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Berkeley High senior Giana Cirolia, 17, strikes a pose for her student ID card during registration Friday. Photograph by Riya Bhattacharjee.
Berkeley High senior Giana Cirolia, 17, strikes a pose for her student ID card during registration Friday. Photograph by Riya Bhattacharjee.
 

News

Riot Erupts Over Fencing In of UC Oak Grove

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday August 28, 2007

It began with a flimsy yellow ribbon and ended with a riot, two arrests and a courtroom hearing. 

At about 6 a.m. Wednesday, the UC Berkeley Police Department started taping off the oak grove adjacent to the UC Berkeley Memorial Stadium to construct an eight-foot chain-link fence around the grove. Protesters have been camped in the trees since December in an effort to stop the university’s plan to remove the trees to make room for a new athletic facility. 

A scuffle between the UC police and protesters during a Wednesday evening rally held by Save the Oaks turned into a riot when the police confiscated food and water which was being sent up to the tree-sitters. 

UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof told the Planet that the temporary fence would create a “safety zone around trees adjacent to Memorial Stadium” to protect both the tree-sitters and the 73,000 fans who are expected at the stadium for Saturday’s football game against University of Tennessee. 

The tree-sitters are protesting the university’s plan to raze the grove to make way for a $125 million student-athlete high performance center in its place, a move that led the City of Berkeley to sue the university over safety concerns. 

“Emotions and passions are running high on both ends,” Mogulof told the Planet. “A temporary barrier is needed because protesters continue to illegally occupy some trees at the site and investigations by the UC police have suggested that it would be a good idea to put a fence up before fans come to the game. We are going to analyze this on a week-to-week basis.” 

Assistant UC Police Chief Mitch Celaya told the Planet Wednesday afternoon that the tree-sitters had been asked to come down before university-hired contractors had started constructing the fence. 

“They made a choice,” Celaya said. “We are not trying to start a riot. We are just trying to prevent potential problems. We don’t want the football fans to walk into the [grove]. We are not allowing anybody to go in and if anyone tries to leave or provide food or water to the tree-sitters they will be cited for trespassing.” 

Steve Volker, attorney for the California Oaks Foundation—one of the three plaintiffs in the lawsuit against UC’s plans to construct the training center—arrived at the grove Wednesday to inform protesters that he had filed a restraining order for the fence which would be heard Thursday (today) at the Hayward Superior Court. 

“This fence is contrary to Judge Barbara Miller’s ruling on Feb. 9 that there should be no physical alteration on the environment of the oak grove until the court rules on the merits of the case on Sept. 19,” he said. “It is a direct attack on fundamental rights, a noose on the First Amendment ... Berkeley is the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement and it now threatens to be its graveyard. This day will be remembered as a day of infamy for this university as an attempt to crush the community’s voice.” 

Citing a similar case at Cornell University where the court had upheld a student’s right to remain on a tree to protest its being cut down, Volker said that courts have repeatedly ruled that no one should be deprived of their civil rights—food and water in this case—on a college campus. 

“The sitters have a constitutional right to protest the logging of the tress,” he said. “They have placed themselves in harm’s way to protect these trees. We either make a stand now or watch our rights disappear.” 

The first altercation took place when the tree-sitters got down to the lower branches and one of their supporters tried to attach a can of guacamole to a bag lowered with ropes. UC police cut the rope off with a sickle while an angry group of people surrounded them screaming “shame on you.” 

“Fuck you Pigs,” said one of the protesters. “What are the rules? We will get food up there one way or the other.” 

At one point supporters started throwing apples and granola bars inside the fence while others continued attempts to tie bottles of water and food packets to the ropes lowered from the trees. 

Celaya said the police were preventing food and water from being sent up to the trees since the sitters were already stockpiled with supplies.  

After observing the situation at the grove, Mayor Tom Bates said in a statement, “While the university may have serious concerns about the safety of the protesters and football fans at Saturday’s game, there is simply no justification for UC Berkeley Police to deny protesters food and water.” 

“UC’s actions are unacceptable and I believe they are putting people’s lives at risk unnecessarily,” Bates said. “I contacted the chancellor’s office to urge them in the strongest possible terms to reconsider their position and allow the protesters access to food and water. Regardless of a person’s opinion of the merits of the tree-sitters protest or the UC stadium proposal, we all need to respect basic human and civil rights.” 

Close to 6 p.m. students, community members and a few city officials gathered outside the fence to watch the tug-of-war between the tree-sitters and UC police. After about half a dozen attempts to prevent the protesters from handing over more food, UC police made two arrests. 

Celaya said that Joseph Fisher, 18, was arrested on two counts of battery and one count of resisting arrest and Drew Beres, 18, could be charged with one count of resisting arrest. Nobody was injured. 

The arrests led to more pushing, yelling and general chaos at the grove. At one point police chased a man dressed in black down Piedmont Avenue. Some protesters formed a circle in front of the evening traffic and refused to budge from the spot for almost 15 minutes. 

“Cut your engine off,” one woman told a driver of a silver Toyota. “You are not going anywhere.” 

“Berkeley’s back,” yelled another oak grove supporters. Drum beats echoed in the distance and strains from the UC football band practicing for Saturday’s game added to the melee of sounds at the grove. 

“They are attempting to deny the protesters food and water to starve them out of the trees,” said former mayoral candidate Zachary Runningwolf, who was one of the initial tree-sitters. “There are many measures that can be done to control crowds. They say they are protecting the sitters but are refusing them their fundamental rights at the same time.” 

“We shall overcome,” sang Berkeley resident Debbie Moore strumming a guitar as she stood wrapped in yellow police tape to show her support for what might be the longest-standing urban tree-sit. 

“How much did that fence cost?” asked Jonathan Huang, a UC Berkeley sophomore. 

“That’s my out-of-state tuition money that’s going to build a fence,” said another UC Berkeley student. “My parents worked their butts off to pay the $40,000 a year and this is what I get! I am pissed off!” 

As evening paved the way for night, the UC cops pulled out six generators and 25 spotlights. A thick yellow rope was let down for water, but this time the police did not attempt to block it. 

“I think our response will be summed up in one word: De-fence,” a masked tree-sitter told media news crews from his leafy perch. “The tree sitters and UC are too polarized and it’s hard to bridge that gap.” 

Amy Elmgren, a peace and conflict studies major from UC Berkeley, pressed her nose against the fence to watch the UC police officers videotaping the tree-sitters. 

“I think this is insane,” she said. “Before today I was ambiguous about what was going on at the grove but this certainly changes it. I am hoping this will reinvigorate student activism on campus.” 

Gianna Ranuzzi, a long-time Berkeley resident, said she was worried that the poles were damaging the tree roots. 

Catcalls, boos and whistles followed the police as they patrolled the grove. The crowds started thinning around 7 p.m.  

The next scheduled showdown will be the lawsuit scheduled to be heard on Sept. 19. 

In a statement released Wednesday afternoon Mayor Bates said that he was open to negotiations for a settlement agreement regarding the lawsuit. 

“From the beginning, I have maintained that a negotiated settlement that addresses our significant public safety and legal issues is a preferred outcome,” he said. “It is regrettable that the university made no offer at the court-mandated settlement conference in February and has yet to submit any settlement offer to the city in this litigation. In fact, the university’s lawyers have at all times urged that this case be expedited to a court resolution. The university sent a letter to the City Council and me last month with an update on their plans—including modest changes such as a reduction in their new parking lot and improved landscaping—but made no offer to negotiate.” 

The statement however issues a caveat that the city was one of four entities engaged in legal action over the university’s proposed stadium projects and “even if the city were to reach an acceptable resolution, the lawsuit would likely continue.” 

UC Berkeley officials have emphasized the importance of a new gym for its 13 athletic teams to replace the seismically unsafe Memorial Stadium, but the city contends that the proposed site is unsafe since it located on the Hayward Fault. 

The Berkeley City Council is scheduled to meet in closed session with its lawyers on Tuesday to discuss the litigation. Bates has requested the university to provide information about a settlement agreement to the city’s attorneys so that the council is able to consider it.


BHS Officials Hope to Quell Back-to-School Chaos

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday August 28, 2007

When Berkeley High starts on Wednesday, school officials are hoping there will be no need this year for “zoo time,” as the beginning-of-the-school-year pandemonium at Berkeley High is commonly known, with students clamoring for books, calendars and lockers. 

When students get back from summer break this time, they will saunter straight to class and get to work. Or at least that is the way it is supposed to work. 

Vice Principal Pasquale Scuderi’s new rules dictate that students should have picked up their back-to-school classroom essentials during registration days last week. 

“So that when the first day of school starts, we can be ready for class and not waste a single minute,” said Berkeley High Principal Jim Slemp during senior registration Friday. “We’ve wasted a lot of time standing in queues in the past, but not anymore. The new school year will start on time.” 

The new idea was implemented for the first time last year. 

“This is a slight improvement on last year,” Scuderi said. “I was given a clean slate to try and see that kids don’t wait in long lines and don’t get their time wasted. So we looked at the layout of the campus and divided them into small groups. It’s a lot of hard work for four days but it’s worth every minute.” 

He added that the latest addition to Berkeley High was a talented group of 24 new teachers. 

“That, and the success of our athletic team,” he said. “Coach [Alonzo] Carter has doubled the participation in football. He also keeps his players’ transcripts with him which will help the athletic program have a bigger take on academics.” 

Although only 47 percent of sophomores and 48 percent of juniors at BHS scored proficient or advanced in English in the recent STAR test results, the numbers are above the statewide scores. The STAR program tests proficiency levels in English and math for every student in California according to one of five levels of performance on the California Standardized Tests for each subject tested: advanced, proficient, basic, below basic, and far below basic.  

“It’s important to keep in mind that STAR is a nice method but it’s one of several methods,” Scuderi said. “There are lots of assessments that we do on campus that test students more intimately. That gives us more relevant data than state tests. Students in our core humanities programs are now doing self assessments.” 

Slemp added that an advocacy program would start at Berkeley High from fall 2006 where every student would have an adult to go to for advice. 

Hundreds of Berkeley High seniors picked up books and ID cards on Friday. 

“It’s been extremely smooth since morning,” said Jun-Ko Kenmotsu, a parent volunteer who was handing out yellow monogrammed organizers. 

“The organizers cost $2 for every student,” said former BHS parent Linda Perry who has been volunteering during registration day for the last 15 years. 

“It’s a fraction of the actual cost. The rest is paid for by donations. Principal Slemp is very enthusiastic about using them as it helps to keep track of class and their social lives as well.” 

The lines moved as if by clockwork, guided by the ever-watchful eyes of the parent-volunteers. 

Berkeley High volunteer coordinator Janet Huseby said the 130 volunteers helped make sure the school year began smoothly. 

“These people gave up work and squeezed in their last hours of vacation to contribute to the community,” she said. “That is just amazing.” 

Corinne Koster, a portrait photographer with the ABC School’s Project, said that things had moved quickly. 

“I was able to take a hundred portraits since morning,” she said, “and apart from concerns about their hair and looks, the students have been just great.” 

Seniors Giana Cirolia, Kara Murray and Samantha Carter were up next. 

“It’s exciting,” said Giana, 17. “You’ve been waiting your entire four years in high school for this and now it’s here. [The class of] ’08 has always been the best class and this is going to be the best class ever.” 

“I am looking forward to Dance Production,” said Samantha. “I am not looking forward to college applications but it’s a goal.” 

As friends found each other during the day, discussions generally focused on the challenges of a new school year. 

“I am looking forward to moving on to better things,” said incoming senior Zoe Janackek. “Senior year is always stressful but it’s also the best. I really want to keep my grades up and work towards getting into a good college.”


Demolition Work Raises Questions in West Berkeley

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday August 28, 2007

A group of Berkeley residents are questioning why the windows of a building at 1050 Parker St. are being dismantled prior to the building getting a demolition use permit from the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB). Demolition permits for any building over 40 years old in a commercial zone must first be reviewed by the Landmarks Preservation Commission to determine whether it has any historic significance. 

