Jewish Film Festival from 11:30 a.m. to 8:45 p.m. at The Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. For information on tickets call 925-275-9490. www.sfjff.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Tao Lin and Stephanie Young read at 7 p.m. at 21 Grand, 416 25th St. at Broadway. Cost is $5. 649-1320. 

“Rewriting Copyright with the Swedish Pirate Party” A panel discussion on how both creativity and civil liberties are often stymied by today’s copyright laws at 5 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Cost is $10. www.hillsideclub.org 

Cal Adventures Open Mic at 7 p.m. at the recreation yard across from Hana Japan at the Berkeley Marina. 642-4000. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Midsummer Mozart, Program II, featuring Elspeth Franks, soprano, at 7 p.m. at First Congregational Church. Tickets are $30-$60. 415-627-9145. www.midsummermozart.org 

San Francisco Renaissance Voices “The Regina Monologues” music for lute, readings from Shakespeare, and Elizabethan madrigals and folksongs at 7:30 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church, 2001 Santa Clara St., Alameda. Tickets are $12-$15. 522-1477. www.sfrv.org 

Berkeley Opera “Aïda” at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $15-$40. 925-798-1300. 

Summer Jazz with Chester Smith & his Organ at 3 p.m., The History of Jazz with Randy Moore at 4:30 p.m. at Open Jam Session at 5 p.m. at Oakland Public Library, Golden Gate Branch, 5606 San Pablo Ave., Oakland. 597-5023. 

Brad Colerick at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

Folk This! and Friends An evening of radical protest music and theater at 7 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $10. 849-2568.  

Con Alma Voice-tet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ.  

JL Stiles at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Ten Ton Chicken, Eyewitness Blues Band, David Gans and others at 7 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10-$20 sliding scale. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Aaron Bahr Jazz Quintet at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373.  

Americana Unplugged: Corbin and Crew at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Ignite, Stick to your Guns These Days at 6 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $10. 763-1146.  

MONDAY, JULY 30 

CHILDREN 

Magic Dan at 3:30 p.m. at the North Branch of the Berkeley Public Library. 981-6250. 

FILM 

Jewish Film Festival from 2:15 to 8:15 p.m. at The Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. For information on tickets call 925-275-9490. www.sfjff.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Austin Grossman and Tao Lin at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

James Lindsay shares stories from his mother’s memoir “Bold Plum” about the guerrillas in China’s war against Japan at 7 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698.  

Marty Nemko describes “Cool Careers for Dummies” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 559-9500. 

Poetry Express with Dale Jensen birthday celebration reading at 7 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

Breaking Chains A night of poetry at 7 p.m. at Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way. 848-1196.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Flutopia at 7 p.m. at Le Bateau Ivre, 2629 Telegraph Ave. 849-1100. www.lebateauivre.net 

Trovatore, traditional Italian music, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

West Coast Songwriter’s Showcase at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $5 548-1761 www.freightandsalvage.org 

Orquesta Borinquen at 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200.  

TUESDAY, JULY 31 

CHILDREN 

Dan Chan the Magic Man and Kat at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext 17. 

Voice of the Wood “How the Jackrabbit Got His Very Long Ears” at 3 p.m. at the West Branch of the Berkeley Public Library. 981-6270. 

FILM 

Jewish Film Festival from 1:45 to 8:45 p.m. at The Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. 925-275-9490. www.sfjff.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES  

Deborah Davis introduces “Not Like You at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Randy Craig Trio at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Wally Schnalle at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $6-$10. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 1 

CHILDREN 

Zun Zun plays “Music of the Americas” in Spanish, English and Portuguese at 3:30 p.m. at the CLaremont Branch od the Berkeley Public Library. 981-6280. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“The Telegraph 3 p.m. Project” Photographs by Robert Eliason and poetry by Owen Hill opens at the Gaia Arts Center, 2120 Allston Way with a reception at 7:30 p.m. exhibition runs to Jan. 31. 665-0305.  

“Glimpses in Time” Photography exhibition in honor of Gordon Parks opens at the Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th St., Oakland, and runs to Aug. 31. 465-8928. 

FILM 

Jewish Film Festival from 2 to 8:30 p.m. at The Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. For information on tickets call 925-275-9490. www.sfjff.org 

Eco-Amok: An Inconvenient Film Fest “Prophecy” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Ian Jackman describes “Eat This!: 1,001 Things to Eat Before You Diet” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Ann Channin, jazz, at 1:15 p.m. at North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. 981-5190. 

Johnny Bones and the Palace of Jazz at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Saul Kaye “A Taste of Paradise” at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Tri Tip Trio at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun/Zydeco dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

The Mundaze Acoustic at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Tenth Annual East Bay Blues Revue at 7:30 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $20. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, AUGUST 2 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Shaped by Water” Abstract landscape paintings by Jane Norling. Reception for the artists at 11:30 a.m. at the EBMUD Gallery, 375 11th St., Oakland. 287-0138. 

“New Visions” Group show of work by Bay Area artists. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Pro Arts Gallery, 550 Second St., Oakland. 763-9425. 

FILM 

“2nd Verse” A documentary exploring teen life in the Bay Area and the popularity of Spoken Word, at 8 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5-$6. 849-2568.  

Jewish Film Festival from 1:45 to 8:30 p.m. at The Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. For information on tickets call 925-275-9490. www.sfjff.org 

A Theater Near You “White Light/Black Rain” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Roberta Spear Retrospective “A Sweetness Rising” with Pholip Levine, Peter Everwine and Sandra Hoben at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 559-9500. 

“Conversations on Art” with Faith Powell on the female subjects in Man Ray’s work at 6:30 p.m. at the Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St. Cost is $6-$8. 549-6950.  

Larry Kearney reads his poetry at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Steve Carter Trio at noon at the downtown Berkeley BART station. info@downtownberkeley.org 

“Once More, For the First Time” students of the Ailey Camp perform at 7 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Free tickets available from 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Dgin, Mad Maggies at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $8. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Tangria Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $9. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Iwori, Raya Nova, Sugar Shack at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082 . 

