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“Heloise Golightly,” five o’clock shadow and all, offered a bit of seriocomic relief during Wednesday night’s environmental comments session devoted to two new buildings at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab—one of which will house the $500 million agrofuel research program funded by BP, the former British Petroleum. Photograph by Richard Brenneman.
“Heloise Golightly,” five o’clock shadow and all, offered a bit of seriocomic relief during Wednesday night’s environmental comments session devoted to two new buildings at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab—one of which will house the $500 million agrofuel research program funded by BP, the former British Petroleum. Photograph by Richard Brenneman.
 

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Few Defend UC Lab in Heated Meeting on EIR

By Richard Brenneman
Friday August 10, 2007

Berkeley residents came to share concerns about the fuel on the hill Wednesday night, and by the time the meeting had ended, only one voice had been raised in its unconditional defense. 

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) officials called the gathering to collect comments to be addressed in the environmental impact reviews of two major projects already greenlighted by the UC Board of Regents. 

The harshest critiques were leveled at the $160 million 160,000-square-foot Helios Energy Research Facility and its primary use as the designated home of the $500 million Energy Biosciences Institute, the alternative fuel research program bankrolled by BP, the rebranded British Petroleum. 

But other speakers, including many long-time Berkeley land use activists, questioned the wisdom of building anything on an environmentally sensitive earthquake-, landslide- and fire-prone hillside still contaminated by past projects conducted under the aegis of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). 

 

Helios, EBI 

Wednesday night’s hearings focused on the Helios building and the Computational Research and Theory (CRT) building, a $90.4 million, 140,000-square-foot, 300-office state-of-the art computing research center. 

Between them, the structures will house facilities for 800 researchers housed at either end of the 203-acre LBNL campus—the Helios building to the east, the CRT facility to the west. 

While Terry Powell—who runs community relations for the lab—said Wednesday night’s meeting would focus on environmental issues, and not the science conducted in the buildings, the lab’s first speaker sailed straight into scientific waters. 

EBI program manager Elaine Chandler is a theoretical physicist who formerly worked in Defense Technologies at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and, before that in Washington as an advisor to the DOE’s assistant secretary of defense programs. 

“Many of our scientists are very concerned about global warming,” she said. “We’re very committed at the lab to getting this problem solved one way or another.” 

“This requires no arable land,” she said, adding, “We have 100 million acres of croplands not being used for food.” 

Chandler said one project under development in the Helios program’s Solar Energy Research Center focuses on using nanotechnology to capture water and carbon dioxide molecules from the air and developing catalysts to split them up into their component atoms for use as fuel. 

“We want to breakdown CO2 and scarf up that carbon to make fuel,” she said. 

Michael Banda led off the discussion of the programs to be housed in the CRT building, starting with the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a major center for non-classified research requiring massive computing power. 

Slated to outgrow its leased quarters in Oakland by 2010, the facility will be housed on the lowest level of a purpose-built structure near the lab’s Blackberry gate. 

CRT project director Les Dutton described more details of the building itself, while Jeff Philliber, the lab’s environmental planner, focused on the mechanics of the process that will produce first a draft environmental impact report by early October, followed by the final EIR in early January 2008, slightly more than a week before final approval by UC Board Regents in mid-January. 

Construction of the Helios building would commence in spring, 2008, with completion expected by autumn, 2010, he said. CRT construction would start in December, 2008, with a February 2011 date set for the facility’s opening. 

 

Public weighs in 

The first speaker, UCB Chemistry professor David Chandler, was the only speaker to offer unalloyed praise for the lab’s agenda. “I’m very grateful that Steve Chu came to Berkeley to run the lab . . . and Helios,” he said. 

Chandler, who said he had “decided to spend my time trying to help the world,” is also the spouse of physicist Elaine Chandler, who had spoken minutes before in her role as EBI program manager. 

From there on, it was all downhill for the lab. 

“You guys have no concept how insulting it is for you to lay out a six-month schedule for doing something without even consulting us first,” said George Oram. 

“What can’t it be in the middle of Nevada, or in Merced?” he said. “Why haven’t you talked at all about why all these buildings have to be up there on the hillsides?” 

Oram drew applause when he described the proposals as “ill-conceived a project as I have ever reviewed, and that includes Bus Rapid Transit.” 

Next up was Daily Planet Arts and Calendar Editor Anne Wagley, who said she was disturbed at “the lack of coordination with the City of Berkeley” over other university-related projects, including the extensive development program planned just down the hill from the lab at Memorial Stadium. 

Wagley said she was also concerned at the costs new construction would impose on the city for roads, sewers and other taxpayer-funded services, and at the notion that taxpayers had to help pay for research that would benefit “a for-profit corporation like British Petroleum.” 

Gianna Ranuzzi thank the lab “for providing a wonderful rallying point for the citizens of Berkeley.” Her concerns included impacts of the Strawberry Creek watershed, and the possible health risks from demolitions at the lab and from the technology that is used at the lab. 

“It’s the wrong place,” she said. You’re making a terrible mistake. Welcome Chernobyl.” 

Rather than build near the Hayward Fault, which is “just waiting for the big one, have you considered the existing and empty buildings at the Mare Island Shipyard?” asked Martha Nicoloff, who brought pictures of the structures. 

 

BP focus 

Next up, and clutching a “STOP BP” sign, was Ayr, one of the activists who has been supporting the ongoing tree sit at Memorial Stadium, who demanded a one-year moratorium on development at the lab. 

“Let’s make it clear they are talking about genetically modified organisms,” he said, referring to EBI’s plan to tweak the genes of plants and microbes in hopes of produce cheaper, more efficient transportation fuels. “They are just furthering the whole push toward narrow, limited thinking that is destroying whole ecosystems, especially in the global South.” 

“Helios is supposed to mean sun, but there’s not a whole lot of sunshine in here,” said Merilee Mitchell. “But there is radiation.” 

BP critic Francisco Ramos, a graduate students in astrophysics at Cal, said that while he wasn’t opposed to science, “I am against the anti-ethical application of science. Listen to the scientists, but not the ones driven by greed. BP has a dark past, but what I’m worried about is a dark present.” 

Jason Hamadi cited the role played by BP in its earlier incarnation as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in the CIA-conducted overthrow of Iranian premier Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 after the democratically elected leader moved to nationalize Iran’s oil supply. 

Anna Aguirre, 74, assailed “the arrogance of UC” in failing to provide paper copies of the proposals at the meeting. “I also worry about the fact that everybody here involved in this, they’re all anglos. There are no African Americans. No Asians. Everybody’s an anglo.” 

Just-graduated UCB student Hillary Lehr, one of the organizers of the first campus teach-in against the BP project, faulted the BP proposal because “There is not a global environmental impact report. There is no global justice policy. I want a global EIR on the products produced by EBI,” she said. 

Gene Bernardi reminded the audience that the DOE had once been named the Atomic Energy Commission, then faulted the scoping report prepared for the meeting for failing “to say a word about the involvement of British Petroleum.” 

Mason Murthi said he was “sick and tired of hearing some of the rhetoric” used by EBI backers. “Steve Chu said ‘this will be our mission to save the world,’” a phrase Murthi said reminded him of colonialist rhetoric used by Europeans in the past to justify conquering other lands. 

“This is not BP’s university, this is not your university,” he told lab officials. “This is not the Anglo-Saxon elite’s university. This is our university.” 

Doug Buckwald charged the university with poor environmental stewardship,” and Zachary Running Wolf, who started the Memorial Stadium tree sit, told audience members, “We need to not trust British Petroleum. We need to build our own mass transportation.” 

Then came a moment of comic relief. Clad in dress and an outrageous blonde wig, rhinestone-studded specs and a dainty watch—in addition to a healthy five o’clock shadow—and speaking in a pseudo-Italian accent, “Heloise Lamplighter” told the lab folks that before building something new, “You gotta clean-uppa the mess you made-a first. You gotta big-a mess over there in-a Richmond. Maybe you oughta clean upa you big messes first.” 

 

General concerns 

Mark McDonald said the university should first “clean up all the VOCs (volatile organic compounds) and clean up all the (radioactive) tritium” at the lab before starting new projects. But since the DOE was the ultimate stakeholder at the lab, “our tax dollars are no object,” with no reimbursement for the use of city roads and other services. 

Janice Thomas, who lives nearby on Panoramic Hill, called the lab “scorched earth,” noting that trout and salmon had long since vanished from Strawberry Creek. “We are going to stop it,” she said. “We have to stop it.” 

Thomas also faulted the health-risk assessment of the lab’s Long Range Development Plan for failing to address health risks from nanotechnology and GMOs. 

Pamela Shivola of the Committee to Minimize Toxic Waste presented detailed charts of faults, contamination plumes, waterways and other features of the lad site—which she called a “a nuclear, nano-technology industrial complex.” 

Development should be located not on the hillside riddled with active faults but in alternative locations, she said. 

Barbara Robben, who graduated from Berkeley with a degree in geology and soil science, said she was concerned both about the dangers of building in a seismic hot spot and with the implications of EBI science for the soils of the world. “The technology they’re striving for is really, really scary,” she said. 

While speakers were allotted three minutes to make their cases, Powell allowed Shivola, Buckwald and Mitchell five more minutes each after all other speakers had finished. 

At the end of the meeting, speakers and lab officials polished off an assortment of Costco cookies and apple juice the lab had provided.


Overflow Crowd Mourns Slain Journalist

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday August 10, 2007

Oakland laid its secondmost famous native son journalist to rest on Wednesday morning, with an overflow gathering of more than 500 city officials, leaders and citizens packing the pews and aisles of St. Benedict Catholic Church in East Oakland for the funeral of Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey. 

Bailey was murdered in downtown Oakland on Thursday morning of last week as he was walking to work at the Post. A 19-year-old handyman with North Oakland’s Your Black Muslim Bakery, Devaughndre Broussard, was arrested a day later when Oakland police raided the bakery on unrelated warrants, and police say he has confessed to Bailey’s murder. In his confession, police say, Broussard said he was angered by an article Bailey was working on that was critical of the bakery. The article has not yet been published. 

The murder of Chauncey Bailey—one of the first American journalists to be killed in this country in many years for working on a story—made instant headlines and topped news broadcasts and talk shows around the world, and quickly made Bailey the most famous Oakland-born journalist since Jack London. 

The services included musical selections that seemed peculiarly Oakland, with a blend of African American gospel and traditional Catholic that included Ave Maria. Bailey’s coffin was rolled out of the church to the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir’s rendition of the the New Orleans standard “When The Saints Go Marching In.” Showing Bailey’s influence over a wide array of Oakland residents, a long contingent of vehicles in procession to burial services at the cemetery included several motorcycles driven by members of the East Bay Dragons Motorcycle Club. Outside the church, a single club member in an East Bay Dragons jacket held up a sign reading “Stop Black On Black Crime.” 

Mourners heard stories about Bailey from his former wife and mother of his 13-year-old son, as well as from colleagues who had worked with him at Soulbeat Television, the Oakland Tribune, and the Oakland Post, but Post publisher Paul Cobb said that “if Chauncey could be around to prepare the story about this funeral, he would say that ‘even though this is about me, Ron [Dellums] had the message.’ This is the headline.” 

Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums gave a powerful, emotional testimony to the slain editor, his voice breaking at times, and at one point receiving a standing ovation when he said, “If we are to pay tribute to Chauncey Bailey and all who have lost their lives in this city to violence, we must at this moment embrace the quality of human life.” After the crowd interrupted with applause, Dellums continued, “We cannot fall prey to fear and cynicism. We will not be cowed by fear. We will take back our community, because you will commit.” 

The mayor called violence a state and national “epidemic” that has “cost 16,000 lives in the streets of America,” but said that he wanted it to be remembered that “from this place, we raised our voices in behalf of nonviolence, not as a tactic, but as a way to live. This madness must end. We can do it.” 

Dellums said that even though he “experienced Chauncey in the somewhat tenuous relationship between journalist and politician,” a remark that brought muted laughter from many in the crowd who remembered press conferences begun by tough and pointed questions asked of the mayor by Bailey, Dellums said that Bailey had his respect. 

“He was always there,” the mayor said. “Whether it was the lone journalist watching several hundred children participate in a track meet, there he was, with a camera in one hand and a tape recorder in the other. It could be a neighborhood cleanup or a large media event, where he always asked the first question, and set the tone. We didn’t always agree on perception. He had his own way of seeing things. But he had a tremendous sense of dedication to this profession.” 

Cobb, for whom Bailey worked in the last months of his life, called Bailey an obsessive and dedicated worker, saying one of his fondest memories was walking with Bailey to a City Hall press conference. “He got a telephone call, so he handed me his briefcase and as we were walking, he conducted an interview while cradling the phone on his shoulder, and writing it all on yellow post-it notes that he then stuck in a row up his sleeve, all the time telling me to hurry up so that we could get to the press conference. He was the editor of the paper. I was just his paper boy.” 

In an allusion to the story that allegedly cost Bailey his life, Cobb would not go into details, but said, to applause, “This community will know what Chauncey Bailey and I were working on, even though we have received threats.” As Cobb broke out into sobs, someone from the crowd shouted out, “We’re with you, Paul,” and someone else added, “God will take care of you.” 

Cobb said the paper has continued to receive death threats that began some weeks ago, one on the morning of Bailey’s funeral. 

St. Benedict pastor Father Jay Matthews called Bailey an “outspoken, articulate, and often uncompromising black man who said what he wanted and meant what he said.” Matthews said that Bailey’s murderers “believed that if they got rid of Chauncey, they wouldn’t have to worry no more. But let me tell you,” Matthews continued, as the crowd rose to his feet, “I’m sure I speak for the mayor and all of the leaders of this community—spiritually, politically, and educationally—they should be worried. His voice will go on.”


Supervisors, Children’s Hospital Clash over Bond

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday August 10, 2007

The Alameda County Board of Supervisors and Children’s Hospital of Oakland appear to be on a collision course over a proposed Children’s Hospital Special Tax Initiative tentatively scheduled to be placed on the February ballot. 

The proposed two-thirds majority tax-initiative ballot measure would authorize the county to collect property parcel taxes ranging between $24 and $250 per year for the construction of a new Children’s Hospital. The tax is expected to generate between $11.2 million and $12 million in revenue for the hospital. But because of differences between the county and Children’s Hospital, one supervisor said privately that county supervisors might end up writing the ballot argument against the initiative. 

Officials of Children’s , a private institution, began circulating petitions early this year to place the measure on the ballot. But the measure has run into opposition from county supervisors, who say that while they support Children’s and want a new facility built, they were never consulted in advance on the measure, and are concerned that the measure as written may not stand up to a legal challenge, and might fill up the county’s debt load so much that it will prevent the county from taking on any other major capital projects, including renovation of the county’s own Highland Hospital. 

Last month, after Children’s Hospital President and CEO Frank Tiedemann told supervisors, “We know you have serious questions, and we will try to give them serious responses,” it looked as if the two sides might be able to work out a compromise. 

At that meeting, several supervisors expressed anger that because they had not been consulted in advance to work out possible problems and conflicts with the tax, they were being put in the position of opposing money for a politically popular institution. 

But supervisors say that a followup meeting with Children’s Hospital officials was not fruitful, and last week the five county supervisors signed a public letter to area elected officials asking them to “withhold your endorsement [of the tax initiative] until our Board has completed its review of the measure.”  

In their letter, the supervisors said “the County of Alameda has a long history of supporting Children’s Hospital … Children’s Hospital is an outstanding institution. We are fortunate to have its unique services in our community. Nonetheless, we believe that it is premature to endorse this special tax.” 

At the same meeting, supervisors approved a recommendation by County Administrator Susan Muranishi that “county staff prepare a report that addresses the fiscal impacts of the measure, including its effect on the ability to finance infrastructure, the potential effect of the measure on County operations including on the Board of Supervisors, and any legal issues associated with the measure.” 

The report is scheduled to be presented to Supervisors no later than September 30. 

County Counsel Richard Winnie had earlier written Children’s Hospital officials asking them to clarify six legal issues associated with the tax initiative, information which Winnie said he needed in order to complete a legal evaluation of the measure. Winnie did not return a telephone message in connection with this article, and the Children’s Hospital official in charge of the ballot measure is out of town until next week, so it is unclear whether Children’s officials have responded to that letter.


Obama Mops Up in Oakland

By Judith Scherr
Friday August 10, 2007

Pauline Beck isn’t absolutely sure who she’ll be voting for in the February presidential primaries, but after spending the morning with the man she called her “co-worker”—Sen. Barack Obama, candidate for president—the 61-year-old homecare worker, said she’d “probably vote for Obama.”  

The presidential candidate’s few hours spent with Beck and her 86-year-old client John Thornton mopping floors, making beds and fixing lunch in Thornton’s East Oakland home was part of the Service Employees International Union’s (SEIU) “Walk a Day in My Shoes 2008” campaign to ensure that the needs of working people get placed prominently in the presidential debate. 

To date senators John Edwards and Christopher Dodd and Gov. Bill Richardson have participated; senators Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and Gov. Mike Huckabee are scheduled to take part in the coming weeks. No Republicans have responded, according to SEIU officials. 

Speaking to reporters at the Oakland Hilton Hotel after his stint working with Beck, Obama reflected on the experience: “One of the downsides of a presidential campaign is that you start living in a bubble. You’re flying from airport to airport, making big speeches. You don’t always have time to spend just listening. It reminds me why I’m doing this—this isn’t just about ambition and polls and fundraising. It’s about my sense of mission.” 

As senator, “you spend your days talking and it’s not clear at the end of the day whether you’ve got anything done. When you’re cleaning out some cobwebs, or you’re mopping the floor and you see the dirty mop water, you know you’ve accomplished something,” Obama said. 

Time spent with Beck wasn’t all work and no talk. Obama found out that in order to support two adopted children and a great nephew, Beck depends on food banks when her salary can stretch no further. Beck’s $10.50 an hour job—which had been minimum wage before she joined the union—offers no sick or vacation days.  

“When she was sick for a month and a half, Pauline lost her salary. There’s no safety net,” Obama told reporters. 

The candidate underscored the service home healthcare workers provide. 

“We’re an aging society and we’re going to have a series of decisions to make about how we care for our elderly,” he said. “Institutional care in some cases may be the only option, but where you have the ability to keep seniors in their homes, in their communities, they are typically healthier, they are typically happier and most importantly, from the perspective of budget hawks, it’s cheaper.” 

 

Inner-city violence 

Obama responded briefly to questions from the press. The one from Josh Richman of the Oakland Tribune hit home for many reporters in the room. At about the same time the mid-morning press conference was taking place, there was a memorial service across town for Chauncey Bailey, the murdered newspaper editor who had once been Richman’s colleague at the Tribune. 

The community “is wracked by violence, much of it black on black. What are you talking about doing to help cities like Oakland?” Richman asked. 

“It’s not just Oakland,” Obama responded, pointing to 32 school students shot in Chicago last year.  

“There are no magic solutions,” he said. “Communities that are poor are like a diseased body, they are more vulnerable to violence, to the drug trade, more vulnerable to HIV/AIDS—their immune system is broken down. If we can strengthen these communities with jobs, education, preventative healthcare, that will all make a difference.” 

 

Barry Bonds 

Someone else wanted to know if Obama would invite Barry Bonds to the White House.  

“If I were president, I probably would. I’d consider [breaking the homerun record] a remarkable achievement. He deserves our congratulations. I’m concerned about the cloud that remains, not just in baseball, but in basketball and in the Tour de France,” he said. “I would like to see our sports leagues recognize that our children look up to sports stars more than other individuals and I’m not sure our kids are learning the right lessons.” 

 

Al Qaeda 

While Obama has said the United States should never have gotten into the war in Iraq, he said, in response to a question, that al Qaeda is a correct target. 

Obama said the officials in the White House had intelligence in 2005 that al Qaeda was growing in Pakistan, but failed to act. “Our safety and security is going to depend to a great deal on how we deal with al Qaeda base camps in Afghanistan and along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border,” he said. 

 

Healthcare 

Obama outlined his healthcare plan, in which individuals without insurance can buy into the plan. Insurance companies would not be able to discriminate on the basis of preexisting conditions.  

“We would negotiate with the drug companies so that they would charge the lowest price for what was needed [and] pay for subsidies for those who couldn’t afford the low group rates by savings—putting more money into prevention.” 

The savings would provide for the 145 million uninsured people, he said. 

SEIU, with 1.9 million members, will consider making a presidential endorsement later this year. The AFL-CIO, which is the nation's largest federation of labor unions, has freed its 55 unions to choose for themselves from among the Democratic contenders. 

 

 

 

Photograph by Anne Hamersky. 

Home Healthcare Worker Pauline Beck looks on as Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barak Obama serves John Thornton, 86, a meal as part of SEIU's Walk a Day in My Shoes 2008 campaign.


D.A. Examines Charges, Kavanagh Hires Criminal Attorney

By Judith Scherr
Friday August 10, 2007

Rent Stabilization Board Member Chris Kavanagh, an elected official embroiled for a second time in controversy around his place of residence, has engaged criminal attorney James Giller of Oakland to defend him—if need be. 

On July 30, the Berkeley city attorney and city clerk asked the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office to look into the question of whether Kavanagh lives in Oakland rather than Berkeley as he claims, and, if so, whether he has defrauded the public. 

“We have to wait and see what happens,” Giller told the Daily Planet on Tuesday, underscoring that to date no charges have been filed. 

“He’s a Berkeley resident,” Giller said. 

Kavanagh responded to Daily Planet calls with an email Thursday saying: “Thank you for your recent phone message inquiries. On account of my legal counsel, I cannot make a statement at this time. But I hope to make a comment soon to address the issues.” 

The question of Kavanagh’s residence surfaced recently when the new owners of a house with a rear cottage on 63rd Street in Oakland tried to evict Kavanagh from the cottage unit, saying they wanted to move into it. (Kavanagh’s name is on the 2001 lease for the cottage, although he has declared he lives in Berkeley on candidacy papers and voter registration forms. Kavanagh has told rent board colleagues that his girlfriend lives at the Oakland address.)  

Kavanagh’s fight against the eviction led to renewed allegations that the Berkeley official does not live at the 2907 Dwight Way, Apt. 16, address where he claims residence for living and voting purposes. 

The question of Kavanagh’s residence was first brought to the attention of the district attorney by the city attorney and city clerk in January 2003. He was not charged with any crime at the time.  

Kavanagh has served on the rent board from 2002 to the present, having been re-elected in 2004. 

The answer to the question of legal residency may be more complicated than it appears on the surface.  

“You have to grapple with the difference between residency and domicile,” Assistant Chief Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley [no relation to this paper’s owners] told the Daily Planet on Tuesday, declining to go further into the difference between the two. 

Referring to the Kavanagh case, she said, “We’re taking a look at it. A person can have a residence in Nebraska, but have a domicile in Berkeley.” O’Malley said she did not know when her office will come to a conclusion on the Kavanagh question. 

City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque declined to define “residence,” when asked by the Daily Planet at the July 31 City Council meeting. City Clerk Pamyla Means directed the Planet on Wednesday to the California Elections Code, which says a person who leaves a particular jurisdiction temporarily “with the intention of returning, does not lose his or her domicile.” 

In the case of San Francisco Supervisor Ed Jew, who will stand trial on charges that include lying about living in the district he represents, the San Francisco Chronicle noted in a July 4 story that “Jew and his attorneys argue that it’s intent, not actual days in a house, that legally determines a politician’s official residence.”  

The key question is whether Jew intends to return to his house, not the time he spends elsewhere, Jew’s attorney told the Chronicle. 

The California attorney general has weighed in on the question (in 72 Ops.Cal.Atty.Gen.8) saying: “While the question of domicile is a mixed question of law and fact…many factors enter into the equation, including where an individual is registered to vote and his or her address for mail…, where tax returns are filed…, where an automobile is registered…, and where a homeowner’s exemption or renter’s credit is taken…. However, the critical element is that of intent. While declarations of intent are significant, they are not determinative. The acts must be examined as well.” 

Charges that could be brought against Kavanagh were specified in the city clerk’s January 2003 report to the district attorney: “If Mr. Kavanagh actually lived in Oakland at the time he filed his papers for candidacy and assumed office or does so at the present time, he may be guilty of at least the following violations of the Elections Code: Section 18100-Registeration of persons not entitled to register; Section 18203—false declaration of candidacy; Section 1835—false statement in candidate’s statement; Section 18500—fraud in connection with vote cast and Penal Code section 118—perjury.”


The Shipyard Isn’t Dead Yet, Say Architect, Official

By Richard Brenneman
Friday August 10, 2007

Don’t be sounding any death knells yet for The Shipyard, one of West Berkeley’s last remaining hangouts for techno and steampunk artists. 

Despite the heated rhetoric that followed city inspections and a welter of violation findings and threats of heavy sanctions earlier this year, relations between the outspoken artists and their erstwhile bureaucratic nemeses have improved, and a crucial, studio-saving compromise is in the works. 

“They have a plan, and it’s doable,” said Deputy Fire Chief David P. Orth, who had found 13 city and state fire code violations at the 1010 Murray St. facility in May. 

Tensions had reached a breaking point that month, after Orth and two other city officials signed notices demanding that the yard’s 30 artists leave the odd collection of refurbished shipping containers that formed their studios. 

The massive oblong steel boxes, stacked two and three deep along the perimeters of the industrial site, provoked the concerns of Orth, city Building Official Joan MacQuarrie and Zoning Officer Mark Rhoades. 

The result was a detailed notice of 15 building code violations, four affronts to the city zoning code and three fire code breaches—accompanied by the threat of $2,500-a-day fines. 

Among their concerns were wiring that failed code requirements, alterations to the containers that threatened their structural integrity, unsafe foundations installed without permits, a solar power system sans permit and allegedly posing a fire danger, and a declaration that some of the artists may have been living in the containers. 

The notices prompted a strong reaction from Jim Mason, who leases the site and sublets to his fellow artists, and led to highly restrained relations between the artists and the city until architect Les Young intervened and took over the delicate task of managing relations between anarchic artists and city officialdom. 

“All of the inspection items are out of the way now,” Young said. “We have plans for a new two-story metal building along Murray Street, and we’ll be lining up containers along the old railroad tracks for use as studios and for storage.” 

Mason and Young have asked the property owner to finance construction, in return for an extended lease at a higher rent. “He’s agreed,” said Young. “He would select the contractor, and the city will be dealing directly with him.” 

Young met with Orth and other city officials Wednesday and presented preliminary designs for the new structure. 

“So far they like it,” he said. “It’s all code-driven at this point, and I don’t see any deal killers.” 

In the interim, Shipyard artists have been busily completing projects for the upcoming Aug. 27-Sept. 3 Burning Man festival—that anarchic event in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert that has become the focus of the energies of many West Berkeley artists. 

“The city has been looking the other way until they’re done,” Young said. 

“They were reminded that they need to continue cleaning up,” Orth said. 

Just how long it will take before the Shipyard can start rebuilding depends on a review of final plans, which have yet to be completed, said Orth. 

“If it just takes an over-the-counter administrative use permit, it could be a matter of weeks. But if it require a full use permit, it could take six to eight months,” Orth said. 

Such use permits have to go through a public hearing process and win a majority vote before the Zoning Adjustments Board.


Downtown Landmarks Debate Revived

By Richard Brenneman
Friday August 10, 2007

Members of the two city citizen panels hammering out policy guidelines for the new downtown plan will meet Monday night to finalize a key section of the document. 

The joint subcommittee is comprised of members from the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee (DAPAC) and the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC). 

Monday night’s meeting marks their 13th session, and at least one more meeting is planned for Aug. 27. 

Recent meetings of the subcommittee have moved forward in a harmony relatively rare to the process of shaping a new downtown plan, which DAPAC members must complete in a rudimentary form by Nov. 30. 

One-time members Raudell Wilson and Carole Kennerly from DAPAC had provided what dissent had existed in the subcommittee, but since their replacements by Jesse Arreguin and Jim Novosel, the subcommittee has functioned with an almost unprecedented unanimity. 

But internal harmony doesn’t mean their plan will sail through the DAPAC process unscathed—as indicated in an earlier vote on the first version of the chapter on Historic Preservation and Urban Design. 

DAPAC Chair Will Travis, Planning Commission Chair Jim Samuels and retired UC Berkeley development chief Dorothy Walker attended the last meeting to argue for revisions that face stiff opposition from the subcommittee. 

Key questions to be resolved focus on the role historic buildings will play in the new downtown plan being drafted in response to the university’s push for 800,000 square feet of new off-campus construction in the city center—about 27 percent of the total floor space of the Empire State Building. 

Of equal importance to the Travis faction is whether or not a strongly preservationist panel should draft the element of the plan that governs new construction and the downtown streetscape. 

At least two subcommittee members say that they also want to draft language that will provide the means for implementing the policies in city law—a move discouraged by Travis and city planning staff. 

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


Dump Truck Kills Berkeley Cyclist

By Bay City News
Friday August 10, 2007

A 55-year-old Berkeley woman was struck and killed by a dump truck this morning [Thurs.] as she was attempting to ride her bicycle through an Oakland crosswalk, the Alameda County coroner's bureau reported. 

Elena Castaneda was struck at around 8:30 a.m. while crossing West Street at Isabella Avenue, according to Deputy Mike Bidle of the coroner’s bureau. 

Police continue to investigate the incident and it remains unclear whether charges will be filed against the driver of the truck.


New Housing Authority Board in Training Saturday

By Judith Scherr
Friday August 10, 2007

The new Berkeley Housing Authority board will be in training for most of the day on Saturday, learning about the history of public housing, the role of the housing authority and the various programs the authority governs. The meeting is public and begins with public comments at 8:45 a.m.  

The meeting, scheduled from 8:30 a.m.– 4 p.m., will be in the Amador Room of the Doubletree Hotel, 200 Marina Blvd. At deadline on Thursday, the agenda was not available online. 


BHS Grad Honors Slain Colleague Through Film

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday August 10, 2007

Community Hosts Sunday Fundraiser for Canon Jones Memorial Scholarship 

 

Canon Christian Jones’ MySpace profile sits untouched since the cruel April night he was shot to death outside Tuskegee University in Alabama. There have been no updates from him. No instant messages.  

But his friends at Berkeley High School have found new ways to keep his memory alive. One heartbroken teenager remembers him in her prayers each day. Another mentions him during conversations in class. And Berkeley High senior Mahaliyah made a movie about him. 

Mahaliyah’s movie, If Concrete Could Speak, will be aired Sunday at a fundraiser for the Canon Christian Jones Scholarship at the Berkeley Marina. The film sends a powerful message to communities all over America to take a long hard look at the issue of gun violence among teenagers. 

In one scene, images of Oakland gun fights fill the frame as these words fill the screen: “The rate of firearm death of youth under 14 years old is nearly 12 times higher in the United States than in 25 other industrialized countries COMBINED.” The next shot cuts to Canon’s mother crying over her son’s dead body at his funeral in Richmond. 

“We can’t live in denial anymore,” said Canon Jones Sr., Canon’s dad, who is still shaken from the cold-blooded murder of his son. 

“Gun violence among the youth has reached troubling heights. These teenagers don’t just take away family members from us. They take away their own lives. This movie is a great way to drive this point home to all of America. Killing someone for a pair of tennis shoes or for being in the wrong block or because of their color means nothing. As a country we have come so far and yet we can’t hold a community together.” 

Quentin Motez Davis, 18, of Macon County and Romanita Michelle Cloud, 18, of Tuskegee, are charged with robbing Canon of his wallet while he was walking from his dorm to a grocery store. When Cloud accidentally spoke Davis’ name, Davis allegedly shot Jones for fear of being identified. Davis and Cloud will stand trial today (Friday) in Macon County. 

 

Canon Jones Scholarship  

Fund Raiser and Barbecue 

Noon-4 p.m. Sunday at Cesar Chavez Park at the Berkeley Marina, with Canon Jones, Sr. at the grill. Sponsored by the Canon Jones Scholarship Committee. To donate, make checks payable to Berkeley Boosters/Pal (memo line: “Canon Jones Scholarship”). For pre-orders, donations or questions, call Kathryn or Michael at 524-9097.


Teenagers Speak Out on Social Issues

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday August 10, 2007

Mahaliyah’s If Concrete Could Speak was one of many films that screened May 31 at the Berkeley High School Film Festival, films that deal with topics often considered taboo even today. 

Students at the Communication Arts and Sciences School (CAS) broke a lot of barriers, raised a few eyebrows and became all grown-up for a few days in May when they embarked on a mission to produce videos for the annual festival.  

“We wanted to highlight gun violence at the festival simply because it seemed the right thing to do,” said Dharini Rasiah, who teaches video production to CAS students. 

A graduate of UCLA and UC Berkeley, Rasiah is quick to point out that this year has been the most difficult one for CAS so far. 

“There have been several incidents of violence against students and teachers and our community has really suffered a lot,” she said. “Canon was a student at CAS and his death is on students’ minds a lot.” 

Mahaliyah, who lives in South Berkeley, said that shootings were a normal phenomenon for her. 

“I can’t count the number of times I have been around one,” she said. “There is nothing cool about being shot. The media has to stop glorifying it.” 

By integrating academic curriculum with social justice issues, students work with Rasiah on original topics for their senior seminar. 

CAS students Trystan Burke and Luara B. Venturi decided to tackle the way young African American males behave with their female counterparts. 

In Imperialism: the Black Woman’s Pimp, Trystan and Luara try to get the audience to think critically about modern-day black culture. 

“Originally, the black community never disrespected their women,” said Trystan. “It’s only during post-slavery that we started using words such as nigga’, bitch and ’ho. It’s the ignorance in us speaking. The lack of education. The lack of respect for our roots. Maybe that’s why we refer to ourselves as niggas ... we have lost our sense of home.” 

“We have been raped by colonization,” added Luara. “I think it’s horrible, I think it’s unacceptable. When did calling a woman a ’ho become the norm?” 

As Luara and Trystan struggled for answers, their friends Simone Obidas and Coimbra Jackson looked for stereotypes in the movie Teen Pregnancy. 

Working non-stop after school for three weeks, the two went to great lengths to interview teenage mothers. 

“The hardest part was coming up with the right questions,” said Coimbra.  

“Most of the mothers we talked to were high school graduates. We were happy to see that most were proud of their children.”  

Both Simone and Coimbra agreed that topics such as teen pregnancy and abortion still carried a big stigma in most social circles. 

“Yes, it’s a touchy subject but our peers are kinda blind to it,” said Simone. “They think it’s funny.” 

Max Perel-Slater, a CAS senior who will be studying pre-med at Wesleyan University this fall, made his movie on the pains of educating citizens of Shirati, Tanzania about the AIDS epidemic. Traveling with a group of CAS students, Max stayed with Dr. Charangi for three weeks on the shores of Lake Victoria to shoot live footage for Shirati Hospital. 

“It was beautiful and sad at the same time,” said Max, staring at the moving images of malnutritioned children on his computer screen. 

“Dr Charangi is a really amazing doctor and yet he still chooses to work in a small village. The extreme poverty in Shirati was beyond anything I have ever seen. They don’t have the means to buy anything. There’s no electricity and they live off ugali, a kind of paste.” 