Neighborhood business owners and residents said they were perplexed when the tall metal-sash multi-light windows went missing from the unoccupied one-story World War II-era building last month. 

The property, formerly owned by Pastor Gordon W. Choyce Sr., was recently purchased by San Rafael-based Wareham Developers. 

Choyce, who heads Jubilee Restoration—the charitable arm of Berkeley’s Missionary Church of God in Christ—had purchased the property along with several others to demolish them all and build Jubilee Village, a large affordable housing project. 

The project stalled in 2004 due to an investigation into Jubilee and the federal government withdrawing funding for the project. It was alleged at the time that the organization had been diverting federal funds. 

Wareham, who own the Fantasy Records building on Tenth Street, has recently applied for a demolition permit for the site, leading to speculation that the dismantling of the windows might serve a larger purpose. 

“It’s obvious to me that someone is attempting to take away any character-defining features from the building so that they can get the demolition permit,” said Berkeley Landmarks Commissioner Carrie Olson, “so that when it comes before the Landmarks Commission, we will say, ‘Oh what a dump’ and approve the permit.” 

Darrell de Tienne, who is representing Wareham, told the Planet Thursday that the windows were removed as part of an abatement process. 

“We had to do it to remove the asbestos from the building,” he said. “We have not started demolishing anything yet.” 

De Tienne said that there were no concrete plans for the site after the building is demolished. 

“It’s possible that it could be linked to Fantasy Records and used for parking or something,” he said. 

Laurie Bright, who owns the neighboring D & L Engines, said that the demolition had taken place during the night.  

“I am extremely suspicious of what’s going on,” he said. “The building’s been sitting there for four years and it has never been vandalized. Then suddenly someone starts tearing down the windows. It’s sitting there empty, open to weather, vandalism and graffiti. There’s nothing left but the shell. Any chance to re-use the building is lost.” 

Olson told the Planet that she had requested a stop-work order from the city’s Code Enforcement Division last week. 

Wendy Cosin, Berkeley’s deputy planning director, told the Planet that a staff shortage had prevented the order from being sent out. 

“It’s my belief that there’s no work going on there now,” she said. 

 

Photograph by Richard Brenneman. 

Demolition work on the windows of this World War II-era building at Tenth and Parker streets has drawn criticism.


Verizon Sues Berkeley Over Cell Phone Towers

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday August 28, 2007

Cell phone giant Verizon Wireless filed a lawsuit against the City of Berkeley in the Federal Court of Oakland last week for allegedly being in violation of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. 

Verizon asked the court to declare Berkeley’s ordinance regarding cell phone antenna installations illegal and to allow the cell phone company to proceed with three of its antenna location permits, including the one atop UC Storage at 2721 Shattuck Ave. 

The other two locations are on lower University and north Shattuck avenues. 

The Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) voted 5-4 in July to reject a use permit application by Verizon Wireless and Nextel Communications for 11 cell phone antennas atop UC storage, following a second remand from the City Council in May. 

ZAB’s decision stated that it was “unable to make the necessary finding based on substantial evidence that the towers were necessary to provide personal wireless service in the coverage area, since service is currently being provided and since no evidence has been presented that existing service is not at an adequate level.”  

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 requires cities to grant cell phone companies a permit within a reasonable period of time and allows the carrier to sue for unnecessary delay.  

The other thrust of the law states that a city violates federal law on its face by creating an overly burdensome ordinance which includes demonstrating necessity for use of the site. 

San Diego’s ordinance regarding cell phone antennas was recently thrown out by Sprint because it was found to be “overly burdensome.” 

The proposal, which was first remanded to ZAB by the City Council on Sept. 26, 2006, had raised health concerns among the neighbors.  

Citing the Telecommunications Act, which prohibits local governments from rejecting wireless facilities based on health concerns as long as the stations conform to Federal Communication standards, the council had asked ZAB to make a decision based on third-party engineering review, parking concerns and illegal construction instead of health.  

ZAB voted 6-3 to deny the construction of 18 cell phone antennas at the Jan. 30 board meeting. Both Verizon and Nextel appealed to the City Council and a public hearing was held in May.  

In a confidential memo to ZAB, City attorney Manuela Albuquerque had warned that a rejection of the Verizon application would be a violation of state and federal law.  

The Planet was unable to get a comment from the city attorney’s office by press time. 

Verizon land use attorney Paul Albritton had told the board at the July meeting that statistics showed that minutes of cell phone usage in Berkeley had increased between 2005 and 2006. 

“There really is hard evidence which shows that down the line cell phone lines will not work when there is a congestion,” he said.


Time Will Tell If Dobbins Can Survive School Board Censure

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Tuesday August 28, 2007

Can the once-promising political future of Oakland Unified School District board member Chris Dobbins survive the recent scandal and censure? To quote the most trite of answers: Only time will tell. 

Before he was accused of conducting an improper relationship with a 17-year-old female OUSD high school student, the 35-year-old Dobbins was considered one of Oakland’s rising political stars.  

The UC Berkeley graduate and educational professional was easily elected to the school board in June of 2006 to replace the retiring District 6 Director Dan Siegel, easily beating local business owner Wandra J. Boyd 52-48 percent. In doing so, he assembled an impressive list of endorsements, including the incumbent Siegel, the powerful Oakland Education Association teachers union and its then-president, Ben Visnick, the Alameda County Democratic Party, and several members of the board of the Oakland Unified School District and the Alameda County Board of Education. 

But maybe more important for someone seeking a larger political future in Oakland—where the ability to cross over racial lines is a necessity for anyone seeking citywide office—Dobbins, who is of mixed Irish-Syrian/Lebanese heritage, was able to garner key African-American endorsements and support against an African-American opponent. 

And Dobbins, apparently, had his eyes set on citywide office. 

Oakland resident Ignacio Ortiz, who spoke in support of Dobbins at last week’s OUSD censure meeting, said he met Dobbins when the two of them were food servers at Chevy’s. “He said he was interested in running for office, and I told him I’d do anything to help him,” Ortiz said. “And he said, ‘What if I ran for mayor?’” 

Whether Dobbins still holds that ambition is not known. 

Dobbins’ election last June went little noticed outside of the 6th District of Oakland, in part because the Oakland school board was still a powerless position at the time in those days of full state control, in part because anything about the Oakland election in 2006 was overshadowed by the epic mayoral battle between former Congressmember Ron Dellums and Councilmembers Ignacio De La Fuente and Nancy Nadel. 

But Dobbins came to citywide attention during last January’s much-watched Fox Oakland citywide inauguration, not so much for what he said in his speech—which was full of the usual thank-you’s and political promises—but of the boyishly, bubblingly enthusiastic way in which he gave it. Oakland, which has had more than its share of politicians giving out grim news from the state school takeover to the epidemic of murders, appeared ready for an officeholder who seemed to clearly be having so much fun on the job. 

That support carried over to Dobbins’ board colleagues. Contrary to the charges made by Dobbins’ supporters at last week’s censure meeting that the censure was a “political vendetta,” Dobbins appeared to have been well-liked by fellow board members before the student impropriety charges surfaced.  

In a board that has seen some legendary political feuds in recent years—the running one featuring former members Dan Siegel and Paul Cobb being one of the more memorable—Dobbins appeared to have no enemies. (Significantly, Cobb, a longtime local African-American activist and most recently the new publisher of the Oakland Post, an African-American-based newspaper, joined Siegel in endorsing Dobbins in the June 2006 election.) 

Even local educator and political leader Toni Cook, who preceded Siegel in the 6th District OUSD board seat, began her remarks during the public comment section at last week’s board censure meeting with the statements, “I like Chris,” and “I know about the good work he has done,” before announcing her support for the censure. 

“You should not be blinded in your judgment by his good works,” Cook told board members. “Any perceived relationship with a minor is wrong, regardless of his intentions. In eight years while I was on the board, we had three cases of employees who had similar charges against them. One went to jail and two were suspended. There can’t be one standard in the district for employees and another one for the board.” 

But Cook, after all, was one of the signators on the petition of candidacy for Wandra J. Boyd, Dobbins’ opponent in last year’s election. If Dobbins decides to continue his political career past his current term, will his personal “likeability” be enough to overcome the current scandal and censure in voters who supported him last year, or for those who may never have taken a position on him before? 

Retired OUSD board member Dan Siegel thinks so. 

“I think he can rebound,” Siegel said by telephone this week, “though it may take time. Clearly he made an error. He and the young woman allowed their infatuation to go on a bit too far. But from all the available evidence, it did not cross the line into a physical relationship, and (Dobbins) did not do anything that could be considered abusive or exploitative of a young person. If he does not resign, it will be a matter he can put behind him.” 

East Bay News Service editor Sanjiv Handa, a longtime observer of Oakland politics, agreed. 

“Oakland voters tend to have a short memory,” Handa said. “Transgressions tend not to come back to haunt politicians.” Handa added that while “it can depend upon how much an opponent uses the information in a negative campaign,” he said that in this area, at least, “negative campaigning can backfire.” 

Handa said that the charges against Dobbins may have been politically nullified, in part, because some board members made statements prior to the investigation that showed they had already made up their minds against him. And Handa said that e-mail excerpts which were published in the censure committee’s report—in one of which, Dobbins wrote to the student that “I have a girlfriend so I should not have been trying stuff in the first place”—might not turn out to be politically damaging if voters feel they were cherrypicked by the committee and taken out of context. 

“I’ve talked to some parents already who see this as a witch hunt,” Handa said. 

That Dobbins may be able to put the issue behind him appears to be true, at least with his hard-core supporters. A crowd of them packed the OUSD board room during the censure meeting, several of them speaking passionately in his support or in criticism of his fellow board members, the rest applauding loudly when they heard something in Dobbins’ favor, or groaning or calling out remarks when they heard something against him. These supporters heard the allegations against Dobbins and rejected them, and, for the most part, will probably remain in his corner for whatever campaign he chooses to run in the future. 

Typical of those was Lolita Morelli, Dobbins’ seventh-grade counselor at Montera Middle School, who called Dobbins “an outstanding individual,” a “moral and ethical person” who Morelli said she imagined “was trying to help” the female student in question. 

And, in fact, Bay Area voters have shown a tendency to continue to support local office holders who have been found guilty of improprieties. 

Earlier this year, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s campaign manager quit after accusing Newsom of having an affair with his wife. Some observers said this was the end of Newsom’s rising star political career. Instead, seven months later, Newsom is as popular as ever, sailing along in his re-election campaign with no serious opposition, having scared off any of the progressive candidates who had once considered challenging him. 

That was also the case with Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates, who had barely won office in 2002 when it came to public light that in the last days of his campaign against incumbent Shirley Dean, Bates had stolen from the newsstand more than a thousand copies of the Daily Cal newspaper edition that included an endorsement of Dean. Four years later, Bates easily won re-election. 

And California Attorney General Jerry Brown, who illegally trashed many of his official records and correspondence as mayor of Oakland on his way out the door at Oakland City Hall this year, seems so far to have suffered no lasting political damage from the action. 

But Newsom, Bates, and Brown were all well-known officeholders with long records of political accomplishments. A majority of voters had formed favorable opinions of them long before their improprieties, one of the key elements in a politician overcoming such problems. 

A second factor, in the Newsom and Bates situations, at least, is a quick and (apparently) sincere apology. Both Newsom and Bates almost immediately admitted wrongdoing, and took their respective punishments (rehab in the case of Newsom, a fine in the case of Bates) without complaint. Though Brown does not appear to have publicly addressed the document—trashing himsel—and has certainly issued no apology, an aide with the attorney general’s office immediately issued a public statement acknowledging that the trashing had occurred. 

It is unclear whether future voters will consider Dobbins’ impropriety more serious than that of the others. At the very least, Dobbins is guilty of a failure to break off a relationship with an underage student he was mentoring immediately after it was clear the relationship had strayed into romantic waters, picking her up from her UC dorm room at 2 a.m. and parking with her in his car at Strawberry Canyon a month after he had promised OUSD staff members that he would not see the girl any more. Voters may believe this more damaging than a consensual adult relationship, or destroying newspapers or documents, or they may not. 