Vortex Tribe at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Pete Escovedo at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $18-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

“I know thousands of songs,” says singer Cynthia Davis, who will perform a special matinee of jazz standards and negro spirituals this Sunday at Anna’s Jazz Island. “But I seldom sat down and learned one. I learned them from the old movies; we used to go twice a week in the old days. When I sing a song, I go back to the scene in the movie. Songs in musicals were written to tell stories. 

“And now that I’m trying to write my life as a theater performance, I’ll have to allude to those movie scenes.” 

Davis, a former longtime Berkeley resident, who taught at the New School in San Francisco and sang at “different clubs around the Santa Fe Bar and Grill,” besides doing an outdoor concert at UC in the ’80s set up by her dancer niece Maya, now lives and sings in Cancun, Mexico. 

“In 1996, I had a sabbatical from the New School, and visited Spain and London,” Davis recalled. “A friend suggested I speak at the school in Cancun; I was invited to teach for three months. That was 11 years ago!” 

She’s sung at the Ritz-Carleton and Maroma Hotels, at the Cancun Jazz Festival (on bills with such acts as Sister Sledge and Diana Krall) and at a club, Roots, “where every night I was introduced as ‘Cynthia Davis, the Golden Voice of Jazz!’” 

Her audiences in Cancun are a mix of local Mexicans and tourists. “People tell people they meet at Immigration to come see me. When I visited Cuba and went to an expensive tourist jazz club, just to take a look, a man said, ‘Hey, I know you!’ I thought it was a pick-up line. But he had a video of me advertising the jazz festival! He invited me and my friends in.” 

She works with a Mexican pianist and a Cuban guitarist. “I don’t scat very much; my guitarist does the scatting,” she said. 

“If I leave Cancun,” Davis said, “people email me and get me back. But I miss Berkeley so much. It’s the only place I could live in the U.S. If I could spend six months in each place, it would be perfect. But the rents here are so high.” 

She moved to Berkeley decades ago, after graduating from Antioch College. “All my Antioch friends had moved to Berkeley. It was a perfect transition.”  

She was reunited with one of them when Loni Hancock knocked on her door, canvassing the neighborhood while running for mayor. Hancock requested that Davis sing at her wedding to Tom Bates. And Davis found herself repeating the same set of songs—twice—at their classmate Karen Jacobs’ house for a party to which Hancock and Bates came late. “I sang it again for them as they held hands and listened.” 

Born in Newport News, Vir., Davis is African American but also Cherokee and Blackfoot, French, Irish, Jewish and Portuguese. Her grandmother was a singer at churches and weddings, appearing once on the Ed Sullivan Show before moving from New York to Newport News to care for her aunt. 

Davis began singing at 6 in a school choir, and at 12 became featured soloist at her high school. Her choir director featured her in a Friday night talent show, rehearsing her in the empty auditorium. “I came out to sing ‘Ebb tide’ and almost fell down. That empty auditorium had 5,000 people in it! So I leaned on the piano for support—and people said, ‘Ooo, she’s got an act!’” 

Later, smaller audiences would make her nervous: “I could see everybody’s face! I was so used to singing in front of large groups, I didn’t think I’d make it through the concert.” 

She was featured every Friday night for five years. Later, Davis was chosen to sing negro spirituals “at everybody’s funeral. I sing them Marian Anderson style. And a capella when I can. I didn’t come from a gospel church.” After moving to Berkeley, Terence Kelly asked her to join the Oakland Gospel Choir. 

Davis has taught “since I was 12. Later, I joined the Future Teachers of America.” At one point, she improvised what would later be termed conflict resolution for 4- and 5-year-olds. Now she is a storyteller two hours a week at a Cancun private school. 

Reflecting on growing up in Virginia during segregation, Davis said, “It was a very polite segregation in Newport News. But our 250 voice choir, with a brilliant director who should’ve been at Juilliard, never won an award. I feel I had an advantage, though, because my mother was a teacher and my father directed a black bank. I seldom rode the bus, but when I did, I sat in front! They weren’t going to stop the bus for that. But my mother would say, ‘I’m going to have to bail you out of jail!’—and I’d say, ‘Yes, you will!’ All my life I bucked the system.” 

Both her parents had gone to college at Hampton Institute, “but that was too close, which is why I went to Antioch”—which finally brought her to Berkeley. 

Davis stopped singing once, but found “I have to sing. Not just to entertain, but because it has something I need. I love sad songs; they get the sadness out. It’s good they’re bringing sad stories back. Otherwise, people put the sadness into anger.” 

“I didn’t really learn how to sing,” Davis concluded, “just placement and how to breathe. I’ve sung all my life. If you ask me how, I’ll tell you to pick a song you love, learn it backwards and forwards, and sing it with all your heart—then get it out there! Then come to me, and I’ll help you.”

In 1969, Ralph Arlyck made a student film called Sean about his 4-year-old neighbor in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. Sean was the son of hippie parents and in an interview with Arlyck he claimed to smoke and eat marijuana, earning the film a great deal of notoriety, including praise and damnation from politicians and dire predictions of Sean’s fate as an adult.  

Thirty years later, Arlyck returned to San Francisco to see what became of Sean and his family. However, the resulting feature, Following Sean, is much more than an update. The project ended up taking nearly a decade to complete, and the final product is something much more profound, Arlyck having transformed the experience into a stirring meditation on time and aging, on youth and dreams and ideals, on middle-age, old age, companionship and family.  

Despite the predictions, Sean is in fact a grounded, articulate and well-adjusted young man. And Arlyck has gone on to a successful career in film. But what makes Following Sean engaging is not so much the factual details of lives lived, but the context in which they’ve been lived, and the ways in which paths cross, diverge, reconnect and diverge again.  

The decision to draw parallels between Sean’s story and his own might at first seem self-indulgent, but Arlyck finds just the right tone, examining the social context in which their lives—and the lives of three generations of each man’s family—have unfolded. Sean’s grandparents were active Communists during the McCarthy era; his father was a hippie refugee from an upper-middle-class upbringing; and Arlyck’s East Coast Jewish background frequently clashes with attitudes and ideals he derived from his West Coast experience. Each man has both embraced and rebelled against his roots, and each has gained his share of wisdom, pride and regret from the experience. It’s a thoughtful film, a sort of cinematic poem, with images from the past juxtaposed with the present, revealing three decades worth of sadness and joy and love and pain. 