Max remembers watching a C-section being performed on a woman under a flashlight, but the memory doesn’t make him squirm. 

“When the flashlight went off, Dr Charangi used the light from his cellphone,” he said, hero worship written in his eyes. 

“That’s what I want to do one day. I want to help these people get better. Make their lives better. Once I get my degree, I am going back to Shirati.” 

 

Photograph by Riya Bhattacharjee. Berkeley High CAS teacher Dharini Rasiah comments on Max Perel-Slater’s video of Shirati Hospital at the school’s video lab as student film makers Mahaliyah, Simone Obidah and Coimbra Jackson look on.  

 

 

 


Jazz Fest Still Lacks African American Artists

By Judith Scherr
Friday August 10, 2007

There have been a few African American artists added to the line-up at the Downtown Berkeley Jazz Festival since attention was called in June to the festival’s lack of African American participation. 

But not enough to clearly demonstrate the centrality of the black American experience in the creation of the music known as jazz, according to jazz vocalist and educator Rhonda Benin. Some 11 out of about 35 band leaders whose groups are slated to play at the Aug. 22-26 festival are African American. 

“We’re still underrepresented,” Benin said in an interview Monday with the Daily Planet.  

The issue, which festival critics underscore is not unique to the festival or the Bay Area, burst into local headlines in June when it was revealed almost simultaneously that the Downtown Berkeley Jazz Festival had hired few African American artists and that Oakland’s Yoshi’s had produced a 10-year anniversary CD with no African American musicians.  

With the sponsorship of the city and others, the festival is produced by the Jazz- school, located downtown, and is subsidized in part by city funds. Susan Muscarella is director of both the Jazzschool and the festival. She did not return multiple calls for comment. 

Critics say that, like the festival, the Jazzschool hires few African American instructors, and that it does not show in its curriculum an appreciation for the foundation of jazz, rooted in the experience of black people in America. In a written statement in June, Muscarella defended the festival: “The stated purpose of the festival, incidentally, is to celebrate jazz and related styles of music from throughout the world,” she wrote. “Part of the festival’s mission has been to reflect the diversity of downtown Berkeley, and it has accomplished that and more.” 

Benin is part of a group of African American musicians and their allies that responded with outrage to the lack of African Americans in the festival and represented on the Yoshi’s CD. (Yoshi’s, the downtown Oakland jazz club, issued an apology and pulled the CD at the time.) 

The group Benin works with has written a statement, still in draft form, that places criticism of the festival within the larger context in which the origins and ongoing African American contributions to jazz are widely ignored. 

Benin provided the draft to the the Daily Planet. 

“We … have come together to address what we sense as a general lack of presence of African Americans in Bay Area institutional, commercial and media jazz programming,” it says. “We see this lack of African American presence explicitly and implicitly as exclusion of our artistic and cultural contributions to music created and developed in our community, and this state of affairs has very real economic and artistic impacts on us.”  

The group underscores in the statement that it does not want to damage either the festival or the Jazzschool, but hopes for a real dialogue with these and other groups to promote understanding of the question. 

“Merely changing the numbers in the arts lineups will not solve the underlying problems,” the letter says. 

Benin said Muscarella ought to have entered into meaningful dialogue with the group. Muscarella had proposed a meeting, but wanted to decide who would be in attendance on both sides of the issue and who would moderate it, Benin said. 

Local jazz saxophonist Howard Wiley refused a June invitation to play at the festival, contending the invitation had been simply to boost the number of black musicians after the negative publicity.  

Speaking Monday with the Daily Planet from New York, where he was working, Wiley pointed to the addition of New York-based drummer Winard Harper to the festival lineup as a positive step forward. 

“I’m always the Berkeley optimist—only time will tell,” said Wiley, a Berkeley native. “I hope Susan has learned something from this.” 

In addition to her concerns about the underexposure of African American jazz artists, Benin said she is disturbed about the state of jazz education. She pointed out that the Jazzschool has a contract with the Oakland schools and fears the Berkeley school will bring in its non-African American instructors—it has very few African American teachers—neglecting the importance of passing on jazz as part of the African American heritage, she said. 

“The institutions of learning that offer, for instance, jazz courses without a discussion of the continuing social context of the music are doing a disservice to their students, the public and the music they purport to teach,” says the statement from Benin’s group, which ends with a call for dialogue.


Spring Turns In Last of Her Campaign Amendments

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday August 10, 2007

Councilmember Dona Spring turned in the last of her 2006 campaign statement amendments to the Berkeley City Clerk’s office Thursday. 

The amendments—which include the rescheduling of a loan—will be posted on the city’s website today (Friday), confirmed city staffer Leslie Roma over the telephone to the Planet. 

Spring, currently serving her fifteenth year as District 4 councilmember, is being investigated by the Berkeley Fair Campaign Practices Commission (FCPC) for possible violations by the Dona Spring for City Council Committee.  

At least 28 separate contributions of or exceeding $50 and a campaign loan were omitted from Spring’s campaign filings from the 2006 election season.  

Spring, who uses a wheelchair and participates in city council meetings remotely because she suffers from a painful chronic autoimmune disease, until recently has served as her own treasurer. She explained that some of the contributors were omitted in part because she relied on an office services business, which failed to do some tasks, and she lacked up-to-date computer software.  

“The majority of my contributors had been filed into the database,” Spring told the Planet over a telephone interview Thursday. 

“The office business service had failed to enter the names into Form 460, the form used to file campaign finances. I take the blame for not turning in about half a dozen names. In the flurry of campaign activities, some of the copies of the checks did not get to their office.” 

Spring added that all the contributions had been verified in an amendment filed in April. 

“All the expenses in the 2006 campaign statement have been verified except for one slight discrepancy. My bank has $68 more than what is shown on my financial forms. I have to look into that.” 

The City Clerk’s office will be handing over the amended statements to the City Attorney’s Office.  

“City Attorney Manuela Alburquerque is currently on vacation but when she gets back we will discuss how we want to resolve this case,” said Spring. 

“I want to continue working with the city attorney’s office to come to a resolution.” 

Campaign violations have been committed by other officials, including former Berkeley mayor Shirley Dean, mayoral candidate Don Jelinek and Rent Board commissioner Chris Kavanagh, in the past. In an interview with the Planet last week Assistant City Attorney Kristy Van Herick said that it was possible that Spring’s violations could be resolved with a settlement. 

The FCPC is scheduled to hold a hearing on Sept 19 to determine whether a violation took place.  

Spring spent the last few weeks getting all her financial information sorted out from her bank and matching it with her campaign statements. 

“It has been a very exhaustive process,” she said. “I feel I have made every effort to reveal all the information. I have correlated all my campaign statements with my bank statements and corrected all the mistakes to make sure that the public knows where my campaign contributions come from and that people are abiding with the contribution limit. I am complying with the law. I went over all the figures with my volunteers forward and backward a hundred times. We will always be making mistakes but the important thing is that you correct your mistakes and I feel I have done that. It’s all an open book now.”


English Speakers Desired: America’s ESL Challenge

By Khalil Abdullah, New America Media
Friday August 10, 2007

WASHINGTON—Had President Bush been able to enact an immigration bill that legalized undocumented immigrants this year, the result would have produced “a one-time shock to the ESL (English-as-a-second-language) training system” in the United States, according to Michael Fix. 

Fix co-authored “Adult English Language Instruction in the United States: Determining Need and Investing Wisely,” a report issued by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI). The report estimates that an additional $200 million annually, for six years, would have to be spent in the United States to attain English proficiency for the country’s 5.8 million adult lawful permanent residents (LPRs). The combined state and federal government spending on English-as-a-second-language (ESL) programs is already more than $1 billion annually. 

Yet, assuming the passage of immigration reform at some date, it will most certainly include the condition that undocumented workers learn English to qualify for citizenship. Using assumptions about the current undocumented immigrant population, the report estimates “that approximately 6.4 million unauthorized immigrants in the country will require English language instruction in order to gain the necessary skills to pass the naturalization exam and obtain LPR status or to fully participate in the country’s civic life.” 

It is the 6.4 million cohort, when added to the 5.8 million LPRs, which gives pause for serious concern about the capacity and effectiveness of an ESL system that already has glaring structural flaws. “In the event of a legalization program for today’s unauthorized population, we project an increase of $2.9 billion a year in new costs for six years .… we assume that none of the $1 billion in current funding would serve the legalizing population,” the report said.  

In addition, the report noted that 1.8 million immigrants enter the United States annually, many with limited English skills, and few educational options are available once they arrive. They add to the already 23 million Americans who reported themselves as having limited English proficiency in 2005.  

The timing of the report’s release speaks to the possibility of elevating the public discourse about ESL funding needs before comprehensive immigration reform is back before Congress, and as changes are made to other federal programs that could impact immigration issues. Demetrios Papademetriou, MPI’s co-founder and president, moderated a July 30 panel discussion about the report’s findings and recommendations.  

Papademetriou framed the necessity for the United States to more fully fund ESL initiatives as an economic imperative in order to remain globally competitive. “There is no real growth in the native [U.S.] labor force in the next five to 10 years,” he said, adding that, in combination with other factors -- including the impending retirement of the baby-boom generation -- the projected negative outcomes without an English-literate populace should force revision of laissez-faire attitudes toward ESL programs. 

Papademetriou explained that the notion of viewing ESL funding as a benevolent or charitable act misses “the consuming economic self-interest” that should be driving funding scenarios at the federal, state, and local level. 

As a simplistic example, a more literate workforce fills higher paying jobs and thus produces economic benefits that ripple through the economy. Panelists cited data that show English-literate immigrants are lower users of social services as just one of the compelling self-interest fiscal rationales for states to become pro-active about better ESL funding and instruction. Non-English speakers, by contrast, stay on welfare longer, for example. 

Currently, ESL is partially funded by various federal programs, including ones that allow states to match dollars. But states match at varying levels; demography is changing as well. While the report showed California facing the largest numerical ESL training challenge, the recent, rapid influx of undocumented workers to the southeastern United States will force that region to make hard choices about ESL funding priorities.  

Margie McHugh, a co-author of the report, noted that the $30 billion revenue captured by Social Security from undocumented immigrants is a possible source of financing for ESL programs. McHugh said the $30 billion estimate is derived from census-based data calculations between 1994 and 2004. As those funds won’t be returned to individual undocumented claimants, they could be the revenue source to fund competitive, innovative, ESL grant awards to the states if there was political consensus. 

One of the systemic difficulties facing ESL, McHugh pointed out, is the “need to professionalize a system where most teachers are part time.” The cost of that goal is captured in the MPI report’s estimate of the additional $200 million needed for ESL to minimally meet projected demand to service the LPR community.  

The report called for implementing a comprehensive system of quality control measures of state ESL programs. “Currently, conventional practices such as random visits, audits, and scheduled program reviews by state monitors are not required,” the report said. 

One of the report’s central recommendations was to “require an annual report to Congress” on the status of ESL implementation. Congress would then be better able to assess the intersection of immigration issues, data, policy, and programs to plan for America’s future needs. Though America has half of the world’s cities with immigrant populations of over one million each, it is lagging behind other countries in addressing ESL needs, according to the report. 

The need for an annual Congressional report, or at the least, a biennial one, derives in part from Fix’s observation that there is “no national language policy” in the United States. Furthermore, during the contentious immigration debate, Fix said, “immigration integration took a backseat during those deliberations” to politics. 

In addition to Papademetriou, Fix, and McHugh, the panel was rounded out by Brigitte Marshall, Israel David Mendoza, and Heide Spruck Wrigley. As panelists, each brought incisive observations about the complexities of ESL funding realties, comments about differences in state approaches to ESL funding, and some brutal truth as well. 

“Level 6,” the highest rung of ESL instruction, “is not enough to succeed in college level coursework,” according to Mendoza, the Director of the Adult Basic Education Office at the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges. In his critique of the inadequacy of current ESL funding, he called for increased access to the Internet for ESL programs with a compatible e-learning curriculum, something unlikely to occur, in his opinion, until the “big players,” like the Gates Foundation and other philanthropies, are brought into ESL funding streams. 

Marshall, who is the director of the Oakland Adult Education Program in California, had several cautionary observations about reforming ESL, noting, “what gets measured gets done.” She spoke to the need to move beyond simply looking at numerical aggregate ESL needs in order to design programs that take into the account the full range of support services often needed by ESL learners. 

During the presentation, data was cited that immigrants, while compromising 15 percent of the American work force, account for 45 percent of the low-wage workers. Unsurprisingly then, said Wrigley, president of LiteracyWork International, there are practical ESL innovations being implemented by corporations. She said McDonald’s, for instance, is beginning to provide Spanish language instruction for its English-speaking personnel as well as the more traditional ESL training for Spanish-literate ones.  

Ultimately, said Wrigley, often what is underestimated is the desire that many immigrants have to learn English, an accomplishment that the panelists agreed is a powerful determinant of success in the United States. “If I learn English, I can help other people just like me,” is a phrase Wrigley said she hears often. She said this desire extends past the requirement to simply master the civics test of the immigration exam, or the practical use of getting a job, but is rooted strongly in the ideal of civic participation in a better America. 

The report can be found at www.migrationpolicy.org. 


First Person: A Shout Out to Non-Moms

By Sonja Fitz
Friday August 10, 2007

It’s all about the children. 

No it isn’t. Before I had a son—for over 39 years of my life—my childless  

friends and I scoffed at this sentiment. Sheesh, we complained, I guess we’re second-class citizens. Never mind that we were working day in and day out to keep this little world running so that the precious Leaders of Tomorrow would inherit. Typical parental self-absorption, we scoffed. And now I’m the proud mom of a beautiful, sweet, brilliant 19-month-old bundle of perfection? I still scoff at it. 

In truth, I feel like both people—a proud and happy mom, no doubt, but I was childless for a little less than half my life (hopefully) and those feelings don’t go away overnight. At least for me they didn’t. I still wish babies and small children wouldn’t go to non-kid-friendly restaurants, movies, and other places grown-ups go for a little quiet and space to mingle with peers. Yeah, my husband and I cart our own tot off to places other than Chuck-e-Cheese or Lake Anza, but in those instances we know were on borrowed time, behaviorally speaking, and we head straight for the door if junior starts acting up. The whole world is not, nor should it be, kid-friendly.  

You don’t know what love is until you have a child.  

Yes you do. I don’t believe parental love is somehow better or more real than other kinds of love, it’s just different. It’s wrapped around an utterly pure subject, spiked with intense protectiveness and a(n un)healthy dose of self-love. Er, that’s why parents are nutty for their own baby’s hilarious antics (yawn) and brilliant utterances (y’huh?), not their neighbor’s—the mini-me factor.  

Parental love makes parents close in on their household in many cases, eschewing community involvement. My husband and I have to work hard to stay part of the world around us—it’s so easy to settle into the family couch on evenings and weekends, and just steep in your own familial juices. Parenthood breeds cliquish tribalism and a totally unBuddhist obsessive attachment. I’m sorry but the love I have for my mother, father, husband, siblings, and friends is just as important to me, and a little less suffocating, truth be told. Yes, I would dive into boiling oil for my son if necessary—and, honestly, isn’t that a bit de trop? 

You can’t be fulfilled unless you experience parenthood.  

Yes you can. Having a child is fun, fascinating, delightful, educational, growth-inducing, self-revelatory, entertaining, sweet, and heart-meltingly delicious, but it is not the sole path to fulfillment. Other things in my life have fulfilled me in a different and equally rich way, such as creative projects, losing weight, communing with nature, great books, long-lasting friendships, helping an aging parent move, helping a friend overcome depression. Do those things seem trivial compared with child-rearing? Maybe they are—to you. Fulfillment is personal, dude. 

No, I would not trade momhood now for all the chocolate in Belgium, but nor would I retroactively trade my 39 years of childlessness for a bazillion dollars and that still vacant co-host gig on The View. I just think our childless brothers and sisters deserve a little respect, if you please, and hold the pity. There is life without offspring, and it’s damn good.  

 

 

 

Sonja Fitz is a Berkeley resident. She  

doesn’t mind and even enjoys reading The Tale of Peter Rabbit 12 times in a row, but she also enjoys a quiet double espresso in trendy-snooty adult-friendly cafés. 


Healthy Living: Yield to Oncoming Traffic

By Erin Ehsani
Friday August 10, 2007

Yes, you’re losing grip.” This is how my acupuncturist, Bronwyn, responded to my complaint of an increasing numbness in my right arm that was hampering my ability to maintain grasp. I could barely write a sentence without losing hold of the pen, my hand creating unintentional squiggly lines because I refused to let go. Ha ha body. I get it. Damn metaphorical translations. 

I sought acupuncture treatment for a long list of physical ailments that were slowing me down, annoyed it cut into my productivity. I went weekly trying to master the recommendations to aid my digestion, increase energy and restore homeostasis. Yet seemingly for all my efforts I continued to spiral downward. My body was responding to years of accumulated stress by rebelling in the only way that could get my attention.  

The divine yield sign emerged as I stuck my tongue out and outstretched my arms for diagnosis. Bronwyn took my hand with tender compassion, “No amount of herbs or needles will help until you learn to slow down.” 

What does “slow down” mean to a recovering perfectionist whose yardstick of success measured tangible achievement? I thrived on a full plate, gluttonously helping myself to more by over-scheduling, multi-tasking, and setting goals to pacify the nagging voice masquerading as motivation.  

I thought I left the hamster wheel years ago only to find this time I was just running in the opposite direction. Pedaling furiously to yoga class. Inhaling my slow food. Reading about being present. It wasn’t just tree pose I couldn’t balance. 

Still I was haunted by memories of my generously proportioned childhood pet hamster. I’d arrive home from school eager to see a show of fun hamster antics only to find Bob stationed in a corner motionless, the wheel gathering dust. We called him lazy. Maybe he was meditating. 

Years later I let the sun stream in through my bedroom window where Duke and I lay unfolding to a gentle wakefulness. During the night he’d find the crook of my legs and position himself in a ball against the back of my knees. I could feel his warmth and staccato heartbeat keeping rhythm with my own along with the twitches and muffled barks of his dreams. I’d lie there knowing even a subtle movement would break the moment and we’d both have to get up to pee. My ex-husband chided us as lazy. I blamed it on Duke. 

My monkey mind equated slowing down with lazy—afraid if I stopped moving I might miss an opportunity and my life would tumble over like dominoes. Never mind the lost years I spent on the fast track where life passed in a blur. I can’t recall anything significant because blinders shut out the world around me. Some days I entertain offering a reward for anyone who can locate the missing years. 

If Lazy is that loner cousin you avoid at family reunions then Selfish is his crazy uncle. The two are related. I was scared to invite either of them over, fearing others would judge me by my relatives. How could I justify rest? How would I say no? Sucked in by the cultural undertow that values productivity over self-nurturance and defines worth by what you “do,” I was beaten against the rocks. Swimming in the mainstream only led me to a whirlpool of depression. Fortunately I saw the lighthouse guiding me back to shore. 

Bronwyn inserts the last needle and steps out while my body works to recover its chi. Slow down. I fantasize about retreating to a cabin in the woods or a beach hut on the edge of civilization. There would be no agenda except to meet my basic needs. There would be no questions, goal setting, or networking—just being. I let my body intuitively lead me to sleep, wake, and eat. I bask in the sun, smell the rain, and tune into nature’s symphony. Maybe I cry or laugh out loud or find out what happens when I sit absolutely still. 

Ah, but somewhere a bell sounds and I am prostrate and pin-cushioned in a small office. I’ve got rent, work, and life happening in the present. The challenge is to be here now—but to slow down enough to know I am alive. I’ve been floating along like a balloon, my head detached from my body lost in thoughts powered by over-analyzing and worry. Now it’s time to let the air out in a long breath and drift towards the ground. 

Slowing down isn’t another to-do item on a list—it’s a commitment to engage in living. It’s both a process and a practice. To suddenly put on the brakes may result in a collision. For now, I’m just trying to yield to oncoming traffic and heed the signs along the path. 

 

Erin Ehsani is a Berkeley freelance writer and traveler trying to decide what exit to take next—slowly. 

 

 

 

 

 


A Fresh Start for Berkeley’s Aquatic Park

By Riya Bhattacharjee and Rio Bauce
Tuesday August 07, 2007

In a corner of West Berkeley, amidst industrial rubble and smoke, two young minds are hard at work resurrecting what has long been a no man’s land. 

An offshoot of Tinker’s Workshop, Waterside Workshops was started by Helder Parreira and Amber Rich at Berkeley’s historic Aquatic Park in July to bring two new programs to the community. 

Berkeley Boathouse, a community boat-building workshop, and Street Level Cycles, a community bike shop, are housed in the old boathouse, tucked between the Aquatic Park lagoon and a bike trail right across the water from the Berkeley Pedestrian Bridge. 

“Aquatic Park has long been a forgotten frontier on the far west side of Berkeley, and this is exactly what we are working to change,” said Waterside Workshops executive director Amber Rich, who was formerly with Tinker’s Workshop. 

“When people look across from the highway or the pedestrian bridge, we want them to see a thriving community representative of what Berkeley has to offer, not a series of neglected, dilapidated buildings.” 

Both Parreira and Rich have worked wonders with the park, clearing off junk and storage space to make room for a bike repair studio and a workshop. Their success coincides with the Berkeley Parks centennial celebrations this month. 

“This place has come a long way,” said Parreira, looking around the boathouse where he teaches kids how to build boats from scratch.  

“In the 1930s the community used this place for a lot of boat-related activities. But at one point people stopped coming here and it became known as a shady place. The maritime heritage of Aquatic Park has almost entirely dwindled away in the last decade. The waters have become polluted, and the buildings have fallen into a state of disrepair. It’s going to take a lot of work for us to get it back to what it was.” 

With help from the Community Development Block Grant, Parreira and Rich leased a piece of land from the city that no one wanted and brought it back to life. 

“Until recently, there was little evidence of the waterside community that once prospered on Berkeley’s waterfront,” said Rich, daughter of traditional craftsmen. 

“This is what Waterside Workshops is hoping to change. Since we came to this location earlier this year, we have watched a community develop, and more and more people are coming back to the park.” 

On Wednesday, kids from all over the Bay Area thronged to the park to salvage bike parts and learn how to scrape and varnish a sailing rig.  

Under Parreira’s watchful eyes, they learned to preserve the dying art of boat building.  

Parreira, a native of the Azores Islands in Portugal, holds a degree in archaeology from UC Berkeley. His passion for traditional wooden boat building was evident from the intricately carved frames that adorn the walls of his studio. 

Next door, Street Level Cycles program director Chris Thompson was busy showing teenagers how to assemble a bike. 

An off-shoot of the bike repair program that was a part of Tinker’s Workshop, Street Level Cycles has been revamped to meet the needs of young people. 

“When I first came, I only knew how to patch a bike and put in tires,” said Berkeley High student Miguel Hernandez, 16. “Now I can put everything in.” 

Telly, Tu’ua and Brian, siblings who had biked down from Sixth Street, were busy rummaging for free bike parts and frames.  

Although open to the entire community, the workshop’s focus group is economically challenged Berkeley youth. 

Parreira told the Planet that the Pedestrian Bridge played an important role in the revitalization of Aquatic Park.  

“Where else in the world can you see such a beautiful pedestrian bridge?” he asked. “It’s designed to face Grizzly Peak one way and the Golden Gate Bridge another way. It’s a part of the Waterside Workshops logo.” 

Parreira added that the city had a long-term plan of linking up Fourth Street with Aquatic Park as part of the North Aquatic Park Plaza Project. 

“We are really excited about it,” said Rich. “There’s going to be a big signage which will help guide people to the park. It’s sort of a commitment the city has given to the park. Eventually we would like to rent out the handcrafted boats to people at a minimal cost. Sailing is not something most people ask for, but when they see it, they gravitate toward it. Part of the reason why people live in the Bay Area is because they want to be close to water. Because sailing is an expensive hobby, we want to use our non-profit status to make it available to people who might not be able to rent out boats at $50 per hour.” 

Despite its initial success, Waterside Workshops faces lofty challenges in the form of funding. 

“We have eight paid staff here and the rest are all volunteers,” said Rich, who is herself volunteering until grants are approved for her salary. 

“We need to do more outreach for donations from the community. Right now we are taking in bikes, tools and parts which would have otherwise ended up in landfills. The sky is the limit for what we want to do, and believe me, there is a lot.” 

 

For more information on the  

Waterside Workshop’s programs,  

visit www.watersideworkshops.org. 


Developer Plans More Projects for Iceland Block

By Richard Brenneman
Tuesday August 07, 2007

Lost in the recent flap over the landmarking of Iceland is the future of the rest of the block on which it’s located—currently the home of McKevitt Volvo. 

Bounded by Shattuck Avenue and Milvia Street on the east and west and Derby and Ward streets on the north and south, the entire block has been slated by developer Ali Kashani to be the site of new projects. 

Formerly the property of the Weston Havens Foundation, the building site at 2700 Shattuck is listed as a project in progress on the website of Kashani’s Memar Properties (wwww.memarpromperities.com), the current owner. 

While the developer’s web site shows a conceptual drawing depicting a block-long structure curving at either end down the side streets, and lists the project as “In progress 2007,” a city staffer said the description is “somewhat optimistic.” 

“Realistically, it will be quite a while before we see something new,” said Dave Fogarty of Berkeley’s Economic Development Department. 

Not depicted on the website is the structure on the west end of the same block with the Volvo dealership: Iceland, on Milvia, which Kashani wanted to essentially demolish and rebuild as a townhouse development. 

A successful move to landmark the skating rink, upheld by a divided City Council, has stalled those plans—though landmarking doesn’t prohibit either demolition or developments which preserve the facade while adding height and interior changes. 

Kashani is out of town this week, and according to a message left on his office phone, will be unavailable for contact until Monday. 

 

Dealership buildings sold 

The Havens Foundation originally owned two of the Shattuck Avenue car dealership properties now being eyed by the city for redevelopment as sites for high density housing-over-retail projects—the McKevitt property and the eastern half of the 2598-2600 block of Shattuck, which is now occupied by Berkeley Honda. 

The property housing the Honda lot was bought by a partnership formed by unnamed local investors, according to Fogarty. 

The McKevitt property is situated at the divide of Shattuck Avenue and Adeline Street—and Adeline has also been targeted by Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates as the proposed focus of a new development-oriented plan. 

Both car dealerships figure prominently in the effort by city staff, spearheaded by Bates, to re-zone two areas of West Berkeley for car sales. 

The futures of both dealerships remain uncertain, said Fogarty, though McKevitt has a longer term lease on Shattuck than the Honda dealership, formerly Doten Honda, which was sold on June 1, 2005, resulting in a protracted labor dispute. 

Car manufacturers want dealerships concentrated along freeways, said Fogarty. “They like them together because buyers like to comparison shop,” he said. 

Most cities create dealership concentrations by using redevelopment statutes, often favored by land sellers as well as by dealers, said Fogarty, because of tax advantages. 

“It also represents a more efficient form of land use because dealers can combine some facilities,” he said. 

Berkeley has precluded redevelopment measures and eminent domain, Fogarty said, even though tax increment funding allowed under redevelopment law can help with creation of roadways, street lighting improvements and freeway interchanges. 

Proposals currently before the Planning Commission call for rezoning two sections of West Berkeley for car dealerships, one south of Ashby Avenue and west of San Pablo Avenue, and the other along the freeway on either site of Gilman Street. 

Concerns about the Ashby-adjacent segment were heavily criticized by the owners of the two largest business owners in the area, Ashby Lumber and Urban Ore, when the commission held its first hearing on the proposals last month. 

The Planning Commission will take up the proposals again following its August recess. 

Bates and the city’s economic development staff said the rezoning would help keep the dealers in Berkeley, along with their sales tax revenues. 

But even if the required zoning and West Berkeley plan changes are made, Fogarty said they offer no guarantee the dealers would remain in the city.  

“Even if the dealerships get the right to move to West Berkeley, they still have to secure the land at a price they can afford, and that is much more problematic, he said.  

 

Havens Foundation 

According its 2005 federal income tax return, the Weston Havens Foundation received $256,811 in rent against $166,146 in expenses on their 2700 Shattuck Ave. property. Comparable figures for 2598-2600 Shattuck were $220,351 in rent against expenses of $39,245. 

The foundation, which was also formed in 2005, reported incomes from properties at 2201-2017 and 2257-2267 Shattuck Ave., and reported receiving $19.88 million in real estate during the year which was formerly held by the Weston Havens Living Trust. 

The nonprofit was created from the estate of John Weston Havens. Jr., who died Oct. 7, 2001 at age 97. 

Havens was Berkeley’s own version of “old money,” a descendant of Francis Kittredge Shattuck, who stamped both his names and his architectural imprint on the face of the city. A cousin, Jeffrey Shattuck Leiter, succeeded Loni Hancock (Bates’ wife) as mayor of Berkeley when she resigned to take a federal job, and he is the former owner of other commercial properties on Shattuck Avenue.  

The foundation created by Havens’s will is based in San Francisco and is charged with funding medical and scientific research. According to its tax statement, it was funded with $28.5 million in net assets, including the Berkeley real estate.


AC Transit Directors Approve Bus Transfer

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Tuesday August 07, 2007

The general manager for the Alameda Contra Costa Transit District says that a trade-in of 16 existing North American Bus Industries (NABI) buses five years early for new Van Hools is still in the economic interest of the district, even though the $1.35 million federal interest in the NABIs cannot be transferred to another debt, as the district earlier anticipated. 

In a memo to AC Transit board members requesting that the district go forward with the trade even without the federal interest transfer, General Manager Rick Fernandez said that “the district would ultimately save money by pursuing this arrangement.” 

But figures documenting exactly how AC Transit would save that money continue to be missing from district public documents on the proposed trade, and AC Transit Board Vice President Rebecca Kaplan, who abstained on the NABI-Van Hool transfer when it first came before the board earlier this summer but voted for it last month, said she will no longer support such transactions unless they include detailed financial information on how they will actually affect the district’s budget. 

“I want to know where the figures come from that justify these transfers, and what is the overall plan for the district’s bus fleet,” at-large Boardmember Kaplan said in an interview late last week. “I’ve told staff that this information needs to be included when these transactions come before the board again.” 

Board members authorized the continuation of the 16 bus sale-and-buy on a 6-0-1 vote, with board member Elsa Ortiz continuing to abstain, as she did when the issue previously came before the board. Board President Greg Harper, who cast the sole nay vote when the transfer originally came before the board, supported the transaction this time around. 

Kaplan said that she had switched her vote from abstaining to approval this time “only because FEMA is waiting for the buses in New Orleans for the Katrina victims, and they are really needed down there.” 

It is not clear how AC Transit’s NABI buses will be used to support Katrina victims in New Orleans. 

The NABI-Van Hool transfer originally came before the board in March, when Fernandez told board members that the district had received an offer from the ABC Company, the U.S. distributor of Van Hool buses, to purchase 10 AC Transit NABI buses for use by the Homeland Security Agency for Hurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans. That number was increased to 20 in early April. ABC offered a purchase price of $85,000 each for the buses. 

In its March 21 resolution authorizing the original transfer, the board gave permission to Fernandez “to transfer all of the remaining federal interest in the [NABI] buses to another federally funded asset yet to be determined.” 

The federal interest comes from the subsidy provided to AC Transit when the NABI buses were originally purchased by the district in 2000. That subsidy is contingent on the district keeping the buses for the federally recommended operation life of public transit buses—12 years. The federal government requires a pro-rated reimbursement for that subsidy whenever local transit districts retire or sell such buses earlier before 12 years. In this case, AC Transit was proposing getting rid of the NABI buses five years early. 

In his July 2 memo recommending continuation of the NABI-Van Hool transfer, Fernandez wrote that “staff was working with the FTA [Federal Transportation Authority] to approve a transfer of the federal interest in these buses to a future capital project. However, staff has recently been informed by FTA that it will not approve the transfer of the federal interest; the alternative is to reimburse the federal interest (based on straight-line depreciation). Staff has evaluated this alternative and determined that it still would be in the district’s best interest to proceed with the proposal.” 

In both March with the original 10 bus transfer and again in April with the 6 bus addition, Fernandez wrote board members that the “fiscal impact [of the bus transfer] will be determined by the proceeds of the sale, estimated at $850,000, the cost of the original procurement of the new buses, and the net reduction in maintenance costs required for keeping the older buses in good operating condition.” But Fernandez also noted in his original March 21 memo that “the proposed early bus replacement will result in a $1.2 million savings to the region.” 

In neither one of those first two memos did Fernandez estimate the maintenance savings. In the July memo which revealed the dropping out of the federal interest transfer, however, Fernandez wrote that “it is estimated that the district would save $1.488 million in maintenance costs.” Fernandez estimated that the saved maintenance costs of the 16 NABI buses would be $93,000 a bus. 

But where that $93,000 maintenance figure comes from is not included in the director’s memo. 

AC Transit Public Information Officer Clarence Johnson said that the figure comes from the anticipated cost of replacing transmissions and seats, repainting, and “putting in a new engine” for the existing NABIs if they were to remain in district hands. “After seven years, virtually everything has to be redone on these buses,” Johnson said by telephone. 


Local Attorney Now Heads Community Law Center

By Rio Bauce
Tuesday August 07, 2007

The East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC) is undergoing a makeover, not only becaused it has moved, but also because it has a new executive director. Last month, the center promoted a minority rights advocate, Tirien Steinbach, to be its new executive director. Steinbach replaced Interim Executive Director Deborah Moss-West. 

“I grew up five blocks from here,” said Steinbach. “I knew when I went into a legal career that I wanted to serve low-income people and people of color. I wanted to see an increase of people of color in law and justice work. Also, I wanted to encourage our student population to reflect our clientele. It’s the perfect synergy of these issues that motivated me to get involved in law.” 

Steinbach grew up in Berkeley, attended Berkeley High School, and graduated in 1999 from the Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley. She began work at the EBCLC in 2001. Before she became the executive director, she was the director of clinical programs, where she supported and guided attorneys, taught seminars at Boalt Hall, and started an outreach program for young attorneys. 

Three years ago, EBCLC realized that they had outgrown their offices and began a campaign to find a new location. Two years later, they bought a new property at 2921 Adeline St. and three months ago finally moved there from their offices on 3130 Shattuck Ave. 

“It’s wonderful,” said Steinbach. “It’s equally convenient for clients. What’s wonderful to hear is that they feel the excellent services we provide are not only reflected by the staff but also by the buildings as well. It’s very gratifying to hear that from clients.” 

The EBCLC provides free legal services for people in Berkeley, specializing in issues of housing, welfare, health, community economic justice, and “clean slate” (restoration of the civil rights of ex-offenders). It has been providing these services since its founding in September of 1988 by a group of Boalt Hall students. Steinbach said that all next year the center will be celebrating its twentieth anniversary. 

“We are the largest legal service in Alameda County,” she said. “We serve thousands of clients every year. When they need someone to listen to them, we help them with that. Sometimes we are able to advocate for them. I hope that we will be around for years to come.” 