Meanwhile, unlike Newsom, Bates, and Brown, the first-termer Dobbins does not have a long political record to fall back on. While his continued hard core support in the 6th District would make him a formidable candidate should he choose to run for re-election in 2010, and a large cadre of family and friends and associates outside the district would be expected to support him whatever he does, he would find that most citywide voters’ knowledge of him will now begin with the question, “Wasn’t that the one who went with that high school girl?” That’s a first impression that will be difficult to overcome. 

Dobbins’ second difficulty in emulating the swift political resurrection of fellow fallen officeholders is the fact that he never issued an unequivocal apology. 

At the first news conference following the revelation of the charges of sleeping with his campaign manager’s wife, Newsom said, simply, “I want to make it clear that everything you’ve heard and read is true, and I’m deeply sorry about that. I’ve hurt someone I care deeply about—Alex Tourk and his friends and family. And that is something I have to live with.” 

Bates did the same, issuing a statement that read: “There is no question that tossing newspapers is absolutely inappropriate and unacceptable. I apologize on behalf of myself and my supporters for our involvement in this activity.” 

In contrast, Dobbins equivocated. 

“I could have used better judgment,” he told fellow board members at the censure meeting, adding that “if [the student involved] felt I overstepped my bounds, then I apologize for that.”  

But rather than leaving it at that, he then tried to criticize his detractors and minimize his actions, first saying that he had been censured when other OUSD board members had not for other infractions, then adding that “at the end of the day, I didn’t steal any money or anything like that.” 

Because of that, privately, following the meeting, several board members—including moderates who did not publicly speak out against Dobbins prior to the investigation was completed—complained that “he still doesn’t get it,” and unless and until that sentiment changes, both with Dobbins and with his closest observers, it will be remembered, making any possible future political campaign beyond the 6th District start off with an enormous impediment to climb and overcome. 

 

Contributed photo. 

At last week’s special board meeting, embattled OUSD Boardmember Chris Dobbins examines the resolution against him that was released by the board’s Censure Committee (Alice Spearman, Noel Gallo and chair Greg Hodge). 

 


Group to Announce Results of West Berkeley Air Quality Testing

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday August 28, 2007

Air monitors set up by a group of West Berkeley residents in May to detect emissions from Pacific Steel Casting (PSC) reveal high levels of toxic metals nickel and manganese. 

The group, which calls itself the Berkeley Community Monitoring Team, is scheduled to present its results at a press conference at a monitoring site on Eighth Street today (Tuesday). 

Pacific Steel contends that the test results are inconclusive and misleading. 

“The results as published by the Berkeley Community Monitoring Team ignore data that does not fit its preconceptions,” a statement issued by PSC said. “The team singles out PSC as the sole source of emissions when air samples tested are cumulative of all sources (including Highway 80) in the industrial neighborhood of West Berkeley. The air monitoring machine is not approved by the EPA, results are not verified by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, and the machine has limited capability in detecting small amounts of individual metals.” 

Located at 1333 Second St., PSC produces steel castings that are used in various industries. Area residents have complained for years about its noxious odors and emissions which they call a health risk. 

“These are preliminary findings but one of the goals is to daylight our monitoring project and encourage other people to stand up on their roofs and put up a monitor,” said L A Wood, who is part of the team. “We went into it with some basic assumptions. Some of the prior sampling by the West Berkeley Alliance for Clean Air and Safe Jobs show traces of formaldehyde and lead and this raised questions in the community. I think our results will seriously challenge Pacific Steel’s Health Risk Assessment Report and urge them to take another look at it.” 

Pacific Steel presented its Health Risk Assessment report to the air district last month. The report—which is yet to be released to the public—will help determine whether the steel foundry poses a health risk to Berkeley residents. 

Wood added that while the air district had supported their project, Pacific Steel had not cooperated. 

“We wanted to know their times of operation but were unable to do so,” he said. “We knew it was primarily at night so we based our sampling on that assumption. One of the main indicators was the smell. Every time you talk about West Berkeley emissions, the city government has pointed to the freeway. But this has more to do with all the industries in West Berkeley than the freeway. There’s a reason why the air district gave us the money for the monitors. They know that something is wrong at the steel foundry.” 

The preliminary results from the community air monitor are based on two dozen samples. The final report will be released after 100 air tests have been completed. 

“These test results are even more proof that Pacific Steel must immediately stop its pollution that threatens the health of the community,” said Bradley Angel, executive director of Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice. “The health of residents is more important than corporate profits.” 

According to Mark Cherniak, an independent international health expert, the levels of nickel and manganese found in the samples taken near the West Berkeley steel foundry were hundreds of times higher than considered safe by the World Health Organization (WHO). 

“The nearest and largest facility known to emit these metals is Pacific Steel,” said Wood. 

“At the locations where monitoring found excessive levels of both manganese and nickel, these levels were found in proportions similar to PSC’s known emissions of these metals.” 

Cherniak’s analysis stated: “The manganese levels at the 700 block of Gilman Street were four to five times the WHO’s guideline value for this contaminant while nickel levels at this location were 180 to 220 times the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s reference concentration for this contaminant.” 

Additionally, “Manganese levels at the 600 block of Gilman Street and the 1300 block of 3rd Street were 10 to 20 times the WHO’s guideline value for this contaminant while nickel levels at these locations were up to 330 times the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s reference concentration for this contaminant.” 

Cherniak also said that all that data from the sampling suggests that PSC was the source of these excessive levels of contaminants.  

“By using a mobile monitoring station, we are for the first time getting an idea of the particular pollution coming from Pacific Steel,” Denny Larson, director of the non-profit Global Community Monitor, an organization that promotes environmental justice and human rights for communities, told the Planet. 

“So far, complaints have always centered around odor. There has never been a comprehensive study of tiny particles eliminated from the foundry which people can’t smell or see. We want to put some scientifically incredible numbers to these particles so that people know how big of a health risk they can be. We are finally honing in on what is harmful.”


Art Exhibit Stirs Controversy Among Korean Americans

By Peter Schurmann, New America Media
Tuesday August 28, 2007

The Korean king kneels, hands clasped in a gesture of submission. Above him looms the Japanese empress, at the head of an armada and clad in full samurai armor with sword outstretched. His armies defeated and his lands occupied, the king swears his country’s eternal loyalty to the Japanese throne. 

No, this is not a screenplay for some epic Korean drama, though it has all the elements. The scene comes from a 14th-century scroll depicting Japan’s legendary 6th-century conquest of Korea’s Silla Dynasty. 

Part of the exhibit “Telling Tales” at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, the scroll has stirred controversy within the Korean community. It has also highlighted challenges the museum faces in drawing the line between art and history. 

The exhibit, which continues until Oct. 21, is tellingly situated between the museum’s Japan and Korea sections. One enters the museum, named for chief benefactor and prominent Korean American Chong Moon Lee, and ascends to the second floor. Passing through a display of Japan’s artistic, religious, and military past, the visitor reaches the scroll in question, delicately placed between Japanese guns and Korean ceramics. 

Not long after the exhibit opened in April, a series of editorials appeared in the Korean-language Korea Daily calling on its readers to protest the display. Koreans responded by sending in hundreds of letters to the museum, including one from the Korean consulate. 

Young Kee Ju, editor of the Korea Daily, says that the exhibit is “problematic” because it “distorts the history of Korea’s relationship with Japan.” Although the painting is a piece of art, he says its antiquity lends its contents historical weight, particularly for viewers unaware of Korea’s past. 

For this reason, his paper called on the scroll to be removed, a move the museum viewed as tantamount to censorship. Instead, the museum provided additional information, clarifying the historical context surrounding the scroll’s fictional contents, which Ju found to be an appropriate resolution. 

The dispute highlights the ongoing frustration of many Koreans who feel that Japan’s perspective of Asia remains the dominant one in the West. 

Recently, a novel by Japanese author Yoko Kawashima Watkins was pulled from American classrooms following a wave of protests from Korean Americans who argued that the book conveyed a negative portrayal of Koreans under Japanese occupation. Issues of censorship arose, pitting artistic expression against historical representation. 

These concerns are once again playing out through the Asian Art Museum’s exhibit. 

At nearly 20 feet in length, the scroll is impressive. It depicts the legendary 6th-century Japanese Empress Jingu who, following the death of her husband, realizes the promise made by the island nation’s protector deity Hachiman by claiming Korea as part of a greater Japan. 

Though myth, the tale formed a launching point for a version of Japanese history taught in classrooms well into the modern era. It has also played a central role in justifying two separate invasions of Korea, the first in the sixteenth century, and again in the twentieth, when Japan succeeded in colonizing the peninsula for over three decades. Japanese rule was justified as the fulfillment of ancient claims over Korea, as depicted in the scroll. 

Not all Koreans, however, view the exhibit as historical. Taesoo Jeong, editor-in-chief of the Korea Times in San Francisco, emphasizes the scroll’s artistic value over its historical accuracy. Though he acknowledges the scroll’s potential in conveying a “false” impression of Korean history, he nevertheless defends its inclusion in the exhibit. 

“It is ridiculous to put a work of art on trial,” Jeong wrote in a recent editorial. Artists in Korea routinely malign Japan, he says, adding that Koreans should be more reflective of their own attitudes before attacking this or any other piece of art. 

The museum’s chief curator and organizer of the “Telling Tales” exhibit, Forrest McGill, says this particular painting was selected for its narrative qualities as an example of how Japan, and Asia in general, used art to depict stories. “The exhibit was not meant to be historical,” explains McGill, who says that the emphasis was on the painting’s elements of narrative animation, a theme intended to complement two other exhibits currently on display. 

A quick glance at visitors’ comments, however, confirms Korean fears that what the museum intends may not be what viewers take away. One, from a Korean mother, complains that her child will gain a false view of Korean history as a result of the exhibit. Another reads, “History is not just what happened, but is also what people say happened.” 


First Person: Six Years into War on Terror, TV Violence Has Skyrocketed

By Margot Pepper
Tuesday August 28, 2007

Violence, selfishness and insults have skyrocketed on national television since the first year of the war on terror, my second-grade students at Rosa Parks Elementary in Berkeley found.  

For the last decade, I’ve had students analyze television preceding National TV-off week organized by the TV-Turnoff Network.  

The mostly 7-year-old students are asked to collect all the data themselves since their teacher has never owned a television. An average total of 35 children’s television shows, both in Spanish and English, are studied for a period of seven days.  

The first day of the study, as homework, students record how many times they see hitting, hurting or killing on half-hour segments of the shows they regularly watch, viewed from beginning to end. The second day, they are to focus on acts of selfishness; the third day, on instances of put-downs and the fourth day, on the number of times a typical class rule is broken.  

Finally, in class, each of four groups of students compiles the data produced by the homework, focusing on one of the four variables in the study. But this year, when I pulled out old samples of graphs compiled by a class in April 2002 as models, the contrasts between the graphs produced five years ago and this April shocked my students.  

“In a half hour of Jackie Chan in 2002 you would see hitting 10 times at most,” wrote gifted 7-year old Flynn Michael Legg. “In 2007, shows of Jackie Chan had 34 hitting scenes.”  

For the 2001/2002 season—year one of President George Bush’s “war on terror”—nearly one-fourth of the television shows my students watched had one or no acts of violence at all in one half-hour. Now, of the shows they randomly watch, only That’s So Raven continues to have no violence, and all other shows have at least three instances of hitting or violence in one half-hour. Today, nearly half of shows randomly viewed by my students contain hitting or more violent acts seven to 34 times each half-hour.  

The maximum number of gratuitous put-downs or insults has nearly doubled since 2002, going from 10 in That’s So Raven to 18 in Dumb and Dumber—over one put-down every two minutes. In Sponge Bob Square Pants, Flynn pointed out, one would hear at most two put-downs in 2002. Today it’s 16. No shows had more than 10 put-downs in 2002. Now three shows did (Sponge Bob: 16; Dumb and Dumber: 18; Letty La Fea: 13). 