Following Sean airs at 10 p.m. Tuesday, July 31 on KQED.

Out of the hundred or so operas that are produced in major houses annually, Giuseppe Verdi’s Aïda ranks among the top 20 and has done so for decades. This brings up a pressing question for opera companies: Is it possible to show the same opera over and over with little change in the production, or are companies obliged to rework expensive operas so that they seem continually new? Last Saturday, the Berkeley Opera opened its own version of Aïda, one that strove to be unconventional—fresher and more relevant. 

Smaller companies seldom stage Verdi’s Egyptian opera because of the financial demands of the opera’s conventions—notably a cast of supernumeraries formed into a victory procession that traditionally includes elephants, horses or some other fauna, as well as a last act that necessitates a double stage, with temple above and tomb below.  

One of Berkeley Opera’s solutions to the burden of the production was to limit casting, costuming and rehearsal time to the opera’s few soloists, and to place the chorus off stage. The ingenious transformation of the Egyptian victory processional into a television broadcast allowed not only for video projections of crowd scenes but also created an ironic portrayal of the opera’s royal family as a kind of media event.  

Which leads us to a more crucial decision by Berkeley Opera’s creative team: the updating of Aïda’s setting to a contemporary milieu. It’s to the company’s credit that it continually tries to address current issues. For the other pressing question in opera today is about social significance: Are traditional operas that showcase long abandoned mores and values meaningful to the culture at large?  

Since the 1980s Peter Sellars has been a force in the direction of opera. His work with composer John Adams has pushed the themes and ideas of opera well into the present century. But his interpretations of Mozart have had even greater effect. For what Sellars brought to opera is directorial license to modernize conventional opera in edgy productions pertinent to today’s politics and sexuality. This is what director Yuval Sharon attempts with Berkeley Opera’s Aïda.  

Sharon’s production opens with a line of uniformed maids cleaning the floor of a white-walled office reminiscent of a room in the White House. The upstage hallway is painted red, the stage-left hallway, ultramarine blue. Men in suits pass through. Above the set is a second stage: a dark attic like room into which a man is thrown on a bed and beaten. During the opera’s course this room serves as torture chamber, killing room and finally the tomb in which Radamés and Aïda die.  

Even though the supertitles don’t refer to any country by name, the parallels with contemporary American political power are obvious. And they can be chilling: for example, when the priest Ramfis sings about “the Deity.” 

Overall, however, the production falls prey to the logical inconsistencies that occur when 130-year-old operas are squeezed into a modern concept; it’s further beset by difficult directorial choices badly made. 

Enacting torture is always questionable. It’s one of those extremes of reality that when set in an essentially imaginary or fantastic medium like theater takes on an artificial and self-conscious quality. It becomes a parody of itself, thereby losing its power and diverting the intent behind portraying it. It seems gratuitous. 

Other attempts to show the horrors and corruption of power—the high priest’s sexual mauling of the Patriotic Girl, the beating of the messenger, the ending throat-slitting by the opposing guerrilla forces—also seemed gratuitous. Set in contrast to the opera’s splendid choruses, which were ably sung by the UC Alumni Chorus, these scenes were awkward at best.  

Aïda is one of Verdi’s more psychologically complex operas: built around the triangle of Aïda, Radamés and Amneris, it brings up questions of personal versus social loyalty and the force of passions to betray. Its ethics of emotions have political implications in and of themselves that are accessible to the audience even in the most conservative productions. Berkeley Opera’s violence-laced interpretation flattened out the characters’ complexity so that they, and consequently the entire production, seemed cartoonish. Which was an injustice to the singers and musicians. 

Juyeon Song sang the role of Aïda in a slightly dark and appropriately weighted soprano. Tenor Kevin Courtemanche sang the role of Radamés vibrantly and energetically. Jennifer Roderer sang the wonderfully dramatic mezzo role of Amneris. The priest Ramfis was sung by bass William Pickersgill, Soprano Margaret Valeriano delivered a sweet and pure toned version of the priestess. The orchestra was kept in fine order by Maestro Jonathan Khuner. 

AIDA 

Presented by Berkeley Opera at 8 p.m. Friday and at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. For tickets and information, call (925) 798-1300, 

or visit www.berkeleyopera.org.

The north fork of Strawberry Creek, which runs in its natural open channel along a block and a half of Le Conte Avenue west of La Loma Ave., is home to a number of distinctive historic structures, including the landmarks Weltevreden (1896), Allenoke Manor (1903), and Theta Xi Chapter House (1914). Among these remarkable buildings, one of the most distinctive is the smallish Oscar Maurer photography studio, whose north elevation descends steeply to the creek bank. 

On July 24, 1907, the Oakland Tribune announced, “Oscar Maurer, the local artist […] is having a studio built on Le Roy Avenue opposite his home and next to the studio of his brother, Fred Maurer, the musician. The structure is unique in design, with cement exterior and tiled roof.” 

Five weeks later, on September 1, the Tribune reported that Maurer “has recently taken possession of his new studio which has just been completed. It is one of the finest hereabouts, being built and furnished in the Spanish style of architecture.” 

Designed by Bernard Maybeck, the studio foreshadows the architect’s eclectic design for the First Church of Christ, Scientist (1910). The elements assembled here include Mediterranean, Mission Revival, Neoclassical, and Modern. 

At the entrance, a delicate Corinthian column embedded in a large plate-glass display window contrasts with the unpainted walls and a beamed ceiling stained in Maybeck’s signature red and blue. The creekside elevation is broken up to resemble a cliffside village with multiple cascading gable roofs. Toward the rear, a tall leaded-glass window displays a double fleur-de-lys motif under a “broken pediment” executed in Spanish roof tiles. 

Unlike the wood-shingle houses Maybeck was designing in the 1890s and the early 1900s, the Maurer studio was built in concrete. As in the Lawson house at 1515 La Loma Ave., the choice of material reflects the impact of the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, in which Maurer lost his previous studio. 

Oscar Maurer (1870 –1965) was born in New York City. His father, Frederick C. Maurer, a manufacturing chemist, immigrated from Germany as a child. Frederick’s eldest brother was the famed lithographer Louis Maurer. It was Louis who advised Oscar to take up photography, the coming great medium with artistic possibilities. 