 


Popular Car Wash Faces Eviction

By Judith Scherr
Tuesday August 07, 2007

Come fall—or maybe winter, as far as the Kandy Mann can guess—there may be one less African American-owned business in Berkeley, four fewer full-time jobs and one less place to get a car hand-washed any day of the week.  

That’s because Kandy Alford could lose the site at the corner of Ashby Avenue and Sacramento Street where he’s operated a car-washing business since 2000.  

Business at Kandy Mann’s Detail car wash is steady, but won’t make the owner or his employees rich. Alford can afford the $2,000 monthly rent—though he got temporarily behind during a recent hospitalization—but he cannot pay the $4,000 a month he says the competition for the site offered Craig Hertz, owner of the former gas station, a red-painted brick building with a pagoda-style tile roof.  

Biofuel Oasis is a women-owned cooperative that operates a biodiesel filling station on Fourth Street at Dwight Way and sells fuel made from recycled vegetable oil. Hertz has apparently agreed to rent the site to them. To convert the use from a car wash to a fueling station, Biofuel still needs to obtain a use permit from the city and is slated to go before the Zoning Adjustments Board in October. 

Biofuel has also asked the city to defer payment for $5,410.25 in permit fees due to financial hardship.  

May 10, Jennifer Radtke, a member of the collective, wrote to Dan Marks, director of planning: “In order to make the project feasible, we need the fees deferred, so we can use the money instead on all the improvements to the property to make it into a viable station. We believe the project offers many benefits to the city of Berkeley that justify a fee deferral.” 

Among those benefits, the letter cites an “easy, local source of biodiesel,” and notes the operation will be powered by solar energy “with lush green plants.” Further, they promised to “provide lots of positive publicity for the city.”  

A worker who answered the phone at Biofuel Oasis on Friday said she could not comment on the move because there may be something new in the works. She said she was unable to share that with the media until the issue could be discussed with a member of the collective who was out of town. 

Alford does not know exactly what’s happening with the property. At first, he said he was told it was being sold to Biofuel Oasis and later told it was to be rented. Then, he was informed the deal would take place “immediately,” but has since learned it is to be in several months. 

Property owner Craig Hertz, president of Lafayette, Calif.-based AEI Consultants, did not respond to the Daily Planet’s requests for an interview by deadline Monday. 

Alford said he just found out that Biofuel won’t have a use-permit hearing at the zoning board until October. 

“I’m here month to month. I’m in limbo,” Alford said, adding, “I don’t need all this stress.” 

Pamela Isaacs has been letting the business owners in the neighborhood know about what may be happening to the car wash and says they support him. And she’s been helping Alford learn about his options and his rights.  

“This man is a 1935 Super Station,” she said of Alford. “To us, he’s a historic landmark.” 

Dave Fogarty, the city’s economic development project coordinator, told the Planet Friday that if Alford comes to them, they would try to help him to find another place of business. However, there are few options in Berkeley.  

Former gas stations like the one Alford occupies currently are being redeveloped, Fogarty said. 

Kandy’s has been able to benefit from the fact that the site is difficult to build on. According to Fogarty, it has a toxic plume beneath it, not from the former gas station, but from a dry cleaning business that was once across the street. That means that projects which require excavation might also require expensive environmental remediation of the soil. 

Given that the development planned at the former Tune-Up Masters at 1640 University Ave. has fallen through, that site might be a temporary option for Kandy’s, Fogarty said. 

 

Photograph by Judith Scherr 

Kandy Mann’s Detail Center at Ashby and Sacramento may have to move. 


Oakland Police Say Bailey Murderer Did Not Act Alone

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Tuesday August 07, 2007

Oakland Police officials are saying that a 19-year-old employee of Oakland’s Your Black Muslim Bakery has confessed to the shotgun murder of Oakland Post editor and veteran journalist Chauncey Bailey. But Oakland Deputy Chief Howard Jordan said at a Monday morning press conference that OPD investigators do not believe the assertion of San Francisco native Devaughdre Broussard that he acted alone in Bailey’s shooting, and are pursuing leads about possible accomplices. 

The 57-year-old Bailey was shot and killed by a lone gunman on the corner of 14th Street and Alice in downtown Oakland early Thursday morning as Bailey was walking to work. 

In the pre-dawn hours on Friday, Oakland police raided the Your Black Muslim Bakery headquarters on San Pablo Avenue near the Emeryville border on warrants concerning murder and kidnapping charges unrelated to the Bailey murder. Police officials said that seven of the nine persons named in the warrants were arrested, and that “firearm-related evidence linked to the Bailey murder” was recovered. 

Shortly after the police raid, inspectors with the Alameda County Health Department closed down the bakery because of reported health code violations. 

Your Black Muslim Bakery was founded by the late Dr. Yusuf Bey, who had once been a member of the Nation of Islam, now headed by Minister Louis Farrakhan. In their press conference announcing the raid and arrests, Oakland police officials pointedly noted that Your Black Muslim Bakery is not affiliated with the Nation of Islam, or with the local NOI mosque headed by Minister Keith Muhammad.  

At the time of his death in 2003, Bey was under state indictment for allegations that he had molested several underage women. 

On Friday, a spokesperson for Your Black Muslim Bakery told reporters that the recent arrests and allegations do not represent the purpose of the organization. “This is not a reflection of Dr. Yusuf Bey,” the Associated Press reported Shamir Yusuf Bey as saying. “We are all sons of Dr. Yusuf Bey. He has taught us morals, he has taught us how to be advocates in our community.” Many of Yusuf Bey’s followers adopted his last name, and it was not clear whether the spokesperson was an actual blood relative of the organization’s late founder. 

Bailey had reportedly recently completed a story about Your Black Muslim Bakery for the Oakland Post. In an interview with KTVU Channel 2 news, Oakland Post publisher Paul Cobb said that he had decided not to publish a Bailey story two weeks ago because of a possible controversy, but Cobb would not say whether the story involved Your Black Muslim Bakery. 

It is not certain what type of story Bailey may have written about the bakery, or if he was working on a follow-up investigation at the time of his death. 

Memorial services for Bailey have been scheduled for Wednesday, Aug. 8, 11 a.m., at St. Benedict’s Church, 2245 82nd Ave., in Oakland. Bailey’s friends and associates are planning to set up a memorial fund in his name, but details about the fund have not yet been released. 

 

Contributed photo  

Oakland Police Department Deputy Chief Howard A. Jordan and Public Information Officer Roland Holmgren announce arrests in the murder of Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey, citing “firearm-related evidence” that links the crime to West Berkeley’s Your Black Muslim Bakery.


Southside Rapist Strikes in Apartment Building Lobbies

By Richard Brenneman
Tuesday August 07, 2007

Berkeley police are seeking a suspect in two Southside rapes, one on July 6 and the other Aug. 2. 

In both instances, the attacker managed to enter the secured lobby of an apartment building, where he targeted and raped an Asian American woman. 

“This is very unusual,” said Berkeley Police Lt. Wesley Hester Jr. “Both of these happened in the daytime, and both involved strangers.”  

Most rapists are known to their victims, and most occur at night—and not in apartment house lobbies. 

“We think the same person was involved in both,” he said. “We are interviewing witness and we are getting some leads.” 

The first attack occurred at about 3 p.m., in the lobby of an apartment building in the 2500 block of Hillegass Avenue, and the second attack happened about 6 p.m. in a lobby in the 2100 block of Haste Street. 

The suspect is described as a thin, well-dressed, dark-skinned African American in his late 20s, who wears his hair in shoulder-length dreadlocks or twists. 

Hester urged anyone with any information about the attacks to call BPD’s Sex Crimes Detail at 981-5735. 

Residents should be aware of their surroundings and avoid speaking on cell phones or listening to recorded music while walking in areas where attackers could be lurking, including alleys, doorways, parking lots and stairwells, the department urged in a bulletin on the attacks. 

The department also urges potential victims not to walk or jog alone whenever feasible. 


War and Peace Notes: Grand Lake Screens New Documentary on Media’s Role in U.S. Wars

By Judith Scherr
Tuesday August 07, 2007

Thursday, the community will have a chance to see the Bay Area premiere of War Made Easy, a film narrated by Sean Penn and based on Norman Solomon’s book by the same name. The film exposes the role of the media as cheerleader for the war in Iraq and shows, using archival footage, how the media played an almost identical role during the War in Vietnam and earlier wars. 

One of the tried-and-true media techniques Solomon points to in the film is comparing the demonized leader in question to Hitler. Another practice is to repeat over and over again that the U.S. loves peace, does not like to fight, but is compelled to, in order to save the poor innocents of the country in question. The media also sell the war by focusing on interesting aspects of advanced warfare technology. 

And it shows how dissident journalists are marginalized. 

War Made Easy will be shown Thursday, 7 p.m. at the Grand Lake Theatre, 3200 Grand Lake Ave., Oakland. Solomon and filmmaker Loretta Alper will be on hand after the movie to answer questions. Tickets are $12 to benefit the National Radio Project’s Making Contact. 

 

Barbara Lee speaks 

Rep. Barbara Lee has been exceptionally busy of late in her efforts to turn the nation toward peace.  

On Aug. 1, the House passed Lee’s bill barring funds from being used to establish permanent bases in Iraq or to exercise control over Iraqi oil.  

On July 30 the House passed Lee’s Darfur Accountability and Divestment Act, which strengthens states’ rights to divest from companies whose business is supporting the genocide in Darfur and bars such companies from receiving federal contracts.  

The previous week, Lee led a bipartisan group of 70 representatives in writing to President George Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi advising them that they will vote for money for Iraq only if it fully funds the withdrawal of U.S. troops.  

In part, the July 19 letter said: “More than 3,600 of our brave soldiers have died in Iraq. More than 26,000 have been seriously wounded. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed or injured in the hostilities and more than 4 million have been displaced from their homes. Furthermore, this conflict has degenerated into a sectarian civil war [for which] U.S. taxpayers have paid more than $500 billion…. 

“We agree with a clear and growing majority of the American people who are opposed to continued, open-ended U.S. military operations in Iraq, and believe it is unwise and unacceptable for you to continue to unilaterally impose these staggering costs and the soaring debt on Americans currently and for generations to come.” 

Lee will discuss recent legislative activity today, Aug. 7, 6 p.m. at the Piedmont Community Center, 711 Highland Ave. 

 

Events marking Hiroshima 

With thoughts on today’s war in Iraq, the 62nd anniversary of the U.S. dropping the bomb on Hiroshima was memorialized Sunday evening in a lantern ceremony at Aquatic Park, sponsored by the Berkeley City Council and numerous peace organizations; on Monday, children memorialized the event by making orgami peace cranes at the Berkeley Public Library; others gathered Monday to protest ongoing weapons research at Lawrence Livermore Labs. 

 

Next week: ‘Shut Up’ 

Aug. 17, at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists Hall 

1924 Cedar St., singer-songwriter Hali Hammer will perform live music to introduce Shut Up and Sing, a documentary about the Dixie Chicks, who spoke out against Bush administration war-mongering and in response got hit with a firestorm of right-wing attacks. 

 

 

 

 

Photograph by Marco Sanchez 

A Japanese Lantern Ceremony for world peace was held in Aquatic Park Sunday.


Fire Department Log

By Richard Brenneman
Tuesday August 07, 2007

Forgotten range triggers blaze 

Don’t leave your stove burner glowing when you jump into the shower. 

That’s the lesson one Berkeley resident learned Friday evening, when a return to the kitchen yielded a vision of flames spouting from the stovetop. 

Deputy Fire Chief David P. Orth said no serious damage resulted to the home in the 1000 block of Delaware Street. 

“The occupant was taking a shower and the kids were down for a nap when some grease caught fire,” he said. 

The flames were quickly knocked down by arriving firefighters, he said.


Landmarks Commission Debates Significance of 19th-Century Home

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday August 07, 2007

The Berkeley Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) did not declare the 19th-century dwelling at 3100 Shattuck Ave. a structure of merit or a city landmark Thursday. 

While co-owners Maggie Robbins and Brian Hill can now take the proposed development to the Design Review Commission on Aug. 16, they are worried that the building might come back to LPC for landmarking in the future. 

A group of neighbors turned up at the LPC meeting to oppose the proposed three-story mixed-use building project, which would demolish the current single-story structure on Shattuck. 

They contend that the demolition would cause significant historic and cultural loss for the neighborhood. But project proponents said that the building was dilapidated and would have to be pulled down. 

A Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA) report states that the building is located in the Ashby Station area, which could be potentially eligible for nomination to the National Registrar of Historic Places as a historic district. 

The Ashby Station neighborhood, now an eclectic modern-day transportation hub serving the East Bay with the BART Richmond line and AC Transit, is an example of a 20th-century American streetcar suburb. 

According to the BAHA report, the removal of several blocks of the historic Ashby Station district in the 1960s for the construction of BART did not impede the presence of a “distinct historic context within the ‘Area of Potential Effect’ surrounding the Ed Roberts Campus project site.” 

The building’s owners voiced their difference. 

“There is no recognizable survey recognizing the district as historic,” said Robbins. 

“The city has not recognized the district as historic. The BAHA document is not official either,” she said. “But the issue of historical resource can mean that people can keep raising this issue. If they want to go ahead and landmark it, it’s fine. But they can’t point to it having any architectural or cultural significance so far.” 

Robbins and Hill bought 3100 Shattuck Ave. from the estate of an ailing woman in 2006 for approximately $474,400, with a plan of demolishing the house to build three compact units over a small commercial space. 

“It’s the kind of place we would like to live in,” Robbins said. “Small, energetic and with the promise of transit-oriented development which would help us reduce our carbon footprint. We envisioned a community-oriented business on the ground floor, not a Wal-Mart. As a result we started putting together the paperwork for the landmarks commission and that’s when the neighbors started raising the issue of historic significance.” 

Robbins and Hill held community meetings in February and May to address the neighbors’ concerns but were unable to convince them that the building was historically unimportant. 

One of the principal opponents of the project is Robert Lauriston, who lives at 1918 Woolsey St. 

In a letter to the LPC, Lauriston states that the staff report misinterprets BAHA’s survey map of the neighborhood, which graphically displays the evolution of the streetcar suburb from its origin in the 19th century to its decline in the mid-20th century. 

Lauriston said that the map included 3100 Shattuck in the list of contributing structures in the National Register of Historic Places historic district application form, which neighbors plan to submit to the California Office of Historic Preservation next year. 

Another neighbor said that the building had African migration cultural and historical significance.  

“People are just throwing out these claims,” said Robbins. “We are hoping to hear something specific but we aren’t really hearing anything.” 

Shattuck resident Zoe Smith spoke in favor of the project. 

“Every house in a neighborhood has a story to tell and a significance but it doesn’t mean that it has to be there forever,” she said. “What that corner needs is a high-density structure and a commercial space.” 

Currently, Shattuck Avenue is peppered with a cross section of architectural styles which include Neo-classical row houses, Victorians and the modern concrete-block structure which was formerly a liquor store and most recently the Octopus’s Garden aquarium store, but is now for rent again. The streetcars are long gone.  

Although the original construction date of 3100 Shattuck remains unknown, city and county records estimate it to have been built during 1904 or 1906. 

Berkeley planning director Dan Marks told the LPC that in his opinion the building possessed no special cultural, educational or architectural value and was not eligible for landmark status. 

Describing the wood frame building as unremarkable, Robbins told the LPC that the building was in very bad condition. 

“The exterior is rather plain,” she told the Planet. “It’s not the classically decorated Victorian people think of. There’s a lot of rot and the foundation is shoddy. The plumbing and wiring are both old. The people who sold it slapped a coat of paint inside and outside but that doesn’t solve anything,”  

Landmarks Commissioner and Daily Planet Calendar Editor Anne Wagley made a motion to initiate a study of the structure, which failed to get enough votes to carry. 

“I would like to see an investigation of whether the building is a historic resource because I care about the neighborhood,” Wagley told the Planet. “A building is not historically significant only when it is built by a famous architect. Even though it has a Shattuck Avenue address, it has frontage on a street where people are trying to restore their homes.” 


Battle of Marin Avenue Nears Key Court Ruling

By Richard Brenneman
Tuesday August 07, 2007

Ray Chamberlin took the Battle of Marin Avenue to a venerable venue last week when he faced lawyers representing the governments of two cities in a San Francisco courtroom. 

Facing three justices from the California Court of Appeal First District, he pled his case against attorneys representing Berkeley and Albany. 

Chamberlin had challenged the controversial reconfiguration of the roadway by the two city governments, which transformed the thoroughfare from four automobile lanes to two, with the goal of slowing traffic on the heavily used street. 

Two bike lanes were added, along with a center lane for making left turns. 

Proponents of the reconfiguration argued that the changes would make the street safer by slowing down cars that used the avenue for commuting to homes in the hills. 

East Bay bicycling advocates lobbied hard for the change, and both city councils endorsed the project, following adoption of separate environmental reviews. 

Chamberlin, a retired electrical engineer who lives in the Berkeley hills, challenged the project on behalf of the thousands of motorists who rely on Marin as a main route from their homes in the hills to the flatlands and freeway below. 

He said he doesn’t expect the court to order the roadway returned to the way it was—but he does hope for a written decision that will set a new precedent about the way environmental laws apply to similar joint projects by two governments in the future. 

What bothers Chamberlin is the way two cities handled what he said amounts to one project. 

“It’s really one project, and I don’t think the way they did it fits what the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) says, or what the case law says,” said Chamberlin. 

The retired engineer found himself in the state Court of Appeal in San Francisco last Wednesday, facing Berkeley Deputy City Attorney Zach Cowan and Robert J. Zweben, representing the City of Albany. 

“I started out looking for an attorney, and I consulted one early on. There was a group here who was interested, but there wasn’t enough money,” he said. ”Environmental attorneys are really expensive, and there was no way I could afford one.” 

So Chamberlin went “pro per,” legalese for representing himself. 

“The cities took me seriously,” he said. 

Delving into CEQA, Chamberlin said he grew concerned that the project had been handled in opposition to the spirit of the law, which generally holds that all aspects of major cases should be handled in one environmental review, rather than being split. 

“The geography of the avenue is continuous and it has always been named the same” in both cities, he said.  

The lay litigator said he was especially concerned because “Albany basically told Berkeley to shut up about it until they were done, and then Berkeley did it. These were real tactics going on, and I don’t think what they did fits what CEQA requires.” 

Berkeley Deputy City Attorney Zach Cowan said the court has to issue a ruling within 90 days of the hearing, though a recent ruling came down in just two weeks. 

“I would hope to hear something within the next 30 days,” he said. 

While Chamberlin said he doesn’t expect that the street would be restored to its prior condition should the court rule in his favor, Cowan said “he can’t have it both ways.” 

Asked if a victory for Chamberlin would mean that the roadways would have to be restored to its earlier four-lane incarnation, Cowan said the implication is that it would be, though the ultimate decision “would be up to the Superior Court on remand.” 

In his original court filing on Feb. 28, 2005, Chamberlin sought a court order mandating a single Environmental Impact Report that covered the entire project from San Pablo Avenue in Albany to The Alameda in Berkeley—with the alternative being abandonment of the project. 

But the reconfiguration went on as the case continued, and in her Jan. 13, 2006, ruling, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Bonnie Sabraw found that Chamberlin had filed his action too late to encompass the larger, Albany segment of the project. 

Approximately one mile of the affected roadway falls within Albany city limits, while only four blocks are inside the City of Berkeley. Because his action was filed more than 30 days after the Albany City Council approved the project, that aspect of the case was moot, the judge ruled. 

Sabraw’s decision gave Chamberlin a victory in Berkeley only, and after additional hearings in the county court, Chamberlin filed a writ of appeal on March 27, 2006. 

Following a blizzard of notices and documentation, the case finally climaxed in last week’s hearing before a three-judge panel


Historic Blood House Back on Zoning Board Agenda

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday August 07, 2007

The Blood House is back on the Berkeley Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) agenda Thursday after the board failed to take action almost two years ago on its proposed removal from 2526 Durant Ave. to make room for mixed-use development . 

The meeting will be held at 7 p.m. at the Old City Hall, 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way.  

Berkeley developers Ruegg and Ellsworth will ask the Zoning Board for a permit to construct a 34,158-square-foot, five-story building with 44 apartments, 18 parking spaces and retail space after moving the historic structure to a different lot. 

Designed by architect Robert Gray Frise, the Blood House was built in 1891 for Mrs. Ellen Blood, who first came to Berkeley in 1889. This stately Victorian near Telegraph Avenue is flanked by two more landmarks—the Albra and the Brasfield—on each side. 

The Blood House was declared a structure of merit by the Berkeley Landmarks Preservation Commission in September 1999. 

Ruegg and Ellsworth’s appeal of the designation failed at the City Council a month later. 

The zoning board was previously unable to make the findings necessary to approve the demolition of the historically designated structure and had wanted the developers to explore other alternatives which would help preserve it. 

Ruegg and Ellsworth presented the idea of relocating the Blood House to an empty lot owned by developer John Gordon at Regent Street and Dwight Way at a May 27, 2004 ZAB meeting. 

Plans to move the landmarked John Woolley House at 2509 Haste St. to the same empty lot to allow Berkeley developer Ken Sarachan an opportunity to build on the site, which is adjacent to another site he owns at the corner of Haste and Telegraph, are also being explored. 

The John Woolley House is currently owned by UC Berkeley. 

At a Dec. 8, 2005 ZAB meeting, staff was directed to prepare an addendum to the certified environmental impact report (EIR) for the Blood House in order to come up with the required findings. According to staff, the addendum to the EIR, which will be presented to the ZAB Thursday, meets CEQA requirements. Under CEQA, moving a structure designated as a historic resource is equivalent to demolishing it. 

After reviewing the addendum, the board will direct the staff about whether or not they should go ahead with the building proposal. 

2323 Shattuck Ave. 

The ZAB will once again hear the request of Berkeley architect Jim Novosel to convert the Fidelity Bank Building at 2323 Shattuck Ave. into a mixed-use development. 

At the July 31 meeting, the board agreed that while they were in favor of the proposed preservation and reuse of this historic structure, they wanted 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. 

Currently, the city does not have any such fund or even a list of projects for which this fee might be collected. 

The property is currently owned by members of the Lakireddy family who own a significant amount of property in downtown Berkeley. The proposed project would take the existing 4,000-square-foot structure and convert the two-story bank space into a restaurant and a dwelling unit.  

The project also 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.  

According to staff reports, the city attorney has advised that an in-lieu fee would not be enough to make a variance for the finding which would allow development to occur without any on-site parking. 

Staff recommends that ZAB deny the variance and recommend that the Planning Commission and the City Council conduct a nexus study which would help decide on the range of fees and the list of projects for which such fees could be used. 

 

Photograph by Daniella Thompson 

The Blood House, 2526 Durant Ave.


Plants to Grow Beyond the Pale

By Shirley Barker, Special to the Planet
Tuesday August 07, 2007

As noted in a previous article, globe artichokes are perennial plants that need a permanent spot outside the vegetable area designated for a four-year rotation plan. These are not the only plants needing their own separate place: rhubarb and horseradish are others. 

Plant horseradish among the vegetables and plan on spending the next two years trying to get rid of it since it spreads like wildfire. The smallest piece of root left behind is likely to regenerate. Planting it in a tall cylinder with a diameter of 12 inches is recommended by some experts as a way to confine it. This was no deterrent to mine, it simply tunneled beneath and popped up all over the place.  

Since horseradish does not need the lush loam of a well-tended vegetable garden, it will do quite well with leaner fare in some out-of-the-way corner. Like globe artichokes, it will die down and return bigger and better than ever, slowly expanding over time. Harvesting the outside roots helps to curb its spread. Like rhubarb, it thrives on winter chill.  

Horseradish makes an underused yet addictive condiment. Roast beef without horseradish is unimaginable. It goes well with smoked fish and makes a sharp contrast to sweet beets. In medieval England it accompanied oysters. There were oyster beds in the coastal village where I grew up, said to date from Roman times. Since gardeners there still dig up Roman trinkets, this seems plausible. Alas, some contaminant destroyed them, although the large square beds are still visible at low tide. Given the pungency of the navy blue mud that is revealed then, intimately familiar to sailors who have miscalculated the tide, one cannot imagine any mollusc therein fit to eat.  

Scrape and grate the roots after digging and washing. A potato peeler is helpful in carving across, around and into the twists and channels of the root. Add a touch of vinegar and salt to the gratings and stir them into thick cream. This is horseradish sauce as it should be and rarely is. If space is at a premium in your garden and the craving for it hits, hurry to Brennan’s, our beloved (though slated for demolition) Irish eatery on Fourth Street just south of University Avenue, whose creamy horseradish, until I started to grow my own, used to leave me gasping, helping to expand my jaws to accommodate their massive sandwiches. 

Horseradish is a crucifer, Armoracia rusticana, and has been in cultivation for hundreds of years. It grows wild here now, introduced by early settlers. It is one of the bitter herbs of Judaism, eaten during Passover. It is the main component of the Japanese wasabi, tinted green. Creamy white is its true color, unless it has oxydized, when it turns brown. (Quickly adding just a little of the vinegar as soon as it is grated prevents this.) The radish part of its common name derives from the Latin for root, radix. The horse part seems to have been corrupted, from an obscurely related word, by the English, as is their wont. Anything with horse in it tends to mean coarse, as in the horse bean and horse gram, both used for fodder. One can imagine some raised equine eyebrows if A. rusticana is added to the morning mash. 

Like horseradish, rhubarb in full growth bears huge, lush leaves that add a decorative touch to the flower garden. Tucked into the herbacious border, when the leaves have died back to a shriveled unsightly heap the plant will be hidden by the Michaelmas daisies, the lupines, the asters, and the oriental poppies. Since, as noted, it needs winter chill to thrive, it is not always successfully grown in Berkeley’s horticultural zone. But it will love the side dressings of compost and mulches usually given to flower beds. 

If rhubarb seems to be doing well in early spring, growth can be hastened by up-ending a bushel basket over the entire plant, forcing the edible stems upwards to seek the light, and making them tender. Flowering stems should be removed, to prevent diversion of the plant’s energy from its stalks. Since nature’s goal is always to set seed, the rhubarb-lover must intervene if edible stalks are desired. 

The origins of rhubarb, Rheum rhaponticum, are uncertain. One ancestor (it is thought to be a hybrid) might have been a wild Siberian. It is in the polygonaceae family, where buckwheat belongs, so definitely has a touch of the Russian in it. Furthermore, the specific epithet is believed by some to derive from Rha, the ancient name for the river Volga, on whose banks it used to grow wild. No wonder it enjoys frosty winters. 

Some purists call rhubarb a vegetable because we eat the stalks, not the fruits. Do they call the globe artichoke a fruit, since we eat its flower buds? As T.S. Eliot pointed out in another context, the naming of things is a serious matter. As he then goes on to demonstrate, it has its absurdities. Names are map-like, enormously helpful and interesting, yet not fundamentally essential. 

Like so many plants under cultivation for centuries, both horseradish and rhubarb reputedly cure many ailments. It seems likely that both might have purgative properties if eaten in excess. There seems to have been some contest between beets and horseradish as to which, in the opinion of the Delphic oracle, was worth its weight in gold. Since horseradish certainly clears the sinuses and contains some vitamin C, and so might help to alleviate the symptoms of the common cold, it is surely worthy of some prize.  

Rhubarb at one time was used to replace tobacco, only discernible as bogus when scrutinized under a microscope. It still, as far as I know, has one endearing usage: when a group voice is required on stage or screen, to be heard at a distance, the actors traditionally murmur “rhubarb rhubarb.”  

Rhubarb is made into wine in English villages, providing a Miss Marples touch if improperly made, since an incorporation, accidental or not, of a leaf or two would make a lethal digestive. The high amount of oxalic acid in the leaves is what has been known to kill. I’d rather take my rhubarb safe and solid, digging into a dish of the pink tart stalks stewed with plenty of sugar and strewn with ripe strawberries, perhaps tucked under a pie crust and baked until golden and oozing rosy juice.


Healthy Living: A Passion for Exercise and Healthier Food Choices

By Wendy Stephens
Tuesday August 07, 2007

When I was younger, and TV was in its relative infancy, and the big radio in my mother’s and my grandmother’s kitchens was a kind of second hearth to gather round and literally rub shoulders over while listening to distant yet homey messages beam in, I became very taken with my mother’s radio idol, lay nutritionist Carleton Fredericks, and my mother’s TV idol, feats of wonder strongman, Godfather of Fitness Jack LaLanne.  

Carleton Fredericks used to say that if you were stranded on a desert island (shades of my son’s former favorite youth survivalist book Hatchet) all you needed to live would be bananas, oranges, and eggs. Mom would say that the lecithin in eggs emulsified the cholesterol. Although Mr. Fredericks has been somewhat debunked as a vitamin pusher (I don’t remember that part at all), at least his radio show was called: “Living Should Be Fun.” In any case, I drew several lessons from that pithy gem: Fruit is good; potassium is great; protein rocks; love that Vitamin C; stay mostly or all vegetarian. 

Jack LaLanne, who still in my imagination at least, pulls multi-ton ships from a rope and tether anchored by his own choppers during his pre-dawn two-hour swim, always espoused one message that has stayed with me my whole life: “Avoid processed foods.”  

What a godsend, as that three-word directive has kept me away from fast food joints, the inner aisles of grocery stores, Velveeta and margarine, leading me gracefully and swiftly to Berkeley, Alice Waters, the once-nascent Gourmet Ghetto, and the notion that indeed our bodies are our temples.  

“If Jack can do it, I can do it: Exercise and eat right,” I used to think. And so began a lifetime of passion for performing ballet, swimming, martial arts, as well as growing, preparing, and sharing fresh organic fruits, vegetables and whole grains.  

My dad ate a heavy meat diet; he would even say, “Pass the fat,” and eat the skin off our chicken, and the trimmings off the steak and roast beef that my mother and my brothers had been trained to regard as cholesterol-laden and therefore unhealthy.  

He ate cured meats and enjoyed big pastrami deli sandwiches as well as making bacon (and eggs) for us on weekends. I looked forward to hearing him say outside the door of my “Paint It Black” tiny lair, a.k.a. bedroom: “Wendy, breakfast is ready,” and have loved chefs ever since. 

At the ripe young (now) age of 40, my dad also decided that climbing stairs and playing sports could lead to a heart attack in someone so old, so he hung up his tennis racket and sneakers and spent more time in his armchair as my brothers became old enough to mow the lawn and do the gardening. Dad got prostate cancer at 60 and was dead of bone cancer by 66. 

Mom, an absolutely frenetic person and vigorous race walker, primarily vegetarian eater of fresh foods and whole grains, eschewer of refined sugar, white flour, candy, and animal fat, is still going strong at 86, with her nearly 92-year-old former union leader/boxer long-term companion, who eats nitrates, hot dogs, cheap lox and anything he damn well pleases, as he keeps himself occupied by making sarcastic comments about the whole world except his blood family. 

Go figure. No one knows for sure how big a role genetics and environment (and plain old feistiness and love of life) play in longevity, but I know one thing: A strong sense of community, however one defines that term, is crucial in feeling swaddled and coddled as one advances through the years, running the streets and parks and tracks, seeing old friends and famous personages at the downtown Berkeley YMCA, shopping the farmers’ markets, and sharing tidbits of nutritional and physical culture knowledge as we local residents come back from our myriad travels, either in the physical or virtual world. 

My passion to prevent and reverse childhood obesity as chairman of the nonprofit Gardens on Wheels Association is driven by my love of exercise and lifelong healthier eating choices (except for the early teenage mania for chocolate that was part of rebelling against the strict injunction against candy consumption). 

We never had soda in my house (waste of money AND unhealthy), and soda is now implicated, in all of its 47 ounces for 69 cents giganticized evil glory, as the leading cause of childhood weight gain and early onset, preventable Type II diabetes.  

For me, the love of life and quest for fitness and meaningful longevity all started with my family, Carleton Fredericks, and Jack LaLanne. “Exercise and avoid processed food.” There is more to it, but that is a good beginning. 


Opinion

Editorials

Editorial: Planners Come and Go, But the Department Never Changes

By Becky O’Malley
Friday August 10, 2007

The announcement that Mark Rhoades is leaving Berkeley’s Planning Department for greener pastures has been greeted in many parts of the city with expressions of enthusiasm—they’re, in a phrase, jumping for joy. One group of citizens, the kind who would sign their letters “Outraged” if the Planet allowed it, is even hosting a party at Café de la Paz on Monday night to celebrate his departure. The paper has received a number of caustic letters about his track record, a few so caustic that the opinion editors breathed a sigh of relief when the senders had second thoughts and withdrew them. We don’t really like to print personal attacks on private individuals, but we don’t like to censor letters either. And it’s hard to top an earlier correspondent’s “duplicitous insect” appellation for Mr. Rhoades—anything more is piling on. 

Civil servants like Rhoades inhabit a curious gray area between public and private status. They’re paid with public money, supposed to be cogs in a well-oiled apparatus which implements policies presumably at the behest of the voters. In theory at least public servants, as they used to be called, are not supposed to use their jobs as levers for advancing either their personal fortunes or their personal political beliefs. But the planning profession has historically had problems keeping the bright line distinction between their own desires and their duty to the democratic process. 

Any analysis of what’s wrong in Berkeley which focuses on the person called Mark Rhoades misses the point, and leaves the city vulnerable to yet another round of more of the same when he’s gone. For many years planning departments in many cities, not just Berkeley, have been infested with ideologues and/or dominated by developers. There are many reasons why this is true. 

The root cause goes way back to the early seventies: Proposition 13. That initiative, supposedly for the benefit of taxpayers, dramatically changed the way city governments were financed. Most revenues no longer came from property taxes, forcing cities to think up creative ways of paying for the services residents of cities like Berkeley expected. 

Funding planning departments from fees assessed on permits seemed like a good idea at the time, since a major part of their functions relate to monitoring and regulating building projects. But the law of unintended consequences soon kicked in. Departmental budgets became more and more dependent on income from development fees, less development meant less budget, and nobody enjoys laying off employees. Keeping the development engine chugging away, whether we need it or not, became important for keeping planning departments solvent. 

Even without the financial incentive, there’s another factor at work. Patti Dacey, who has served on several key city commissions, is fond of quoting what her administrative law professor told his students on the first day of class when she was in law school: every regulatory body is eventually captured by the industry it’s supposed to regulate. That’s a good rule to remember. Think of the PUC, the FDA, the FCC—any acronym agency you know anything about. And it’s true in spades in planning departments.  

Developers, by the very nature of their job, are frequently in and out of the Berkeley building known not so fondly in some quarters as The Planning Palace (one of the nicer buildings, downtown with its own roof garden and other amenities.) It’s only natural that they quickly get on a first name basis with the planning staff. Anyone masochistic enough to watch Zoning Adjustments Board meetings soon notices that it’s been “Mark” and “Ali” and “Patrick” for a long time, not “Mr. Rhoades” and “Mr. Kashani” and “Mr. Kennedy,” and they all are chummy with “Rena,” the developers’ favorite lawyer. And then there’s the revolving door problem: witness the rumor that “Mark” will soon be working for “Ali.”  