Very few shows have no insults at all any more. All the shows my students watched this year showed people or characters being selfish at least once in each half-hour. In 2002, only three shows had more than three acts of selfishness in a half hour. Now, 10 did. Half of the shows showed five to nine instances of selfishness each half hour. 

Students also found that in April 2002, only one show depicted the violation of ordinary class rules (no hitting, put-downs, swearing, etc.) twelve or more times. In April of 2007, the number of such programs rose to six. 

In 2001, the maximum times class rules were broken on a given half-hour show was 17 on one show. In 2007 the number of such shows has quadrupled with the maximum number of rules broken on a given show doubling or reaching over 34. These differences compelled us to substantiate our findings with Internet research. Indeed, children in the “yellow group” found that according to a 2007 study by the Parent’s Television Council (PTC) called “Dying to Entertain,” since 1998, violence on the ABC network has quadrupled (a 309 percent increase).  

In 1998 the station had about one act of violence per hour (0.93). By 2007, it was almost four or 3.8 on average. CBS, according to the PTC study, had the highest percentage of deaths during 2005-6, with over 66 percent of violent scenes depicting death after 8 p.m. (www.parentstv.org).  

Students in the “blue group” reading the same PTC study noted that now violence has shifted to being more central to the story with more graphic autopsy scenes or torture scenes. The study remarks that the 2005-6 season beginning in the fall was one of the most violent ever recorded by the PTC. 

Precocious 7-year-old Maeve Gallagher reported in her essay: “The green group found kids will have seen 200,000 violent acts on television by age 18 … and 16,000 murders,” according to Real Vision, a project of the TV-Turnoff Network.  

“Videos and TV are ‘teaching kids to like killing,’ according to a 1999 Senate Judiciary Committee Report entitled ‘Children, Violence and the Media,’” Maeve cited. 

The Senate report also found that 10 percent of crimes committed are caused by violence seen on television. The findings by students in the red group convinced the rest of the class to limit their viewing of television, turning it off completely during the TV-Turnoff Network’s TV-off week—something they were reluctant to do when our unit of television study began.  

What they discovered, largely thanks to the TV-Turnoff Network’s website (www.tvturnoff.org) is that there are more televisions (2.73) in the average home than people (2.55). The average home has a television on eight hours a day, more than was the case 10 years ago, asserts Nielsen (2006).  

Children who watch six or more hours a day perform worse on reading tests than do those who watch one hour a day or don’t play video games, reports the Center for Screentime Awareness (www.screentime.org).  

And by the time they finish high school, children will have spent more hours watching TV than in school. “I suspect the increase in television violents [sic] has something to do with the war on terror,” Andres Ventura hypothesized in his essay summing up his conclusions to the study. “By scaring kids and parents and pushing violents [sic], people are more likely to vote for war. The TV makes you dumb because if you see a lot it makes you forget things. It makes parents dumb too. It makes them forget how things were when they were kids.”  

“If you watch too much TV when you are an adult, you lose the kid that is inside you,” Maeve Gallagher agreed. 

“Watching television replaces your imagination with television thinking and there’s not much space left after that,” Daniel Hernandez-Deras, commented a few years ago.  

One of the most shocking facts my students found was that according to the TV-Turnoff Network’s Real Vision project, parents spend only 38.5 minutes a day with their children in meaningful conversation.  

And more than half of 4-6 years olds (54 percent) would rather watch TV than spend time with their parents. This finding inspired Alejandro González’s unique conclusion: “I think Jorge [sic] Bush wants to make people more scared. We know Jorge [sic] Bush likes war. And… TV makes you like more war. What’s scary is kids spend more time seeing TV than being with their dad. Since our study, I turn off the TV more and go play with my dad. Maybe the president used to watch more TV than being with his dad.” 

 

Margot Pepper is a Mexican-born journalist and author whose work has been published internationally. Her memoir, Through the Wall: A Year in Havana, was a top nomination for the 2006 American Book Award.


Police Blotter

By Rio Bauce
Tuesday August 28, 2007

Assault with a deadly weapon 

At 2:34 a.m. on Saturday, Aug. 25, a 47-year-old Berkeley woman called into report that she had been assaulted with a crowbar and robbed at the corner of Eighth and Heinz streets. 

 

Car break-ins 

There were a series of eight car break-ins around the UC Berkeley Campus and Telegraph Avenue area on Saturday. The break-ins occurred on the 2200 block of Parker Street, on the 1700 block of Curtis Street, at the corner of University Avenue and Curtis Street, on the 2200 block of Ashby Avenue, on the 2500 block of Chilton Street, on the 2400 block of Dana Street, on the 2100 block of Channing Way and on the 1900 block of Delaware Street.  

 

Hot-prowl burglary 

At 4:39 p.m. Saturday, a Berkeley man who lives on the 1500 block of Delaware called in to report that he had heard somebody break into his house while he was home. He heard somebody close the door and throw down the deadbolt. When he called out to the burglar, he fled. 

 

Trash can  

Around 4 a.m. Sunday, Aug. 26, somebody set a trashcan on fire on the 2100 block of Kittridge Street. There isn’t any suspect description. 

 

Another hot-prowl burglary 

A Berkeley woman called police at 5:43 a.m. Sunday to report that a teenager had broken into her house through an open window on the 2400 block of Blake Street. The police do not have anybody in custody. 

 

Phony money 

At 6:35 p.m. Sunday, an employee from Down Home Music, on the 1800 block of Fourth Street, called in to report that somebody had passed a fake $100 bill. No one was arrested. 

 

Robbery 

At 10:01 p.m. Sunday, three men robbed a Berkeley man on the 2000 block of Henry Street. No suspects have been identified.


Elmwood Hardware to Close for Remodel, Might Not Reopen

By Richard Brenneman
Friday August 24, 2007

Elmwood Hardware, a fixture-selling fixture of the Berkeley scene for 84 years, will close next month for extensive remodeling, said owner Tad Laird. 

Whether it will reopen remains in question, he said. 

Bolfing’s Elmwood Hardware, at 2951 College Ave., first opened its doors in 1923 and has served the neighborhood continuously ever since. 

“We have to empty the store to do our remodeling. While we will keep our fingers crossed, there’s no guaranteeing that we will reopen as a hardware store,” Laird said. 

The space now occupied by the store will be subdivided into two commercial spaces, “and we hope to be able to get one of them open by Christmas,” he said. 

Whatever happens, the change is good news for Johnny Williams, who owns the building’s other tenant, Boss Robot Hobby at 2953 College. 

“He’s told us that we’ll be getting half the hardware store space, and we can really use it,” said Williams. “We’ve outgrown this space several times over. So at least some good will come out of it.” 

The hardware store is a popular neighborhood institution, but Laird has said the relatively small size of the store and a lack of in-house warehouse space has made business difficult. 

One possible clue to the store’s fate was posted on the store’s front window along with “sale” signs Wednesday night, a SPACE FOR LEASE sign advertising 1,550 square feet of prime retail space. 

The hardware store has to vacate before the first phase of work can begin, which will see the removal of hazardous building materials such as asbestos and possible lead-based paint. 

“We hope to have all the merchandise out by the middle of September, and though I may be overly optimistic, we’d like to be open again by Christmas.” 

But just who will occupy the hardware store’s remaining half of the space remains in question. 

The building’s other tenant, Elmwood Stationers, will remain in its current space at 2947 College to the north of the hardware store. 

The potential closing of one of the avenue’s last neighborhood-serving businesses may mark the end of an era, said one nearby merchant. 

Storefronts that once accommodated cobblers, a drug store, and other merchants and services that catered to those within walking distance have become the home to restaurants and upscale vendors serving a regional clientele.  

 

Expansion plans shot down 

At Laird’s own request, Berkeley’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) declared the building at 2947-53 College Ave. a city landmark 13 months ago. 

During the same session, he presented commissioners with his plans to raise the building to three floors, adding office and warehouse space and four units of senior-oriented housing. 

Commissioners praised his proposal, which includes the restoration of the storefront to its original design, but his proposal ran aground over the housing when city planning department staff turned thumbs down. 

“They said they could not support variances needed for the project, but they said wished us all the best,” said Laird. “But I’ve talked with people at city hall who said this is just the kind of project the city needs.” 

The problem? His proposal called for too much building for the size of the site. 

Laird and his architects, Charles Kahn and Todd Poliskin of Kahn Design Associates of Berkeley, had worked closely with an LPC subcommittee to fine-tune their plans before submitting them to the city for permits. 

“The main goal is to design this with a public-space focus,” said Laird when he presented his plans to the LPC last year. “It’s an important building in the heart of the neighborhood and we are posting all the designs and drawings on the Kitchen Democracy website because it has been our intention from the start to get as much feedback and comment from the public as possible.” 

The question put to Kitchen Democracy participants was “Should Elmwood Hardware renovate the store and build four housing units?” 

But the project ran up against the Elmwood’s zoning regulations, the city’s strictest in their limits on mandated maximum floor space areas of commercial buildings. 

Elmwood codes restrict commercial buildings to floor space that occupies no more the 80 percent of the total lot area—except for corner lots, where total coverage is allowed. 

By contrast, Laird’s project calls for 180 percent coverage (100 percent on one floor, 80 percent on the other), which means that the structure could only be built if the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) voted to grant a variance. 

ZAB would have to approve another variance because the building’s 19.5-foot height is 18 inches more than the codes allow, and yet another to permit a third floor where the codes allow only two. 

Laird put the proposal to participants in Kitchen Democracy, an online interactive website devoted to community issues, and received an overwhelming endorsement.  

Of the 406 responses from individuals who had registered with the site, 377 voted their support, with only 14 opposed, 13 voting “maybe” and a lone responder declaring neutrality. 

 

The ‘other’ project 

Laird points to the Kitchen Democracy numbers generated by his project in comparison with another variance-needing project that did win staff support and ZAB—and City Council—approval, John Gordon’s Wright’s Garage at 2629-2936 Ashby Ave. 

Gordon’s project also survived an appeal to the City Council, which rankled the Elmwood Merchant’s Association because of the variances ZAB granted increasing the number of restaurants and clothing stores permitted above the commercial neighborhood’s already overstrained quota system. 

Merchants also worried that customers drawn to the restaurant and exercise club proposed as two of the building’s tenants would compound an already vexing neighborhood parking problem. 

Kitchen Democracy responders also got to weigh in on Gordon’s project, and while their votes amounted to just more than half of those who expressed their opinion’s on Laird’s project, the renovated garage also emerged with a resounding set of upthrusting thumbs—173 yes to 20 negatives, 23 maybes and a single neutrally disposed voter. 

“That project could get approved with all its impacts on the neighborhood, but when you try to put in four units of housing and preserve an 84-year-old family business, you get shot down,” he said. 

Laird said he’s also frustrated that his city councilmember can’t offer support. Gordon Wozniak had been forced to recuse himself from voting an appeal of Gordon’s project to the council by members of the merchant’s group and the Elmwood Neighborhood Association, and he had also expressed a positive opinion about Laird’s project on the same website. 

“Can you imagine if members of Congress couldn’t speak out on projects they supported?” asked Laird. 

The vote to hear the appeal of Gordon’s project failed 4-2-2, with five votes needed for the hearing, with Councilmember Darryl Moore absent and Betty Olds and Mayor Tom Bates voting for approval without a hearing.  

But the store owner said he plans to move ahead with the remodeling of his commercial space with the hope that the city will eventually look more favorably on the larger project. 

Meanwhile, Laird said he’ll build what he can and hope for the best.  

Hobby store owner Williams is the one person who’s thoroughly delighted. 

“We’re eager to get more space, and we love this neighborhood,” he said. “We live here, too. It’s our fourth year.”


City Housing Authority Throws Out Waiting List

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday August 24, 2007

Angel Bertha Elzy has been waiting for a house since 1983.  

On Wednesday Elzy’s hopes were shattered when the Berkeley Housing Authority voted to erase the existing low-income public housing waiting list and start afresh. 