In 1886, the Maurers moved to San Francisco, where Oscar’s father became associated with the Bass-Hueter Paint Co. and San Francisco Pioneer Varnish and Glycerine Works, eventually rising to corporate secretary. The family resided on Potrero Hill. 

The teenaged Oscar got hold of a box camera, set up a darkroom in the basement, and was soon selling a line of San Francisco scenes to local art stores (framed prints were popular as home decoration at that time). He studied chemistry and physics at the University of California but didn’t pursue a scientific career. Between 1891 and 1898, he worked as a salesman for Bass-Hueter. By 1897 he had become a member of the California Camera Club, to whose board of directors he would be elected in 1900. In 1898 Maurer traveled to Mexico, where he made his photograph “The Storm,” exhibited at the Chicago Salon of 1900. Alfred Stieglitz, one of the exhibition’s three jurors, commented on this print: 

While the Chicago Salon is honored by the presence of much of the best work by the acknowledged leaders, it is also distinguished by the exceptionally fine work bearing names that we will certainly hear more of in the future. One of these names is Oscar Maurer of San Francisco. He sends “The Storm,” and it is one of the big things of the exhibition. The picture possesses rare feeling, exquisite tones, and the best of composition. All visitors seem to notice it. 

The critical success may have given Maurer the courage to become a full-time professional photographer. In 1899, he was listed in the San Francisco directory as a photographer at 220 Sutter Street, which was the address of the Wetherbee Photo Company. In late 1900, Maurer and William E. Dassonville opened a portrait studio on a second-floor balcony in the rear of Lassen & Bien’s photographic supply house on Stockton Street. 

Working in the Pictorialist tradition, Maurer shot primarily landscapes and seascapes. In early 1901 he entered ten prints in the First San Francisco Photographic Salon, then left for Europe with Dassonville. His travels in France and Holland resulted in a portfolio titled Life Under Foreign Skies, which was published in Camera Craft. 

Having returned from Europe in time for the Second Photographic Salon, Maurer entered “about twenty studies,” reported the San Francisco Call on January 10, 1902, “one especially standing out prominently—‘On the Maas’—a Dutch scene.” Reviewing the same exhibition a week later, the Call opined that “the best individual collection of photographs is shown by Maurer.” Also in 1902, Maurer’s work was presented in Charles H. Caffin’s article “The New Photography” in Munsey’s Magazine. The following year, it was on display in Vol. VII of the journal The Camera. In an article for Camera Craft, Maurer wrote, ”Not until the present day has the camera been recognized as a legitimate means for the production of pictures that may be termed works of art.” 

Maurer did not confine himself to nature subjects but pursued documentary urban photography as well. His pre-1906 work perished in the San Francisco post-earthquake fire, but a few published examples remain. Volume 22 (1900) of the San Francisco periodical The Wave included his Chinatown camera study “For Ways That Are Dark.” The July 1903 issue of Everybody’s Magazine carried the article “The Kindergarten of the Streets” by Edith Davids. Documenting the activities of children in New York’s Lower East Side, the article was illustrated with fifteen photographs by Maurer. It was republished in the book Tales of Gaslight New York. 

In 1903, Oscar Maurer married Margaret (Madge) Robinson, an elegant, cultivated, and socially prominent woman who co-founded the Hillside Club. Two years later, the couple traveled to Europe, where Oscar shot the photographs that illustrated Madge’s article “Old World Friendliness Between Man and Nature” (The Craftsman Vol. 8, 1905). Also in 1905, the Maurers moved into Weltevreden, the showcase Berkeley home of Madge’s mother, Mary Moody, at 1725 (now 1755) Le Roy Ave. 

Oscar’s parents moved to Berkeley the following year, in the wake of the San Francisco earthquake, settling into a new Mission Revival house at 1726 (now 1776) Le Roy Ave., across the street from Weltevreden. The house was built in 1905, apparently by F.E. Armstrong, for Margaret Marx, who continued to own it for a number of years but never lived in it. Oscar’s brother, Frederick Jr., a respected pianist and music teacher, lived in this house until his death in 1947. The house remains largely unaltered to this day. Oscar photographed it for a Sunset magazine article titled “Berkeley, the Beautiful,” which featured several Northside landmarks, including Weltevreden, Allenoke Manor, the Beta Theta Pi chapter house, and Charles Keeler’s house. 

Oscar continued to work in San Francisco. He and Arnold Genthe are said to have used a studio space at the George H. Knight gallery on Sutter Street in rotation. It is not clear whether this is the location mentioned in an Oakland Tribune society column dated August 12, 1905, which announced “a studio tea to be given by Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Maurer at their studio on Sutter Street.” The column described the studio as “delightfully artistic” and furnished with “rare and wonderful old things” the couple had brought back from Europe. 

As his workload increased, Maurer took a studio of his own in the California Academy of Sciences building at 819 Market Street, where he remained until the building (containing his entire body of work) was destroyed in the 1906 fire. Remaining from that period are his post-earthquake images of the devastation, taken with a No. 1 Folding Kodak camera. 

After 1906, Maurer continued to exhibit his photographs in prestigious venues such as the Photo-Secession Gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue, New York. Many of his images were published in the American Journal of Photography over the next two decades. He also wrote technical articles and essays on his photographic excursions, sometimes publishing in Sunset magazine. 

In 1911, several of Maurer’s photographs were included in California—The Beautiful, a portfolio of camera studies and poetry published by Paul Elder. Two years later, he showed a collection of photographs taken in Mexico and Southern California at a group exhibition mounted in the California School of Arts and Crafts, 2119 Allston Way, Berkeley. “These are done on fine Japanese tissue paper, entirely a new medium used in photography,” reported the Oakland Tribune on April 6, 1913. 

While his exhibition and published photographs often depicted nature and street scenes, Maurer derived his income mostly from portrait photography. 

Following the destruction of his San Francisco studio, Maurer bought a new Aristo arc light and set up shop in Berkeley—first at Weltevreden, then in his new studio across the street. 

During the first decade of their married life, Oscar and Madge Maurer were luminaries of the Berkeley artistic social scene, which was closely tied to the Hillside Club. Around 1914, they left Berkeley for Del Mar, and the studio was occupied by portrait photographer Maude Stinson, who worked there until 1949. 