A third element in the mix is ideology. Planners are educated, often poorly educated, to believe that they know more than is knowable about the right way to do things. Their profession, like much of the social science world, is infested with pseudo-scientific jargon fueled by “studies” that follow few of the protocols that would be required to quote results in hard science.  

There are classic examples of planning theory run amok: nationally the social engineering attempted by Robert Moses (not the civil rights hero, the other one) in New York, locally the urban renewal disaster of driving the African-American residents out of San Francisco’s Western Addition. Berkeley in the same period was saved by vigilant citizens from a similar fate. The now-thriving Fourth Street shopping area was supposed to be leveled to build yet another office park, but it was preserved by local action. 

However ideologues just don’t quit. In the last 10 years or so the dominant ideology has been “smart growth,” the unproven theory that making already-developed urban areas ever-denser will prevent sprawl into the hinterlands. It has its soft practitioners who have some good and intelligent ideas, for example Richmond Councilmember Tom Butt, who pushes re-use of the best older buildings in his city. But hard-core smart growthers seem to truly believe, in the complete absence of replicable data that a real scientist would recognize, that cramming more and more people into older cities like Berkeley and San Francisco will quench the American’s historic thirst for a little plot of land to call his own.  

The evidence, such as it is, seems to point in the opposite direction. As old urban areas like New York, San Francisco and Berkeley become increasingly uninhabitable for everyone except the very rich who can afford to escape to the country occasionally, working class and poorer people continue to move out to the ever-more-distant suburbs.  

Berkeley’s first high-profile ideologue in this era was city manager James Keene, who hired a consultant to draft a general plan whose main feature was supposed to be super-density, damn the consequences. The public process, mandated by the city charter, was intended to be perfunctory, but a vigorous planning commission, with backbone courtesy of Rob Wrenn, Gene Poschmann and Zelda Bronstein, took it over. With lots of citizen input, they produced a remarkable document that stands as a real monument to what the public actually wants. Not, of course, that the Planning Department pays any attention to it. 

James Keene departed in July 2000, with this comment by Berkeley’s beloved Pepper Spray Times: “Keene developed a knack for derailing critical policy discussion through bureaucratic lexicon laden with subjunctive clauses, arcane qualifiers and numbing equivocations.” (PST is now printed inside the Planet and recently celebrated its 10th anniversary; the next edition runs Tuesday). He originally hired Mark Rhoades, who has continued the tradition of trying to evade the public will by any means necessary. Other Keene-era functionaries are still functioning, such as Wendy Cosin, responsible for the legal tangle around the Gaia building, in which the city is still enmeshed even after developer Patrick Kennedy has sold out. 

So it’s a bit simplistic to start cheering because one Mark Rhoades will no longer have the job of Director of Current Planning. (Or whatever job he holds at the end of his term. One reason Planet editors won’t miss him much is that his job title seemed to morph as his influence waxed and waned. We never knew what to call him.) The oxymoronic edifice called “planning theory” still stands, and it will continue to emit true believers who see their job as outwitting those city residents they like to denigrate as NIMBYs. (Somehow they never seem to be able to remember that the slogan “Not In My Back Yard” was coined by residents near Love Canal to oppose the carcinogenic toxic wastes that planners approved for dumping in their neighborhoods.) As long as we have a planning department bought and paid for by developers, things can’t be expected to change much.  


Editorial: Let’s Talk About What the Media Can Do

By Becky O’Malley
Tuesday August 07, 2007

“...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.....Let me digress by immodestly pointing out that, unlike for you, the challenges of broadcast programs like this one are not theoretical for me. I literally wrote the book on this subject....Unlike your newspaper which has only one point of view, my radio show serves the entire community and all points of view.....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.”  

—Peter Laufer, July 26 e-mail 

 

“I still can hardly fathom that he meant that essay to be taken seriously. I mean, you could teach half a semester on rhetoric from that one document alone, and a good portion of a psychology class, too.” 

—from a friend, July 28 (?) e-mail. 

 

Well, first a confession. I didn’t tell the whole truth: Laufer caught me with my socks down, as it were. What I like about radio, as compared to television, reading or even web-surfing, is that it offers busy women like me the chance to multitask, which most of us need to do most of the time, even at 10 o’clock on a Sunday morning. But—and here’s the honest truth—when I listened to Laufer’s program on KPFA I was actually lounging around on my bed considering sorting socks. Yes, I do sometimes have to sort my socks, though not nearly as often as I should. The publisher buys socks in gross lots, all black and all the same, so he doesn’t have to sort his, but while most of my socks are black, I confess to having a few red ones and even a couple of purple ones too. I’m not exactly a fashion plate, but you do lose street cred if you show up wearing one black sock and one purple one. Now, it’s possible just to grab socks from the unsorted drawer, but in theory (though this is not theoretical for me) if you pre-sort your socks you can get out the door faster in the morning.  

But enough about socks—Jon Carroll wrote the definitive piece on socks a few weeks ago, and there’s not much I can add to the master’s work. I do have a few more words on the subject of domestic disorder, however. Suffice it to say that the accusation that I’m a closet neat freak provided my friends and family, especially my mother, with hours of hilarity. I didn’t write the book on creative untidiness, but I could, easily. 

And I have a bit more to say on the serious charges in Laufer’s opus. Regular readers of this paper, especially its opinion pages, know that saying the Planet prints only one point of view is just about as laughable as accusing me personally of excessive sock sorting. It’s so silly that belaboring it is a waste of valuable newsprint. 

What readers might not know is that my familiarity with “the challenges of broadcast programs” is not completely theoretical. When I first moved to Berkeley in 1973 and was looking for interesting work, I took part in a collective program on KPFA which I think was called “Women’s News,” though it might have been something else, but which had a distinctive feminist flavor. There I learned practical-then though now-obsolete skills like tape-splicing. One of our goals was to train women for radio to remedy the gender imbalance which existed in broadcasting at that time.  

A couple of years later, when I was working at Pacific News Service, I was one of the regular panelists on a KPFA show called “Holes in the News,” a weekly review of the print media organized by the legendary Elsa Knight Thompson, the American who became the first woman news broadcaster on the BBC during World War II. My fellow panelists were Sandy Close, who’s since founded New America Media, and (I think, among others) Larry Bensky. Among my colleagues at PNS, which had a radio service in those days, were Renee Montagne, now anchor of National Public Radio’s morning show, and Frank Browning, who now broadcasts from Paris for NPR. As far as more recent talk radio is concerned, I’ve been a guest on KQED’s Forum a couple of times and done an op-ed or two for them, I’ve been on KPFA once in a while, and most recently I was on KGO on the Ron Owens show. Though I haven’t done all that much in the medium myself lately, I’ve seen enough good radio being made that my opinions should be taken seriously.  

But the few paragraphs in my recent editorial criticizing Laufer’s show with Mayor Tom Bates didn’t rise to the level of a hit piece, though they may have stung. Believe me, if I actually did a hit piece, you’d know the difference. In my immoderate youth as a political activist, before I took up journalism, I wrote a few genuine hit pieces which almost got me run out of town. This editorial was intended as constructive criticism, nothing more, as the listeners who wrote to the paper about it seem to have understood. 

Laufer seems to be getting the point too: 

 

“Please consider this a formal invitation to join me on the air on my KPFA current affairs show Sunday, August 12, at a few minutes past 9 in the morning. We can take advantage of the opportunity to discuss the challenges facing Berkeley and world, along with the role we in the media play in the public debate. ..” 

—Peter Laufer, July 31 e-mail. 

 

Now that’s more like it. In my 50 or so years of participating in the public debate, I’ve at various times made news, reported on news, and consumed news. This has given me plenty of opportunity to reflect on what role the media can and should play, so I look forward to the discussion on Sunday. 

On a more somber note, all of us at the Planet have been saddened by the death of our colleague, Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey, a brave man who told the truth as he saw it wherever he was. It appears that his murder is part and parcel of the continuing tragedy of urban America, where any 19-year-old fool can get ahold of a gun and re-enact the bloody dramas he’s undoubtedly seen in the media since he was a baby. One topic I’d like to discuss somewhere, sometime, perhaps even on Laufer’s show on Sunday, is what role the media play in glorifying violence in the eyes of young people. It’s not the only cause of the epidemic of killing which has polluted our cities, but it’s one of the causes, and we need to address it. 

 


Public Comment

Letters to the Editor

Friday August 10, 2007

MORE STORIES ON KALW 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thanks so much for your recent story on StoryCorps Griot, the national project collecting the stories of African-Americans which will bring its mobile recording booth to Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland from through Sept. 19. 

As you reported, some of the stories people tell in Oakland will be broadcast on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.” But readers should also know that many more stories of local people will air on KALW, the public radio partner for StoryCorps Griot. We can be heard throughout the Bay Area at 91.7 FM, and we’ll also post the stories at our website www.kalw.org. 

I encourage people to listen to the stories from our community, and if you have a story to tell, there’s still plenty of time to reserve time in the booth by calling (800) 850-4406. 

Matt Martin 

General Manager 

KALW-FM, San Francisco 

 

• 

THE UNIVERSITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As a resident of Berkeley for more than 40 years, I am distressed at what seems to be the increasing tendency of city officials and some community organizations to regard the University of California at Berkeley as a malevolent, destructive force rather than our city’s greatest asset. Often issues are exacerbated and inflamed by misinformation. The modernization of Memorial Stadium and construction of a new student athlete center is a case in point. The headlines blared:  

“University to cut down old growth oaks!!” The trees, however lovely are hardly that. They were planted in 1923 by the university long after the construction of Memorial Stadium. It has been asserted the athletic center is intended only for the football team—not so. More than 400 athletes from 13 different teams, seven women’s and six men’s will use the facility. In the Pac-10 Cal now ranks dead last in space available for athletic training and sports medicine. 

Currently the City of Berkeley has allocated a quarter million dollars from its budget for a court challenge to block the upgraded stadium and new athletic center. The university has already offered several compromise responses to neighborhood and city concerns, including the planting of three new trees for everyone removed, and enhanced landscaping on the plaza along the stadium’s western edge. The university is proposing negotiation as opposed to costly litigation. Let us hope our councilmembers will engage in this more logical choice. 

Susan S. Pownall 

• 

PUT THE $$ IN PERSPECTIVE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

JoAnn Richert Lorber is upset that the City has allocated $250,000 to sue the University over the Stadium complex expansion plans. This amount is a drop in the bucket compared to the $11-$13 million that the City (and Berkeley residents) subsidize the University for the infrastructure costs of sewers and storm drain, fire protection, up keep of roads and sidewalks, because the University pays no property taxes or fees or assessments as other property owners do. For a detailed report, done in 2004, on the cost of UC Berkeley to the City of Berkeley contact the Berkeley City Manager. 

Sure it is nice to have Stephen Hawking visit the campus, or for the athletes to win an NCAA championship, but if Berkeley had that $11-$13 million per year, we could at least make a start at mending our crumbling culverts, improving our parks, providing really affordable housing to those that need it, ensuring our artists aren't forced out of town, and the list goes on. 

All UC expansions cost Berkeley residents dearly, and visiting luminaries do not ameliorate the degradation of our quality of life or our rising tax bills. 

Anne Wagley 

• 

3100 SHATTUCK 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Your story on the Aug. 2 Landmarks Preservation Commission discussion of the proposed demolition of 3100 Shattuck gave the false impression that there is some doubt as to whether the structure is an historic resource. In brief summary, the facts are as follows:  

In January 2004, as part of the California Environmental Quality Act review of the Ed Roberts Campus project, the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association published a survey of historic properties within the surrounding neighborhood. That survey includes a map that identifies 3100 Shattuck as one of 14 remaining 19th-century structures that contribute to a proposed Ashby Station streetcar suburb historic district.  

In a letter dated April 11, 2005, the California State Historic Preservation Officer determined that a streetcar suburb historic district somewhat smaller than the one proposed by BAHA, but still including 3100 Shattuck, is “eligible for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places at the local level of significance.” That determination refers to “criteria A and C,” which means the district is of both historical and architectural significance. The contributing 19th-century properties are of historical significance only; the architecturally significant elements are 65 Colonial Revival structures built in the first decade of the 20th century. 

The combination of the SHPO’s determination that the district is eligible for inclusion in the NRHP and BAHA’s expert opinion that 3100 Shattuck is a contributing property means that for the purposes of CEQA, 3100 Shattuck is an historic resource and may not be demolished without environmental review. 

Robert Lauriston 

 

• 

TUESDAY’S PLANET 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

What a pleasure it was to read the editorial page in Tuesday’s Daily Planet. Starting with Becky’s great piece on the media with which I thoroughly agree. Back in the 1960s, I had occasion to work for a commission seeking answers to the violence that took Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. The media was a prime culprit. Time to bring up those questions again and again. Then...the Elmwood traffic barriers. I’ve become so pathetically used to them that it surprised me to see them mentioned once again. They are an obvious cause of Elmwood traffic. They are outdated, not to mention eyesores one and all. Get rid of them! 

And finally, someone seems to be recognizing that our city’s suit against the university over the stadium project will do little if anything for the city, even if the city wins. A dangerous stadium will remain, the city coffers will suffer as fewer people come to Berkeley to spend money and the city pays hundreds of thousands in legal fees, the students who double as athletes will continue to have substandard facilities. What’s in this for the city? Such a pleasure to read the Planet Tuesday. 

Linda Schacht Gage 

 

• 

CARS IN BERKELELY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In Tuesday’s San Francisco Chronicle, Carolyn Jones discusses the auto malls proposed for Berkeley. Excuse me? We’re going to take away your driving lanes (see Marin Avenue and BRT proposals), and your parking (Hink’s and Oxford lots), but PLEASE don’t take your car-buying business elsewhere! Buy in Berkeley, just don’t drive in Berkeley! 

How can this city offer us residential development after development with inadequate parking because we’re the wave of new public-transit-villagers...and yet push for an auto mall? How dare they suggest a Trader Joe’s with horrendous traffic and parking consequences, all the while supporting the idea of an auto row so we can compete with Oakland for sales tax dollars? 

This city does not have a liberal and compassionate agenda. Political views get thrown aside when the almighty dollar is at stake. 

Carolyn Sell 

 

• 

LANDLORDS’ LOBBY GEARS UP FOR VENDETTA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Contributors to the opinion section of the Daily Planet are entitled to express their opinions freely. But it is disingenuous for such individuals to obscure that they have played a significant formal political advocacy role in opposing tenants’ rights. The following writers, who have recently (and vociferously) opined on the matter of tenant’s advocate Chris Kavanagh’s residency, are high profile Berkeley landlord lobbyists according to public records. Yet they consistently fail to identify themselves as such, posing instead as merely “Berkeley residents.” Planet readers have a right to know the affiliations of these folks and to judge whether or not they have a “horse in the race,” so to speak. 

Berkeley attorney and landlord David M. Wilson (Aug. 3) describes himself as un-affiliated with the Berkeley Property Owners Association (BPOA), the major landlord advocacy group in the city. But in other public documents he is identified as “Director of BPOA” (see “Supporters of Barbara Gilbert for City Council” document”). He has appeared before the Berkeley City Housing Advisory Commission on behalf of anti-tenants rights proposals. He is credited with drafting the pro-landlord condo conversion proposed ordinance language endorsed by BPOA and their associated “Housing Justice Coalition.” He is elsewhere publicly identified as the father of current President of BPOA, Michael Wilson. 

Another letter writer is Berkeley landlord and anti-rent control advocate John Koenigshofer (Letters, Aug. 7) who can frequently be found railing against tenants’ rights in local media. (For an example of such, see his anti-rent control letter to the Planet of June 27, 2003.) Leon Mayeri (Letters, Aug. 7) was Treasurer of the Berkeley “No on Measure Y campaign” in 2000 (Measure Y sought to strengthen tenants’ rights in Berkeley.) Mayeri’s Anti-Measure Y campaign was apparently investigated for two “apparent violations” of fair elections practices during the campaign (see Berkeley City Board of Commissions Meeting, December 14, 2000). 

Their opinions are those of landlords and anti-rent control proponents with a serious agenda. 

Leslie Fleming 

 

 

• 

OPPOSITION TO  

WEST BERKELEY DISTRICT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am writing to express my opposition to the proposed West Berkeley CBD. Whereas I understand there are issues that need to be addressed in the vicinity of Aquatic Park, and whereas I appreciate the efforts some community organizers in this regard, the problems and crime associated with the area need to be addressed by City of Berkeley, not by private patrol car. 

In the long term the West Berkeley CBD will be counter productive. 

West Berkeley needs thriving businessbusinesses, not empty, unrented space. It needs a nighttime presence through active small businesses, residences and restaurants. 

The proposed CBD is a significant tax on small businesses and residents, increasing rents and thus increasing vacancies. This is the opposite of what is needed, both from the point of view of safety and city revenue! 

Don’t be fooled—this assessment is not going to be paid by the landlords. It will be paid by small businesses. Those that rent space in West Berkeley will be required to pay the full value of the assessment through the terms of “triple net” leases that are the norm. And the amount that is being asked is significant—as much as a 10 percent increase in rent for warehouse-like space, depending on the lot configuration. 

The CBD is a benefit to a few large landlords at the cost of a small businesses, renters and home-owners. 

West Berkeley needs to be a community that works together, not one divided by a few large property owners who are granted a disproportionate power to vote a tax that affects the rest of us. 

Susanne V. Hering 

West Berkeley business owner 

 

• 

CHRIS KAVANAGH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As a tenant and Green Party member, I know Chris Kavanagh’s as a tireless advocate for tenants and the have-nots in our community. The progressive political stances he shares with thousands of my fellow Berkeleyans are not tainted by the residential allegations currently lodged against him. 

If it turns out that he is not a Berkeley resident and has defrauded the city, he taints only his personal reputation, not the political beliefs he holds. Consider the hundreds of Democrat and Republican politicians caught breaking the law every year—the party faithful of those two parties are proof that lawbreakers’ political stances are separate from their scandals. 

An extra-special thanks to the Daily Planet’s reporters for covering a scandal that could negatively effect an issue near and dear to its editorial page. I really appreciate the separation of the news department and Mrs. O’Malley’s editorial stances! 

Jesse Townley 

 

• 

CYCLISTS AND THE POLICE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Those fascist pig-dogs of the Berkeley police force! Now they have stooped to giving citations to bike riders just because they don’t stop where there is a stop sign. Will this unmitigated assault on our civil liberties to run stop signs never cease? The forces of repression are running absolutely unchecked. Next thing you know people will be cited for running lights, driving on sidewalks, going the wrong way on one-way streets, or not yielding to pedestrians. Once this sort of mistreatment of our citizens begins, it really is a slippery slope to a totalitarian state. 

I have a confession to make. A few weeks ago, I stopped my car at a four-way stop sign, saw a bicycle approaching from a small distance as I pulled away from the corner, and proceeded anyway, assuming—of course wrongly—that the bicycle would stop at the stop sign. It didn’t even slow down. The gallant bicycle rider, exercising his natural right to run stop signs, nearly hit me, He then saluted me with the raised middle finger. I tried to get out of my car and apologize to him for not assuming he would run the stop sign as well as for my contribution to global warming, but he rode merrily along, left arm with his middle finger aloft. (I will digress to say that I am in favor of global warming, so that we will have some nice days at the beach, and my home on the bottom of the Berkeley Hills will be beachfront property making that beach trip a shorter one. I’d also like to go to a Giants game and not freeze.) 

It terribly bothers me that if a cop had been there, he might have actually given this poor lad a ticket. Thank god that injustice was avoided and the kid can continue to run stop signs and continue his experiment into collisions between bicycles and automobiles in order to determine which one sustains the greater amount of damage. 

Paul Glusman 

 

• 

RULES OF THE ROAD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I understand Michelle Lerager’s consternation over Berkeley police actions toward bicyclists (Aug. 7). It is strange that they would crack down on erratic cycling when there are thousands of irresponsible, dangerous and selfish automobile drivers on our streets. 

The bicycle is only a threat or traffic nuisance if you drive a car. Few pedestrians will complain about bicycles, and those only because some cyclists are so intimidated by cars that they ride on sidewalks, an activity cycling activists condemn. The truth is, most bicyclists have drivers licenses, most know how to drive a car and are aware of the rules of the road. 

In fact, bicycle advocates in the late 1890s went to court repeatedly to gain recognition as vehicles. Even the Supreme Court decided that yes, bicycles are entitled to the road, and are subject to all rules therein. So, why do we ride so crazily? Well, first, we aren’t given our rights by the steel and glass monsters we share the road with, and second, we have this little problem of maintaining our forward momentum. 

I demand cars give up road space to everyone else, and if I could have one exception to the rules of the road governing bicycles, I would fix the state vehicle code and solve Michelle Lerager’s problem by passing legislation that says STOP equals YIELD for bicycles. 

Hank Chapot 

Oakland 

 

• 

WHITHER MAILBOXES? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I went to mail a letter one morning a few weeks ago and was surprised to see that the mailbox on the corner of MLK and Cedar had been removed. 

I’ve since noticed that a number of other mailboxes have ‘gone missing’. 

Where have they gone and how can we get them back? 

I would have preferred more mailboxes, not fewer, as they already seemed too few and far between. 

Eve Fox 

• 

GUNS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

This is a letter to Michael “Ad Hominen” Hardesty. Mr. Hardesty, do you really believe that Chauncey Bailey would be alive today had he been carrying a gun when he was shot down in cold blood last Thursday? Would he have had even a split second to draw a gun when ambushed with absolutely no warning? I don’t think so.  

Dorothy Snodgrass 

 

• 

KANGAROO ABUSE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

A true “Crime Against Nature” is about to be committed against Australia’s national symbol, the kangaroo. Senate Bill 880, authored by Sen. Ron Calderon (D-Los Angeles), has passed the Senate, and will be voted on by the full Assembly when the Legislature reconvenes on Aug. 20. 

California has banned the importation of kangaroo products for more than 35 years, primarily for cruelty reasons. The adults are spot-lighted at night, then brutally gunned down. The wounded escape to suffer a lingering death. The joeys (babies) have their heads smashed. 

And for what, pray? Mostly for athletic shoes and pet food, God help us. Adidas reportedly has spent nearly a half-million dollars promoting this travesty. And Nike, too, uses kangaroo hides. Substitutes are readily and cheaply available. Soccer superstar David Beckham refuses to wear shoes made from kangaroo hide for ethical reasons. We should follow his lead. 

If SB 880 passes, the law would not be enforceable. Once the animals are skinned, it is nigh-impossible to distinguish one kangaroo from another, and many species are endangered. 

Assembly members who have already voted AYE in committee include Lois Wolk (D-Vacaville), Jared Hoffman (D-San Rafael), Tom Berryhill (R-Modesto), Charles Calderon (D-Montebello), Doug La Malfa (R-Yuba City), Nicole Parra (D-Hanford), and Bill Maze (R-Visalia). They need to hear from their constituents. 

Please contact your Assemblymember before Aug. 20. All may be written c/o the State Capitol, Sacramento, CA 95814. 

Eric Mills 

Action for Animals 

Oakland


Letter: West Berkeley Community Benefits District

Friday August 10, 2007

Editors, Daily Planet: 

An otherwise fine article by Judith Scherr on the proposed West Berkeley Community Benefits District (CBD) unfortunately misstated what many believe is a central point of the CBD formation. BID’s and CBD’s typically concern themselves with beautification, security, and cleanliness. The planned West Berkeley district proposes something very unusual, to act as a lobbying entity on economic development, land use, and zoning. Since the proposed district has been created and controlled by the largest developers, property owners, and commercial brokers in West Berkeley, allowing their use of assessed CBD funds for these purposes is highly problematic. In meetings and now in the Planet article Marco LiMandri (New City America consultant) and Michael Goldin state that these lobbying functions are “not part of this (plan).” Article author Judith Scheer goes on to say that: “The budget proposal confirms there are no funds set aside for rezoning efforts.”  

What Scherr missed and for some reason the CBD’s authors seem determined to hide is the clearly stated Item No. 111 from their (latest) July 15 Fourth Draft Budget Breakdown for the West Berkeley Community Benefit District: “Overall District Management—$60,000 for first year” “District administrator (to)…work with the city on…“economic development strategies. Outreach to political reps, city officials. Attend public hearings. Hiring professionals (to) advise on land use issues, input on West Berkeley Plan.”  

Since the West Berkeley Plan is the zoning document for West Berkeley it’s clear that, despite protestations, lobbying for the largest developers and property owners on zoning and development issues is a high priority of the CBD steering committee. If they want people to actually believe what they’re saying on this issue, their actions should reflect their words. This would be accomplished by removing the item from the budget.  

In the article, Mr Goldin, WBBA member and architect of the CBD, defends the participatory nature of the process by quoting the CBD’s survey letter: “ We welcome any affected property owner in the study area to be involved in this CBD formation process.” The simple fact is that planning meetings for the proposed CBD have been taking place for nearly a year now to which only the very largest property owners (Wareham, Bayer, Goldin, etc.) have been invited. When several affected neighbors requested by phone and e-mail to New City America consultant Marco LiMandri that they be notified of upcoming meetings, these requests were ignored as were other requests for informational phone calls to be returned. So much for the open process “welcome.” At every possible step the regulatory and day-to-day initiation of the CBD has been governed by West Berkeley’s largest corporations and landowners.  

That the largest moneyed interests determine the policies of our national government is an unfortunate fact, but at what point did this same sad standard of democracy become acceptable in Berkeley? 

Judy Dater 

Margret Elliott 

Catherine Jones 

M. Sarah Klise 

David Snipper 

G. Barry Wagner 


Commentary: West Berkeley Improvements—Benefits for Everyone

By Steven Donaldson
Friday August 10, 2007

I have to thank Sarah Klise for including my name with some of the larger property owners in West Berkeley. I guess she sees me as a “big shot” now, controlling the fate of West Berkeley! I own two Victorian buildings and operate my branding design studio on Fifth and Addison. Oh, I also live in West Berkeley and my kids have gone through elementary school here. 

Secondly, thanks to the Daily Planet for running her “commentary” as a news piece, implying this was factually driven. Not that anyone believes half the stuff written in this publication but it is a bit much when you run such obvious opinion pieces as a lead article. [Editor’s Note: The July 31 piece by Sarah Klise to which Mr. Donaldson refers did in fact run on the commentary page, not in the news section.] 

I also would like to remind you that Ms. Klise vehemently opposed the building of the now approved West Berkeley Bowl, which is heavily supported by the local community and by everyone on the steering committee of our proposed new business improvement district. 

Yes, I’ve been meeting with these folks, who are all very dedicated to improving the quality of life in West Berkeley and making it a great place for the businesses and the residents here. The Community Improvement or Business Improvement District concept, which is governed by state law, is a structure that allows neighborhoods such a Telegraph Avenue, Downtown Berkeley, or Solano Avenue for example, to raise money for improvements in their defined neighborhood district. They raise money through an assessment process that adds an incremental amount to property tax payments. The money is then used to fund improvements such as landscaping, lighting, transportation, clean-ups and safety. 

The idea of this district, which is supported by councilperson Daryl Moore and Michael Caplan of the Economic Development department with the City of Berkeley, is to bring much needed ongoing improvements and services currently not provided by the City to the area that would benefit residents, business and industry, with the lion’s share of the costs carried by the business community. 

Some of the services in this district will include cleaning up trash which is dumped throughout West Berkeley, including the rail right of way and vacant lots, dealing with graffiti removal—there’s been an epidemic of graffiti in West Berkeley, adding to the free bus shuttle service and expanding the service—currently paid for by Wareham and Bayer and, lastly, a 24-hour security patrol that will help reduce crime, car break-ins and the occasional robberies. Eventually we’d like to see improved lighting, landscaping and visual enhancements throughout West Berkeley. 

These are just some of the improvements we want to see happen to this area. Are these the evil intentions of developers or the vital contributions of local committed businesses trying to help our community? 

Yes, the largest business and property owners in West Berkeley will have a weighted vote on this based on size and ownership of property but they also will pay for the bulk of the entire budget. Residences included in the mixed use areas will pay less than 2% of the entire budget ($140 a year flat amount) and yet will receive all the services available to the district equally. That seems pretty fair to me. 

Why does West Berkeley have to be us against them? We all live, work, own land or rent, share streets and suffer from the same issues is this area. We all need to work together to improve the West Berkeley area—why not get the larger property owners to share the greatest burden of cost for this? 

Yes, these big businesses and developers have influence in West Berkeley. Bayer helped pay for our entire science program at Rosa Parks Elementary School where my kids went to school. They also contribute to the Berkeley Symphony and many other community programs we all benefit from. Wareham Development also contributes to the local community and has continued to make improvements to the area including the undergrounding of utilities and improvements to the streets. 

These “big developers” who Ms. Klise says are taking over are contributing to the value of Berkeley by providing employment, paying property taxes and supporting innovative technology development and drug discovery we all will benefit from. 

I guess Ms. Klise would be happy to get rid of these “big businesses,” let the graffiti and trash proliferate and forget about the quality of life here-oh, and while we’re at it let’s stop the Berkeley Bowl from bringing a much needed grocery store to our neighborhood. 

 

Steven Donaldson is a Berkeley resident. 


Commentary: The Legacy of Mark Rhoades

By Stephen Wollmer
Friday August 10, 2007

The departure of Mark Rhoades from his positions in the Planning Department has been met with private sighs of relief from Berkeley residents and even some a public celebration (Café La Paz, 6:30 p.m. Monday, Aug. 13). As the City of Berkeley’s zoning officer for the last five years, Mark has used his febrile and fertile imagination to bend and twist the Zoning Ordinance beyond recognition in favor of the developers who fund his department but to the dismay of current residents, who believe that the City should be defending their rights to equal treatment before the law. 

Mark has always claimed that he would help the neighborhoods against outsized projects if only those pesky state laws didn’t tie his hands. But time after time, when given the option to interpret city and state laws to protect current residents, he has consistently ruled in the developer’s favor. I am sure that neighbors of each project in Berkeley’s hall of shame(ful) developments have their own tales to tell of Mark’s “creative” back-scratching for developers and backstabbing of the neighbors.  

As recent victims of decisions by Mark, Neighbors for Livable Way presents our nominations to the long and shameful list of questionable judgments by Mark and his smart growth minions on the project at 1885 MLK: 

• That the “orderly development of the area” required that a 21-foot property line setback to an 1890 Edwardian be reduced to five feet in order to give Hudson-McDonald a few more units. 

• That Hudson-McDonald’s project would be held to the policies and ordinances in place at the end of 2004, but when policies or ordinances were found to be inconvenient they were ignored. 

• Convincing Planning Director Dan Marks to allow Hudson-McDonald to substitute an entirely new project as a “modification” of the deemed complete project, thus avoiding current zoning. 

• Initially arguing that a Trader Joe’s met the state law definition of a “primarily neighborhood-serving” store. 

• That the state density bonus law requirement that applicants show waivers and modifications of development standards are necessary for the economic feasibility of affordable housing units can be stretched to justify a free parking lot for Trader Joe’s. 

I join many other Berkeley residents and business owners in encouraging the city manager and the planning director to think long and hard about Mark’s legacy and to choose his replacement carefully. The city desperately needs a zoning officer and planners who read and implement our ordinances and plans as they are written, and not as simplistic “smart growth” believers think they should be. 

 

Stephen Wollmer is a Berkeley resident. 

 


Letters to the Editor

Tuesday August 07, 2007

CHRIS KAVANAGH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

For years Rent Board Member Chris Kavanagh has avoided discussion of the injustices of rent control by invoking a simply defense; “the public voted for it.” Kavanagh wanted us to believe he held the democratic process in high esteem. Apparently not.  

Kavanagh has been a particularly self-righteous proponent of rent control, demeaning the concerns of those who have been injured by it. Such ideological “certainty” is self-delusional and facilitates an “end justifies the means” mentality.  

Whether Kavanagh lied to the public because he thought his leadership and insight was invaluable or simply because he could not achieve success without deception and fraud, is immaterial. What matters is his apparent violation of the most fundamental and sacred aspect of democracy, fair and honest elections. He must be held accountable.  

If it is proven that Kavanagh lied about his residency he must relinquish his elected post and reimburse the public for the money and benefits he has stolen. As a rent board member he has received $25,000 to $35,000 in stipends. He has had access to the city’s generous health and dental care plans. He has enjoyed a 75 percent reduction in his YMCA annual membership fees (worth about $4,000).  

One can’t help but wonder if his friends and fellow ideologues on the Rent Board were really unaware of this deception? Is there a “wink and a nod” policy that accepts fraud and perjury in service of what they believe to be “the greater good”? How is it that they spend $3.5 million dollars a year keeping track of who lives where but they can’t figure out where their own members live? 

I am not surprised by Kavanagh’s apparent indifference to basic fairness, such indifference is a prerequisite to blind support of Berkeley rent control. 

John Koenigshofer 

 

• 

RENT BOARD FIASCO 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

For the past several days, I have had numerous conversations with people from all political persuasions who are appalled by the actions of Berkeley Rent Board Commissioner Chris Kavanagh and the seemingly corrupt behavior of his legal counsel and former Rent Board associate Marc Janowitz. 

The facts are abundantly clear: Mr. Janowitz has had first-hand knowledge that Kavanagh has been living outside of Berkeley during Kavanagh’s tenure as a Berkeley elected official. Janowitz played a role in the election of Kavanagh and his law firm obtained lucrative contracts and benefited tremendously from Kavanagh’s position as an elected official. It will be very interesting to hear Janowitz arguing in court in defense of Kavanaugh, as he recently stated that Kavanagh lives “primarily in Berkeley.” Interesting, indeed, since Janowitz is defending Kavanaugh’s eviction from his Oakland residence. 

As this scandal continues to unfold, its breadth and depth are deeply disturbing and suggest criminal conduct well beyond the scope of a county prosecutor. What we are looking at here is rampant, sophisticated racketeering, and in order for justice to prevail, a federal investigation is warranted. Here’s hoping that our progressive community resolves this issue with the help of federal prosecutors, in much the same manner as the Reddy case several years ago, when a major federal investigation was clearly needed. 

Leon Mayeri 

 

• 

BUS RAPID TRANSIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The opinion pieces by Doug Buckwald and Mary Oram distort what happened at the Transportation Commission workshop on Bus Rapid Transit. In reality, about three people (including Mr. Buckwald but not Ms. Oram) tried to disrupt the meeting and to change its agenda. Chair Sarah Syed did a very good job, in difficult circumstances, of keeping the meeting focused on its agenda, which was to have people state issues to the entire group, and then break up into smaller groups for discussion. 

Mr. Buckwald’s claim that Ms. Syed let BRT supporters speak and stopped BRT opponents is totally untrue and defamatory. She let Steve Finacom go on at great length raising objections to BRT, explaining to one of the disruptors that he was raising issues. But she stopped me from speaking in support of BRT after two or three sentences, explaining that I was arguing rather than raising issues. 

Mr. Buckwald and the other disruptors apparently haven’t heard that we live in a democracy. Majorities of Berkeley voters elect councilmembers. Councilmembers appoint commissioners. Commissioners set the agendas for their meetings. It is the job of the chair to make sure that commission meetings follow their agendas. Noisy minorities do not have the right to disrupt these meetings or to change their agendas. 