The lists, said housing authority executive director Tia Ingram, were inaccurate. The housing authority wiped clean as many as 5,000 names on the affordable housing waiting list and has asked everyone to apply again to determine whether they are eligible. 

“We struggled a lot about what to do with this list,” Ingram told the board during Wednesday’s public meeting. “In November we attempted to salvage some people on that list. Our effort was not successful. Do we have accurate information in any of our reports? I don’t know. What’s a fair, clean way to do it? I don’t know. Anything short of a new list is riddled with challenges from the past.” 

Rocked by a recent scandal that led to the resignation of former Housing Department Director Steve Barton and the formation of a new governing body independent of the city, the agency called the decision to abolish the existing lists a difficult one. 

“I understand the difficulty of trying to come up with a fair way to do it,” said member Adolph Moody, who abstained from voting. “I am blessed because I live in a house. At this point I don’t have the conscience to go ahead and purge the list. It’s not because I think I have a better solution. I can’t prove anything and feel for all of you. I can’t deny anyone.” 

The board’s 5-1 vote will also allow families potentially eligible for three- and four-bedroom units five business days to get on the new low-income public housing waiting list. An independent agency hired by the agency will review the applications. 

The low-income public housing program was privately managed by Affordable Housing Associates (AHA) from September 2003 through June 2007, during which AHA was responsible for drawing families from the wait list to fill vacancies. 

After AHA’s contract was terminated in June, the Berkeley Housing Authority took over this responsibility. While preparing to fill five vacant units, agency staff stumbled across a multitude of inaccuracies and decided to purge the list. 

“We learned that there were three different versions of the wait list,” Ingram’s report to the agency stated. “The active list that had been used by AHA for the preceding four years and two separate and distinct wait lists that were being retained by two BHA staff members.” 

The report further states that after studying each of the internal waiting lists and consulting with those previously responsible for them, agency staff were unable to determine whether either of the two lists were “the” list or whether to combine both lists into one. 

The AHA list met the same fate. 

“The papers report up to 5,000 families will be taken off the wait list, but that number is at the extreme high end,” Ingram said. 

According to Ingram’s report, the largest list dated back to 1999 and contained over 5000 applicants, including those that only qualified for one- or two-bedroom assistance. 

“These applicants should have been removed from the list because they did not qualify for placement on the wait list for three- and four-bedroom units.” 

Staff’s proposal to abolish the existing waiting list and create a new one was approved by both the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and Stephen Schneller, Director of Public Housing.  

However, a number of people at the meeting vociferously opposed the move. 

“I think it’s horrible,” Elzy said as she broke down into tears. “They have been taking me through hell. I applied in the early ’80s and then they made me reapply again in 2000. And I am still waiting. I am living on and off in Berkeley and Oakland. I am practically homeless. I am devastated by the news.” 

Lorin Cook, a diabetic, demanded the reason for being dropped over the years to number 934 when at one time she was number 108 on the waiting list. 

“People need to have proof,” she told boardmembers. “What is the excuse for this?” 

Rent Board commissioner Jesse Arreguin called the decision drastic. 

“It will have serious implications for tenants in Berkeley,” he said. “How are you going to process the new applicants? I am not sure you have the capacity to do so.” 

“The lists are invalid and the only solution is to start all over again,” said commissioner Allen. “It’s important to create a system to prevent this from happening again.” 

“What could be done to ensure that this does not happen again?” asked commissioner Marjorie Cox. 

Ingram said that the new list would be static and password protected and it would form the baseline for the future. 

“We would also be keeping notes everyday for our knowledge,” she said. 

“It pains me to establish a new list,” said commissioner Dorothy Hunt. “But we have to start somewhere. Everybody will be affected but we can start clean.” 

Lynda Carson, founder of the group Save Berkeley Housing Authority, condemned the decision to abolish the lists. 

“It’s shocking news to all the low-income tenants who did everything they had to do to receive assistance,” she told the Planet. 

“It’s a slap in their face. A lot of people call the housing authority every day to check where they are on the list. They will have to start all over again.” 

Carson added that a lot more people would be signing up for the new list. 

“If we compare what happened in Oakland in June 2006,” she said. “Over 40 percent of Oakland’s low-income families signed up for the list. People are very desperate. These are hard times for everybody.” 

 

Photograph by Riya Bhattacharjee. 

Angel Bertha Elzy is comforted by friends after learning her place on the low-income public housing waiting list was purged Wednesday at the Berkeley Housing Authority meeting.


Telegraph Noise Battle Targets Evangelicals

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday August 24, 2007

A new kind of battle is brewing on Telegraph Avenue. Those who are leading the fight say it is not against religion, or against freedom of speech, but they contend that some religious speech on the street is just too loud. 

Neighbors, merchants and activists stood on the corner of Telegraph and Haste Wednesday to protest the weekly sermonizing of the Bay Area Ministries, which they say is too loud. 

“We are not anti-Christ, we are not anti-religion, but we are anti-noise,” said Russell Bates, a prominent figure on Telegraph, who has been protesting against the ministry. “They have been doing it for 15 years but it’s gotten to the point that the sound level is disturbing people who live, work or simply pass by in the area.” 

The Bay Area Ministries, an Evangelical Christian ministry based out of Oakland, argued they were below the legal decibel level. 

“We have been at Telegraph and Haste for about 15 years now and we have never been found in violation,” said Lawrence Rosenbeum, a ministry member. 

“The last couple of weeks we’ve had a number of extra outreaches but normally we are there only on Saturdays. We are not out there to disturb people, we are just trying to make sure that people can hear us.” 

Gyen, who works at Telegraph Flowers across the street, said the noise drives her customers away. 

“I can’t battle these guys and do my job too,” she said, selling potted orchids to two UC Berkeley undergrads. “I am here when they arrive and I am here when they leave. They are so loud that I can’t hear myself on the phone and my customers just get aggravated. Whenever I walk up to them and complain it always gives rise to conflict.” 

Gyen added that calls to the police led to a cat-and-mouse game between the ministry’s members and the city. 

“They send down a man with the decibel meter and he spends some time checking the noise level,” she said. “But the ministry has its own decibel meter and they try to keep it at the edge. It’s a huge waste of police tax dollars. They are completely abusive to the system. As far as I am concerned, it could be my favorite band but when it’s rattling on that loudly for four hours it’s too much.” 

Rick, who sells African jewelry on the corner of Telegraph and Haste, agreed. “What annoys me is that they turn the volume down when the police arrive but turn it up again when they leave,” he said. “It scares people away from my shop. That’s not what Jesus preached.” 

Marc Weinstein, who co-owns Amoeba Records, called the noise problem a nuisance. 

“A lot of times I have had to pay $4,000 out of my pocket to purchase permits for that corner to keep them from being there,” he told the Planet over a telephone interview from Los Angeles. “It has a terrible impact on my business. Our customers are not interested in their messages. It just creates a big ruckus. I pay $31,500 in rent for my space and these people pay $36 for a permit to disrupt my business. I want the city to stop people from holding amplified events. It’s cutting into their own efforts to make Telegraph better.” 

Weinstein said he resented the fact that most people preaching on behalf of the ministry were from outside the community. 

“They have people from Colorado and Iowa out there,” he said. “I want them to stop standing on my corner and stop ruining my best business days. The city should be more calculated about the places these people should be allowed to preach.” 

Sgt. Mary Kusmiss, spokesperson for the Berkeley Police Department, said that the BPD had responded to a fair number of complaints about the amplified music. 

“Community members were particularly upset about the noise levels on Aug. 16,” she said. “Recently, we also received a complaint about an ADA issue which said the ministry was blocking right-of-way on the pavement.” 

Manuel Ramirez, Berkeley environmental health manager, told the Planet he was aware of the community’s concerns. 

“The city is monitoring the problem,” he said. “We issue amplification noise permits to them like many other organizations. Noise levels are also monitored regularly. The standard for that area is background level plus 10 decibels 50 feet from the source. If they violate that we can revoke their permit.” 

Telegraph merchants said they were concerned about the ministry’s attempts to increase their time from four to 36 hours every month. 

“It’s just too much,” said Bates. “They must conform to their permit. If they don’t do something about it, we will. That’s not a threat, it’s a promise.” 

Ramirez said that the only new permits that had been sought from the city were for two events for Sept. 8 and two in October and November. 

But for people on Telegraph, the problem doesn’t stop at noise. 

“They are unruly and rude,” said Ann Marie, an activist. “They shove their pamphlets on my face and when I protest they gave me a look that sort of says you are going to burn in hell.” 

“They condemned the tarot card reader to hell the other day,” quipped Bates. “They need to find a new location.” 

Rosenbeum said that all the group did was preach about Jesus Christ and play Christian music. 

“We don’t force anything on anyone,” he said. “And when the police tell us to turn down the volume we do.” 

 

Photograph by Riya Bhattacharjee.  

Russell Bates protests against the Bay Area Ministries outside Telegraph Flowers Wednesday. He is joined by the store’s florist Gyen and Berkeley resident Michael Delacour. 


San Pablo Park Plans Centennial Bash

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday August 24, 2007

San Pablo Park—the West Berkeley recreation center that served as a social and sports mecca for East Bay African Americans in the heavily segregated years before World War II and became the symbol of Berkeley’s legendary ethic of ethnic diversity—turns 100 this month, and local officials and residents are honoring it this Saturday with a centennial celebration. 

The free, all-day festival sponsored jointly by the City of Berkeley, the San Pablo Neighborhood Council and the San Pablo Park community includes entertainment by Latin jazz artist Pete Escovedo and Trinidadian musical storyteller Ashiba, as well as food booths and youth and adult activities. 

The day’s events will also include the unveiling of a community mural and a plaque for longtime park leader Frances Albrier, coordinated by Berkeley historian Donna Graves. 

The park is located on Park Street between Russell and Ward. 

When the park was purchased by the City of Berkeley in 1907 for $35,000, making it the city’s oldest recreation area. Berkeley was a far different community than it is today. While the city was experiencing a population boom, jumping from a little over 13,000 residents in 1900 to more than 40,000 in 1910, it was still considered a largely undeveloped hinterlands. Vintage photographs show much of the edge of the bay, a vast, open marsh, and acres of farmlands running up into wooded, unpopulated hills. 

According to Berkeley, “A City in History,” by Charles Wollenberg, published online by the Berkeley Public Library, “in 1900 there were only 66 black residents in Berkeley … But after the turn of the century, black professionals and prosperous blue collar workers began to settle in Berkeley. In spite of the overall climate of discrimination, Berkeley had a reputation for relative tolerance. In South Berkeley, blacks could buy inexpensive homes in well-kept, mixed neighborhoods. The African American population steadily increased, to 500 in 1920, 2,000 in 1930 and 3,000 in 1940. By the beginning of World War II, Oakland and San Francisco had more black residents than Berkeley, but among Bay Area cities, Berkeley had the highest proportion of African Americans in its population, about 4 percent.” 

The largest ethnic community in West Berkeley at the time of the San Pablo Park purchase was Finnish, and the area was popularly called Finntown. But in the intervening years, a small number of African American middle class residents began buying up property and building homes around the edge of the park, and they gradually turned the park and the adjacent neighborhood into an East Bay center of African American social life in much the same way that West Oakland, with a larger black population, became the center of African American musical entertainment during the same period.  

By the 1920s, San Pablo Park was one of the regular stops for barnstorming Negro League baseball teams, and sports fans would come from all over the Bay Area to see such legendary players as Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell, and Josh Gibson compete against teams made up of local African American players. 

Richmond resident Betty Reid Soskin, now a ranger with the United States Park Service, remembers riding from her home in East Oakland with her grandfather, George Allen, in the 1930s on Sundays to sell pralines, a homemade Louisiana candy delicacy, at Negro League barnstorming ballgames. 

The park was also the home of African American tennis tournaments between Northern and Southern California players, some of which had local participants—like a young Oakland resident Lionel Wilson, later a California Superior Court judge and Oakland’s first black mayor—who went on to social or political prominence. 

But San Pablo Park was a place where residents of all races were able to meet and mix long before that was fashionable. 