Already in the 1930s and possibly for a considerable time before, the studio was no longer the property of any Maurer. In 1941 it was purchased as an investment by Lorena Sauer, wife of the geographer Carl Ortwin Sauer. Used as a voice studio for a while, in the 1950s it was rented by the interior design firm of Ruth Dibble and Elsie Semrau, who had a hand in decorating the Sauers’ home at 1340 Arch Street and who purchased the studio toward the end of the decade. They remained there until the early 1980s. 

Oscar and Madge, who almost drowned in the great San Diego flood of 1916, moved from Del Mar to Los Angeles. They divorced in the early ‘20s, and both soon remarried. Oscar’s second wife was Elizabeth Baker Robinson, a performance artist. They eventually moved to Berkeley, and from the late 1920s until the early ‘40s lived with Fred at 1776 Le Roy Avenue. Oscar then established a studio in Santa Monica but returned to Berkeley by 1950, now living at 2418 Ashby Avenue. 

With the illness of his wife (she died in 1957), Maurer withdrew little by little from the grind of portraiture work. As a widower, he lived alone at 2646 Telegraph Avenue. In 1965, the Oakland Museum exhibited his 1906 earthquake photographs. He died the same year, aged 94. 

Daniella Thompson publishes berkeleyheritage.com for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA). 

Photograph: The Oscar Maurer studio, 1772 Le Roy Avenue (Daniella Thompson) 

In both print and web issues: 

• Recent Home Sales -- includes not only the recent sale prices of the listed addresses but also the previous sale price and date. Readers can see how prices are rising or falling in the neighborhood they live in or where they hope to move. Partial listings will be in weekend print issues, with full data plus an interactive map on the web. 

• Open Homes -- a complete list of all the homes open for view each weekend. Basic listings are always free to sellers, who should ask their listing agent to make sure their home is included. Even more information can be found on the web, including an interactive map.  

On the Web: 

• Zoning application listings with interactive map -- the interactive map shows all zoning permit applications for Berkeley and provides a graphical look at development hot spots.  

• Recent Home Sales -- The only easily accessed data on recent East Bay home sales on the web; the only such listing that includes the previous sale price and date of sale. Includes data on sales for the previous month, not just the previous week; the only web site that presents this information on an interactive map. 

• Open Homes --- the most easily accessed data on weekend open homes in the East Bay. The only site organized so that it can easily be printed at home. The most complete and accurate map of East Bay open homes available on the web.

Sebastopol is not exactly next door, but the Apple Capital of Sonoma County is a great excuse for a day trip. The Gravenstein Highway (Route 116) between US101 and the town is lined with roadside attractions, botanical and otherwise, although there seems to have been a sudden wave of mortality among the local antique stores. 

Peacock Horticultural Nursery is the new kid on the block. Robert Peacock and Marty Waldron opened it two years ago, after moving up from San Leandro three years before that. Peacock, a landscape designer, also did plant merchandising for the flagship Smith & Hawken in Mill Valley, until the company decided it had grown beyond mere plants.  

The place they found in Sonoma, just down the road a piece from California Carnivores, had a history as a nursery: the previous owner grew violets for sale at a roadside stand. “There’s a fantastic legacy of camellias, old roses, old landscape,” Waldron said. It’s bracketed by huge old oaks where red-shouldered hawks yodel and acorn woodpeckers yammer. 

Peacock’s (“PeaHort” to its friends) may be small, but it’s densely packed with plants. There’s a bit of everything: succulents, cycads, aroids, bonsai, grasslike things. “We love the restios,” admits Waldron. The owners describe the place as “dedicated to providing unusual, obscure and hard to find plant choices for the collector as well as the home gardener,” and it shows. 

“Robert is always looking for unusual stuff,” Waldron continues. “We’re trying to find a niche, something little and unusual. And no tchotchkes.” They’ll try to propagate anything, like the mystery Miscanthus, maybe South African in origin, they picked up at a UC Botanical Garden sale a while back.  

With all that variety, Peacock’s twin (and overlapping) strengths would be shade plants and variegated-foliage specimens. Waldron touts an Acer ‘Eskimo Sunset’ as “plant of the month,” and it really is a stunner: cream and green patterned leaves with a strong blush of burgundy on their undersides. Other things you wouldn’t think came in variegated varieties pop up: violets, ceanothus, hydrangea, a little cactus, elderberry. 

The pride of resident cats—one of whom, a gray tabby, rejoices in the name Hortus Third—adds to the nursery’s atmosphere. Waldron calls them “our marketing directors,” all domesticated from feral families. 

We stopped at Peacock’s mainly to pick up a Sonoma Farm Trails map, since our road atlas didn’t do justice to the county’s back roads, and left with a whole flat of stuff for our shady spots. Peacock and Waldron are finding more than one niche to fill, and their establishment deserves more than a casual look. 

In fact, it requires more than a casual look. The sign pops up suddenly on the busy road, and like all those nurseries on the road to Half Moon Bay it’s an invitation to a rear-end collision. Take it slow and resist the road’s importunate tailgaters. Peacock Nursery is too good to miss. 

Sebastopol field trip: a new nursery among the antiques and apple orchards 

Sebastopol is not exactly next door, but the Apple Capital of Sonoma County is a great excuse for a day trip. The Gravenstein Highway (Route 116) between US101 and the town is lined with roadside attractions, botanical and otherwise, although there seems to have been a sudden wave of mortality among the local antique stores. 

Peacock Horticultural Nursery is the new kid on the block. Robert Peacock and Marty Waldron opened it two years ago, after moving up from San Leandro three years before that. Peacock, a landscape designer, also did plant merchandising for the flagship Smith & Hawken in Mill Valley, until the company decided it had grown beyond mere plants.  

The place they found in Sonoma, just down the road a piece from California Carnivores, had a history as a nursery: the previous owner grew violets for sale at a roadside stand. “There’s a fantastic legacy of camellias, old roses, old landscape,” Waldron said. It’s bracketed by huge old oaks where red-shouldered hawks yodel and acorn woodpeckers yammer. 