The people who are now leading the battle to stop BRT are the same people who work against all environmentally sound planning in Berkeley, and they resort to disrupting meetings because they cannot win elections. They tried to stop the Brower Center, and they could not even get the issue on the ballot. They put Measure P on the ballot to stop smart growth, and it lost by a larger margin than any ballot measure in Berkeley history, with 80 percent voting against. Now, the same narrow-minded NIMBYs are working against BRT, and one of them is even calling it “Bus Rapid Development.” 

I have watched NIMBYs losing elections and disrupting meetings since the 1980s. I am sure I will continue to watch them losing elections, because they do not represent the majority of people in Berkeley. They are a distinct minority, but we hear so much from them because they are empty barrels who make a lot of noise. 

Charles Siegel 

 

• 

ELMWOOD TRAFFIC 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thank you, R. J. Schwendinger, for your continued concern about Berkeley’s ignored traffic congestion in our Elmwood area. I join you in asking for a current environmental report on the area’s traffic-related pollution. Your statistics about several studies of the effects of such pollution are vital, noting frightening increases in such illnesses as childhood asthma, and adult cardiopulmonary disease. 

However, there is another cause of the “crippling poisonous exhausts” in the area, as well as our volume and attraction of new and old commerce. Our ignored “traffic diverters” funnel much of the area’s vehicles onto College Avenue, which daily becomes a polluted parking lot. These diverters were installed in the 1960s, apparently to prevent dangerous through-traffic on residential streets. Instead, we have created a dangerous thoroughfare which is at least 75 percent residential! 

There have been complaints over the years, even petitions from residents, apparently to no avail. I found that a July, 1984 request for “removal or modification of diverters” was turned down by the City Council. This request includes the words, “local prohibitions of entry-to or exit-from streets by means of design features must be consistent with the responsibility of local governments to provide for public health and safety.” The diverters are not only undemocratic and irrational, it is probably unconstitutional to expose certain residents to the dangers of daily toxic pollution while neighbors are protected on closed streets. 

The removal of these barriers can probably result in an almost immediate and fair dispersal of this traffic congestion, as it’s done in other cities! The comparison of traffic on Berkeley’s College Avenue and the same street in Oakland’s busy Rockridge district cannot be ignored. Our traffic-engineers obviously know there are preferable traffic controls. It is baffling that our city has been ignoring this crime, which affects not only Elmwood residents but all of us who treasure and traverse the area. It is also baffling that apparently most affected or damaged College Ave. residents have not insisted on fair solutions.  

Gerta Farber 

P.S.: Cynthia Papermaster has incorrectly quoted me in her letter, (“Fear of Impeachment,” Aug. 3). Perhaps she didn’t realize that leaving out the last half of my sentence would greatly and unfairly change it’s meaning? My July 31 letter stated that Representatives Conyers and Kucinich “fear impeachment proceedings will involve congress far too long”—not that these gentlemen “fear impeachment,” as she wrote! 

Perhaps Papermaster felt my true words would cause people to also reconsider the timing of the action to impeach. Our goals are the same: to immediately end this immoral war. Let’s at least use honesty in our discussions. 

 

MORE ON ELMWOOD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

R.J. Schwedinger paints an accurate picture of traffic and air quality in the Elmwood area. Even decades ago, when I lived on College Avenue, the flow of traffic was endless. Seeing the soot on my windows made me wonder what the soot buildup looked like in my lungs. However, in my opinion, he or she points to the wrong causes. The occasional Cal game days contribute little to the overall problem. In addition, arguing that a long-established commercial district should not adapt in order to continue to thrive seems like a side issue. 

First, Elmwood residents are not just victims. We also contribute to the problem. Who is filling most of those limited on-street parking spaces, anyway? How many Elmwood residents are either without a car or, for that matter, without a second or third car per household? Second, and perhaps most importantly, we have created the traffic mess on College by constructing our beloved traffic barricades. There is nothing wrong with the way Berkeley’s streets were designed. In most places, they form a logical grid that would allow for traffic to percolate throughout the city. We just don’t let that grid do its job. Instead, those who can have diverted traffic off of their own streets and dumped it on other’s. That means that the first thing Elmwood residents do when they leave their homes by car is to drive onto Ashby or College or (for those further south) Claremont. We have created and are contributing to our own traffic problem. And it is the jammed-up nature of traffic in the area that causes the high levels of soot and other air contaminants.  

What we seem to ignore, or forget, is that every street in Berkeley is a residential street. Those of us who are well-organized find ways to fight for our own little traffic turf (Remember the signs on stop sign-choked Piedmont/Gayley telling people to use Telegraph?). Our traffic policies create winners and losers. The problem with deciding that Ashby and College should function like suburban arterials is that the hideous thoroughfares upon which they are modeled are usually four or six lanes across, not the two lanes on the roads through Elmwood.  

So here is my solution: let Wright’s Garage convert to whatever commercial use the owners can sell, and simply barricade the intersection of College and Ashby. I am not sure where all of the traffic will go after that, but at least it will be someone else’s problem.  

Steve Weissman  

 

• 

WHO’S AFRAID OF THE  

BIG BAD WOLF? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Like several recent letter writers I think that getting Bush-Cheney out of office before the 2008 election is of great importance. However, I’d like folks to consider the lack of strong evidence that the reason Pelosi, Reid and others are hedging on impeachment is fear of losing political ground in the 2008 elections. We might ponder the possibility that the Democrats, as a whole—though not stalwarts like Barbara Lee—may be afraid of the expectations they will arouse if they actually use their power to stop the war and to impeach. If they gain the presidency based instead upon elections after terrifying statements like Obama saying that we could invade Pakistan if Musharref doesn’t go after the Talliban, then the public will already be prepared again for the “lesser of two evils” and will know that the Democrats may temper, but will not reverse the war on terrorism, the decimation of Constitutional Rights, the aggressive policy in harmony with Israeli interests in the Middle East, and aggression against Venezuela, Cuba and Haiti. Just looking back at the Clinton presidency provides evidence that—with all that money flowing into their pockets—the Democrats are unable to deliver on health care and other aspects of the social service net unless forced by public unrest to do so—let alone resurrect the Bill of Rights and abandon policies of aggression and economic depredation. Of course Hillary, Obama or Edwards wouldn’t be as criminal, obtuse or self-defeating as Bush. But acting in the public’s clear interest with an impeachment procedure could well unleash a dragon of popular democratic discontent, terrifying to the Democratic leadership for different reasons than people think. All the more reason to push them harder now.  

Marc Sapir  

 

• 

IRRESPONSIBLE JOURNALISM 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Is the Daily Planet a medium for responsible journalism, or a “rag,” a place where all manner of opinion can stand as “fact”? Unfortunately, it is increasingly the latter. The form of nearly any article by Richard Brenneman regarding the University of California, Berkeley starts with a paragraph that seems intended to startle the reader. The adjective “massive” invariably shows up in this inaugural paragraph, as in: “The university plans to build a “massive (fill in the blank)” that will likely cause “(fill in the blank) problems.” The next few paragraphs bolster the alarm created in the first, by quoting various neighborhood groups and/or city officials. There may be a paragraph of fact inserted somewhere toward the end of the piece, and the obligatory quote from a university spokesperson—but by that time the rhetorical trick has caste its spell. 

No where is this journalistic irresponsibility more evident than in your coverage of the ongoing controversy over the renovation/retrofit of Memorial Stadium. The first phase of this project is the building of a Student-Athlete High Performance Center adjacent to the western wall of the stadium. This building will allow the 450 or so people who work in the stadium offices each day to move into a safe, state-of-the-art facility. Numerous teams, including Cal’s women’s softball team that currently has no lockers or showers, will now have the basic facilities they deserve. The football team, which currently has the least amount of training and locker room space in the Pac-10, will finally have the facilities they deserve. There will be meeting rooms, locker rooms, medical/training rooms and an imaging center. The building itself is astutely designed, much of it is underground, and it follows the contours of the surrounding landscape seemingly effortlessly. 

The Student-Athlete High Performance Center is not in any meaningful sense a “gym.” If you want to do a responsible piece on this issue, you should show the drawings of the building. You should describe the cramped quarters, or the absence of them, that several Cal teams now have. You should describe why moving the SAHPC elsewhere is not viable without causing huge inconveniences (bus rides, shuttles, etc.) for many of the teams that would use the facility. And you should describe the concerns neighbors have regarding parking, the on-going debate over seismic safety, and the issue of the oak trees. This is if you have any interest in responsible journalism. 

Mitchell Wilson 

 

• 

RAPID BUS NOT AN OPTION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Just for the heck of it, I rode a 1R “Rapid Bus” all the way from Telegraph and Ashby in Berkeley to the end of the line at Bayfair BART. This was between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. on Thursday. The trip covers the longest version of the proposed BRT corridor. Rapid Bus is called the “no build” option for BRT. Based on my recent experience, I think this is a bad option. The 1R did have some bursts of speed between some of its widely-separated stops, but it wasn’t very rapid when it had to contend with the heavy car traffic. I saw 1R buses pass each other and get bunched up. I watched delays as people slowly paid their fares, standing in line at the front door. I watched the driver have to get up and operate the mid-bus wheelchair ramp. I think “no build” is a not a useful alternative for BRT. We really need the unique BRT features—all-door boarding with POP, rolling wheelchairs on at the stations and we especially need the dedicated bus lanes. No bus can possibly be rapid unless it gets some advantage over all those cars. A “compromise” giving up any of the BRT features is really a sell-out and a waste of public money. Worse yet, such a deliberate “design for failure” will give political ammunition to those who wish to destroy public transit in general. 

Parking loss can be mitigated by nearby replacement parking. Dedicated bus lanes won’t increase congestion or cause more cut-thru traffic if a substantial number of people remove their cars from the congestion and become BRT riders enjoying the benefits of the bus lanes. Cyndi Johnson asks what, pray tell, would encourage drivers to switch to public transit. If the answer really is “nothing will,” then we may as well forget the whole BRT project, and continue to slog along with local buses. Dropping BRT would be such a terrible missed opportunity, not to mention show hypocrisy about Measure G. If we’re really serious about reducing GHG in the East Bay, we have to reduce our car driving—which means a lot more of us will want to ride public transit. 

If we want to travel quickly on transit, we have to have BRT, not Rapid Bus. We need to make up our minds: do we continue clinging to cars or do we get serious about GHG, pollution, congestion, renewable resources and our quality of life? 

Steve Geller 

 

• 

PATIENTS GROUP 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It’s interesting to see the Berkeley Patients Group, a so-called medical marijuana dispensary, putting disabled people in wheelchairs out front when they run afoul of the law. For years now I have been approached by people with disabilities that have been thrown out of their “club.” Club is the right term because they run these places like velvet rope nightclubs for the pretty set. Ever since they found medical people that would sign off anyone without any regard to medical history, the treatment of those with medical problems has been disgraceful. When I went to talk to whoever it is that is supposed to run the “club” about one incident I was insulted about being in a wheelchair and told that I was lucky to be “in that wheelchair or you’d be getting your ass kicked.” 

The truth is that our own medical advocates have been driven out by a very aggressive group that controls all three of our clubs and others throughout the state. The few true medical patients that still use Berkeley clubs seem to be kept around and “tolerated” for the photo op. 

As someone who worked to get Prop. 215 passed and put together shows with Country Joe for the cause of those that needed legality in their fight for life. I feel duped by these folks. I have never been told by anyone at Longs or Elephant Pharmacy to “Wait until I see you out on the streets.” What kind of thugs have we allowed to take over in Berkeley?  

Dan McMullan 

Disabled People Outside Project 

 

• 

SOUTH BERKELEY LIBRARY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

A couple of years ago, unable, as usual, to find an empty seat among the half dozen chairs at two tiny tables jammed between shelves, computers, and the check-out counter, I asked a staff person why they didn’t open up the meeting room at the back, add some shelves on the walls, and use it as a reading room during library hours. No, I was told, that would mean hiring someone to supervise the back room, financially impossible. 

Now we are hearing various plans for remodeling South Branch, possibly moving it to the future Ed Roberts Campus. We hear figures like $4 million or $6 million, in so-far non-existent funds. It sounds as if relief for cramped South Branch readers could be delayed for another decade. 

Compared to the non-existent millions proposed, using the meeting room as a reading room—just a reading room, no computers, no electronic stuff, just salary for one staff person and maybe a desk—seems a cost-effective way of making some slight improvement in the disgracefully inadequate South Berkeley Library. 

Dorothy Bryant 

 

• 

LAWSUIT SHOULD BE DROPPED 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Kudos to JoAnn Richert Lorber (Aug. 3), who shared many of the benefits of living in Berkeley, many related to the very presence of the university who is currently being sued by the city. Not only will the lawsuit against the university due to the stadium construction delay the much needed safety enhancements to the stadium, it is also costing the city $250,000.  

With this lawsuit, the city seems to disregard the benefit the games bring to the city, in tax revenues and good will. As a West Berkeley resident, I was heartened to read in a restaurant blog that recommendations for pre- and post-game eating venues mentioned restaurants throughout the city, including multiple locations in West Berkeley. The first game this season is already sold out, with many Tennessee fans coming to town specifically for the event. They will be staying in Berkeley hotels, eating in Berkeley restaurants and generating tax revenue for the city!  

As Ms. Lorber suggested, I would encourage all of those who are outraged by this waste of resources by the city to let your council members know. The lawsuit should be dropped. Instead, spend the resources (time and money) on activities that generate more positive benefit, like capitalizing on all the visitors and UC fans who come to Berkeley for the many events at UC.  

Karin Cooke 

 

• 

GOP VALUES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Oh, this president and his Republican backers! They spent hundreds of billion (with a “b”) dollars destroying the infrastructure in Iraq, and it’s our bridges falling down because money wasn’t spent to maintain our infrastructure. Now we hear them complain that a few million dollars to provide medical insurance for our poor children is “too expensive.” This Republican administration. Sheesh! 

Bruce Joffe 

Piedmont 

 

• 

GUNS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Calling someone “dishonest” because you disagree with them is an ad hominem attack. I happen to believe that my views on U.S. self-defense are in accord with the facts. Most civilians do not own tasers and you can be in serious trouble if you injure someone with a spray. Suppose they become immobilized on your property? Better to just scare them away with a gun. I do think that people should take lessons in gun safety and be psychologically prepared to use a gun in self-defense. Otherwise, just having a gun locked away is useless.  

Robert Clear is impressed with official stats. Having lived almost half my life in D.C. and the other half here in Oakland I am convinced that there are many unreported crimes. Clear’s statement that people without guns are more able to walk away from bad situations is laughable on its face. A criminal is much more likely to attack someone he believes is disarmed than take a chance with a gun owner. As far as guns not saving lives there are many people who are living proof that they do. Clear doesn’t elaborate on the “social factors” that allegedly cause crime so there was nothing there for me to respond to. I suspect that is just another left liberal excuse to rationalize crime. I never claimed that half the population owns guns.  

I believe it is closer to one third, 100 million people out of 300 million-plus Americans. The main point I was making is that in most cases where guns are used in self-defense are non-lethal. The potential criminal is scared off. And there are no victims, hence no police stats. That is definitely the most desirable outcome. 

Michael P. Hardesty 

Oakland 

 

• 

JOHN EDWARDS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Presidential candidate John Edwards is receiving intense interest in Iowa and in the Bay Area. He is racking up donations—large and tiny—often ahead of the pack. His $15 a head appearance in San Francisco Aug. 1 packed the house. His following in the South increased dramatically after his poverty tour. 

You’d never guess this success from the coverage the media are giving him. It’s all Hillary and Obama as though no one else was in the race. MSNBC, CNN, the print press: all display a blanket code of silence. “Meet the Press” on Sunday was a gross example of what is going on. Tim Russert invited two authors who each had written books on the candidates, one on Hillary and one on Obama. The discussion focused on those two and then went on to the Republican candidates. 

Edwards has pledged to challenge the rigged system that has created the two Americas he describes. He promises not to take money from lobbyists, to work for campaign finance reform, increase taxes on the rich to help finance programs for health care and education. All this must not sit well with the owners of the swollen media empires, now clutched in a few powerful hands. The press is not free, so we are not free. 

Nina King Luce 

 

• 

KPFA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As a long-time media activist and KPFA-watcher, and currently a termed-out community representative on KPFA’s Program Council, I’d like to weigh in on the recent editorials and responses. I support what Becky O’Malley said: I think she’s correct and I would add that the first hour of the Sunday Salon program that featured Mayor Bates also struck me as an unfocused discussion—one that attempted to link a recent study of soaring U.S. obesity rates with the “gourmet foodie” culture of Berkeley, instead of food supply issues that cause obesity rates to skyrocket, most noticeably in lower-income populations. 

That said, I think the lesson to be learned here is that a progressive community radio station benefits from collaborative decision-making on programming and a wide circle of opinions and voices, and suffers when it retreats into hierarchy, secretiveness and buy-in to mainstream media myths about objectivity and professionalism. We can have a mayoral love-fest on KGO any day of the week. 

I understand that running KPFA is a difficult task and the level of criticism can be hard to take, so maybe it’s no surprise that the conversation has been heated. But the issue here is the Sunday morning program needs to forge tighter connections with Bay Area progressives, activists and community organizations so it can provide acute, sharp and uncompromising coverage of local issues—and KPFA internally needs to honor the richness and diversity of its volunteers and surrounding city and region by making sure programming decisions don’t occur in bolted conference rooms but in larger committee structures that include a dozen plus people drawn from different places and experiences. It doesn’t do the station any good to box out its own programming council with volunteer, community and board input. It just makes for less rewarding programming. 

Tracy Rosenberg 

Media Alliance 

Former community representative 

KPFA Program Council


Commentary: Shame on Governor For Vetoing Universal Health Care Bill

By Jessica Rosen
Tuesday August 07, 2007

The OneCareNow universal health insurance campaign in 365 cities in 365 days is dedicated to ensuring quality, affordable universal healthcare gets passed in California. To get involved, go to www.onecarenow.org. 

Gov. Schwarzenegger denied Californians their right to quality, affordable healthcare by vetoing Senator Kuehl’s Universal Healthcare legislation. The sell-out governor’s veto is immoral. 

Gov. Schwarzenegger’s veto of SB 840 (Kuehl) shows a profound ignorance of Senator Kuehl’s carefully considered and thoroughly researched bill that would provide comprehensive health insurance to all California residents and save money. 

SB 840 provides for a single health insurance agency, not a government-run healthcare system. Doctors, hospitals and other providers would continue to operate as private firms as they do now. 

SB 840 is NOT socialized medicine. It is sound public policy, just like the national guard, the police, and the fire service. We all face unpredictable risks, so we share the cost of public services to protect us from them. It’s the same with health care, as every other nation in the developed world has long since discovered. 

There is already a vast and ineffective bureaucracy that has mishandled our health insurance dollars for decades causing tremendous waste and human suffering. The private insurance bureaucracy is literally killing people and deserves to be eliminated. A new, coherent, responsive and carefully administered public health insurance agency could eliminate this waste and unnecessary suffering. 

Senator Kuehl’s plan would actually save money for the families and businesses that currently purchase health insurance. Private health insurance firms waste 30 percent of our premium dollars on what they call “administrative costs” that include marketing expenses, profits and outrageous salaries for executives. Even more telling, they refer to the money that they pay to doctors, hospitals and other healthcare providers as “medical losses.” 

Under SB 840, the government would NOT be providing medical care. It is a health insurance system. It would be less intrusive than the current system of “pre-approvals,” “exclusions” and “pre-existing conditions” that leave millions without care. Each of us could choose our own personal physician who would manage our care. Our doctor, not an insurance clerk, would decide what prescriptions and procedures would be best for us. 

SB 840 is a new health insurance paradigm. It improves affordability with built-in checks and balances that control costs. It emphasizes shared responsibility with a risk pool that includes all Californians. And it promotes healthy living with community-based education programs and an emphasis on preventive care. 

Unfortunately, none of the facts about SB 840 is going to change the governor’s mind. Not because they are untrue, but because he is beholden to the insurance companies who are making billions of dollars at the expense of ordinary people who are terrified by the prospect of a sudden illness or accident. 

It is a matter of record that the governor has accepted millions of dollars in campaign donations from the health insurance industry. This makes him part of the problem. He’s a puppet of the vested interests who are happily exploiting the suffering of millions of ordinary citizens. 

It’s a shame that the governor cannot do what’s right. A shame that he has to grovel for cash from these soulless tycoons who could care less about people like you and me. A shame that he doesn’t truly feel the anxiety and pain of six million of his constituents who have no health insurance. 

 

Jessica Rosen is a Berkeley resident.


Commentary: Rotating Primaries: An Eternally Bad Idea

By Thomas Gangale
Tuesday August 07, 2007

Ever wonder why nothing ever gets done in Washington? One of the reasons is that some of our elected officials, once they get an idea into their heads, they fixate on it until the end of time, no matter how dumb it is. The latest dumb, old idea is being trumpeted by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Lamar Alexander (R-TN), and Joseph Lieberman (ID-CT). The fact that they’re touting it as a “tri-partisan solution” ought to tell that it’s more hype than substance. There’s a Democrat, a Republican, and a Leiberman. What, is Leiberman a party of one? Well, I guess that makes it easier for him to get seated in a busy restaurant. 

So much for the hype, now let’s take a look at their dumb, old idea: a plan for rotating regional presidential primaries. The idea dates back to the early 1970s, when Oregon Republican Bob Packwood introduced a bill for such a plan in the U.S. Senate. The bill had only two co-sponsors and it died in committee. Thirty-two similar bills have been floated in Congress over the past 30 years, and they have met the same fate. “Jumpin’ Joe” Leiberman himself has tried this twice before, in 1996 and 1999, and all he ever had was one co-sponsor. Quite simply, this is a plan that can’t survive outside the committee room. 

Neither of the political parties likes this idea, although they are interested in other reform proposals. A Republican commission passed on it in 2000, and even though a 2005 Democratic commission invited a presentation on the rotating regional plan, the commission’s report didn’t even mention the plan. In fact, in the Democratic commission’s deliberations, the rotating regional plan ranked second from the bottom, just above doing nothing. 

It’s pretty clear why: one-quarter of the nation would vote on the same day, the second block of voters would have to wait until a month later, the third block yet another month.... Now, who in his or her right mind thinks that any but the first block of votes will have any meaning? When the Howard Dean campaign collapsed in late February 2004, less than a quarter of the delegates had been chosen, and at that point John Kerry was the de facto Democratic nominee. The other way of looking at it is that more than three-quarters of the nation’s Democrats had absolutely no say in the nomination of John Kerry. 

The rotating regional plan would permanently disenfranchise three-quarters of the electorate in both parties. Because the winner of the first regional primary would look like “The Winner” and the others would come off looking like also-rans, every candidate would spend all of his or her time, energy and money in those first states in a do-or-die effort. The rest of the country would be completely ignored. 

Since no resources would remain for any real campaigning after this electoral Armageddon, the states in the remaining three regional primaries would get on the bandwagon with The Winner of the first primary. Win one, get three free. Any politician can do that math. The lucky first 25 percent would rotate from one four-year cycle to the next. Your particular region would get to cast a meaningful vote once every four cycles, or once every 16 years. You would be privileged to choose your party’s nominee three or four times during your life. That’s enough voting privilege for one lifetime, right? 

According to H.L. Mencken, “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong.” This is one of them. There are much better alternatives out there, but politicians are ignoring them so they can continue riding their tired old hobbyhorses, rather than study new solutions based on solid political science. The American people deserve better than this empty-headed grandstanding. 

 

Thomas Gangale is the executive director at OPS-Alaska, a think tank based in Petaluma, where he manages projects in political science and international relations. He is the author of From the Primaries to the Polls: How to Repair America’s Broken Presidential Nomination Process, to be published by Praeger in December 2007.


Commentary: Do Berkeley Police Have It In for Bicyclists?

By Michelle Lerager
Tuesday August 07, 2007

I am a 56-year-old woman who has enjoyed riding my bike all over Berkeley for over 25 years. I bike to work daily; I do most of my errands by bike; and I ride to reduce my carbon footprint and for fitness—I’m proud to say I ride up Spruce Street regularly for aerobic exercise. I am a very safe, conservative bicyclist. I stop at all stop lights and proceed cautiously at stop signs, slowing or stopping and taking my proper turn when entering intersections. I avoid main streets and appreciate the “Bicycle Boulevards,” which I use whenever possible. 

Much to my dismay and torment, in recent months I have twice been pulled over by police officers in patrol cars while riding my bike and admonished and/or threatened with a citation, when I was proceeding with caution and alertness and the road courtesy I always employ. In the first case, I was scolded by an officer for not dismounting from my bike at a stop sign while proceeding east on Blake Street at Milvia Street—an intersection whose south side is blocked by a traffic barrier that prevents the entry of any through traffic from the side where I was crossing the intersection. In the most recent instance (just today), as I was traveling north on California Street at Addison Street, I was threatened with a moving-violation citation (whose fine, the officer said, would be $275) for not coming to a full stop, although I had slowed my bike from a modest pace to a very slow pace as I approached the stop sign and proceeded through the intersection. A car traveling east on Addison Street arrived at the intersection (which is controlled by a four-way stop) at the same time as I did, and the car stopped at the stop sign. I felt it was very safe for me to proceed and that my doing so did not impede the movement of the car or violate its right to proceed. 

I do not understand why the police seem so concerned with such a relatively minor infraction. Do bicyclists really need to get off or completely stop their bikes on quiet residential streets where there is little traffic and their proceeding does not put anyone at risk for an accident? I am confused and upset. What has always been a pleasant activity for me is now fraught with worry that I will be pulled over again by the police if I don’t get off my bike at every stop sign. 

I know that some bicyclists ride dangerously, and I strongly disapprove of reckless driving, whether by bikes or cars. But really, if a bicyclist comes to a four-way stop and no other vehicles are anywhere nearby, must the bicyclist stop and get off her/his bike or risk getting a ticket? And what constitutes stopping? How many seconds do you have to be stationary on the bike to prove you stopped? Also, is the bicyclist required merely to stop, or is s/he also required to get off the bike? The officer who confronted me today said, “It’s my opinion that you just have to stop.” The other officer was of the opinion that the law required bicyclists to step off their bikes at stop signs. Do we bicyclists have to guess what police officers’ opinions of the law’s requirements are? 

I admit that I did not come to a full stop in either of the instances mentioned above. But is it reasonable to expect bicyclists to do that in a situation where common sense determines there is no risk to anyone created by a bicyclist’s slowing down, checking traffic in all directions, and then proceeding without stopping? I have never seen any other bicyclist actually get off her or his bike at stop signs if conditions were clear for proceeding. (If we did do that, it would take all day just to get across town!) 

I appreciate the difficult, vital work that Berkeley police officers do every day, but I don’t understand the way in which they seem to be enforcing traffic laws with respect to bicyclists. What is accomplished by harassing conscientious bicyclists who are not endangering themselves or others and who, after all, are contributing to the city’s livability by reducing car emissions, noise, and traffic congestion? I would appreciate hearing an explanation on this from the Berkeley Police Department in your pages. 

 

Michelle Lerager is a Berkeley resident.


Columns

Column: Undercurrents: The Speculation Over the Murder of Chauncey Bailey

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday August 10, 2007

The assassination of Oakland Post editor and long-time Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey on a daytime downtown Oakland street—now exactly one week ago, as of the time of this writing—is a test for Oakland, under a national spotlight. Some of us are passing it. Some of us are not doing so well. 

One of those passing, at least in the initial stages, is the Oakland Police Department.  

In that passing grade, I’m not including the quick arrest of the alleged confessed shooter of Mr. Bailey, 19-year-old Your Black Muslim Bakery handyman Devaughdre Broussard. Oakland police officials say that last Friday morning’s raids on several bakery properties had been planned for some time, and were unrelated to the Bailey murder, based upon warrants concerning a May kidnapping and torture case, and two July North Oakland murders. Given that it was widely being talked about around Oakland on the Thursday afternoon following Mr. Bailey’s murder that he had been working on an unflattering story about Your Black Muslim Bakery, it is difficult to believe that Oakland police did not hear some of that talk, and did not speed up the raids on the bakery properties as a result.  

Still, if Oakland police knew in advance that the murder weapon was going to be found on the property, they are not saying so, and therefore the finding of that weapon, and the subsequent arrest of Mr. Broussard and announcement of his confession, can at this point only be attributed to good fortune. 

However, there are other areas of the events surrounding the raids and arrest where the Oakland Police Department deserves praise. 

The first is the fact that despite the fact that a number of weapons were found on the Your Black Muslim Bakery premises by police, no weapons were fired by either side, and no one was injured. There are many ways in which the Friday morning raids could have gone wrong, with the possibility of resulting injuries and deaths. That it did not can only be attributed to good planning, good leadership, and disciplined execution on the part of the police. They should be commended for that. 

The second area where OPD is due praise is in the careful manner in which they have released information—and refused to draw conclusions from that information—in the aftermath of the raids and arrests. 

We are all familiar with instances, notorious instances, where police or law enforcement officials have not been so careful. One of them is the recent rape allegations against members of the Duke University Lacrosse team, which Durham, North Carolina District Attorney Mike Nifong chose to prosecute on CNN and MSNBC and the Fox News Channel, rather than in the Durham County courts. The public case eventually collapsed, and the charges withdrawn and, unfortunately, the citizens of Durham County are left with the possibility that either innocent young men were unfairly slandered in the national press by county officials, or a Durham County woman was assaulted and her attackers went free because the prosecutor decided playing for the publicity was more important than preparing for the trial. 

Perhaps with a mind towards such fiascos, and the international attention the murder of Chauncey Bailey was generating, Oakland police officials have been measured and cautious in what they have released to the press concerning the Your Black Muslim Bakery arrests. 

At the Friday afternoon press conference announcing the raid and arrests, Assistant Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan would only say that “evidence linked to the murder of Chauncey Bailey” had been found in the raids, with Lt. Ersie Joyner later revealing that the evidence was a weapon. Mr. Jordan and Mr. Joyner refused to speculate beyond that, despite repeated questions by reporters, saying only that the persons arrested were being questioned, and the department was continuing its investigation. 

And that’s exactly how it should have been. The department satisfied the public’s need to know evidence in the Bailey murder had been uncovered—confirming the widespread speculation that there was some connection with the murder to Your Black Muslim Bakery—but refusing to participate in any public rush to judgment. 

And in his announcement on the following Monday of Mr. Broussard’s confession to the Bailey murder, Deputy Chief Jordan was equally careful. “We don't believe he worked on his own, and I can't get into specifics," the Chronicle quoted Mr. Jordan as saying. "We're still trying to investigate how the plan was developed and who was involved in the plan.” The assumption by many people reading that statement or seeing it on the evening news was that Oakland police believed that Mr. Broussard was acting on orders from Your Black Muslim Bakery officials. Whether or not that is a good assumption, and whether or not that is actually the theory that Oakland police are working on, Mr. Jordan was careful not to say it, and rightfully so. If there is enough evidence developed by police to bring to the District Attorney and a judge to take out a warrant for further arrests in the Bailey murder, then police should do so, and it is proper for them not to speculate in detail about that. Speculation don’t make it so. 

But while Oakland police have been careful in the dissemination of information surrounding the murder of Chauncey Bailey, some of my colleagues in the media, unfortunately, have not. 

In the Aug. 7 story “New Details On Man Who Confessed To Killing Editor,” San Francisco Chronicle reporters Henry K. Lee and Matthai Chakko Kuruvila wrote that “among those arrested Friday during raids at the bakery at 5832 San Pablo Ave. and three nearby homes was Yusuf Bey IV, 21, the son of the bakery's founder. The arrests were linked to Bailey's homicide, two other slayings in July and the May 19 kidnapping.” To show that this wasn’t a misprint or an aberration, Chronicle reporter Leslie Fulbright wrote on the same day, in the companion article “Bey Son-In-Law Says He Was Editor’s Source” that “seven people were arrested during a raid at the bakery and three other locations in connection with a string of crimes, including Bailey's slaying. Among them was Yusuf Bey IV.” 

This takes some sorting.  

As we said earlier, Oakland police conducted the Friday morning raids on warrants involving a May kidnapping and torture case and two July North Oakland homicides. Seven persons, including 21 year old Your Muslim Bakery leader Yusuf Bey IV, were arrested on those warrants and held for questioning. After police obtained Mr. Broussard’s’ confession, he—and only he—was charged with Mr. Bailey’s murder. Three other men arrested on Friday morning, Yusef Bey IV, 20 year old Joshua Bey and 21 year old Tamon Halfin, have been charged in connection with the May kidnapping and torture case. No one has yet been charged with the two July North Oakland murders. 

But according to the two Chronicle articles, the seven arrests, including that of Mr. Bey IV, were connected with all of the crimes, including Mr. Bailey’s. And that, in fact, was not true. 

Less egregious, but still problematic, was the August 8 Oakland Tribune article by staff writers Harry Harris and Paul T. Rosynsky, “Bakery leader, cohorts charged”, which began “Members of a violent faction of Your Black Muslim Bakery, including leader Yusuf Bey IV, were charged Tuesday with a host of vicious crimes including murder, kidnapping and torture. The charges stem from two ruthless episodes since May, including the killing of Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey, who was slain with a shotgun as he walked to work in downtown Oakland Thursday morning. The other charges stem from an alleged May kidnapping and torture in which several members of the bakery kidnapped two women using a car modified to look like a police cruiser.”  

A careful reading of the entire article shows that only Mr. Broussard has been charged with the Bailey murder. But if you only read the first three paragraphs, you would believe that charges for that murder have been brought against Mr. Bey IV. 

Nothing here should be construed to mean that I am advocating that newspapers or broadcast media should not investigate, on their own, the Bailey murder and the events surrounding and publish or broadcasts those results. But a newspaper or media broadcast company publishing information that it says connects the individuals arrested in the Your Black Muslim Bakery raids with all the crimes being discussed—including the two North Oakland murders and the murder of Chauncey Bailey—is far different from the patching together of a paragraph that gives the impression that Oakland police have done so. 

Why is this important, and not merely nit-picking? 

The public is free to speculate on what events led to the murder of Chauncey Bailey. Nothing I say, in this column, should be interpreted as an intention to attempt to take away that freedom to speculate, even if I had the power to do so. Like everyone else in Oakland, I am doing my own speculating. But because of its unique power in our society to both disseminate information and shape public opinion, the media has a different responsibility. Columnists, editorialists, and other opinion writers can join the ranks of speculation, if they wish. But while the news stories and news reports may freely publish and reprint the speculation of others, the facts published or broadcast in those news stories and news reports should be facts only, and not our own spin and interpretation. To do otherwise is to turn the media into the leader of a mob. Many of us, both in this city and in other localities, have lived through such times when either we or our friends or family or people who live near us and look like us have been the victims of such media-led mob mentality. We would not like to go through such times again, here in Oakland, even if it is in a cause we believe to be just and righteous and necessary, the finding of all of the persons responsible for the murder of Chauncey Bailey, and bringing them to justice. 