In a February 2006 article on a gathering to honor park pioneer Frances Albright, the Daily Planet wrote that “while restrictive real estate covenants kept Asians and African Americans from renting or purchasing homes in other parts of Berkeley during the early 20th century, the area around San Pablo Park was open to minorities. The result was a neighborhood mix where whites, Asians and African Americans grew up with each other, played together and went to school together at nearby Longfellow. 

“One San Pablo Park veteran—UC Berkeley Phi Beta Kappa Elizabeth Gee—related how the South Berkeley community in the ’20s and ’30s was a racial oasis in a desert of discrimination. Gee related how her mother, a Chinese-American, was forced by the U.S. government to give up her United States citizenship when she married Gee’s father, a Chinese national. Gee later had to leave California to marry her own husband—who was white—because California law through World War II prevented marriage between the races—identical to the laws of the Jim Crow segregated South at the time.” 

Another park regular during the ’20s and ’30s who epitomized San Pablo’s racial mix was Johnny Valiotis, whose Greek parents owned a grocery store in the area. Valiotis hung out with the black kids in the park and neighborhood, mostly playing music, and later changed his last name to Otis and his racial identity to African American, becoming the legendary rhythm and blues band leader and composer Johnny Otis. 

“It is great to be able to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of San Pablo Park and still see that it is as vibrant and active as ever,” Councilmember Darryl Moore said in a statement. “This park is a testament to how vital open space is to building community.”


Lawsuit Seeks Halt to Lab Plans, New Environmental Review

By Richard Brenneman
Friday August 24, 2007

Berkeley’s oldest tree-sitter, two Panoramic Hill residents, and two Berkeley landmark commissioners—one current, one former—have joined forces to file a legal challenge to expansion plans at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). 

The petition for a writ of mandate lodged in Alameda County Superior Court last Friday challenges the UC Board of Regents’ July 17 adoption of the environmental impact report (EIR) for the lab’s Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) 2026 and the LRDP itself. 

If successful in their request for an order halting efforts to move forward with new projects, the action could delay plans to build a new lab building to house the controversial $500 million BP-funded Energy Biosciences Institute. 

The plaintiffs are Berkeley residents Sylvia McLaughlin, Janice Thomas, Hank Gehman, Anne Wagley and Lesley Emmington. (Wagley is the Daily Planet’s Arts and Calendar editor.) 

Their action constitutes the third pending legal challenge to UC Berkeley’s massive expansion plans for the coming decades. 

“We just thought this was an important thing to do because we are concerned about safety issues and the cumulative impacts of all the projects” on the community, said Sylvia McLaughlin, one of the founders of the Save the Bay organization, who sat in a threatened oak tree near Memorial Stadium in protest of the university’s expansion plans in that area of the campus. 

Terry Powell, the lab’s community relations officer, said she couldn’t comment on the action because she hadn’t seen the court papers—though she had been aware that an action was pending. 

“We believe the 2006 LRDP as certified by the Board of Regents is adequate,” said Dan Krotz of the lab’s media relations staff. 

The petition seeks a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction blocking the regents from taking an action to launch projects at the lab that are covered by the LRDP, and for a writ voiding the board’s certification of the EIR and approval of the planning document. 

If successful, the action would force the university to draw up and certify a new EIR responding to the challenges raised by the critics before the projects in the LRDP could move forward. 

The case has been assigned to Judge Frank Roesch, and a preliminary settlement conference has been scheduled for Oct. 31. 

The EIR approved by the regents outlines impacts of new construction planned for the 203-acre site on the scenic slopes of Strawberry Creek Canyon, including: 

• 980,000 square feet of new construction and demolition of 320,000 feet of existing buildings, making for a net increase of 660,000; 

• Addition of 375 to 500 new parking spaces, the precise number depending on whether or not the university develops alternative transportation programs; 

• About 1,000 new employees above the current 4,375. 

The lab, administered by the university under contract with the U.S. Department of Energy, is the center of a wide range of research, including projects involving two controversial forms of new technology, nanoparticles and genetically modified organisms (GMO). 

 

BP site included 

Both technologies will be employed in the Helios Building, where BP-funded research as well as projects funded from other sources will be seeking new forms of energy demanded by the specter of diminishing oil supplies, national security issues and the reality of global warming. 

The university has already issued a call for bids on the project, which are to be opened on Sept. 11. 

That $160 million, 160,000-square-foot Helios Building near the western end of the lab campus is one of two projects the regents have already approved under the provisions of the new LRDP and its EIR.  

The second structure is a $90.4 million, 140,000-square-foot, 300-office state-of-the art computing research center. The Computational Research & Theory Building will rise at the western end of the 203-acre LBNL a short distance from Blackberry Gate.  

Attorneys Michael Lozeau and Douglas Chermak of Alameda are representing the plaintiffs in the action filed in Alameda County Superior Court. 

Named as defendant is the UC Board of Regents, and the action seeks to overturn the board’s approval of the LRDP, their certification of the plan’s EIR and their approval of mitigations, monitoring plans and related items. 

Lozeau and his law firm specialize in environmental law, and the action cites as its ground alleged violations of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). 

They are seeking a stay of the board’s decisions on the LRDP and its EIR, a temporary restraining order barring the regents from any actions to implement any site-specific projects government by the LRDP and EIR. 

They are also asking the court for a writ of mandate ordering the board to reverse its decisions on the documents, a suspension of all activities specified by them until the court decides in any changes need to be made. 

The suit also asks for an order to prepare a new EIR, and to order the university to pay the costs of the lawsuit, including attorney fees and whatever other sums the court may determine. 

 

Other actions 

A second set of lawsuits challenging yet another UCB regents-approved EIR is also underway in the Alameda County courts. 

That action challenges the approval of the EIR for the Southeast Campus Integrated Projects, including the four-story gym and office complex planned at the site of the oak grove along the western wall of memorial stadium. 

A hearing on that case is set for mid-September. 

Several actions have been combined into one case, with plaintiffs including the City of Berkeley, City Councilmember Dona Spring, the Panoramic Hill Association and the California Oaks Foundation. 

Wagley is also a plaintiff in a third suit challenging another university LRDP—or rather, the settlement that ended a City of Berkeley lawsuit challenging the LRDP for the main campus through 2020. 

After losing an April decision before Alameda County Superior Court Judge Jo-Lynne Q. Lee, Wagley and co-plaintiffs Dean Metzger, Jim Sharpe and Carl Friberg filed an appeal before the state Court of Appeals which is now pending.


Oakland School Board Reprimands Dobbins for Conduct

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday August 24, 2007

Solemn-faced members of the Oakland Unified School District board gave fellow board member Chris Dobbins the severest possible reprimand on Wednesday night, voting 5-2 to censure him “in the strongest possible terms,” stripping him of committee assignments, and requesting his resignation for what the board called “unethical, unprofessional, and inappropriate conduct” regarding Dobbins’ contact with a 17-year-old district high school student.  

Dobbins and board member Kerry Hamill cast the two votes against the resolution. A large number of Dobbins’ supporters attended the special board meeting, several of them speaking in favor of Dobbins and against the censure motion.  

Meanwhile, the board released for the first time details of the allegations against Dobbins, including late-night parking with the student in secluded East Bay spots and emails that indicated a relationship that—while not necessarily sexual—had gone far beyond mentoring. 

Board member Greg Hodge, who chaired the committee that investigated the allegations against Dobbins and made the censure and resignation request, said that the board action was necessary because “this board can have no tolerance for certain types of behavior … we need to distance ourselves from that,” and said that “if a 35-year-old man tried to date one of my daughters, we’d be having another kind of conversation.” 

Dobbins, who earlier appeared alternately angry and visibly shaken as fellow board members took turns to lecture him from their seats across the OUSD board chambers, said in a public statement following the vote that he would not resign.  

And while Dobbins added, “I could have used better judgment,” and, “if [the student involved] felt I overstepped my bounds, then I apologize for that.” The first-term board member criticized the findings against him and tried to minimize his actions, saying, “I don’t feel the investigation was conducted in a totally ethical manner,” and “at the end of the day, I didn’t steal any money or anything like that.” 

Dobbins later told reporters, “I don’t think I should be censured.”  

But during the board meeting, Dobbins seconded and then voted for Hamill’s substitute motion that would have censured him only, dropping the call for his resignation and the stripping of his committee assignments. 

Hamill said that she considered censure “serious,” and that “stripping him of his board responsibilities does an injustice to the residents of his district who elected him.” 

But while calling Hamill’s concerns and substitute resolution “positive,” board member Gary Yee said, “the alleged conduct stepped over a professional line. It’s important for the men on this board to exemplify actions towards women, especially the actions of older men towards younger women. Much as I would like to support a more modest resolution, a censure alone would water down the message.” 

Board member Alice Spearman told Dobbins that while “I don’t take any joy in supporting this censure, it sounded like you made light of the situation” when Dobbins complained that other board members had not gotten censured for other deserving actions.  

“Right now, I wouldn’t trust you with any female student,” Spearman said. “You still have a lot of stuff to offer to the district. That’s your being. But you’ve got to use better judgment.” 

And board member Noel Gallo said that the censure resolution was “not a political vendetta against Mr. Dobbins” but a test for the district. “You judge any institution by what it believes, what it values, and what standards it lives by.”  

Gallo, who was the first board member to call for Dobbins’ resignation following the allegations and had been one of his sharpest critics, then said, “forgiveness is the way to heal” and walked across and shook Dobbins hand. 

In making its recommendation, a three-member board committee made up of Hodge, Noel Gallo, and Alice Spearman issued a report that gave details of the allegations that caused OUSD State Administrator Kimberly Statham to contact the Department of Youth Services last month about complaints her office had received about Dobbins. The DYS referral led to an Oakland Police Department investigation that ended with no criminal charges filed against Dobbins. 

In a section entitled “Statement of Corroborated Facts,” the report said that Dobbins developed a friendship with the 17-year-old student, who Dobbins said he was mentoring, over the course of several months. The report noted that on the night when the student graduated, Dobbins picked her up at 2 in the morning from where the student was staying at an Emeryville hotel and drove her to the Berkeley Marina, where they parked. The student told board members that the two kissed and hugged in the car while at the Marina, but Dobbins denies those allegations. 

The following day, two Oakland Unified School District staff members met with Dobbins over rumors the staff members had heard about Dobbins’ relationship with the student. Dobbins said on Wednesday that he learned “for the first time” during that meeting that the student had romantic feelings for him, and agreed with staff members that he would end his relationship with the student. 

Excerpts from email messages between Dobbins and the student, released with the report, confirmed that the relationship between Dobbins and the student had gone beyond that of mentoring. 

On the same day that staff members met with Dobbins and he promised to break off the relationship, the student wrote Dobbins, saying, “what happened last night, even if it wasn’t meant to be, definitely confirmed my feeling. I guess before I wasn’t sure what to think about you. I understand you have a girlfriend, and I always questioned myself if I was doing the right think by liking someone who is taken. … I can say you are everything I look for in a man.” The student wrote, however, that “you made it clear that we can’t be together.” 

Four days later Dobbins wrote back, addressing the student as “dearest” and saying that after reading her email, “I just have to say again that I have to listen to my head and not my heart … When the opportunity presented itself, I got scared because I am too old to be trying to get at you. In addition, it is unethical to do so. Plus, I have a girlfriend so I should not have been trying stuff in the first place.” 

But Dobbins continued to see the student at late hours, picking her up at her UC dorm room at 10 p.m. in early July, taking her to dinner, and then parking at Strawberry Canyon in Berkeley. 

Asked by reporters if that had not violated his pledge to staff members to break off the relationship, Dobbins said, “I was distancing myself from her, but I was doing it on my own terms. After that, I never saw her again.” 

Dobbins said that “I never did anything criminal with her,” saying that he often met with her at her request to discuss family and school problems that she was having, and that he met her during late hours because he was studying for the California Bar Exam and those were the times when he had finished studying.