Peacock’s (“PeaHort” to its friends) may be small, but it’s densely packed with plants. There’s a bit of everything: succulents, cycads, aroids, bonsai, grasslike things. “We love the restios,” admits Waldron. The owners describe the place as “dedicated to providing unusual, obscure and hard to find plant choices for the collector as well as the home gardener,” and it shows. 

“Robert is always looking for unusual stuff,” Waldron continues. “We’re trying to find a niche, something little and unusual. And no tchotchkes.” They’ll try to propagate anything, like the mystery Miscanthus, maybe South African in origin, they picked up at a UC Botanical Garden sale a while back.  

With all that variety, Peacock’s twin (and overlapping) strengths would be shade plants and variegated-foliage specimens. Waldron touts an Acer ‘Eskimo Sunset’ as “plant of the month,” and it really is a stunner: cream and green patterned leaves with a strong blush of burgundy on their undersides. Other things you wouldn’t think came in variegated varieties pop up: violets, ceanothus, hydrangea, a little cactus, elderberry. 

The pride of resident cats—one of whom, a gray tabby, rejoices in the name Hortus Third—adds to the nursery’s atmosphere. Waldron calls them “our marketing directors,” all domesticated from feral families. 

We stopped at Peacock’s mainly to pick up a Sonoma Farm Trails map, since our road atlas didn’t do justice to the county’s back roads, and left with a whole flat of stuff for our shady spots. Peacock and Waldron are finding more than one niche to fill, and their establishment deserves more than a casual look. 

In fact, it requires more than a casual look. The sign pops up suddenly on the busy road, and like all those nurseries on the road to Half Moon Bay it’s an invitation to a rear-end collision. Take it slow and resist the road’s importunate tailgaters. Peacock Nursery is too good to miss. 

Peacock Horticultural Nursery 

4296 Gravenstein Highway South 

(Highway 116), Sebastopol 

(707) 291-0547 

9 a.m.–5 p.m. Wed.–Sun. or by appointment 

www.peacockhorticulturalnursery.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.

Before I proceed to plagiarize, I like to, at least, pay homage to the memory and, in this case, their extraordinary creativity and insight of the oracle. 

In 1975, the musician Brian Eno (and the painter Peter Schmidt) published a set of flash-cards called Oblique Strategies. They still sell through a British supply house for £30.00 and are designed to help musicians (and other artists) break through blocks and expand their creativity. 

An example of one card (there are roughly 100 in the set) is “You can only make one dot at a time.” 

Now, on the face if it, this seems like a silly statement. What dots? Are they musical notes? Paint dots? Pixels in a digital art work? 

The point is for you to see how you might apply these cryptograms to your situation. They are often broad and intentionally incongruous. They are designed to throw you off balance and knock you out of the box you’ve been stuck in. 

Here’s another one that I just love: “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.” 

This is a little easier to wrap once mind around. Basically, it says, don’t jump to fixing your mistake. Take a good healthy look at it. Was there something in it that you can learn from or use? Sometimes our mistakes are actually just the right action but so out of step with our current image that they just look wrong at first glance. Take a minute to look carefully at them and you may decide that this is exactly where you should be heading. Isn’t this fun? 

Years ago, my wife and I used to throw the I Ching when we felt stuck or on the horns of something (dilemma or opportunity). The OS cards are similar but they’re also designed specifically to get you to try something new in the interest of the creative process. 

I’ve thought for some time that remodeling or architectural design could make good use of these cards (which are really designed for artists and most specifically for musicians) but I’d like to do one better by suggesting a set just for the housing design professional (or the amateur equivalent). 

So here are a few possible cards one might find in a deck of Oblique Space-Design Strategies: 

“Put inside things outside. Put outside things inside.” 

This one could be interpreted as putting the NFL in your living room on a giant flat screen TV and taking a nap in the back yard, but we can do a little better than that. If one meditates on this mantra, one might put a creek through the hallway and a clawfoot tub on the back porch. 

The first go around with one of these things might be all wrong but once you’re out of the box, you can play with the things you find and put them together in a way that you can live with. The real trick is getting out of the damned box. 

Here are some more suggested cards: 

• Use something wobbly that is safe and fun. 

• Install it upside down. Does it work? 

• Consider the sound the room (floor, ceiling, etc.) will make. Give it a song. Make it very quiet. Make it scream. 

• Use color to help people doing something in the room. What are they doing? Is it a plum activity or a vermillion ones. 

• What happens if it’s very wide? Short? Long? Round? 

• Make it taller than any you’ve seen. 

• What animal is the space (Furry? Fast? Hibernating?) 

• If the house is a cell? Where are the vacuoles? Mitochondria? Nucleus? 

• Devote the design of a room/house/lamp/lawn to a person you love deeply. Let things you love about them manifest in your choices. 

• Make one space that you can feel completely safe in. One you can sleep in for 10 hours. One that feels like a cup of coffee. 

• Have the electrician design the plumbing. Have the gardener design the electrical system. Now compare to the drawings. What did you learn? 

• Try making the square thing round and the round thing square. 

• Take a poem you like and use each of the first 10 words as your overriding design constraints for 10 systems or 10 rooms. 

• Make something really dangerous but exciting. Now work backward to where it’s safe but still feels exciting. 

• Make some portion of the built environment suited to hosting a wild animal (mouse, moose, elephant). 

Try making up a set for yourself. You can make cards based on throwing the I Ching and interpret them for yourself. In fact you can base cards on a randomly selected page from a psychology text, a romance novel, a book on Feng Shui or a guide on resoling shoes. Our brains have an extraordinary ability to pick patterns out of one set of activities or studies and apply them to grossly dissimilar circumstances. Employing this deep skill (or oblique strategy) is one of the great secrets of creative individuals. 

A great resource that has some less wild-haired directives is the not-sufficiently-famous A Pattern Language by the Christopher Alexander and members of the Center for Environmental Structure here at Berkeley. 

A pattern language is similar in that each mantra/fortune/edict can be expressed initially as a single line of text, a single phrase, such as “Thick Walls” (pattern # 197. They all have numbers). Each pattern speaks about the way things in buildings feel or work when various features ( or patterns) are manifested and also presents alternatives that change the feeling or function. These patterns far exceed building design and range beyond to design an entire globe. It’s a fun idea, designing a world based on a set of principles culled from previous successes (most patterns are simple observations about what worked well in the past … often the distant past). 