I believe that can be done—if we are careful, and courageous, and patient—without violating the principles in which we say we believe. So far as I can see to this date in the events surrounding the murder of Chauncey Bailey, the Oakland Police Department is showing how that can properly done. The rest of us that work in other official capacities in this city—in public leadership and the media—should follow their lead. 


Column: The Public Eye: I’m Trying to Get On the Bus

By Zelda Bronstein
Friday August 10, 2007

I had my transit-oriented epiphany one morning in late May as I was making my way to a conference at the UC Student Union. I live in north Berkeley near the intersection of Solano and Colusa. Loathe to pay $20 to leave my car for six to eight hours in the city-owned Telegraph-Channing garage, I decided to look for a free space on a Northside street and walk from there to the conference. But as I motored through neighborhoods north of Cedar above Shattuck, my fantasized unregulated spot failed to materialize. Everywhere I looked, I saw two-hour parking signs. Time was wasting, and I was getting further and further from my final destination. I returned home, left my car in the driveway and, feeling both chastened and virtuous, caught the bus.  

Negative reinforcement works. Trouble is, it can work against virtue as well as for it. After my revelatory May experience, I resolved to take the bus whenever possible. Unfortunately, AC Transit makes it so hard to get information about routes and schedules that I’ve ended up driving even when I’d rather ride. 

I recently wanted to go to a 5:10 late matinee at a movie theater in downtown Berkeley. Not long ago, I would have just walked to the familiar bus stop at Solano and Colusa and waited for the 43 bus. But on June 24, AC Transit changed many of its routes, schedules and bus numbers. The 43 was no more. What, I wondered, had taken its place, and when did it stop on Solano? In this era of climate change campaigns, you’d think those questions would be easy to answer. Guess again.  

If you Google the AC Transit website and click on “Maps and Schedules” you get a list of dozens of bus numbers with no up-front indication of where the buses go or how their routes relate to the discontinued lines. You also get a “Maps” option with links to specific cities. I clicked on “Richmond-Berkeley.” Up came a map so small as to be illegible, but it was accompanied by a table of signs that could be used to home in on specific areas and to enlarge or diminish the map at those points. I began to click and to move the cursor. Transit corridors come into focus, with bus lines shown in color. But I could only see a tiny part of any line at once. Again, too much trouble. 

What I wanted was an old-fashioned schedule that listed the street name of the route (alongside the bus number) and the times that the bus made its major stops. In fact, just such a schedule is posted on the AC Transit website but to get to it, first you have to know the number of the bus line. 

I decided to abandon the website and to call for help. Under “AC Transit,” the phone book gives two numbers for “Bus Information,” 511 and 817-1717. Ditto for the website: Click on “Contact Us,” and under “Travel Information,” you’ll see: “Phone: Dial 817-1717 or 511 and say, ‘AC Transit,’ to speak with person about route information including time points, destinations, or trip planning.” 

I dialed 511 but didn’t get a person, at least not a live one. Instead, I heard music with a technobeat followed by an unctuous taped male voice that said: “Welcome to the Bay Area’s 511. Main Menu. I can give you information on traffic…” When I interrupted with “AC Transit,” the Voice said in a resigned tone, “OK, AC Transit.” But instead of connecting me to a live operator, it continued: “You can ask for information on cash fares, prepaid passes, lost and found or damaged passes. In addition, for complaints, commendations….” When I repeatedly said, “AC Transit,” the Voice would say: “I’m sorry, I missed that” or “You can interrupt me at any time” or “To hear a complete list of what’s available, say: ‘What are my choices?’” It was maddening.  

I hung up, went back to the website, rummaged through various drop-down menus, found a phone number for District Secretary Linda Nemeroff, (891-7284) and called it. I doubted that the secretary’s official duties included dispensing basic travel information, but I thought I might reach a helpful live person. Happily, Ms. Nemeroff was at her desk and indeed did her best to help me. First she tried to find the information herself on the AC Transit website. She encountered the challenges I’d just described to her. Then she put me on hold while she searched for someone who could tell me what bus to take from Solano and Colusa to downtown Berkeley. When, after five or so minutes, nobody turned up, she asked if she could relay my concerns to somebody at AC Transit who could address them. By then, it was nearly 4:30, and I was worried that I was going to miss my show. I told her I’d call her back, said goodbye and drove to downtown Berkeley, where I was lucky enough to find an on-street parking place near the movie theater just in time to make my show. 

Subsequently I did speak to Ms. Nemeroff. She called me—several times, in fact—and said she’d forward my questions to the appropriate party. The next working day, I got a call from Latonya Smith, who works in AC Transit’s Customer Services department. Ms. Smith was also quite helpful; she’s sending me information about the changed bus lines. She also told me that earlier in the summer, such information had been posted on the website as well as handed out at BART stations and elsewhere; and that the agency was soliciting feedback on the recent changes from focus groups of riders.  

That all sounds good. But would-be patrons shouldn’t have to call Customer Service to get information about bus schedules and routes. Here are a few suggestions for making AC Transit more user-friendly: Cut the crazy-making, voice-prompted taped responses that force callers to contemplate irrelevant, time-consuming “menus.” Have phone inquiries answered by well-informed staff who know the new routes and schedules and how they relate to the old ones. Post those routes on the AC Transit website in easy-to-access formats. Put the information about the June schedule changes back on the website. Stock each bus with ample hard copy versions of its current route and timetable. When I was in New York City in July, I greatly appreciated the signs posted on a pole near each bus stop listing the routes and timetables for each line that stopped there. I understand that it could take awhile to achieve that coverage in the East Bay (Ms. Smith told me that AC Transit has 6500 bus stops); I can only say: Go for it.  

AC Transit wants to spend $400 million on Bus Rapid Transit. How about funding a Bus Rapid Info project that offers effective, low-tech aids that make it easier to get on the bus—any bus—in the first place? 


East Bay Then and Now: Buyer Sought for Historic West Berkeley Church

By Daniella Thompson
Friday August 10, 2007

Westminster Presbyterian Church, which changed hands last year, is on the market again. The third landmark designated by the City of Berkeley, the church at 926 Hearst Ave. and Eighth Street is the second oldest in town, having been built in 1879—a year after the neighboring Church of the Good Shepherd went up. 

Originally called the First Presbyterian Church of West Berkeley, it was designed by the prominent San Francisco architect Charles Geddes (1820–1903). Geddes had already designed the Community United Methodist Church of Half Moon Bay in 1872 and would go on to design the Noe Valley Ministry of San Francisco in 1888. 

In the same year that the Berkeley church was constructed, Geddes drew up plans for the Yosemite Chapel, the oldest building standing in Yosemite Valley and the first of the park’s buildings to be listed in the National Register of Historic Places. 

Born in Nova Scotia, Geddes immigrated to the United States in 1848. In 1860, the U.S. census listed his occupation as “carpenter,” but a decade later he had been upgraded to “architect.” He appears to have teamed up with his son-in-law, the contractor-builder Samuel Thomson. 

Geddes’ work spans a spectrum of Victorian idioms, including Carpenter Gothic, Italianate, Stick style, and New England vernacular. Late in his career he became more experimental; for the Sheldon Jackson Museum (1895–07) in Sitka, Alaska, Geddes created a plain, octagonal concrete structure topped with a small, windowed octagonal cupola. Although not the first octagon in the West (five octagon houses were built in San Francisco in the mid-19th century), the museum was Alaska’s first concrete building and startlingly modern-looking. 

The First Presbyterian Church of West Berkeley was far more traditional—a typical Gothic Revival building executed in wood. Its details were announced in the Berkeley Advocate on May 8, 1879: 

 

The First Presbyterian Church Society has accepted the lot in part donated by Captain Bowen, on the corner of Bristol and Eighth streets. The size of the lot is 52 x 100 feet, and the contract for the building has been awarded to George A. Embury, the builder of the East Berkeley Presbyterian Church, for $2,850. The building is to be 32 feet broad by 57 feet long, with a tower and a spire 80 feet from the ground. The tower will be 10 feet square. The audience room will be 30 ft. 9 in. by 40 ft., and will contain 44 pews, with seating capacity for about 200 persons, although much more space will be available when required by throwing open the lecture room, the size of which is to be 14 x 24 feet. 

The whole interior of the building on the first floor, and the pastor’s study in the tower, is to be plastered and hard-finished. The windows will be stained glass, imitation of lead work. 

 

The church was completed in August 1879 and dedicated on Oct. 26 of that year. The congregation that commissioned it had started meeting four years earlier in the Ocean View School, where the Rev. Doc. James Curry began preaching. In 1877, the congregation was officially organized as the First Presbyterian Church of West Berkeley. At the time, there were only six members, including the first Ruling Elder, Captain James S. Higgins, owner of the Temperance Grocery Store at San Pablo Avenue and Delaware Street. Higgins’ store began its life in 1854 as Captain William J. Bowen’s inn. (The building still exists, now at 834 Delaware Street, and is a City of Berkeley Landmark.) 

Captain Bowen not only made a partial donation of land for the church but served as one of the congregation’s first five trustees. 

The congregation remained small throughout its 95-year existence, seldom reaching 75 members. It occasionally blamed its low membership on the nearby presence of saloons, West Berkeley being outside the one-mile perimeter around the university campus within which liquor sales were prohibited. When local option was being hotly debated in West Berkeley, Rev. George H. Wilkins, pastor from 1906 to 1909, was hung in effigy in the middle of the street. 

Being impecunious, the congregation relied on assistance from Presbyterian Church mission funds. In 1899, the session minutes recorded that “there are no specially poor to be cared for by the church. All are very poor and while caring for self have but little for other things.” Despite its poverty, the congregation rose to the challenge after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, offering shelter to refugees who had fled to Berkeley. 

In 1899, the name was informally changed to Westminster Presbyterian Church to avoid confusion with the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley. The change was never made legal, since that would have entailed the payment of $1 to the Probate Court. Yet in 1914 they managed to scrape together $1,950 and built a two-story clubhouse designed by Walter H. Ratcliff, Jr. 

The congregation stopped using the buildings in 1968 and officially disbanded in 1972. The property was acquired by Lawrence Gerard Smith, a self-styled “Catholic Orthodox priest” unaffiliated with the Catholic Church. Smith renamed it St. Procopius Latin Rite Church and celebrated a traditional Latin mass that attracted no more than 20 parishioners each Sunday. 

The church interior being rather plain and austere, Smith set about adorning it. He was fortunate to meet the Albany artist Gerald Gaxiola, who agreed to paint a mural on the empty wall behind the altar. Gaxiola, later to gain a modicum of fame as the subject of Les Blank’s film “The Maestro: King of the Cowboy Artists,” spent four months populating the wall with life-size figures forming an ecumenical survey of Catholicism. The deep-perspective scene also included Lawrence Smith, dressed in black robe and cowl, and the bare-chested, muscle-bound artist at his easel. At the very top, two adult male angels in their birthday suits, wings flapping, looked down on the mitered crowd. 

Smith also installed stained-glass windows in the sanctuary. Although Geddes’ original plans called for “stained glass, imitation of lead work,” funding must have proved insufficient, and the Westminster Presbyterian congregation made do with hammered glass. It was also during Smith’s watch that the church was designated a City of Berkeley Landmark. 

In 1977, Smith was one of 20 candidates running for the Berkeley city council. The same year, he was convicted of a misdemeanor child molestation charge and sentenced to probation. The police kept an eye on him thereafter. He was in the habit of picking up boys at James Kenney Park, as well as in San Francisco and Oakland, but no evidence against him turned up until 1983, when Smith was charged with six felony counts of sexually abusing Vietnamese and Hispanic boys. He was sentenced to eight months in prison in January 1984. 

Amazingly, Smith returned to the church following his spell in prison and owned it for another nine years. In 1993, when members of the Mekane Selam Medhane Alem Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church saw it for the first time, St. Procopius had been closed for five years, says Benyam Mulugeta, chair of the Medhane Alem board. 

Formed in 1986, the congregation had been using other churches’ facilities for their services. They bought Smith’s church for $300,000, after which Smith demanded an additional payment for the stained-glass windows. Since Medhane Alem declined to buy them, Smith took the windows with him to Mexico, says Mulugeta. 

Smith settled on Calle Libertad in Guadalajara, across the street from the U.S. Consulate General. There, too, he got into trouble, albeit of a different kind. David Agren, a Canadian journalist living in Guadalajara, twice reported in his blog that Smith aroused the ire of his neighbors by sheltering as many as 95 stray dogs in his home. Following a lawsuit, a failed appeal, and many fines from the city, Smith moved the dogs and was looking for another place to live. 

Shorn of its stained-glass windows, the sanctuary next lost the Gaxiola mural. The Ethiopian Orthodox congregation was not interested in a Roman Catholic mural, and the nudity offended some parishioners. There was apparently no curiosity about the identity of the artist, either. The mural was painted over, and the sanctuary reverted to its plain and austere Presbyterian appearance, only more so, since the hammered glass was gone, too. Remaining is the lovely wooden staircase ascending to the organ loft, where the organ appears to be intact. 

Medhane Alem eventually outgrew the church. Two years ago, the congregation bought the former First United Lutheran Church on Mountain Blvd. in Oakland. Initially they had planned to turn the Berkeley church into a monastery and school but have since determined that they need at least ten acres—they want to include a retreat and some farming operations—and are looking beyond the Bay Area for suitable land. 

After sitting empty for a year, the church was acquired last year by the Pentecostal congregation New Word of Faith. Bishop Nathaniel L. Brown says that his congregation is already outgrowing the space. Since many of the parishioners are in recovery from substance abuse or other criminal activities, they are finding it hard to keep up with payments on their usurious first mortgage (the second mortgage is carried by Medhane Alem). 

Appraised last year for $2,100,000, the church is currently listed for $1,700,000. Included are the 4,200-square-foot chapel and the Ratcliff-designed assembly hall, which contains a dining hall with a 200-person capacity, a full kitchen, four bedrooms, three bathrooms, four offices, a storage room, and an attic. The church is available for immediate move-in. For more information contact Benyam Mulugeta at (650) 906-8012. 

 

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

 

 

Photograph by Daniella Thompson 

Westminster Presbyterian Church at 926 Hearst Avenue was built in 1879.


Garden Variety: Seize the Time, Pet the Kittens at Westbrae’s Paradise Pottery

By Ron Sullivan
Friday August 10, 2007

Now that Clay of the Land has gone out of business—the likable and savvy owners lost their lease to a developer, how novel—I guess I ought to mention other local marvelous discount pottery places. Here’s one to get to before the high-rise axe descends upon its lot, as there’s been a for sale placard there right from the start.  

The lot’s owner is on record as wanting to accommodate its former tenant, A New Leaf Garden Gallery, while building there but as the gallery moved to San Francisco instead and that’s a juicy bit of real estate in a prosperous neighborhood, who knows what will actually happen?  

Paradise Pottery was an oddly recent discovery for me. I’d passed it a zillion times, and gone to Westbrae Nursery next door too, but in the two years it’s been open I had somehow not quite accomplished the opportune intersection between my free time, the direction of traffic, and the place’s open hours.  

It’s not that they place isn’t open much, either. Tuesday’s the only closed day and there’s a reasonable chance there’ll be someone there anyway. Maybe I should try to change the schedule of my orthodontist appointments, or the rhythm of my Costco runs.  

But I solved the problem the other day when I drove ‘round the corner and spotted a miraculously easy parking space. I parked for a half-hour and Joe and I took a stroll through the crockery.  

We were greeted by an adolescent gray tabby kitten who played some jittery game of peekaboo with us, coming forward for a pat on the head and then changing his mind, pursuing things we couldn’t see among the urns and pots, peering cautiously around a stack to see if we were watching, getting distracted by some subtle movement on the ground before he decided how to react when we were caught looking.  

The potscape he was exploring comprised indoor- and outdoor-sized planters, watertight things that could become cachepots or fountains or miniature pools. This was set in a cozy lot of flagstone, gravel, and a mostly-dry fake stream, varied by rock walls with cascading erigeron, upright leafy and spiky tropicals, a couple of nice lacy shade trees. It’s pretty much unchanged from A New Leaf’s place, which is nice. I only wish they’d kept the stream running.  

The crockery is in general quite handsome; it’s certainly various enough for various tastes and priced reasonably. The range includes brightly painted Talavera ceramics from Mexico; big things from China or Vietnam with deep-black, bricky-red, or subtle drip glazes, shiny or leathery or incised or molded or pebbly or matte. It’s a deep variety for such an apparently small lot.  

Staff seems to consist of Beth Chambers, who welcomed us with exactly the right balance of helpfulness and backing-off, and the owner. And that cat, Casper, and his calico sister Tibby. Go on over and tell them we said Prrrrrrrr.  

 

PARADISE POTTERY 

1286 Gilman St., Berkeley. 528-4291 

10 a.m.—6 p.m. Wednesday through  

Monday. Closed Tuesdays.


About the House: Retrofitting a Lousy Foundation

By Matt Cantor
Friday August 10, 2007

We had a little shaker a few weeks ago and I was faced with the same series of encounters in the ensuing days that I’ve faced so often over the last 20 years. They tend to go something like “Hey, that was a pretty big quake we had the other day, eh? But you know, there weren’t any cracks in my walls or anything. Not as bad a Loma Prieta.” And I get started… “Well, the fact is that what we had the other day was tiny.” Then comes the math. “Did you know that a 7.2 on the Richter is roughly 30,000 times bigger than a 4.2 (the one we just had)”…faces go blank, people wander away wondering why they bothered talking to me in the first place. Maybe I’m just not a people person. Oh well, my kids love me. 

Those are the facts and I’ll beleager you just a bit more before I move on to practical matters. First, all those earthquakes your house has been through…They’re nothin’. Just plain nothin’. The last earthquake that hit our town that was worth any serious attention at all was well over a hundred years ago, in 1868. Andrew Johnson was being impeached and UC was being founded (in Oakland of all places). The 14th Amendment was being passed to give African Americans full rights (and corporations the right to rule our lives) and Thomas Edison was applying for a patent for the first electric voting machine (no, I am not kidding). The point is that this was so long ago that nobody living can remember it and there are effectively no structures standing today that can give evidence of what that earthquake was like.  

It’s likely that when we do get our earthquake (Loma Prieta was somebody else’s earthquake) that over 150,000 homes will have to be abandoned and the occupants consigned to refugee status. If you don’t want to be one of those folks—and I assume you don’t—then it’s time to bolt and brace your house. If you’ve had it done years ago or by someone of less than definitive credentials then it makes sense to have it looked at. There might be some need for improvement. 

Now, I have this bad habit of taking a long time to get around to what I wanted to talk about and so I duly apologize if I’ve wasted some of your time. I guess I needed a prelude. So, that being done, here’s what I wanted to get to: 

A lot of homes have bad foundations. Now, that’s a rather broad remark, so I’ll try to clean it up a bit. Many foundations, especially those from before 1935 suffer from a range of ills, including concrete deterioration (soft concrete), rotation (tilting of the footings) and cracking (or settlement). These can, in combination, be serious enough to require replacement of part, or even all, of your foundation. In my book, serious deterioration is the most serious failing when it comes to earthquake readiness because it keeps bolts from staying in one place when the earth starts shaking. When foundations are really crumbly (you can drive a screwdriver an inch through) there may not be any point in adding bolts. But I firmly believe, having sat down with a number of engineers and other experts over the years, that all but the worst foundations can be retrofitted to some effectiveness.  

Even foundations that have settled badly, those with cracks and fairly serious rotation, can have bolts and bracing panels installed with reasonable assuredness that they will add greatly to the earthquake resistance of a house. The reason I point this out is that many people are putting off doing seismic work until they get to the foundation and this can mean, due to the high cost, a delay that may end badly. 

The earthquake isn’t going to wait for all of us to upgrade our foundations, so we need to decide which ones we’re going to do and retrofit the rest of them to our best ability. Most retrofits are not going to fail as a result of a bad foundation and there are many faulty foundations that will work more than well enough if bolts and bracing panels are properly installed. So, if you don’t have cash to fix the foundation this year, it’s time to do the retrofit. 

Here are some pointers for those who know that they have poor quality concrete and are ready to get this vital task completed. First, use more bolts. When concrete quality is poor it’s beneficial to distribute the lateral load of the house (the weight of the house moving left and right) over a larger area. By putting more bolts into the older, softer concrete, we put less stress on each portion and decrease the likelihood that the bolts will break through the concrete. Here’s a freebie we get from doing this: since weaker concrete tends to vary in strength as we move around the perimeter of the foundation, we increase the chance that some bolts will be in better concrete and will stay in place. In the end, all we need to do is to be sure that enough of the house is grasped and held in place to prevent it from sliding off of the foundation. 

Another thing that I recommend for weaker concrete is the use of epoxy for bolt installations. Yes, we’re talking about gluing the bolts in place. This may sound silly or weak but it’s just the opposite. When concrete is crumbly, the typical expansion bolt doesn’t work very well. This is a bolt that, when tightened, enlarges in diameter near the base, thus lodging it in place. If concrete is soft, this enlargement can just push some rocks and sand around and actually weaken this area all the more. Not only does this weaken the area immediately around the bolt but also leaves the bolt loose and more able to slam through soft concrete. Epoxy, on the other hand, strengthens the area immediately around the bolt, fills any voids and bonds the bolt to the foundation. It’s a much better connection for weak concrete. 

Once again, many retrofits have been poorly done and it’s a good idea to have someone look at them. Nevertheless, poor concrete is only occasionally so bad that that a retrofit isn’t worth the money. This local fault has been pretty faithful to its schedule and has us now about a decade overdue. Even if you end up reinstalling bolting and bracing in five years when you get that new foundation, I still think it’s wise to go ahead and spend the money to bolt and brace to that old broken concrete today. The alternative may be hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage that could have been avoided with just a few thousand spent now. 

Insurance may recoup some of your losses when that day arrives or it may not. If this quake is centered in a densely developed area (It’ll probably be at my house), the cost may be more than the underwriters have set aside and you may not be made whole (financially speaking).  

John Lennon said “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.” I don’t think there are many earthquakes in Liverpool so I have no idea how he understood this problem so well. 

 

 

Got a question about home repairs and inspections? Send them to Matt Cantor, in care of East Bay Real Estate, at realestate@berkeleydailyplanet.com.


Quake Tip of the Week

By Larry Guillot
Friday August 10, 2007

Playing in the Traffic? 

As a loving parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, (etc), would you consider letting that child you love so much go out and play in the street? Not even if it were a relatively “quiet” street, not in a million years. 

But you will let that same child play in your house, surrounded by bookcases, heavy furniture, and large wall hangings, right? If you live in the interior of our country, not problem. If, however, you live in California, you are putting that child, and yourself, at risk. 

Securing is easy and cheap, an incredible bargain for the safety and peace of mind that it brings. Please think about it. 

Here’s to making your home secure and your family safe. 

 

Larry Guillot is the owner of QuakePrepare, an earthquake consulting, securing and kit supply service. Contact him at 558-3299 or see www.quakeprepare.com to receive semi-monthly e-mails and safety reports.  

 


Column: The Public Eye: Giuliani: ‘It’s Great to Be Rich”

By Bob Burnett
Tuesday August 07, 2007

On July 24, Rudy Giuliani, the leading Republican presidential candidate, gave a campaign speech in San Francisco. It’s illuminating to study the former New York City mayor’s remarks because they reveal a lot about him and the prevailing philosophy of the GOP. He asserted that Democrats “do not understand a capitalist economy…they think it’s bad to make money. They think it’s bad to be rich… I think it’s great to be rich.” 

Giuliani’s personal story indicates why he boasts of his affluence. When he left office, early in 2002, he capitalized on his fame as “America’s Mayor.” Rudy formed a consulting firm, Giuliani partners, and began a lucrative lobbying career that has earned him tens of millions of dollars. He supplemented this with six-figure speaking engagements throughout the world. 

In his speech, Giuliani argued that Dems do not understand the nature of the American economy. He claimed that the principal Democratic candidates for president—Clinton, Edwards, and Obama—“want to raise your taxes 20 to 30 percent, and it could be more.” Giuliani defended the tax cuts instituted by President Bush: “Tax reductions stimulate an essentially private economy. Why Democrats don’t get this, I don’t understand… They attack President Bush for lowering taxes twice and for taking us to war… It’s pretty smart if you’re going to run a war to lower taxes… [To] stimulate the private sector.” Giuliani wrapped up by claiming, “the country is really going in the right direction.” 

It’s tempting to focus on the many factual errors in Giuliani’s remarks: for example, he claims that Clinton, Edwards, and Obama want to increase taxes “20 to 30 percent” across the board, while they have said nothing remotely like that. But it’s more illuminating to look at his philosophy because it’s a remarkably candid presentation of mainstream Republican attitudes about capitalism and limits. 

Republicans give capitalism a higher priority than they do democracy, as they believe capitalism inevitably produces democracy. This formulation is both simplistic and incredibly destructive. It’s based upon the notion that greed is good. Giuliani reflected this in his remark, “it’s great to be rich.” “Greed is good” has been the operating philosophy of the Bush administration, which has pandered to the ultra-rich, “the haves and have mores.” While there is nothing wrong with being rich, per se, there is something wrong with being greedy, being consumed by “rapacious desire.” Greed elevates the personal interest above the public interest and reduces the ultimate moral test to “what’s in it for me.” A look at the careers of Bush and Giuliani indicates that what binds them, ideologically, is the primacy of personal over public interest. 

Republicans believe that the public holdings of the United States are a free resource that can be used to satisfy individual greed. The environment—public lands and resources, air, and water—can be used in the pursuit of personal wealth. The Bush administration has assiduously catered to special interests. They’ve fed out of the public trough. 

Behind both of these destructive attitudes lurks the carnal belief that there should be no limits on the pursuit of personal wealth. Republicans don’t like the federal government because it sets limits, either directly through the federal government’s oversight and regulation function, or indirectly through taxation. The Bush administration has restricted the federal bureaucracy and reduced taxes, promoted policies that benefit the ultra-rich. 

Despite Giuliani’s assurance to the contrary, Americans don’t believe the United States is going in the right direction. Many Americans have very concrete reasons for their dissatisfaction: poor healthcare, employment insecurity, or dissatisfaction with the educational system. But the common concern that underlies our discontent is the belief that the government is not operating for the benefit of all the people, but instead to enhance the fortune of the privileged few. According to Rudy Giuliani that’s the way it should be: government should get out of the way and stop setting limits on Republicans’ rapacious desire for more wealth. 

Stripped to the barest ideological elements, that’s the difference between Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals. Republicans believe that with no government and no limits, the rich will flourish and magically this will help everybody else—wealth will “trickle down” throughout American society. Liberal Democrats believe in limits. They know the “trickle down” theory is a fantasy and argue that sanctioning unrestricted greed doesn’t help Americans, in general. It permits the ultra-rich to make exorbitant salaries and buy private jets. 

When Rudy Giuliani argues that Democrats don’t understand a capitalist economy, he’s really saying that they don’t support the Republican economic theory of unrestricted greed. He’s acknowledging an elemental difference between Dems and the conservatives that run the GOP. Liberal Democrats believe in the common good and Republicans don’t. Dems believe that the public interest comes before the private interest. They believe that democracy has a higher priority than capitalism; that there must be an economy that works for everyone in order to have a functioning democracy. Liberal Democrats believe that requires placing limits on capitalism, not letting greed run rampant. 

 

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


Green Neighbors: The Madrone: The Red Jewel of Our Pacific Forest

By Ron Sullivan
Tuesday August 07, 2007

Sometimes when you’re walking through Briones Park, through the oak-laurel forest on the trail that leads to the archery range and that old-homestead meadow where they line up the Boy Scouts to salute things, your gaze and the sun shining through the canopy and the remnants of the day’s fogbank will intersect at just the right moment. I swear you can see the various leaves getting all excited about photosynthesis, that quotidian necessary miracle, and open themselves cell by cell to the light.  

The dark forest turns into individuals dancing slow as wood and fast as wind, and even the rustle of the leaves seems to change its tone. At that moment the madrones show themselves, shine out, glow like bright coals banked in the green around them. They make their own spotlights. Their light seems to come from within as much as from the sun, because that ruddy incandescence isn’t from their sun-grasping surfaces, as autumn-stoked trees’ are, but from their bark, the skin of their trunks and branches underneath the bright green leaves.  

We really do have some extraordinary trees here, and madrone, madrona, madroño, Arbutus menzieseii is high on that list. It’s not its size—a 60-foot-high specimen is a mighty madrona indeed, in a land where we still have remnant redwoods that easily top 350 feet—nor is a red-skinned tree exactly unique in a state where some of our 80-odd manzanita species grow to tree size.  

But madronas have a different sort of presence. Their skin—it barely qualifies as bark, it’s so thin—has its own shades of red, scarlet or sunburned gold where manzanitas’ are shades of burgundy. They grow as twistedly as manzanitas do sometimes, but on a bigger and more open scale. Sometimes you might not notice you’re standing under a big madrone except that the light has turned a little warmer, and you might just think the sun’s come out or gone halfway in or 10 degrees down toward sunset.  

But if you look up, you’ll see the amber and scarlet mid-trunk, the ruddy branches, the big leathery green leaves, long ovals in their whorls around their twigs making an opportunistic pattern to catch the sun. Sometimes you’ll look straight up but more often, especially in our bioneighborhood, you’ll follow the trunk off on some improbable angle or around a giddy twist. That pattern might have been set in response to the madrone’s long-gone neighbors as it elbowed its way up to the canopy in its thirst for light. But I’ve seen expert observers call it “inexplicable,” so who knows? 

Madrone is tough but likes its sunshine, so it tends to show up on the edges of forests of bigger trees like redwood and Douglas-fir. Companioning with trees like liveoaks and bigleaf maple, it keeps a more integrated distribution and shows up as a surprise—or punctuation.  

The farther north you go, the bigger the madrones. It’s startling for someone who’s used to the picturesque, curving smaller specimens we see here to come round a bend in a dirt road on the Lost Coast and be hailed by a scattered line of militarily upright 60-footers on a sunlit slope. Sometimes you just have to stop in the middle of the road (because the middle is all there is to the road) and get out to see their tops, to take in a whole tree in one eyeful.  

It’s no surprise to anyone who’s seen one growing from an unlikely bare rock and leaning confidently cantilevered out over the surf a hundred feet below that madrone has a serious root system and is good at erosion control. Its berries, red or yellow, feed many bird species including our native band-tailed pigeon. Sometimes you’ll see a flock of those gathering around a tree that’s having a particularly productive year. As the birds are half again the size of city pigeons, this makes an impressive conclave. 

The berries are edible for humans too, though their flavor is supposed to be dull. Come to think of it, I’ve never tried one. They’re coming into ripeness; I’ll have to remedy that as soon as I can do so legally.  

The wood is dense and hard, but the size and unpredictable form of the tree, as well as the wood’s tendency to check and crumble if it’s not specially treated, means it’s not much used for lumber. It’s smooth and close-grained and (no surprise) handsomely ruddy if it’s heartwood, golden to yellow if it’s sapwood. You can buy small quantities for small projects and I’d call it pretty pricey: Woodworker’s Source sells 20 board feet of Arbutus menzieseii at a statutory inch thick (meaning less than that after finishing) for over $200.  

There’s a bench on the Packrat Trail to Jewel Lake in Tilden that straddles a usually-dry streambed and has a bit of view over the slope. A companionable madrone leans near it. It’s a good spot to enjoy its company, as well as the birds and critters that travel through. 

 

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Green Neighbors” column appears every other Tuesday in the Berkeley Daily Planet, alternating with Joe Eaton’s “Wild Neighbors” column. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section.  

 

Photograph by Ron Sullivan. 

A shrubby little madrone at Lake Lagunitas. This protean species also grows as 60-foot forest trees.


Arts & Events

Arts Calendar

Friday August 10, 2007

FRIDAY, AUGUST 10 

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 

California Shakespeare Theater “The Triumph of Love” at the Bruns Ampitheater, 100 Gateway Blvd., Orinda, through Sept. 2. Tickets are $15-$60. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

Woodminster Summer Musicals “The Wizard of Oz” Fri.-Sun. at Woodminster Amphitheater in Joaquin Miller Park, 3300 Joaquin Miller Rd., Oakland, through Aug. 19. Tickets at $23-$36. 531-9597. www.woodminster.com 

EXHIBITIONS 

Mark Axelrod “Sticks and Stones Not Only Break Bones” oil paintings, and Linda Braz “Explorations” mixed media installations and sketches, opens at The Gallery Of Urban Art, 1746 13th St. Oakland. 706-1697. 

“Art in Wood” works by Ervin Somogyi on display at the City of Berkeley Building, 1947 Center St. Lobby Gallery, through Nov. 9. 981-7546. 

FILM 

From the Tsars to the Stars: A Journey through Russian Fantastik Cinema “Planet of Storms” at 7 p.m. and “The Amphibian Man” at 9 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

H.D. Moe and Mel C. Thompson read at 7 p.m. at Nefeli Caffe, 1854 Euclid Ave. 841-6374. 

“Prosody Castle 2” Performance poetry at 7 p.m. at The Gallery of Urban Art, 1746 13th St. at Wood, Oakland. Donations accepted. www.thegalleryofurbanart.com 

Diane LeBow, Katherina Audly and others read from “Greece: A Love Story” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Steve Gannon and Cruise Tones at 5:30 p.m. at Park Place at Washington Ave., Point Richmond. Free. www.pointrichmond.com/prmusic/ 

University Summer Symphony perfoms Beethoven, Stravinsky and Rimsky-Korsakov at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $5-$10. 642-4864. http://music.berkeley.edu 

The Dunes, part of The Arab Cultural Initiative, at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $8-$10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Walter Savage Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Abyssinians, reggae, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15-$20. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

“Maniko” with Kit Walker on keyboards, Teerth Gonzalez on percussion at 7:30 p.m. at Sacred Space at Rudramandir, 830 Bancroft Way, at 6th. Cost is $20. 486-8700. 

Bluegrass Buffet with the Mighty Crows, Belle Monroe & Her Brewglass Boys, and Bluegrass Revolution at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50-$16.50. 548-1761.  

Seconds on End, rock, at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

Scott Amendola, Wil Blades, Jeff Parker at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com  

Brook Schoenfield at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. w 

Stormcrow, Limb from Limb, Sixteens at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

2ME at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

The Memphis Murder Men at 9:30 p.m. at the Stork Club, 2330 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $5. 444-6174. 

Mushroom at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Marco Benevento at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sat. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $8-$18. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, AUGUST 11 

CHILDREN  

The Panchatantra: Animal Lessons from India Sat. and Sun. at 12:30 and 3:30 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave. 452-2259. 

THEATER 

SF Mime Troupe “Making a Killing” Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. at Live Oak Park, Shattuck Ave. at Berryman. www.sfmt.org 

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 

“Around the Globe” Works by various artists opens with a reception at 6 p.m. at Expressions Gallery, 2035 Ashby Ave. 644-4930. 

“New Visions” Group show of work by Bay Area artists. Artists’ talk at 1 p.m. at Pro Arts Gallery, 550 Second St., Oakland. 763-9425. 

FILM 

The Overdub Club “Year of the Caves” film and music experiments at 8 p.m. at 21 Grand, 416 25th St., at Broadway, Oakland. 444-7263. 

Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker “Taste of Cherry” at 6:30 p.m. and “And Life Goes On” at 8:35 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Jules Lobel discusses “Less Safe, Less Free: The Failure of Preemption in the War on Terror” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

“Jewish Literature: Identity and Imagination” with Dr. Naomi Seidman at 2 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Bay Area Rockin’ Solidarity Labor Chorus and the Vukani Mawethu Chorus, in a benefit for The Highlander Center at 8 p.m. at Kehila Synagogue, 1300 Grand Ave., Piedmont. Tickets are $7-$12.50. 415-648-3457. 

University Summer Symphony perfoms Beethoven, Stravinsky and Rimsky-Korsakov at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $5-$10. 642-4864.  

Latin Music Festival with Latin jazz and rock, samba and salsa, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. at Pavilion Stage, Broadway and Water St., Oakland. Free. www.jacklondonsquare.com 

“Gateswingers Jazz Band” at 8 p.m. at Central Perk: 10086 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. 558-7375.  

Gary Wade & Friends, guitar and vocals, at noon at Cafe Zeste, 1250 Addison St. at Bonar, in the Strawberry Creek Park complex. 704-9378. 

Orquesta La Moderna Tradición, classic and modern Cuban dance music, at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Lloyd Gregory and Friends at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Lepidoptera at 7:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 644-2204. www.epicarts.org 

Three Mile Grade, bluegrass, at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Ruben Quinones and Rick Hardin at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Gearóid Ó Hallmhuráin & Barbara Magone at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Andy Tisdall, The Fancy Dan Band at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Royal Hawaiian Serenaders at 9 p.m. at Temple Bar Tiki Bar & Grill, 984 University Ave. 548-9888. 

Something New at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

“Cari Lee & the Saddle-ites” at 9 p.m. at Downtown Restaurant & Bar, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

Blind Duck, Irish music, at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $5. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Misner & Smith at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7. 558-0881. 

Broun Fellinis at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

WarKrime, Rabies, Second Opinion at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, AUGUST 12 

EXHIBITIONS 

Exhibition of Remastered Black Panther Posters and book signing by Emory Douglas at 3 p.m. at Guerilla Cafe, 1620 Shattuck Ave.  

FILM 

From the Tsars to the Stars: A Journey through Russian Fantastik Cinema “Aelita, Queen of Mars” at 4:45 p.m. and “Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka” at 7 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Architecture Tour of the Oakland Museum and Gardens at 1 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak at 10th St. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

Sheila Kohler reads from her new novel “Bluebird, or The Invention of Happiness” at 4 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“Invocation to the Sun God Narayana” by the Jyoti Kala Mandir College of Indian Classical Arts at 6 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $12-15. 86-9851. mail@jyotikalamandir.org 

Bill Evans String Summit at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761.  

Aleph Null at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Americana Unplugged: Big B and his Snake Oil Saviours at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Pappa Gianni & North Beach Band at 2 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

María Volanté “Intima” at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $13-$15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Cafe Bellie at 7:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054.  

Randy Marshall at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Bayonettes at 5 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

Sunny Hawkins at 7 and 9 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$20. 238-9200.  

MONDAY, AUGUST 13 

CHILDREN 

“The Case of the Missing Mutt” with Tony Borders and his puppets at 10:30 a.m. at the South Branch, Berkeley Public Library. 981-6260.  

EXHIBITIONS 

“Wood Bodies” Photo mosaic portraits of home and place by Marty Kent and Ted Harris. Reception for the artists at 7 p.m. at Café Strada, 2300 College Ave. 848-1985.  

THEATER 

Duck’s Breath Mystery Theatre, comedy, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $20.50-$21.50. 548-1761. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Jane Booth describes “Transformed by Triathlon: The Making of An Improbable Athlete” at 7:30 p.m. at Laurel Bookstore, 4100 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland. 531-2073. 

Poetry Express with Carol Hogan from Phoenix, Arizona at 7 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

City Concert Opera Orchestra performs Haydn’s “L’Isola Disabitata” Opera in two acts with period instruments at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $10-$20. www.cityconcertopera.com  

Nada Lewis, Eastern European songs, at 7 p.m. at Le Bateau Ivre, 2629 Telegraph Ave. 849-1100. www.lebateauivre.net 

Parlor Tango at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Edgardo y Candela, salsa, at 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200. 

TUESDAY, AUGUST 14 

CHILDREN 

P&T Puppet Theatre performs The Adventures of Spider and Fly at 3:30 p.m. at the North Branch, Berkeley Public Library. 981-6250. 

FILM 

From the Tsars to the Stars: A Journey through Russian Fantastik Cinema “Stalker” at 7 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

William Poy Lee will give a talk on his book “The Eighth Promise : An American Son’s Tribute to his Toisanese Mother” at 7 p.m. at El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Ave. El Cerrito. 526-7512. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

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

Singers’ Open Mic with Kelly Park at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Jenny Ferris & Laura Klein, jazz, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

George Kuo, Martin Pahinui & Aaron Mahi at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

At Night & Lonesome Architects at 7:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 644-2204. www.epicarts.org 

Kash Killion at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$14. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Jazzschool Tuesdays, a weekly showcase of up-and-coming ensembles from Berkeley Jazzschool at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 15 

CHILDREN 

Dogs and Tales! Hear stories and meet a pet from the Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society at 10:30 a.m. at Central Berkeley Public Library, 3rd Floor, Community Meeting Room. For ages 5-10. RSVP to 981-6223.  

FILM 

International Latino Film Festival “Rosita” at 7 p.m. at Richmond Public Library, 325 Civic Center Plaza, Richmond. 620-6555. 

Eco-Amok: An Inconvenient Film Fest “Silent Running” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Café Poetry hosted by Paradise at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña. Donation $2. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik and Three Blind Mice, at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Skye Steele at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Solo Cissokho, Senegalese Solo Kora at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Lecture demonstration on the Griot Culture and the Kora at 8 p.m. Cost is $12-$15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Whiskey Brothers, old time and bluegrass, at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473.  

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

Tapwater at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Matt Lucas at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Mel Martin and the Benny Carter Centennial Tribute Band at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$20. 238-9200.  

THURSDAY, AUGUST 16 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Homeland Obscurity” Works by Catherine Richardson and Will Tait opens at the Float Art Gallery, 1091 Calcot Place, Unit #116, Oakland. 535-1702. 

“Women by Women: The Dynamic Feminie Aspect” works by Jennifer Downey and Susan Matthews. Perfomance at 5 p.m. and artist talk at 7 p.m. at the Craft & Cultural Arts Gallery, State of California Office Building Atrium, 1515 Clay St., Oakland. Exhibit runs to Aug. 31. 622-8190. 

FILM 

Oakland International Black LGBT Film Festival through Sun. at the Parkway Theater, 1834 Park Blvd. 814-2400. www.clubrimshot.com 

Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker “Ten” at 7 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Murray Suid describes “Words of a Feather: A Humorous Puzzlement of Etymological Pairs” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Tony Trigilio and Andrew Demcak, poets, at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Rosa Los Santos at noon at the downtown Berkeley BART station. info@downtownberkeley.org 

Rachael Sage at 8 p.m. at Epic Arts Studios, 1923 Ashby Ave. 644-2204.  

Kelly’s Kitchen, Project Greenfield at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $8. 525-5054.  

Biscuit Burners, mountain music, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

Jack Gates Group at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ.  

Saul Kaye at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

La Muneca y Los Muerteos, Fast Heart Mart, Samvega at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082. 

Milagro at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $8-$10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Lee Ritenour & Friends at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $22-$26. 238-9200.  


Hungarian Actor Finds a Home in Berkeley

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Friday August 10, 2007

The interesting thing about me is that I’m not interesting at all,” smiled Krisztina Peremartoni as she handed out a card reading, “Hey Actor! Shouldn’t you be acting?” for her Open Acting classes, held in a studio in Oakland. 

How she finds herself living in Berkeley after a quarter century on the stages of Budapest and around Europe as female principal for the Hungarian National Theatre is, however, very interesting, indeed. 

After growing up in Vestrem, near Hungary’s Lake Balaton, Peremartoni was accepted at 18 to the Theatre Conservatory. After no particular acting experience (“In Hungary, we’re big in reciting poems, not performing plays in school”), she found herself on stage every night after her second year at the Conservatory. “One of the big theaters takes you—big theater, not a studio theater—and you play six shows a weekend. By the time I was 20, I already had 500 performances to my credit.” 

Her training was heavily influenced by Russian theater. “Because they were occupying us, their theater culture had a big influence.” Like the Moscow Art Theatre, to which Peremartoni would later have a scholarship, the classes “were very professional; just the number of different classes in movement: acrobatics, jazz dance, ballet, modern dance, stage movement, horse riding, shooting—that’s just a few! It’s unbelievable how rich our education as actors was. And there was only one school, no private ones. If you weren’t accepted, you’d never be an actor.” 

After four years’ training, she was hired by the prestigious Vig Theatre. “It was a big thing, very hard to get in.” Her first role was a kind of success of scandal: “We performed [polish playwright] Gombrowicz’s Operette, and I played the lead role—completely naked. That was unheard of at that time. It was unavoidable, as I represented Freedom, and had to be naked the whole time. The Communist Party didn’t like it, and sent a delegation to check out whether I was really naked or not, so we had to fake it, put leaves on my breasts, things like that ... It was a big scandal. I was the first Communist naked actress! It was really hard on me.” 

Commenting on the social role of theater in those years, Peremartoni said, “Theater always in a hidden way went against the Party. It was always political. When we were ready to do a performance, the Party would send a few people to watch, and say, You cannot say this, say that ... They’d censor the whole play! Our duty was to find a way to deliver the message to the audience and trick the Party so they couldn’t see it. That was our political mission in society—and why, when Communism was over, we didn’t know what to do. There was nobody to go against. Everything became pointless, meaningless, aimless ... A big crisis: we didn’t know who the enemy was, anymore.”  

But theater culture was “a lifestyle ... every theater has a club, where they’d cook for you—and the tabs would run forever! We’d stay together, late nights after a performance, talking about the show, how to do better ...” 

After five years with the Vig, Peremartoni was hired by the National Theatre. The repertory was “32 different plays on the program in one month—that’s a lot! With one big theater and two studio theaters ...” The National played “the classical authors, always, older and modern—Moliere, Schiller, Brecht ... of course Shakespeare, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller ... not much in experimental theater touched the National. Influenced by Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeucz Kantor, some small theaters did experimental plays, and I performed in a few—but I don’t think what I did was very good.” 

Peremartoni performed in film and TV movies—“every year, at least four lead roles”—but never liked film work. “It’s kind of abstract, not natural. It’s no fun, and you have no idea, no control, over the outcome. I’d think I had a good director, then see later the movie was bad—and the opposite. There is no such thing as film acting, just acting! I tell my students that theater is king.” 

Asked why she retired after 25 years at the top of her profession, Peremartoni said, “It was a very intense, full-time job, both at home and touring the big cities of Europe. I always had big dramatic roles, and didn’t want to carry the burden of tragedy anymore. I killed everybody I possibly could, and everybody killed me! I killed my children and they killed me. I had so many husbands, I couldn’t handle one more—and I cheated on everybody. I died of every imaginable sickness; in my last play, I had AIDS—then I moved to San Francisco! Now I just want to have a glass of wine in Berkeley and talk.” 

Peremartoni moved to the Bay Area in 2000 “because I fell in love with an American man.” After a year, she “somehow ended up” cast in a Traveling Jewish Theatre production, and was offered every role she auditioned for—but “I wasn’t thinking in English; to act in a language not your own is extremely difficult. If I was 18 when I came, maybe ... But I heard myself speaking lines from Chekhov in English, hearing from the outside, and it killed it.” 

In 2001 she started teaching in San Francisco, classes she now holds in Oakland in Jeffrey Bihr’s studio on Miles Street. Though trained in Stanislavskian style, she is put off by American “Method” acting and its teaching styles. “It’s not acting, it’s psychotherapy. I never heard of a method before; you either act or not—and learn through acting.”  

Commenting that American acting students are too academic, she said, “I get them directly into the emotion. They’re too much in their head, and acting’s from the instincts, from the gut. I want to get them out of their head—I can’t fuck [with] them there!” 

She went on: “Theater is going into the core emotion. An emphatic relationship. It’s about listening, about hearing the other person. Not about standing in your own bubble, not connecting.” 

Peremartoni strives to keep long-term students. “You can only really grow in a group situation with the same people and constant feedback.” She’s interested in teaching “what kind of roles a person can attract. I first was cast as an ingenue; I wanted to change, and had to learn how to make people cast me for the opposite role ... Theater’s about conflict; there’s always the opposite.” 

After living five years in Berkeley, she says, “I think it’s the best place on the planet to live, for a free spirit, who likes freedom and acceptance.” 

 

Krisztina Peremartoni can be reached through her website, www.openacting.com, or at (415) 793-7783. 

 


Take a Walking Tour of Berkeley’s Best Art Deco

By Steven Finacom, Special to the Planet
Friday August 10, 2007

Three quarters of a century ago the Art Deco or Moderne era left a legacy of exuberant edifices in the Berkeley architectural landscape. Several of the best will be showcased on a downtown architectural tour this Saturday, Aug. 11. 

Leading the tour is Paula Trehearne, preservation director of the Art Deco Society of California. The society conducts a regular series of architectural tours of Deco monuments in Bay Area communities, particularly San Francisco and Oakland. 

The tour is free to Art Deco Society members. There’s a $10 cost for others. Gather in front of the United Artists Theatre at 2274 Shattuck (between Kittredge and Bancroft) at 11 a.m. The tour lasts about an hour and a half. 

“The term Art Deco was used to describe the effects on design of the 1925 Parisian Exposition, but it was now somewhat confused with Modernism (less decoration, more function). Sometimes they were blended. Both now mingled with several other passing fashions, so that there was an anything goes atmosphere for a few years,” journalist and author Alan Jenkins wrote in the 1930s. 

Today, the architecture and broader design aesthetics of the late ’20s through the early ’40s subdivide into a whole salad bowl of styles including Art Deco, Modern, Moderne, Zig Zag Moderne and Streamline Moderne. 

The era—which encompassed both economic prosperity and Depression, uneasy peace and all-out war—produced some remarkable East Bay structures including the Hollywood epic exterior of George Kelham’s Life Sciences Building on the UC Berkeley campus and the fantasy palaces of Oakland’s Paramount and Fox theaters. 

During the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s in Oakland and Berkeley’s downtowns, “frozen fountains” of terra cotta rose into the sky, sleek neon cascades poured down facades, iconic figures strode sculpturally across walls, and marquees seemed to take off and streak around the corner. 

Fluid concrete, glass block, and silvery metals came into their own as structural or decorative materials. 

Terracotta—which could be shaped, glazed and fired in an elaborate variety of forms—highlighted the exterior of many period buildings or covered them entirely. Terrazzo—small bits of colored stone mixed in a mortar matrix and polished smooth—became a favored material for floors, staircases and even parts of sidewalks. 

Berkeley’s Deco era buildings are mainly public, commercial, and institutional structures. They include ornate facilities conceived and financed in the prosperous 1920s and much more restrained and simplified late 1930s and early 1940s Depression-era buildings. 

Most of the best will be visited on the tour, which loops through the downtown past the Central Library, Berkeley High School, Civic Center Park with its still lamentably dry 1940s fountain, the Veterans’ Memorial, the old Farm Credit Building (renovated as the Martin Luther King, Jr. Civic Center Building) and the Kress Building, now housing Half Price Books. 

The route includes the landmark Howard Automobile dealership at Durant and Fulton (recently remodeled into a Buddhist educational center), period theaters, and some of the great 1930s and ’40s buildings of the UC campus including Life Sciences, Edwards Track Stadium, and the UC Printing Plant at Oxford and Center Street. 

These buildings were not necessarily called “Art Deco” or “Moderne” at the time. When built they were simply “modern architecture” done in the latest eye-popping styles and departing from Berkeley’s much more numerous Victorian, Craftsman, and Period Revival structures. 

“We talk about the buildings and the architects” on the tour, says Trehearne, who has been giving similar tours for two decades. Details of local history are not the focus. 

If you want to learn about Deco architecture from an expert, with Berkeley’s best examples as backdrop, this should be a good event. However, if you’re primarily interested in Berkeley history beyond architecture, perhaps wait for another type of walking tour. 

The Art Deco Society of California is an organization whose members share a genuine love of the design, fashions, customs, music, dances, food, drinks, cars and traditions of the era. Attendees at some of their events are enjoined to dress in period style. But there are no such restrictions on the walking tours. Show up as you wish, and enjoy. 

The Art Deco Society website is at www.artdecosociety.org. The Berkeley tour and other tours are listed under “Calendar of Events.” 

Daniella Thompson has also profiled some of Berkeley’s most interesting Moderne-era structures (not on the tour but near it) at berkeleyheritage.com. Click on “Essays” and look for the Harris House and “Call Me Joe” features. 

 

Photograph by Steven Finacom 

Ornate cast concrete pylons of 1932’s Edwards Track Stadium tower along Bancroft Way at the edge of the UC campus.


East Bay Then and Now: Buyer Sought for Historic West Berkeley Church

By Daniella Thompson
Friday August 10, 2007

Westminster Presbyterian Church, which changed hands last year, is on the market again. The third landmark designated by the City of Berkeley, the church at 926 Hearst Ave. and Eighth Street is the second oldest in town, having been built in 1879—a year after the neighboring Church of the Good Shepherd went up. 

Originally called the First Presbyterian Church of West Berkeley, it was designed by the prominent San Francisco architect Charles Geddes (1820–1903). Geddes had already designed the Community United Methodist Church of Half Moon Bay in 1872 and would go on to design the Noe Valley Ministry of San Francisco in 1888. 

In the same year that the Berkeley church was constructed, Geddes drew up plans for the Yosemite Chapel, the oldest building standing in Yosemite Valley and the first of the park’s buildings to be listed in the National Register of Historic Places. 

Born in Nova Scotia, Geddes immigrated to the United States in 1848. In 1860, the U.S. census listed his occupation as “carpenter,” but a decade later he had been upgraded to “architect.” He appears to have teamed up with his son-in-law, the contractor-builder Samuel Thomson. 

Geddes’ work spans a spectrum of Victorian idioms, including Carpenter Gothic, Italianate, Stick style, and New England vernacular. Late in his career he became more experimental; for the Sheldon Jackson Museum (1895–07) in Sitka, Alaska, Geddes created a plain, octagonal concrete structure topped with a small, windowed octagonal cupola. Although not the first octagon in the West (five octagon houses were built in San Francisco in the mid-19th century), the museum was Alaska’s first concrete building and startlingly modern-looking. 

The First Presbyterian Church of West Berkeley was far more traditional—a typical Gothic Revival building executed in wood. Its details were announced in the Berkeley Advocate on May 8, 1879: 

 

The First Presbyterian Church Society has accepted the lot in part donated by Captain Bowen, on the corner of Bristol and Eighth streets. The size of the lot is 52 x 100 feet, and the contract for the building has been awarded to George A. Embury, the builder of the East Berkeley Presbyterian Church, for $2,850. The building is to be 32 feet broad by 57 feet long, with a tower and a spire 80 feet from the ground. The tower will be 10 feet square. The audience room will be 30 ft. 9 in. by 40 ft., and will contain 44 pews, with seating capacity for about 200 persons, although much more space will be available when required by throwing open the lecture room, the size of which is to be 14 x 24 feet. 

The whole interior of the building on the first floor, and the pastor’s study in the tower, is to be plastered and hard-finished. The windows will be stained glass, imitation of lead work. 

 

The church was completed in August 1879 and dedicated on Oct. 26 of that year. The congregation that commissioned it had started meeting four years earlier in the Ocean View School, where the Rev. Doc. James Curry began preaching. In 1877, the congregation was officially organized as the First Presbyterian Church of West Berkeley. At the time, there were only six members, including the first Ruling Elder, Captain James S. Higgins, owner of the Temperance Grocery Store at San Pablo Avenue and Delaware Street. Higgins’ store began its life in 1854 as Captain William J. Bowen’s inn. (The building still exists, now at 834 Delaware Street, and is a City of Berkeley Landmark.) 

Captain Bowen not only made a partial donation of land for the church but served as one of the congregation’s first five trustees. 

The congregation remained small throughout its 95-year existence, seldom reaching 75 members. It occasionally blamed its low membership on the nearby presence of saloons, West Berkeley being outside the one-mile perimeter around the university campus within which liquor sales were prohibited. When local option was being hotly debated in West Berkeley, Rev. George H. Wilkins, pastor from 1906 to 1909, was hung in effigy in the middle of the street. 

Being impecunious, the congregation relied on assistance from Presbyterian Church mission funds. In 1899, the session minutes recorded that “there are no specially poor to be cared for by the church. All are very poor and while caring for self have but little for other things.” Despite its poverty, the congregation rose to the challenge after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, offering shelter to refugees who had fled to Berkeley. 

In 1899, the name was informally changed to Westminster Presbyterian Church to avoid confusion with the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley. The change was never made legal, since that would have entailed the payment of $1 to the Probate Court. Yet in 1914 they managed to scrape together $1,950 and built a two-story clubhouse designed by Walter H. Ratcliff, Jr. 

The congregation stopped using the buildings in 1968 and officially disbanded in 1972. The property was acquired by Lawrence Gerard Smith, a self-styled “Catholic Orthodox priest” unaffiliated with the Catholic Church. Smith renamed it St. Procopius Latin Rite Church and celebrated a traditional Latin mass that attracted no more than 20 parishioners each Sunday. 

The church interior being rather plain and austere, Smith set about adorning it. He was fortunate to meet the Albany artist Gerald Gaxiola, who agreed to paint a mural on the empty wall behind the altar. Gaxiola, later to gain a modicum of fame as the subject of Les Blank’s film “The Maestro: King of the Cowboy Artists,” spent four months populating the wall with life-size figures forming an ecumenical survey of Catholicism. The deep-perspective scene also included Lawrence Smith, dressed in black robe and cowl, and the bare-chested, muscle-bound artist at his easel. At the very top, two adult male angels in their birthday suits, wings flapping, looked down on the mitered crowd. 

Smith also installed stained-glass windows in the sanctuary. Although Geddes’ original plans called for “stained glass, imitation of lead work,” funding must have proved insufficient, and the Westminster Presbyterian congregation made do with hammered glass. It was also during Smith’s watch that the church was designated a City of Berkeley Landmark. 

In 1977, Smith was one of 20 candidates running for the Berkeley city council. The same year, he was convicted of a misdemeanor child molestation charge and sentenced to probation. The police kept an eye on him thereafter. He was in the habit of picking up boys at James Kenney Park, as well as in San Francisco and Oakland, but no evidence against him turned up until 1983, when Smith was charged with six felony counts of sexually abusing Vietnamese and Hispanic boys. He was sentenced to eight months in prison in January 1984. 

Amazingly, Smith returned to the church following his spell in prison and owned it for another nine years. In 1993, when members of the Mekane Selam Medhane Alem Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church saw it for the first time, St. Procopius had been closed for five years, says Benyam Mulugeta, chair of the Medhane Alem board. 

Formed in 1986, the congregation had been using other churches’ facilities for their services. They bought Smith’s church for $300,000, after which Smith demanded an additional payment for the stained-glass windows. Since Medhane Alem declined to buy them, Smith took the windows with him to Mexico, says Mulugeta. 

Smith settled on Calle Libertad in Guadalajara, across the street from the U.S. Consulate General. There, too, he got into trouble, albeit of a different kind. David Agren, a Canadian journalist living in Guadalajara, twice reported in his blog that Smith aroused the ire of his neighbors by sheltering as many as 95 stray dogs in his home. Following a lawsuit, a failed appeal, and many fines from the city, Smith moved the dogs and was looking for another place to live. 

Shorn of its stained-glass windows, the sanctuary next lost the Gaxiola mural. The Ethiopian Orthodox congregation was not interested in a Roman Catholic mural, and the nudity offended some parishioners. There was apparently no curiosity about the identity of the artist, either. The mural was painted over, and the sanctuary reverted to its plain and austere Presbyterian appearance, only more so, since the hammered glass was gone, too. Remaining is the lovely wooden staircase ascending to the organ loft, where the organ appears to be intact. 

Medhane Alem eventually outgrew the church. Two years ago, the congregation bought the former First United Lutheran Church on Mountain Blvd. in Oakland. Initially they had planned to turn the Berkeley church into a monastery and school but have since determined that they need at least ten acres—they want to include a retreat and some farming operations—and are looking beyond the Bay Area for suitable land. 

After sitting empty for a year, the church was acquired last year by the Pentecostal congregation New Word of Faith. Bishop Nathaniel L. Brown says that his congregation is already outgrowing the space. Since many of the parishioners are in recovery from substance abuse or other criminal activities, they are finding it hard to keep up with payments on their usurious first mortgage (the second mortgage is carried by Medhane Alem). 

Appraised last year for $2,100,000, the church is currently listed for $1,700,000. Included are the 4,200-square-foot chapel and the Ratcliff-designed assembly hall, which contains a dining hall with a 200-person capacity, a full kitchen, four bedrooms, three bathrooms, four offices, a storage room, and an attic. The church is available for immediate move-in. For more information contact Benyam Mulugeta at (650) 906-8012. 

 

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

 

 

Photograph by Daniella Thompson 

Westminster Presbyterian Church at 926 Hearst Avenue was built in 1879.


Garden Variety: Seize the Time, Pet the Kittens at Westbrae’s Paradise Pottery

By Ron Sullivan
Friday August 10, 2007

Now that Clay of the Land has gone out of business—the likable and savvy owners lost their lease to a developer, how novel—I guess I ought to mention other local marvelous discount pottery places. Here’s one to get to before the high-rise axe descends upon its lot, as there’s been a for sale placard there right from the start.  

The lot’s owner is on record as wanting to accommodate its former tenant, A New Leaf Garden Gallery, while building there but as the gallery moved to San Francisco instead and that’s a juicy bit of real estate in a prosperous neighborhood, who knows what will actually happen?  

Paradise Pottery was an oddly recent discovery for me. I’d passed it a zillion times, and gone to Westbrae Nursery next door too, but in the two years it’s been open I had somehow not quite accomplished the opportune intersection between my free time, the direction of traffic, and the place’s open hours.  

It’s not that they place isn’t open much, either. Tuesday’s the only closed day and there’s a reasonable chance there’ll be someone there anyway. Maybe I should try to change the schedule of my orthodontist appointments, or the rhythm of my Costco runs.  

But I solved the problem the other day when I drove ‘round the corner and spotted a miraculously easy parking space. I parked for a half-hour and Joe and I took a stroll through the crockery.  

We were greeted by an adolescent gray tabby kitten who played some jittery game of peekaboo with us, coming forward for a pat on the head and then changing his mind, pursuing things we couldn’t see among the urns and pots, peering cautiously around a stack to see if we were watching, getting distracted by some subtle movement on the ground before he decided how to react when we were caught looking.  

The potscape he was exploring comprised indoor- and outdoor-sized planters, watertight things that could become cachepots or fountains or miniature pools. This was set in a cozy lot of flagstone, gravel, and a mostly-dry fake stream, varied by rock walls with cascading erigeron, upright leafy and spiky tropicals, a couple of nice lacy shade trees. It’s pretty much unchanged from A New Leaf’s place, which is nice. I only wish they’d kept the stream running.  

The crockery is in general quite handsome; it’s certainly various enough for various tastes and priced reasonably. The range includes brightly painted Talavera ceramics from Mexico; big things from China or Vietnam with deep-black, bricky-red, or subtle drip glazes, shiny or leathery or incised or molded or pebbly or matte. It’s a deep variety for such an apparently small lot.  

Staff seems to consist of Beth Chambers, who welcomed us with exactly the right balance of helpfulness and backing-off, and the owner. And that cat, Casper, and his calico sister Tibby. Go on over and tell them we said Prrrrrrrr.  

 

PARADISE POTTERY 

1286 Gilman St., Berkeley. 528-4291 

10 a.m.—6 p.m. Wednesday through  

Monday. Closed Tuesdays.


About the House: Retrofitting a Lousy Foundation

By Matt Cantor
Friday August 10, 2007

We had a little shaker a few weeks ago and I was faced with the same series of encounters in the ensuing days that I’ve faced so often over the last 20 years. They tend to go something like “Hey, that was a pretty big quake we had the other day, eh? But you know, there weren’t any cracks in my walls or anything. Not as bad a Loma Prieta.” And I get started… “Well, the fact is that what we had the other day was tiny.” Then comes the math. “Did you know that a 7.2 on the Richter is roughly 30,000 times bigger than a 4.2 (the one we just had)”…faces go blank, people wander away wondering why they bothered talking to me in the first place. Maybe I’m just not a people person. Oh well, my kids love me. 

Those are the facts and I’ll beleager you just a bit more before I move on to practical matters. First, all those earthquakes your house has been through…They’re nothin’. Just plain nothin’. The last earthquake that hit our town that was worth any serious attention at all was well over a hundred years ago, in 1868. Andrew Johnson was being impeached and UC was being founded (in Oakland of all places). The 14th Amendment was being passed to give African Americans full rights (and corporations the right to rule our lives) and Thomas Edison was applying for a patent for the first electric voting machine (no, I am not kidding). The point is that this was so long ago that nobody living can remember it and there are effectively no structures standing today that can give evidence of what that earthquake was like.  

It’s likely that when we do get our earthquake (Loma Prieta was somebody else’s earthquake) that over 150,000 homes will have to be abandoned and the occupants consigned to refugee status. If you don’t want to be one of those folks—and I assume you don’t—then it’s time to bolt and brace your house. If you’ve had it done years ago or by someone of less than definitive credentials then it makes sense to have it looked at. There might be some need for improvement. 

Now, I have this bad habit of taking a long time to get around to what I wanted to talk about and so I duly apologize if I’ve wasted some of your time. I guess I needed a prelude. So, that being done, here’s what I wanted to get to: 

A lot of homes have bad foundations. Now, that’s a rather broad remark, so I’ll try to clean it up a bit. Many foundations, especially those from before 1935 suffer from a range of ills, including concrete deterioration (soft concrete), rotation (tilting of the footings) and cracking (or settlement). These can, in combination, be serious enough to require replacement of part, or even all, of your foundation. In my book, serious deterioration is the most serious failing when it comes to earthquake readiness because it keeps bolts from staying in one place when the earth starts shaking. When foundations are really crumbly (you can drive a screwdriver an inch through) there may not be any point in adding bolts. But I firmly believe, having sat down with a number of engineers and other experts over the years, that all but the worst foundations can be retrofitted to some effectiveness.  

Even foundations that have settled badly, those with cracks and fairly serious rotation, can have bolts and bracing panels installed with reasonable assuredness that they will add greatly to the earthquake resistance of a house. The reason I point this out is that many people are putting off doing seismic work until they get to the foundation and this can mean, due to the high cost, a delay that may end badly. 

The earthquake isn’t going to wait for all of us to upgrade our foundations, so we need to decide which ones we’re going to do and retrofit the rest of them to our best ability. Most retrofits are not going to fail as a result of a bad foundation and there are many faulty foundations that will work more than well enough if bolts and bracing panels are properly installed. So, if you don’t have cash to fix the foundation this year, it’s time to do the retrofit. 

Here are some pointers for those who know that they have poor quality concrete and are ready to get this vital task completed. First, use more bolts. When concrete quality is poor it’s beneficial to distribute the lateral load of the house (the weight of the house moving left and right) over a larger area. By putting more bolts into the older, softer concrete, we put less stress on each portion and decrease the likelihood that the bolts will break through the concrete. Here’s a freebie we get from doing this: since weaker concrete tends to vary in strength as we move around the perimeter of the foundation, we increase the chance that some bolts will be in better concrete and will stay in place. In the end, all we need to do is to be sure that enough of the house is grasped and held in place to prevent it from sliding off of the foundation. 

Another thing that I recommend for weaker concrete is the use of epoxy for bolt installations. Yes, we’re talking about gluing the bolts in place. This may sound silly or weak but it’s just the opposite. When concrete is crumbly, the typical expansion bolt doesn’t work very well. This is a bolt that, when tightened, enlarges in diameter near the base, thus lodging it in place. If concrete is soft, this enlargement can just push some rocks and sand around and actually weaken this area all the more. Not only does this weaken the area immediately around the bolt but also leaves the bolt loose and more able to slam through soft concrete. Epoxy, on the other hand, strengthens the area immediately around the bolt, fills any voids and bonds the bolt to the foundation. It’s a much better connection for weak concrete. 

Once again, many retrofits have been poorly done and it’s a good idea to have someone look at them. Nevertheless, poor concrete is only occasionally so bad that that a retrofit isn’t worth the money. This local fault has been pretty faithful to its schedule and has us now about a decade overdue. Even if you end up reinstalling bolting and bracing in five years when you get that new foundation, I still think it’s wise to go ahead and spend the money to bolt and brace to that old broken concrete today. The alternative may be hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage that could have been avoided with just a few thousand spent now. 

Insurance may recoup some of your losses when that day arrives or it may not. If this quake is centered in a densely developed area (It’ll probably be at my house), the cost may be more than the underwriters have set aside and you may not be made whole (financially speaking).  

John Lennon said “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.” I don’t think there are many earthquakes in Liverpool so I have no idea how he understood this problem so well. 

 

 

Got a question about home repairs and inspections? Send them to Matt Cantor, in care of East Bay Real Estate, at realestate@berkeleydailyplanet.com.


Quake Tip of the Week

By Larry Guillot
Friday August 10, 2007

Playing in the Traffic? 

As a loving parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, (etc), would you consider letting that child you love so much go out and play in the street? Not even if it were a relatively “quiet” street, not in a million years. 

But you will let that same child play in your house, surrounded by bookcases, heavy furniture, and large wall hangings, right? If you live in the interior of our country, not problem. If, however, you live in California, you are putting that child, and yourself, at risk. 

Securing is easy and cheap, an incredible bargain for the safety and peace of mind that it brings. Please think about it. 

Here’s to making your home secure and your family safe. 

 

Larry Guillot is the owner of QuakePrepare, an earthquake consulting, securing and kit supply service. Contact him at 558-3299 or see www.quakeprepare.com to receive semi-monthly e-mails and safety reports.  

 


Berkeley This Week

Friday August 10, 2007

FRIDAY, AUGUST 10 

A Ramble into, through, and above Strawberry Canyon, with guides, at 5:30 p.m. followed by a Farmers’ Market Barbeque at 7 p.m. at the Haas Club House, UC Campus. For details call Berkeley Architectural Heritage 841-2242. www.berkeleyheritage.com 

Peace Meditation & Origami class for all ages with Hiroshima survivor Takashi Tanemori at 7 p.m. at Unity of Berkeley, 2075 Eunice St. Suggested donation $10-$20, no one turned away. 528-8844. 

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 7:30 p.m. at Finnish Brotherhood Hall, 1970 Chestnut St at University. Donation of $5 requested. 528-4253.  