Fire Code Violations Close UC Fraternity

By Rio Bauce
Friday August 24, 2007

On Thursday, the Berkeley Fire Department (BFD) threw the 16 residents of UC Berkeley’s fraternity Kappa Sigma out of their house for violating several fire safety codes, including not replacing a dysfunctional sprinkler system. 

“They’ve known since the end of school last year,” said David Orth, BFD public information officer. “They need to bring it up to code and for whatever reason, they haven’t.” 

In May, the BFD notified Kappa Sigma, on the 2400 block of Warring Street, of the violations. The fraternity hired workers to update their building facility. However, when BFD returned to the building on Thursday morning, the necessary renovations were not complete. 

“Now, the building cannot be used for normal occupancy,” said Orth. “We told everyone to move their things out by 3 p.m. Now only the workers can stay inside.” 


Chancellor Briefs Press on Campus Projects

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday August 24, 2007

After outlining diversity and energy initiatives at his back-to-school press briefing Thursday, UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau fended off top UC Regent Richard Blum’s criticism that the UC ten-campus system suffered from a “dysfunctional set of organizational structures, processes and policies.” 

Blum, in his analysis, called for a major overhaul of the UC system which would streamline fundraising and add to a diverse student body. 

Birgeneau, in a session with reporters, said that the analysis had referred to the UC system as a whole and not to any particular UC campus.  

He pointed out that UC Berkeley had already made significant improvements that had especially benefited students from economically challenged backgrounds. 

On Monday, the first day of fall semester at the university, more than 34,000 students will come across new facilities and new faces in top positions of leadership. 

“I’m excited about the start of another school year. We are moving forward on important areas of research and expanding opportunities for our students,” Birgeneau said. 

Enrollment is up since 2006 and 34,525 students are expected to register for the 2007-08 academic year. 

Asians at 36.4 percent dominate the new freshman and transfer students, with Caucasians (31.6 percent) and Latinos (12.4 percent) coming in at second and third places respectively. Ninety percent of the incoming students are from California. 

The total 2007-8 fees for a California undergraduate, including health insurance, stands at $8,384, an increase of $600 over the previous year. 

Gibor Basri, A UC Berkeley astrophysics professor, was named the new vice chancellor for equity and inclusion, a position created by Birgeneau to promote diversity within faculty, students and staff. 

Improved facilities on campus include state-of-the-art scientific and technological innovations and more parking spaces. 

The campus is scheduled to open Stanley Hall, which will house the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, and a bio-nano center for the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society in September. 

The chancellor also updated the press on the construction of the C.V. Starr East Asian Library/Chang-Lin Tien Center for East Asian Studies which will house the campus’ extensive East Asian collections. 

He added that the seismically unsafe Warren Hall, the former home of the School of Public Health, will be demolished in early 2008.  

The Li Ka Shing Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences, a new five-story structure that will house teaching and research on stem cell research, will be constructed in its place. 

Speaking about UC Berkeley’s environmental responsibilities, Birgeneau said that the model program Cal Climate Action Partnership will launch pilot initiatives to reduce energy use on campus this fall. 

Projects include replacing incandescent bulbs with energy efficient fluorescent lighting and determining the eligibility of solar-panel installations.


School Board Appoints New Deputy Superintendent

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday August 24, 2007

The Berkeley Board of Education welcomed Javetta Robinson as the school district’s new deputy superintendent-chief financial officer at their first meeting after summer break Wednesday. 

Robinson, who most recently served as chief financial officer for the Oakland Unified School District, replaced outgoing deputy Eric D. Smith, who helped the Berkeley Unified School District attain greater financial stability and a balanced budget. 

District superintendent Michele Lawrence informed the board that Smith was leaving to return to his family in Southern California, from where he had been commuting the last two years. 

“We are in a stronger position than we were before and there are many challenges ahead, but I am sure we are going to have a great year,” said school board president Joaquin Rivera. 

Robinson brings ten years of public education experience to Berkeley. She started her career as an internal Auditor for Sacramento Unified and then went on to spend two years at Compton Unified in Southern California as the chief business officer. 

“Since Ms. Robinson’s path has crossed mine more than once in our careers, I was able to call on a few administrators whose judgment I know and trust and they gave her the highest recommendations,” Lawrence said in a statement. “Combined with what I’ve seen of her work in Berkeley I am confident in her abilities and the contribution she can provide to Berkeley.” 

 

Derby field  

The board approved a fee that would allow community groups to use the Berkeley High School East Campus field once it opens in September. 

Although the board approved the decision to look at an alternate “Curvy Derby” option for the field earlier this year, BHS and B-Tech students would be able to use it as an athletic field once it opens next month. 

If the board decides to implement the Curvy Derby plan, the current field will be replaced with a regulation-sized baseball diamond which would coexist with an open Derby Street. 

Since no rental rates exist for East Campus, district staff looked at fee schedules charged by the University of California and the City of Berkeley in order to establish the school district’s recommended fee. 

The hourly rates for the city fall between $15 and $35 while those for UC range from $40 to $200 per hour. 

BHS rents out its turf at between $36 (direct) and $102 (market) per hour. Based on this comparative data, the board approved a direct rate of $35 per hour and a market rate of $90 per hour. 

Lew Jones, facilities director for the district, explained that the direct rate pertained to youth and religious groups while the market rate was for everybody else. 

Board member Karen Hemphill questioned whether the community would be free to use the field during non-school hours. 

“I would hate to see the field sitting there and the community not being able to use it,” she said. “If I lived in the neighborhood and wanted to play frisbee there, will I be able to do that?” 

“The casual Frisbee player does not cause as much of a problem,” said Lawrence. “But organized groups would get this charge ... This is a new field and we have to have new dollars to take care of it. We have to make sure that the glass is removed and the dog feces cleared up. Somebody has to be hired to mow the lawn and clean it up. We need additional custodians to take care of that. The field has to be ready on Monday morning or the next time the athletic team wants to use it. And the money for that has to come from somewhere.” 

Hemphill stated that recreational facilities for the youth in South Berkeley was important, especially since the neighborhood lacked in them. 

 

Hillside surplus property 

The board approved the issuance of an RFP to hire a real estate consultant to study the Hillside Surplus Committee report before they marketed the property. 

The property—which is 2.85 acres—has a split-level three-story wood frame building and a portable building. Designed by Walter Ratcliff and built in 1926, the main building of the Hillside property has been designated a city and state landmark. 

Hillside has housed BUSD students in the past. It can no longer do so because a trace of the Hayward Fault is located under the main building. 

According to the staff report, it could take up to two years to dispose of the property. 

“I cannot wait two years,” said school board member Shirley Issel. “This property is rotting. I have a problem with the timeline.” 

Board president Joaquin Rivera directed staff to look at ways to revise the current timeline to make the process move faster.


DAPAC, Landmarks Meet to Finish Chapter

By Richard Brenneman
Friday August 24, 2007

The key document in the battle over the role of historic buildings in shaping the public face of tomorrow’s downtown will take definitive form Monday night. 

At least for the time being. 

The meeting that starts at 7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center (1901 Hearst Ave.) is the 14th session of a subcommittee comprised of four representatives each from the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) and the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee (DAPAC). 

The panel is hammering out their version of what will become either one of two possible chapters in the new downtown plan mandated by settlement of a city suit challenging UC Berkeley’s expansion plans through 2020. 

While the subcommittee members have reached amicable consensus among themselves, they have been facing an equally concerted push from five other DAPAC members who are not on the subcommittee, but most of whom have attended the subcommittee sessions offering their own comments and a counter-draft to the subcommittee’s work. 

DAPAC Chair Will Travis, Planning Commission Chair James Samuels, retired UC Berkeley development executive Dorothy Walker, former city Councilmember Mim Hawley and downtown Y advocate Jenny Wenk often find themselves at odds in DAPAC meeting with the four DAPAC members on the subcommittee: Zoning Adjustments Board member Jesse Arreguin, Patti Dacey, architect James Novosel and Wendy Alfsen. 

The LPC members of the subcommittee—Chair Steven Winkel, Robert Johnson, Carrie Olson and Jill Korte—are often teamed up as members of the commission’s strong preservationist majority. 

Samuels, during his time on the LPC prior to jumping to the Planning Commission, often voted against them, while Dacey—ousted from the LPC by Councilmember Max Anderson—teamed with the majority. 

Subcommittee members will be confronting three documents, two of them rival versions of the proposed chapter—one based on revisions from Travis, Samuels and the other three DAPAC-only members, and the other a revision of the subcommittee’s earlier draft by Dacey and Novosel. 

Both versions include changes made in the Dacey/Novosel draft during the subcommittee’s Aug. 13 meeting. 

The titles of the two documents reflect one of the key differences between the two groups. The subcommittee’s chapter is entitled Historic Preservation & Urban Design, while the rival draft is called Historic Preservation & New Construction. 

Subcommittee members will also examine the proposed Streetscapes and Open Space chapter for possible integration with their chapter. 

Whatever the subcommittee produces will then be subject to more changes by the full membership of DAPAC, which is charging toward a Nov. 30 deadline for completion of its work. 

The final version of the plan, after tweaking by city staff and the Berkeley Planning Commission, can’t be adopted by the city until it meets with the approval of the university and its planners—a condition of the settlement of the LRDP lawsuit. 

That settlement is facing a legal challenge currently pending before the state Court of Appeals. 

Two other DAPAC subcommittees are also scheduled to meet this week to put the finishing touches on their own chapters. Both meetings start at 7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Heart Ave. at Martin Luther King Jr. Way. 

The Transportation Subcommittee meets Tuesday, while the Housing and Social Services Subcommittee gathers the following night. 


Police Blotter

By Rio Bauce
Friday August 24, 2007

Battery 

On Wednesday at 11:51 a.m., a 13-year-old boy called in to report that he was playing basketball behind a duplex on the 1700 block of Oregon when a 25-year-old man approached him, began calling him names, made fun of his tennis shoes, and said that his playing was “weak.” The man picked the boy up by the armpits and tried to throw him into a nearby garbage can. Another basketball player saw this happening and intervened but not before the suspect hit the boy in the stomach and began to choke him. 

 

Theft 

A Berkeley woman on the 2700 Fulton parked and locked her red 21-speed Peugeot cross-trainer hybrid bicycle, with a Canadian flag bumper sticker, to a pole at 1 a.m. in the morning on Wednesday. When she went to retrieve the bike at 10:30 a.m., the bike was gone. No suspects are in custody. 

 

Hit-and-run 

At 9:55 a.m. on Wednesday, a Berkeley woman on the 1300 block of Northside called in to report that a dark blue Nissan had struck her car and then taken off. Her car sustained minor front damage. No suspects have been identified. 

 

Connected robberies 

On Tuesday at 9:25 p.m., a 41-year-old Berkeley resident was walking west on Berkeley Way from Shattuck on the northside sidewalk when he heard people behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw two young men walking quickly towards him. One of the suspects had one of his hands under his hoody (as if to conceal a weapon). They confronted the victim and demanded his money. The second suspect went through the victim’s pockets and only found pocket change. The two took off eastbound on Berkeley Way. 

Fifteen minutes later, a 37-year-old Oakland man was walking eastbound on Berkeley Way towards Shattuck when he saw two young men approaching him. When they reached him, they pushed him against a fence at 2005 Berkeley Way. One of the suspects had his hand under his hoody, while the other suspect checked his pockets and took $300 from his wallet. They returned the wallet to the victim. The two fled westbound on Berkeley Way towards Milvia Street. The suspects are not in custody. 

 

Auto burglary 

On Tuesday, a 17-year-old Lafayette girl reported an auto burglary on the 800 block of Potter Street. She had parked her black ’99 Ford F250 at 8:30 p.m. When she returned at 10:10 p.m., she discovered that her purse and wallet (with cash, driver’s license, debit cards, and credit cards) were missing. The officer determined that a vandal had popped the window. 

 

Robbery 

On Tuesday at 10:32 p.m., a 28-year-old Oakland man, who works at a Chinese restaurant in Oakland, was delivering Chinese food on the 1400 block of Ward Street. When he reached the single-family dwelling, three male suspects hit the deliveryman. who fell to the ground. One man came behind him and grabbed his neck, while the other two yelled to get the driver’s money. Two of the three suspects examined the deliveryman’s pockets. He began to fight and scream. He suffered some abrasions to his elbows during the fall. The three suspects made off with the $33 worth of Chinese food and the contents of his pockets.