If these various methodologies don’t work for you, try anything. That’s the real message here. Don’t do what everyone else is doing. The architectural world and particularly the remodeling world seen locally is doing just what William Morris observed it to be doing in the 1870s when he was developing the Arts and Crafts movement as a rebellion against industrialization. We’re all being sold our pre-designed dream homes (do we all dream alike?) either whole or in one slab of granite after another. 

A common fear that I hear or see in the nascent remodeler is that what they do will be too different from what everyone else is doing. Professional and homeowners alike seem to lack the bravery to do something even a little different than their neighbors. I guess the advertisements are working. We’re all so afraid of not fitting in. Now, here’s the funny part about this dilemma and it’s not a warm fuzzy lifestyle piece: 

Years ago, I remember inspecting a house that someone brave had rehabbed. Each room had different colors and they were terrific, vibrant, strong and emotional. The rooms were rich and had character and voice. The lighting was good (not fancy, just good) and the furnishings were fun and often loud. It was hard not to smile walking through the place. When this place hit the market it went WAY over the typical asking price for a house of this size and location.  

It is clear that it turned people on. Not just one or two odd folks but everyone. The lesson is that individual expression is more widely understood than a dull mass message and that this will be more welcome than most of us fear it will. 

Goethe said “Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.” Goethe was speaking to the designer or poet just as much as he was to the conqueror. Go boldly. 

Got a question about home repairs and inspections? Send them to Matt Cantor, in care of East Bay Real Estate, at mgcantor@pacbell.net.

A Quakelet With a Vertical Twist 

The 4.2 quake early Friday, July 20, which originated near Butters Drive in the Oakland hills, gave Berkeley some serious shaking. The energy moved northwest along the Hayward fault and, by the time it rose to the ground in Berkeley, it was vertical, so Berkeley felt it more than other places. Shaking was felt near Point Reyes, and as far as Napa. 

The entire Hayward Fault is due for a large quake. The last major quake on that fault was 139 years ago. Did the July 20 quake release some of that strain that’s been building up over the years? Unfortunately no, says Steve Walter, USGS seismologist. What does he suggest? “Be prepared.” Get your emergency kit up to snuff, secure that furniture, get an automatic gas shut-off valve installed, and have your retrofit checked. 

Here’s to making your home secure and your family safe. 

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

FRIDAY, JULY 27 

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 

The Sydney B. Mitchell Iris Society will hold its annual Bearded Iris Rhizome Auction from 7:30 to 10 p.m. at the Lakeside Park Garden Center, 666 Bellevue Ave, Oakland. Growing advice from experts is available. 277-4200. 

International Working Class Film Festival with “Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America” and others at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Suggested donation $5. www.HumanistHall.net 

Free Compost for Berkeley Residents from 11:45 a.m. to 2:45 p.m. at the Berkeley Marina Maintenance Yard, 201 University Ave, next to Adventure PlaygroundSelf-serve. Please complete sign-in log before loading compost. 644-6566. 

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310. 

Circle Dancing, simple folk dancing with instruction at 8 p.m. at Hillside Community Church, 1422 Navellier St. Pot luck at 7 p.m. 528-4253. www.circledancing.com 

SATURDAY, JULY 28 

Berkeley Kite Festival on Sat. and Sun. from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Cesar Chavez Park, Berkeley Marina. www.highlinekites.com 

Mini-Farmers in Tilden A farm exploration program, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. for ages 4-6 years, accompanied by an adult. We will explore the Little Farm, care for animals, do crafts and farm chores. Wear boots and dress to get dirty! Fee is $6-$8. Registration required. 1-888-EBPARKS. 

Brooks Island Voyage Paddle the rising tide across the Richmond Harbor Channel to Brooks Island from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. For experienced boaters who can provide their own canoe or kayak and safety gear. For ages 14 and up with parent participation. Cost is $20-$22. Registration required. 1-888-EBPARKS. 

Kid’s Garden Club for ages 6-9 to explore the world of gardening, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 1-888-EBPARKS. 

Cece Weeks Commemoration Day Potluck and Tree Planting, in honor of the disability and Indian rights activist at noon at Ohlone Park, McGee St. entrance. 332-6654. 

Electronics Recycling for televisions, computers, monitors, and home electronics, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Elephant Pharmacy, 1607 Shattuck Ave. 868-3034. 

E-Waste Recycling from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at IKEA Emeryville, 440 Shellmound St. For a list of what can be recycled see www.unwaste.com 

Oakland 1946 General Strike Walk to revist the sites of Oakland’s “Work Holiday.” Meet at 10:30 a.m. at the fountain at Latham Square, Telegraph and Broadway. For information call 464-3210. 

Oakland Heritage Alliance Walking Tour of the Estuary to learn about Oakland’s founding on the waterfront. Meet by 10 a.m. at the C.L. Dellums statue in from of the Amtrack station, Second and Alice Sts. Cost is $10-$15. 763-9218. www.oaklandheritage.org 

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 Sydney B. Mitchell Iris Society will hold its annual Bearded Iris Rhizome Sidewalk Sale from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. in front of the Downtown Oakland YMCA, 2350 Broadway. Growing advice from expertsis available. 277-4200. 

Explore the Ohlone Greenway in El Cerrito from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on a six-mile hike to visit a restored creek, view public art, and hike the Hillside Nature Area. Return by BART. Reservations required. 415-255-3233. www.greenbelt.org 

Summer Garden Party with musical entertainment featuring a Barbershop Quartet & old-fashioned brass ensemble and Ice Cream Bar, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Salem Lutheran Home, 2361 East 29th St., Oakland. Free. 534-3637. 

Cherokee Society for the Greater Bay Area General Meeting with a focus on Cherokee visual art. Potluck lunch and program, including Cherokee language practice and children’s activities from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Community Meeting Room, 3rd flr., Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 464-4649. www.bayareacherokee.org 

“Rosie Goes Green” Presentations on green technology in Richmond’s historic Atchison Village, from 9:30 to 2:30 p.m. at the AV auditorium, by the flagpole, Curry St. and Collins, at west end of McDonald Ave., Richmond. Food, music and other entertainment. 215 5530. 