SATURDAY, AUGUST 11 

Art Deco Walking Tour of Downtown Berkeley Meet at 11 a.m. in front of United Artists Theater, 2274 Shattuck. www.artdecosociety.org 

Oakland Heritage Alliance Walking Tour of Temescal Meet at 10 a.m. in front of Genova Delicatessen, 5095 Telegraph Ave. 763-9218. www.oaklandheritage.org 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland uptown to the Lake to discover Art Deco landmarks. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of the Paramount Theater at 2025 Broadway. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. 

SF Mime Troupe “Making a Killing” at 2 p.m. at Live Oak Park, Shattuck Ave. at Berryman. www.sfmt.org 

The Great War Society meets to discuss “What the Doughboy Wore” by Norm Miller at 10:30 a.m. at 640 Arlington Ave. 527-7118. 

“Amazed” A family maze and labyrinth making event from 1 to 4 p.m. at The Museum of Children’s Art, 528 9th St., Oakland. Cost is $5. 465-8770. 

Solo Sierrans Hike in Tilden Park Meet at 4:30 p.m. at Lone Oak big parking lot for an hour and a half hike through the cool woods. Some climbing on fire trails. Optional dinner afterwards. 234-8949. 

Introduction to Permaculture Learn the principles of using permaculture, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Cost is $10-$15, no one turned away. Call to pre-register and for location. 548-2220, ext. 233. 

Re-Dedication of Brookdale Park with entertainment, food, spoken word and community booths at 11 a.m. at 2535 High St., Oakland. 533-2366. 

Re-Leaf the San Pablo Creekside Help push out the invasive plants and bring back native vegetation from 9:30 a.m. to noon at 4191 Appian Way, El Sobrante. For information call 665-3538. www.thewatershedproject.org 

“Less Safe, Less Free: The Failure of Preemption in the War on Terror” with Jules Lobel at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Hopalong Animal Rescue Come meet your furry new best friend. Cats and kittens available for adoption from noon to 3 p.m. at Your Basic Bird, 2940 College Ave. 267-1915, ext. 500. 

CoHousing Potluck at 2 p.m. at 2220 Sacramento St. 849-2063. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

Fast Pitch Softball for Adults at noon on Saturdays in Oakland. For information call 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 

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755.  

SUNDAY, AUGUST 12 

Oakland Heritage Alliance Walking Tour of Laurel Neighborhood Meet at 10 a.m. at the Albertson’s parking lot, 4055 MacArthur Blvd. 763-9218. www.oaklandheritage.org 

Green Party BBQ at 11 a.m. at Live Oak Park. Look for the green and white canopy. 

SF Mime Troupe “Making a Killing” at 2 p.m. at Live Oak Park, Shattuck Ave. at Berryman. www.sfmt.org 

Mumia Abu Jamal on the Road to Freedom? with Mumia’s lead counsel, Robert R. Bryan on developments in Mumia’s case at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Universalists, 1924 Cedar at Bonita. Suggested donation $5-$10. 526-4402. 

The Red Oak Victory Ship Pancake Breakfast from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 1337 Canal Blvd in Richmond harbor. Exit Canal Blvd off Hwy 580. Cost is $6, children under 5 free. 237-2933. 

Free Sailboat Rides from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Cal Sailing Club, Berkeley Marina. Wear warm, waterproof clothing and bring a change of clothes in case you get wet. www.cal-sailing.org 

Middle East Peace Petition Release Party from 3 to 6 p.m. at Redwood Gardens, 2951 Derby. 548-9840. 

Community Meditation and Potluck at 7 p.m. at 1940 Virginia St. Sponsored by The East Bay Open Circle. 495-7511. www.eastbayopencircle.org  

MONDAY, AUGUST 13 

Peace Child Summer Arts Camp for Children ages 8-12 with singing, dancing, acting, music-making, shadow puppetry, and art-making about peace runs to Aug 17, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Arlington Community Church, 52 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Cost is $100. 526-9146. 

Emergency Womyn’s Round Table and Pot Luck to strategize on how to bring our troops home at 6 p.m. at Redwood Gardens, 2951 Derby St. RSVP to 524-2776.  

Peoples Park Community Peace Rally Planning at 7 p.m. at Café Mediterranean, 2400 block of Telegraph Ave. The rally and concert will take place Sept. 15. 658-1451. 

Roads to Recovery to celebrate the departure of Mark Rhoades and learn about neighborhood issues at 6:30 p.m. at Cafe de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck. Cost is $5. RSVP to 849-4619. mariebowman@pacbell.net  

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. 548-0425. 

Dragonboating Year round classes at the Berkeley Marina, Dock M. Meets Mon, Wed., Thurs. at 6 p.m. Sat. at 10:30 a.m. www.dragonmax.org 

Drop in Knitting Class at the Albany Library Work on your own project or make pet blankets and children’s hats to be donated to charity organizations, at 3:30 p.m. at 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

TUESDAY, AUGUST 14 

Readers Theater Program for children ages 7-10 at 2 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6223.  

Family Storytime for preschoolers and up at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Community Sing-a-Long every Tues, at 2 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. 524-9122.  

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. 

Games Club Games designers meet at 6 p.m. and games lovers meet at 8 p.m. to discuss board, strategy and social interaction games at at Dr Comics and Mr Games, 4014 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. To RSVP call 601-7800. 

Baby-Friendly Book Club meets to discuss “The Third Man” by Graham Greene at 10 a.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

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 15 

Walking Tour of Historic Oakland Churches and Temples Meet at 10 a.m. at the front of the First Presbyterian Church at 2619 Broadway. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

Recording African American Stories Add your voice to the Library of Congress and the National Museum of African American History, Wed. from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., by appointment, at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland, through Sept. 12. For appointment call 228-3207. 

“Under the Radar” Israelis and Palestinians Working Together against Occupation and for Human Rights at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Unitarian Fellowship Hall, 1924 Cedar St. at Bonita. Donation $5-$20, no one turned away. Sponsored by Jewish Voice for Peace. 465-1777. 

Lead-Safe Painting & Remodeling A free class to learn about lead safe renovations for your older home, from noon to 2 p.m. at Lakeview Branch Library, 550 El Embarcadero, Oakland. Presented by Alameda County Lead Poisoning Prevention Program. 567-8280. www.ACLPPP.org 

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Book Discussion at 4 p.m. at the Central Berkeley Public Library, 4th Floor, Children’s Story Room. 981-6223.  

“What the Bleep Do We Know?” at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donation $5. www.HumanistHall.net 

“Insights to Wellness” Demonstrations at 7:45 p.m. at Takibi Yoga Studio, 4550 San Pablo Ave., Suite D, 2nd Floor, in Emeryville. Cost is $5. 

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 every Wednesday 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 at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. www.geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, AUGUST 16 

Free Diabetes Screening Come find out if you might have diabetes with our free screening test and make sure not to eat or drink anything for 8 hours beforehand, from 8:45 to noon at the Downtown Oakland Senior Center, 200 Grand Ave. 981-5332. 

World of Plants Tours Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $5. 643-2755.  

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Club meets at 6:45 p.m. at Spud’s Pizza, 3290 Adeline at Alcatraz. namaste@avatar.freetoasthost.info


Arts Calendar

Tuesday August 07, 2007

TUESDAY, AUGUST 7 

CHILDREN 

Crosspulse Rhythm Duo at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

P&T Puppet Theater, “The Adventures of Spider and Fly” at 10:30 a.m. at Berkeley Public Library, West Branch. 981-6270. 

FILM 

Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker “Rugs, Roads and Palaces” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Zilpha Keatley Snyder reads from her children’s book “The Egypt Game” at the Middle School Mystery Book Group at 4 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. All ages welcome. 981-6223. 

Anita Thompson describes the legacy of her late husband in “The Gonzo Way: A Celebration of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

CZ & The Bon Vivants at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

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

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

Jazzschool Tuesdays, a weekly showcase of up-and-coming ensembles from Berkeley Jazzschool at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 8 

CHILDREN 

Gary Lapow “Get A Clue @ Your Library” for ages 3-8 at 3:30 p.m. at the Claremont Branch of the Berkeley Public LIbrary. 981-6280. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“A New Home, A New Life” Photographs by Refugee Youth in Oakland. Exhibition closing reception at 5:30 p.m. 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 

Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott artist talk at 7 p.m. at Kala Art Gallery. www.kala.org 

FILM 

Eco-Amok: An Inconvenient Film Fest “The Mutations” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Cara Black and Peter Gessner discuss their latest mysteries at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

Café Poetry at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña. Donation $2. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik and Three Blind Mice, at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Ben Adams Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com  

A Night of Rumi, Persian Sufi music and poetry at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

La Verdad at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

J-Soul at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Mikie Lee and Amber at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Big Blue Whale at 9:30 p.m. at the Stork Club Oakland, 2330 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $5. 444-6174. 

Rod MacDonald at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Vusi Mahlasela, South African singer-songwriter, at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$20. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, AUGUST 9 

THEATER 

Women’s Will “Romeo and Juliet” Thurs. and Fri. at 8 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes. 420-0813. www.womenswill.org 

FILM 

“War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” at 7 p.m. at Grand Lake Theater, 3200 Grand Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $12. www.warmadeeasythemovie.org 

Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker “First Graders” at 7 p.m. and “Fellow Citizen” at 8:45 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

William Gibson reads from his new novel “Spook Country” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Louann Brizendine describes “The Female Brain” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Sara & Swingtime at noon at the downtown Berkeley BART station. info@downtownberkeley.org 

John Jorgenson Quintet at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $24.50-$25.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Atmos Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $9. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Houston Jones & Jacques at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave 548-5198.  

Squaretape, The Fourfits, The Corner Laughers at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Julia Lau at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Maldroid, Royalty at 9:30 p.m. at the Stork Club Oakland, 2330 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $5. 444-6174. 

Marco Benevento at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sat. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $8-$18. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

FRIDAY, AUGUST 10 

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 

California Shakespeare Theater “The Triumph of Love” at the Bruns Ampitheater, 100 Gateway Blvd., Orinda, through Sept. 2. Tickets are $15-$60. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

Woodminster Summer Musicals “The Wizard of Oz” Fri.-Sun. at Woodminster Amphitheater in Joaquin Miller Park, 3300 Joaquin Miller Rd., Oakland, through Aug. 19. Tickets at $23-$36. 531-9597. www.woodminster.com 

EXHIBITIONS 

Mark Axelrod “Sticks and Stones Not Only Break Bones” oil paintings, and Linda Braz “Explorations” mixed media installations and sketches, opens at The Gallery Of Urban Art, 1746 13th St. Oakland. 706-1697. 

“Art in Wood” works by Ervin Somogyi on display at the City of Berkeley Building, 1947 Center St. Lobby Gallery, through Nov. 9. 981-7546. 

FILM 

From the Tsars to the Stars: A Journey through Russian Fantastik Cinema “Planet of Storms” at 7 p.m. and “The Amphibian Man” at 9 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

H.D. Moe and Mel C. Thompson read at 7 p.m. at Nefeli Caffe, 1854 Euclid Ave. 841-6374. 

“Prosody Castle 2” Performance poetry at 7 p.m. at The Gallery of Urban Art, 1746 13th St. at Wood, Oakland. Donations accepted. www.thegalleryofurbanart.com 

Diane LeBow, Katherina Audly and others read from “Greece: A Love Story” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Steve Gannon and Cruise Tones at 5:30 p.m. at Park Place at Washington Ave., Point Richmond. Free. www.pointrichmond.com/prmusic/ 

University Summer Symphony perfoms Beethoven, Stravinsky and Rimsky-Korsakov at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $5-$10. 642-4864. http://music.berkeley.edu 

The Dunes, part of The Arab Cultural Initiative, at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $8-$10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Walter Savage Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Abyssinians, reggae, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15-$20. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

“Maniko” with Kit Walker on keyboards, Teerth Gonzalez on percussion at 7:30 p.m. at Sacred Space at Rudramandir, 830 Bancroft Way, at 6th. Cost is $20. 486-8700. 

Bluegrass Buffet with the Mighty Crows, Belle Monroe & Her Brewglass Boys, and Bluegrass Revolution at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50-$16.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Seconds on End, rock, at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

Scott Amendola, Wil Blades, Jeff Parker at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com  

Brook Schoenfield at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. w 

Stormcrow, Limb from Limb, Sixteens at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

2ME at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

The Memphis Murder Men at 9:30 p.m. at the Stork Club, 2330 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $5. 444-6174. 

Mushroom at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Marco Benevento at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sat. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $8-$18. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, AUGUST 11 

CHILDREN  

The Panchatantra: Animal Lessons from India 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 

“Around the Globe” Works by various artists opens with a reception at 6 p.m. at Expressions Gallery, 2035 Ashby Ave. 644-4930. 

“New Visions” Group show of work by Bay Area artists. Artists’ talk at 1 p.m. at Pro Arts Gallery, 550 Second St., Oakland. 763-9425. 

FILM 

The Overdub Club “Year of the Caves” film and music experiments at 8 p.m. at 21 Grand, 416 25th St., at Broadway, Oakland. 444-7263. 

Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker “Taste of Cherry” at 6:30 p.m. and “And Life Goes On” at 8:35 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Jules Lobel discusses “Less Safe, Less Free: The Failure of Preemption in the War on Terror” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

“Jewish Literature: Identity and Imagination” with Dr. Naomi Seidman at 2 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Bay Area Rockin’ Solidarity Labor Chorus and the Vukani Mawethu Chorus, in a benefit for The Highlander Center at 8 p.m. at Kehila Synagogue, 1300 Grand Ave., Piedmont. Tickets are $7-$12.50. 415-648-3457. 

University Summer Symphony perfoms Beethoven, Stravinsky and Rimsky-Korsakov at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $5-$10. 642-4864. http://music.berkeley.edu 

“Gateswingers Jazz Band” at 8 p.m. at Central Perk: 10086 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. 558-7375.  

Gary Wade & Friends, guitar and vocals, at noon at Cafe Zeste, 1250 Addison St. at Bonar, in the Strawberry Creek Park complex. 704-9378. 

Orquesta La Moderna Tradición, classic and modern Cuban dance music, at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Lloyd Gregory and Friends at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Three Mile Grade, bluegrass, at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Ruben Quinones and Rick Hardin at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Gearóid Ó Hallmhuráin & Barbara Magone at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Andy Tisdall, The Fancy Dan Band at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Royal Hawaiian Serenaders at 9 p.m. at Temple Bar Tiki Bar & Grill, 984 University Ave. 548-9888. 

Something New at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

“Cari Lee & the Saddle-ites” at 9 p.m. at Downtown Restaurant & Bar, 2102 Shattuck Ave. 649-3810. 

Blind Duck, Irish music, at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $5. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Misner & Smith at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7. 558-0881. 

Broun Fellinis at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

WarKrime, Rabies, Second Opinion at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, AUGUST 12 

EXHIBITIONS 

Exhibition of Remastered Black Panther Posters and book signing by Emory Douglas at 3 p.m. at Guerilla Cafe, 1620 Shattuck Ave.  

FILM 

From the Tsars to the Stars: A Journey through Russian Fantastik Cinema “Aelita, Queen of Mars” at 4:45 p.m. and “Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka” at 7 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Architecture Tour of the Oakland Museum and Gardens at 1 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak at 10th St. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

Sheila Kohler reads from her new novel “Bluebird, or The Invention of Happiness” at 4 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“Invocation to the Sun God Narayana” by the Jyoti Kala Mandir College of Indian Classical Arts at 6 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $12-15. 86-9851. mail@jyotikalamandir.org 

Bill Evans String Summit at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Aleph Null at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Americana Unplugged: Big B and his Snake Oil Saviours at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Pappa Gianni & North Beach Band at 2 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

María Volanté “Intima” at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $13-$15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Cafe Bellie at 7:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Randy Marshall at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Bayonettes at 5 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

Sunny Hawkins at 7 and 9 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$20. 238-9200.  

MONDAY, AUGUST 13 

CHILDREN 

“The Case of the Missing Mutt” with Tony Borders and his puppets at 10:30 a.m. at the South Branch, Berkeley Public Library. 981-6260.  

EXHIBITIONS 

“Wood Bodies” Photo mosaic portraits of home and place by Marty Kent and Ted Harris. Reception for the artists at 7 p.m. at Café Strada, 2300 College Ave. 848-1985.  

THEATER 

Duck’s Breath Mystery Theatre, comedy, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $20.50-$21.50. 548-1761. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Jane Booth describes “Transformed by Triathlon: The Making of An Improbable Athlete” at 7:30 p.m. at Laurel Bookstore, 4100 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland. 531-2073. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

City Concert Opera Orchestra performs Haydn’s “L’Isola Disabitata” Opera in two acts with period instruments at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $10-$20. www.cityconcertopera.com  

Nada Lewis, Eastern European songs, at 7 p.m. at Le Bateau Ivre, 2629 Telegraph Ave. 849-1100. www.lebateauivre.net 

Parlor Tango at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Edgardo y Candela, salsa, at 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200.


The Theater: ‘Three Musketeers’ in Full Swing at Hinkel Park

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Tuesday August 07, 2007

You have compromised the honor of a lady!” “And you’ve bastardized an English poet!” With repartee and ripostes, fast dialogue and swordplay, Shotgun Players’ The Three Musketeers, an adaptation by Joanie McBrien (who also directed) with Dave Garrett of the rich Alexandre Dumas epic of the wars of religion in 17th-century France under the sway of Cardinal Richelieu, is in full swing weekend afternoons in John Hinkel Park, for free—and it’s quite a crowd-pleaser.  

The tale of young Gascon (read “Southern country boy”) D’Artagnan, come to the big city to make it as a king’s musketeer, and the incredible web of adventures he’s enwrapped in from his first day in Paris, still makes for a great page-turner—or scene-changer. And the scenes furiously revolve as the stalwart (if wet-behind-the-ears) lad finds himself lined up for three consecutive duels against guess who, only to take sides with them against a kind of ambush by the cardinal’s guards, earning him the eternal comradeship of a troika of off-beat masters of the blade, his surrogate older brothers, and (unwittingly) his key into the intrigues of court and red cap. 

The Players toss off the juicy melodramatic lines with slight tongue-in-cheek somewhat different from Dumas’ stagey irony. The audience takes up where the Players leave off, laughing sarcastically at manners and mores, theatrical turns and turns-of-speech that are more 19th-century Romantic (as interpreted by the adaptors) than 17th-century classicist (or lusty or whatever one conceives the French of that century to be) and displaying an easy skepticism about religion, royalty, chivalry and whatever else seems creaky or preposterous to contemporary enlightenment. It would be curious to see if future generations take our self-serious enlightenment in much the same dismissive way. Even on the page, Dumas’ theatricality was as double-edged as his heroes’ swords. 

The Shotgun cast reels it out with a great deal of exuberance. This is one of the things the company does best, expressing their own enjoyment at making a spectacle.  

There’s a kind of cinematicization of the material; it plays well outdoors, but (like a mini-series) isn’t expansive. It doesn’t burst out of itself only to gather itself back in and burst out again, as the original story and all great episodic and serial fiction do. Still, the swashbuckling is bracing, with whole ensembles erupting at any moment, fencing their way across the sward at the base of the amphitheater, with the able guidance of musketeer and fight director Dave Maier (Athos) and fight captain and choreographer-ensemble member Andrea Weber. 

And the director is to be congratulated for omitting the almost-obligatory dose of fake Gallic kitsch American productions always seem to foster on the French. 

Much of the cast is familiar of face to those who follow Shotgun: the musketeers themselves—Dave Maier as brooding, misogynist Athos, Eric Burns as Porthos the Dandy and Gabe Weiss as Aramis—are longtime Shotgun troupers. Fontana Butterfield, a very familiar company member, almost steals the show as Lady deWinter, with a dose of noirish femme fatale and sleek stage movement. Dan Bruno is fine as that English rake Buckingham, who to be near his secret love, Anne, Queen of France (well-played by Marissa Keltie), would expend the lives of countless Protestant martyrs—“and what of that!”  

Others are return collaborators—notably Meghan Doyle, in a nice turn as D’Artagnan’s damsel-in-distress love interest Constance, and Carla Pantoja, a turncoat lady-in-waiting, charmingly called Kitty, who nonetheless retains a very soft spot for the dashing D’Artagnan. 

D’Artagnan, played with elan by Ryan Montgomery, is very much the ingenu (male version of ingenue), counterpointed by Constance, herself more worldly-wise, who arranges for him to be the courier for the Queen’s diamond necklace, unaware that Milady deWinter is after the self-same stones. Opposite in the spectrum is the totally cynical Cardinal Richelieu, played by Dennis McIntyre like a clerical Ming the Magnificent, evil chortle and all. Carson Creecy IV represents the foppish king, drawing laughter every time he exits with his prissy carriage. 

The show runs seamlessly until the end—and this might be true only for readers of the book, or the Classics Comic book at least—when the truly tear-jerking and spectacular demises, respectively, of Constance and Lady deWinter have been trivialized somewhat into a continuous action-movie stab-and-slash. But the adaptors deserve praise for the clear exposition of the plot, which literally is a plot with many sub-conspiracies and counter-plots. It was amusing to read a review of the show in one of the city papers that praised it for dwelling on lesser-known subtleties of the story. But those “subtleties” are all part of Dumas’ grand design for what’s been accorded the status of a boy’s book. His original story is so jam-packed with incident and detail that there’s no time in a two hour-plus stage adaptation for anything but the resume’ of that grand design itself. 

 

Ryan Montgomery and Dave Maier in The Three Musketeers. 


Green Neighbors: The Madrone: The Red Jewel of Our Pacific Forest

By Ron Sullivan
Tuesday August 07, 2007

Sometimes when you’re walking through Briones Park, through the oak-laurel forest on the trail that leads to the archery range and that old-homestead meadow where they line up the Boy Scouts to salute things, your gaze and the sun shining through the canopy and the remnants of the day’s fogbank will intersect at just the right moment. I swear you can see the various leaves getting all excited about photosynthesis, that quotidian necessary miracle, and open themselves cell by cell to the light.  

The dark forest turns into individuals dancing slow as wood and fast as wind, and even the rustle of the leaves seems to change its tone. At that moment the madrones show themselves, shine out, glow like bright coals banked in the green around them. They make their own spotlights. Their light seems to come from within as much as from the sun, because that ruddy incandescence isn’t from their sun-grasping surfaces, as autumn-stoked trees’ are, but from their bark, the skin of their trunks and branches underneath the bright green leaves.  

We really do have some extraordinary trees here, and madrone, madrona, madroño, Arbutus menzieseii is high on that list. It’s not its size—a 60-foot-high specimen is a mighty madrona indeed, in a land where we still have remnant redwoods that easily top 350 feet—nor is a red-skinned tree exactly unique in a state where some of our 80-odd manzanita species grow to tree size.  

But madronas have a different sort of presence. Their skin—it barely qualifies as bark, it’s so thin—has its own shades of red, scarlet or sunburned gold where manzanitas’ are shades of burgundy. They grow as twistedly as manzanitas do sometimes, but on a bigger and more open scale. Sometimes you might not notice you’re standing under a big madrone except that the light has turned a little warmer, and you might just think the sun’s come out or gone halfway in or 10 degrees down toward sunset.  

But if you look up, you’ll see the amber and scarlet mid-trunk, the ruddy branches, the big leathery green leaves, long ovals in their whorls around their twigs making an opportunistic pattern to catch the sun. Sometimes you’ll look straight up but more often, especially in our bioneighborhood, you’ll follow the trunk off on some improbable angle or around a giddy twist. That pattern might have been set in response to the madrone’s long-gone neighbors as it elbowed its way up to the canopy in its thirst for light. But I’ve seen expert observers call it “inexplicable,” so who knows? 

Madrone is tough but likes its sunshine, so it tends to show up on the edges of forests of bigger trees like redwood and Douglas-fir. Companioning with trees like liveoaks and bigleaf maple, it keeps a more integrated distribution and shows up as a surprise—or punctuation.  

The farther north you go, the bigger the madrones. It’s startling for someone who’s used to the picturesque, curving smaller specimens we see here to come round a bend in a dirt road on the Lost Coast and be hailed by a scattered line of militarily upright 60-footers on a sunlit slope. Sometimes you just have to stop in the middle of the road (because the middle is all there is to the road) and get out to see their tops, to take in a whole tree in one eyeful.  

It’s no surprise to anyone who’s seen one growing from an unlikely bare rock and leaning confidently cantilevered out over the surf a hundred feet below that madrone has a serious root system and is good at erosion control. Its berries, red or yellow, feed many bird species including our native band-tailed pigeon. Sometimes you’ll see a flock of those gathering around a tree that’s having a particularly productive year. As the birds are half again the size of city pigeons, this makes an impressive conclave. 

The berries are edible for humans too, though their flavor is supposed to be dull. Come to think of it, I’ve never tried one. They’re coming into ripeness; I’ll have to remedy that as soon as I can do so legally.  

The wood is dense and hard, but the size and unpredictable form of the tree, as well as the wood’s tendency to check and crumble if it’s not specially treated, means it’s not much used for lumber. It’s smooth and close-grained and (no surprise) handsomely ruddy if it’s heartwood, golden to yellow if it’s sapwood. You can buy small quantities for small projects and I’d call it pretty pricey: Woodworker’s Source sells 20 board feet of Arbutus menzieseii at a statutory inch thick (meaning less than that after finishing) for over $200.  

There’s a bench on the Packrat Trail to Jewel Lake in Tilden that straddles a usually-dry streambed and has a bit of view over the slope. A companionable madrone leans near it. It’s a good spot to enjoy its company, as well as the birds and critters that travel through. 

 

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Green Neighbors” column appears every other Tuesday in the Berkeley Daily Planet, alternating with Joe Eaton’s “Wild Neighbors” column. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section.  

 

Photograph by Ron Sullivan. 

A shrubby little madrone at Lake Lagunitas. This protean species also grows as 60-foot forest trees.


Berkeley This Week

Tuesday August 07, 2007

TUESDAY, AUGUST 7 

Rally to Support the Woodfin Workers at 4:30 p.m. at Woodfin Inn and Suites, Shellmound Ave. and Shellmound Way, Emeryville. 

Monitor Native Oysters in the Bay Help monitor oyster populations and set up equipment for our Native Oyster Monitoring Study at 10 a.m. at the Berkeley Marina, 201 University Ave. 452-9261, ext. 119. www.savesfbay.org/oysters  

“Youth Prison Reform: Does the Governor Have It Right?” with Pat Kuhi. Brown Bag lunch at noon at the Albany Library, Marin and Masonic Ave. Sponsored by League of Women Voters of Berkeley, Albany, Emeryville. 843-8824. http://lwvbae.org 

Opening of the Southside Community Park, serving the Santa Fe nighborhood of Richmond, at 3:30 p.m. at the end of Virgina Ave. off Harbour Way St., Richmond. 307-8150. 

WIllard Neighborhood Ice Cream Social Part of National Night Out, from 7 to 9 p.m. at Willard Park, corner of Derby St. and Hillegass Ave.  

Lawyers in the Library Free legal information and referral presented in conjunction with the Alameda County Bar Association. Sign-ups at 5 p.m. for appointments between 6 and 8 p.m. at the Rockridge Branch of the Oakland Public Library, 5366 College Ave. 597-5017. 

Dance Dance Revolution Interactive Game at 5:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library Community Room, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6100. 

Family Storytime for preschoolers and up at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704.  

Community Sing-a-Long every Tues, at 2 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. 524-9122.  

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. 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 8 

LBNL Building Plans Learn about the plans for the 160,000 sq-ft Helios building and the 150,000 sq-ft Computational Research Facility at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst St. See www.lbl.gov/Community/Helios and www.lbl.gov/Community/CRT 

Walking Tour of Oakland City Center Meet at 10 a.m. in front Oakland City Hall at Frank Ogawa Plaza. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. 

Pax Nomada Bike Ride Meet at 6 p.m. at Nomad Cafe for a 15-25 mile ride up through the Berkeley hills. All levels of cyclists welcome. 595-5344. 

Free Diabetes Screening Come find out if you might have diabetes with our free screening test and make sure not to eat or drink anything for 8 hours beforehand, from 8:45 to noon at the Latina Center, 3919 Roosevelt Ave., Richmond. 981-5332. 

Poetry Writing Workshop with Alison Seevak at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

“Coming Out to Your Children” a workshop for LGBT parents at 6:30 p.m. at Women of Color Resource Center, 1611 Telegragh Ave., #303, Oakland. 415-981-1960. stephanice@ourfamily.org 

Farsi Club at 1:15 p.m. at North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. 981-5190. 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. 548-9840. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Sing for Peace at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. 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 9 

The Cultural Landscape of Strawberry Canyon with Charles Birnbaum at 7:30 p.m. at the Town & Gown Club, UC Campus. Cost is $20, reservtions required. 842-2242. www.berkeleyheritage.com 

Introduction to Urban Permaculture Hear and see local permaculture designers from the Ecological Division of Merritt College’s Landscape Horticulture Department discuss what’s possible in a city, at 7 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. 548-2220, ext. 233. 

“War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” A new documentary film based on thebook by Norman Solomon at 7 p.m. at Grand Lake Theater 3200 Grand Ave , Oakland. Tickets $12. www. 

warmadeeasythemovie.org 

“Can a New Virus Explain Diabetes?” a discussion forum at the East Bay Science Cafe at 7 p.m. at Spud’s Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. 558-0881.  

East Bay Macintosh Users Group reviews the iPhone at 7 p.m. at Expression College for Digital Arts, 6601 Shelmound, Emeryville. http://ebmug.org  

Screening to Reduce Risk of Stroke at Bayview El Cerrito Fraternal Order of Eagles at 3223 Carlson Blvd., El Cerrito. Cost is $139. To schedule an appointment call 1-877-237-1287. 

World of Plants Tours Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $5. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

FRIDAY, AUGUST 10 

A Ramble into, through, and above Strawberry Canyon, with guides, at 5:30 p.m. followed by a Farmers’ Market Barbeque at 7 p.m. at the Haas Club House, UC Campus. For details call Berkeley Architectural Heritage 841-2242. www.berkeleyheritage.com 

Peace Meditation & Origami class for all ages with Hiroshima survivor Takashi Tanemori at 7 p.m. at Unity of Berkeley, 2075 Eunice St. Suggested donation $10-$20, no one turned away. 528-8844. 

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 7:30 p.m. at Finnish Brotherhood Hall, 1970 Chestnut St at University. Donation of $5 requested. 528-4253.  

SATURDAY, AUGUST 11 

Art Deco Walking Tour of Downtown Berkeley Meet at 11 a.m. in front of United Artists Theater, 2274 Shattuck. www.artdecosociety.org 

Oakland Heritage Alliance Walking Tour of Temescal Meet at 10 a.m. in front of Genova Delicatessen, 5095 Telegraph Ave. 763-9218. www.oaklandheritage.org 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland uptown to the Lake to discover Art Deco landmarks. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of the Paramount Theater at 2025 Broadway. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. 

The Great War Society meets to discuss “What the Doughboy Wore” by Norm Miller at 10:30 a.m. at 640 Arlington Ave. 527-7118. 

“Amazed” A family maze and labyrinth making event from 1 to 4 p.m. at The Museum of Children’s Art, 528 9th St., Oakland. Cost is $5. 465-8770. 

Introduction to Permaculture Learn the principles of using permaculture, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Cost is $10-$15, no one turned away. Call to pre-register and for location. 548-2220, ext. 233. 

Re-Dedication of Brookdale Park with entertainment, food, spoken word and community booths at 11 a.m. at 2535 High St., Oakland. 533-2366. 

Re-Leaf the San Pablo Creekside Help push out the invasive plants and bring back native vegetation from 9:30 a.m. to noon at 4191 Appian Way, El Sobrante. For information call 665-3538. www.thewatershedproject.org 

“Less Safe, Less Free: The Failure of Preemption in the War on Terror” with Jules Lobel at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Hopalong Animal Rescue Come meet your furry new best friend. Cats and kittens available for adoption from noon to 3 p.m. at Your Basic Bird, 2940 College Ave. 267-1915, ext. 500. 

CoHousing Potluck at 2 p.m. at 2220 Sacramento St. 849-2063. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

Fast Pitch Softball for Adults at noon on Saturdays in Oakland. For information call 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 

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

SUNDAY, AUGUST 12 

Oakland Heritage Alliance Walking Tour of Laurel Neighborhood Meet at 10 a.m. at the Albertson’s parking lot, 4055 MacArthur Blvd. 763-9218. www.oaklandheritage.org 

Mumia Abu Jamal on the Road to Freedom? with Mumia’s lead counsel, Robert R. Bryan on developments in Mumia’s case at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Universalists, 1924 Cedar at Bonita. Suggested donation $5-$10. 526-4402. 

The Red Oak Victory Ship Pancake Breakfast from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 1337 Canal Blvd in Richmond harbor. Exit Canal Blvd off Hwy 580. Cost is $6, children under 5 free. 237-2933. 

Free Sailboat Rides from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Cal Sailing Club, Berkeley Marina. Wear warm, waterproof clothing and bring a change of clothes in case you get wet. www.cal-sailing.org 

Middle East Peace Petition Release Party from 3 to 6 p.m. at Redwood Gardens, 2951 Derby. 548-9840. 

Community Meditation and Potluck at 7 p.m. at 1940 Virginia St. Sponsored by The East Bay Open Circle. 495-7511. www.eastbayopencircle.org  

MONDAY, AUGUST 13 

Peace Child Summer Arts Camp for Children ages 8-12 with singing, dancing, acting, music-making, shadow puppetry, and art-making about peace runs to Aug 17, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Arlington Community Church, 52 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Cost is $100. 526-9146. 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. 548-0425. 

Dragonboating Year round classes at the Berkeley Marina, Dock M. Meets Mon, Wed., Thurs. at 6 p.m. Sat. at 10:30 a.m. www.dragonmax.org 

Drop in Knitting Class at the Albany Library Work on your own project or make pet blankets and children’s hats to be donated to charity organizations, at 3:30 p.m. at 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17.. 

CITY MEETINGS 

Disaster and Fire Safety Commission meets Wed., Aug. 8, at 7 p.m., at 997 Cedar St. 981-5502.  

Waterfront Commission meets Wed., Aug. 8, at 7 p.m., at 201 University Ave. 981-6740.  

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., Aug. 9, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. 981-7410.  


Clarification

Tuesday August 07, 2007

Regarding a report in the Aug. 3 article “Spring Agrees to Negotiate Campaign Violation,” a July 26 FCPC staff update clarifies that Berkeley City Councilmember Dona Spring did not incur any late filing obligation for the SEIU Local 535 PAC $250 contribution because it was hand-delivered a week after the date on the check.


Correction

Tuesday August 07, 2007

The Planet incorrectly stated in a story Friday on the proposed South West Berkeley Benefits District that in the draft budget there are no funds allocated to address zoning issues. The draft budget, however, allocates $60,000 for the first year for “overall district management,” which will include funding a district administrator responsible for “oversight of contracted services.” Those services are to include: “Hiring professionals (to) advise on land use issues, transportation planning, [and] input on [the] West Berkeley Plan.” South West Berkeley zoning is spelled out in the West Berkeley Plan adopted by the city.