“The U.S. vs John Lennon” Screening at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists Hall, 1924 Cedar at Bonita. Donations accepted. 528-5403. 

Family Sundown Safari at 5 p.m. at the Oakland Zoo. A hands-on program for children 3 and up to explore the Valley Children’s Zoo. 632-9525. www.oaklandzoo.org 

Your Library, Your Way - Have Your Say! An Albany Library Community Forum from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 526-3720 ext 16. 

Fast Pitch Softball for Adults at noon on Saturdays in Oakland. For information call 204-9500. 

Guinea Pig Adoption Fair from 1 to 4 p.m. at RabbitEars, 303 Arlington Ave., Kensington. 525-6155. 

Preschool Storytime for 3 to 5-year-olds at 11 a.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720 ext. 17. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732.  

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755.  

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174. . 

SUNDAY, JULY 29 

“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. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

Oakland Heritage Alliance Walking Tour of the Eichers of Oakland to learn about Oakland’s residential district of houses by Joseph Eichler, from 1:30 to 4 p.m. Cost is $10-$15. Reservations required. 763-9218. www.oaklandheritage.org 

Toddlers in the Meadow Little ones and their grown-up friends exlore the meadow and look for butterflies, at 10:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Beautiful Butterflies Learn what kinds visit our meadows, at 2 p.m. at the Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

“Rewriting Copyright with the Swedish Pirate Party” A panel discussion on how both creativity and civil liberties are often stymied by today’s copyright laws at 5 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Cost is $10. www.hillsideclub.org 

Kids’ Day, with children selling their artwork and homegrown produce from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Kensington Farmers’ Market, 303 Arlington, behind ACE Hardware, Kensington.  

Social Action Forum with Stephen Zunes on terrorism and the Middle East at 9:30 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, One Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302. 

CoHousing Slide Show and information on a new co-housing project in Grass Valley at 2 p.m. at 1250 Addison St, Suite 113. 849-2063. 

Bicycle Trails Council of the East Bay presents The DirtLaw Festival with music, films and food from 5 to 11 p.m. at Blake’s on Telegraph, 2367 Telegraph Ave. Cost is $10. 848-0886. www.btceb.org  

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. Call to confirm. 841-8732.  

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

MONDAY, JULY 30 

Sing-a-long Circles in the Oak Grove from 4 to 6:30 p.m. at the threatened Oak Grove in front of Memorial Stadium, Piedmont Ave., just north of Bancroft. 658-9178. 

Summer Science Club for children in grades 3-5 for two weeks in the afternoon at Hall of Health, 2230 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $100, financial aid available. 549-1564. 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

Family Sing-a-long at 6:45 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6223. 

Dragonboating Year round classes at the Berkeley Marina, Dock M. Meets Mon, Wed., Thurs. at 6 p.m. Sat. at 10:30 a.m. For details see www.dragonmax.org 

TUESDAY, JULY 31 

Tuesdays for the Birds Tranquil bird walks in local parklands, led by Bethany Facendini, from 7 to 9:30 a.m. Today we will visit Berkeley Meadow in the East Shore State Park. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233. 

“Elevating the Sparks of Peace: Stories of Hope and Reconciliation from the Holy Land” with Eliyahu McLean of Jerusalem Peacemakers at 8:30 p.m. at Chochamat HaLev Maggid Conference, 2215 Prince St. 704-9687. www.chochmat.org 

Tuesday Documentaries at 7 p.m. at the Gaia Arts Center, 2120 Allston Way. Donation of $5 benefits the Berkeley Food and Housing Project. 665-0305. 

Bayswater Book Club meets to discuss “The Secret History of the American Empire” by John Perkins at 6:30 p.m. Call for location 433-2911.  

Community Sing-a-Long every Tues, at 2 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. 524-9122.  

Family Storytime for preschoolers and up at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704.  

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 1 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around Preservation Park to see Victorian architecture. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of Preservation Park at 13th St. and MLK, Jr. Way. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234.  

South Berkeley Library Presentation with Noll & Tam Architects who have been hired to investigate possible spaces for the library at the Ed Roberts Campus, at Board of Library Trustees meeting at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 3rd flr. Community Meeting Room, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6107. 

“Richmond Shoreline and its Resources” A talk by Rich Walkling and a showing of the documentary “Rheem Creek and Breuner Marsh: A Promised Land” at 7 p.m. at 4191 Appian Way, El Sobrante. 665-3538. www.spawners.org 

American Red Cross Blood Services Volunteer Orientation from 10 a.m. to noon at 6230 Claremont Ave., Oakland. To register call 594-5165.  

CSI at Your Library A crime solving presentation by the Berkeley Police for children 10 and up at 2 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6223. 

Family Math and Science Night at 6 p.m. at the West Branch of the Berkeley Public Library. A bilingual program for children ages 7-10 and their families. 981-6270. 

Skin Cancer Screening at the Markstein Cancer Education Center, Summit Campus, Oakland. Appointments reuired. 869-8833, option 2. 

Pax Nomada Bike Ride Meet at 6 p.m. at Nomad Cafe for a 15-25 mile ride up to through the Berkeley hills. All levels of cyclists welcome. 595-5344. 

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. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at 6:30 p.m. at the Berkeley BART Station. www.geocities.com/ 

vigil4peace/vigil 

Stitch ‘n Bitch at 6:30 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

THURSDAY, AUGUST 2 

El Sabor de Fruitvale Farmers market with activities for children, information on community services and music, from 3 to 7 p.m. at Fruitvale Village Plaza, 3411 East 12th St., near the Fruitvale BART. www.unitycouncil.org 

Summer Family FIlm Series at 3 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6223. 

“The White Rose” A film about a group of courageous youth in Nazi Germany at 7 p.m. at Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way. 848-1196. www.revolutionbooks.org 

Cope with Creativity Workshop on “Healing Touch for Self-Care” at 6:30 p.m. at 4401 Howe St., Oakland. To register call 888-755-7855, ext. 4241. 

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Club meets at 6:45 p.m. at Spud’s Pizza, 3290 Adeline. namaste@avatar.freetoasthost.info