Opinion

Editorials

Editorial: Celebrating the Small Changes

By Becky O’Malley
Tuesday August 28, 2007

For many months, there was a bottle of champagne in our office refrigerator, being saved for the day Karl Rove was indicted. The donor wasn’t a member of the reporting staff, since they are expected to preserve the appearance of political neutrality, but I’m pretty sure that if and when Rove had actually been indicted everyone, including the reporters, would have accepted a celebratory glass with enthusiasm. It didn’t happen—Rove was allowed to slither off the scene without going to jail, an over-enthusiastic former sales manager popped the champagne cork for some petty triumph, and the focus shifted to Alberto Gonzales as villain-du-jour. (Meanwhile, the odious Rummy had also left the building.) 

The permanent villains, of course, are still Bush and Cheney. It seems that most thinking people have decided that George W. plays Charlie McCarthy to Cheney’s Edgar Bergen. For you youngsters, Bergen was a famous ventriloquist, and Charlie was his dummy. The true fan may remember that McCarthy had a good line of facetious chatter, but there was another dummy, Mortimer Snerd, who was the real card-carrying dummy in the act. He never said anything that wasn’t very very stupid. On the current Washington stage, Alberto Gonzales seems to have gotten the Mortimer Snerd role. 

Not only has he lied repeatedly, he’s lied about lying, again and again, and he seems to have thought he could get away with it. He’s contradicted himself, on camera, about things he originally said also on camera. As my grandkids would say, how dumb is that?  

He’s become a figure of fun for his pathetic attempts to cover his tracks, but the bad deeds he facilitated were not at all funny. He turned the respected position of U.S. attorney into a political patronage job. He cooked up a warrant-less electronic surveillance program after the Sept. 11 attacks, and tried to sucker his ailing boss into going along with it. And much more. 

He’s been a prime target for the impeachment frenzy now sweeping some segments of the left. There are many who seem to believe that if we can just burn enough of the bad Bushies at the stake, figuratively speaking, the nation will be delivered from evil. Would that it were so simple.  

From time to time in my youth I read things about an amorphous philosophical tradition which united a lot of varied theories under a banner labeled Personalism. I have no idea where the discussion had gone since then, but the invaluable Wikipedia, rightly or wrongly, today lists three main pillars of the definition of big-P Personalism: “1. Only people are real (in the ontological sense), 2. Only people have value, and 3. Only people have free will.”  

That’s way too confusing to discuss in this space, but it does suggest to me that many observers and would-be actors on the political scene suffer from a kind of creeping lower-case personalism. That is to say, they seem to think that if we can just get rid of all the bad actors the stage will be clear for progress to continue its forward march.  

This is similar to the Great Man view of history, and also to the popular interpretation of Dick the Butcher’s remark in Henry VI, part 2: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” This quote is generally used in an anti-lawyer context, but it more properly should be interpreted as showing that villains want to get lawyers out of the way so they can carry out their nefarious plans.  

Gonzales in particular, though a lawyer himself, was clearly trying, at the behest of his principals (whoever they were) to get rid of the honest U.S. attorneys so he could do what he wanted. It didn’t work. 

But it’s also a dangerous mistake for the good guys to think that getting rid of the individuals who seem, as of now, to be personally responsible for what’s going on will solve many of the country’s problems. If we could have impeached, in one fell swoop, Rove, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Cheney and Bush, we’d still have a mess in Iraq which would not easily be cleaned up. 

All of the above, plus many Democrats, now seem to be gravitating to the position that getting rid of the current premier of Iraq will fix things there, and that’s not true either. And remember when we thought Ashcroft was the villain? He’s actually come up a notch in public esteem since we heard how he defied Gonzales from his sickbed. (Whatever happened to Colin Powell, by the way?) 

On the public stage, the actors come and go, but the problems remain. Even on a local level, it seems than some can’t be persuaded out of the little-p personalist analysis that improper choices by officials exercising free will have gotten us where we are today. Our local villains are distinctly minor league, not in a class with the truly wicked Gonzales, Cheney et al, and they’re even less potent, of course. But that hasn’t stopped calls for the replacement of the city attorney along with most of her staff, nor chilled the triumphal cheers that greeted the resignation of one high-level planning official.  

Many of the same people sincerely believed that the last mayor was a scoundrel of the deepest dye, and are now shocked to conclude that her replacement is even worse, though their political philosophies appeared to differ at election time. Others held the reverse views of the two mayors, but it hasn’t made much difference either way. Ugly development continues apace, lining the same pockets as it goes on its merry way.  

The current president of the University of California is departing under a cloud, but it’s foolish to expect much to change there either. The institution will continue to swallow up the cities it inhabits, student fees will continue to rise, executive compensation (that’s pay for administrators in plain English) will continue to be exorbitant.  

Are there systemic solutions for all these problems? Earlier primaries? Shorter campaigns? Abolish the Electoral College? Get rid of district elections? Elect the Regents? Preferential voting? Public financing of campaigns? Spending limits? Many novel ideas are proposed, but few are proven to work.  

There are two words that should be kept in mind when suggested quick fixes to political systems are being evaluated: Ed Jew, the poster child for the law of unintended consequences. Two probably adequate politicos were passed up in favor of a fresh face under a new preferential voting scheme, and look how much trouble it’s caused. 

My favorite French proverb is “Plus ca change, plus la meme chose”—the more things change, the more they remain the same. Changing faces doesn’t seem to do much, but changing the rules can’t be relied on to do the right thing either.  

Nevertheless, it’s satisfying to see Gonzales on his way out the door in disgrace. We can only hope his replacement isn’t worse.


Editorial: At Least We Don’t Jail Our Prophets

By Becky O’Malley
Friday August 24, 2007

Berkeley residents who get tired of being called NIMBYs and worse by the powers-that-be think they have problems. The artists and other denizens of West Berkeley who object to the new taxation scheme which the big property owners are trying to foist on the neighborhood they call home are currently getting the full treatment from those who think they know what’s best for the area: how to clean it up and make it all nicey-nice for the newly lucrative biotech labs and the high-end condos speculators are hoping to build near them. Their turf is also the target of city re-zoning efforts both spot (Berkeley Bowl) and far-reaching (auto dealership specials). They complain, with some justification, that their now-affordable housing and workspaces are being threatened by gentrification, that there’s obvious inequality in the way different contenders for West Berkeley space are being treated. 

Well, perhaps they’d better watch their language. In Berlin, a sociology professor who specializes in documenting the effects of urban renewal on minority populations was arrested, along with three colleagues, and put in solitary confinement for three weeks under Germany’s draconian post-911 “anti-terrorist” laws. The evidence? Prosecutorial word-spotters detected those suspect words “gentrification” and “inequality” in his published academic articles. Not only that, he met with some of the more radical anti-urban-renewal dissidents without taking his cell-phone along, presumably so that he couldn’t be tracked by police spying on the “militant group” (known just as “mg”) which has been blamed for a number of arson attacks on construction projects.  

The Deutsche-Welle website reported that, “the prosecutor’s office said Andrej H. [Holm] had met with a suspected member of mg twice and that the researcher used ‘keywords and phrases’ in his academic texts that had appeared in documents written by mg, such as the term ‘gentrification,’ according to news reports. It also said that ‘as an employee of a research institute, [he] had access to libraries where he could inconspicuously do the research required for the founding of a militant group.’ ” As of Thursday, Professor Holm was out of jail, but the charges against him had not been dropped.  

Thank goodness, things are nothing like that bad around here. There are, however, many echoes of the German attitude that those in power know what’s good for you, and if you protest you’re suspect, to be seen in many local controversies in the Bay Area and elsewhere. For example, there’s a big development project proposed for the Bayview-Hunter’s Point area right now which proponents are sure will be great, but some local folks aren’t sure and are protesting. Developers and established community leaders are united in applying derogatory labels to their protests. 

Academics around the world are busy with petitions on Professor Holm’s behalf. The progressive planning associations (yes, there are some) are doing their best to get the German government to listen to reason. But even supporters are carefully qualifying their opinions to make sure they’re not linked to the radical anti-globalization points of view which the “mg” crowd is thought to espouse.  

Here in Berkeley plenty of voices have been raised to suggest that if it’s good for British Petroleum (now just coyly ‘BP’) or for auto dealers or for the Bayer corporation or for any of the other big landholders in West Berkeley it must be good for everyone. They’ve got a right to these opinions, of course, and we support that right by giving them space in the paper to express them. But they cross a line when they suggest that there’s something illegitimate about citizens who don’t like the plans that are being made. And city officials, both elected and hired, who disparage citizen complainers and do their best to evade their scrutiny are even worse, since theoretically their job is to serve the people, all the people, not just the economically powerful people. 

And the various individuals and groups who are scrapping with AC Transit and UC Berkeley deserve to get some respect too. The people who are mad at the transit agency’s plans, with just a couple of exceptions, sincerely want to be able to get somewhere efficiently on the bus. Their major gripe is that they think the limited amount of public money could be spent more intelligently to accomplish that goal.  

The UC neighbors who think that building a glorified gym and offices right next to the Hayward fault, with road access already over-burdened, are not crypto Stanford fans or opponents of physical fitness. The Planet has published a number of letters from the letter-writing campaign being organized by parents of student athletes, who of course are entitled to promote what they think their kids need or at least what they want. But we’ve also gotten links to blogs being written by other supporters, and with friends like those the UC Student Athlete High Performance Center doesn’t need enemies. A sample, from a blog called calgoldenbears: “IT IS TIME WE THOUGHT OF EVERYONE AND NOT JUST THE TREES, THE RICH LAND OWNERS, AND THE OUT OF CONTROL FARCE THAT IS BERKELEY CITY GOVERNMENT.” (all caps sic).  

For those who once were proud to attend a school that seldom won a football game, people like this guy look like prime examples of how our alma mater has gone downhill. Back in the day, the football players used to train at Edwards Field, and then run all the way to the stadium, accompanied by student cheers as they passed. Is it really an improvement to put the new gym (which will serve a maximum of 500 students daily out of perhaps 40,000) in an area poorly served by mass transit, so that it must have a huge parking lot? Of course, when have footballers ever taken the bus?  

But no matter how put-upon our local civic watchdogs must feel sometimes, and even if being called “civic watchdogs” sometimes feels to some of them like an insult, they should keep an eye on the chilling tale of what’s been happening to Professor Andrej Holm in Berlin. If they do, they will surely realize that there are worse fates than simply being unappreciated. It’s true that a prophet is often without honor in his or her own country, but at least here, now, we don’t throw our prophets in jail for using the wrong vocabulary.  


Public Comment

Letters to the Editor

Tuesday August 28, 2007

VAN HOOL BUSES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I recently rode a double (accordion) Van Hool bus at the Union City BART station. It was totally filled with middle schoolers, who are about half to two-thirds adult size. The bus was perfect for them. They perched on the oddly placed seats like bird in a tree, and had confab groups with their friends all crowded on adjacent seats, since conversation and even physical contact (high fives) were possible across the narrow aisles.  

I have heard that people in Europe are, overall, physically smaller than in the United States, and now, seeing how good those buses are for smaller people, I believe it. Maybe AC Transit and Van Hool should start sponsoring weight reduction and agility classes for senior bus riders so we can fit the buses.  

(There is a precedent, the bed of Procrustes, in Greek mythology).  

Teddy Knight 

 

• 

CITY SHOULD SETTLE ITS LAWSUIT AGAINST UC BERKELEY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I cannot begin to express my disappointment in the position the Berkeley City Council has taken with regards to the construction of the Student Athlete High Performance Center and Memorial Stadium retrofit. 

It is unrealistic to expect the university to build the stadium in another location or require it to utilize local NFL venues. So, the only logical solution is to retrofit Memorial. Furthermore, as the geological testing has proved beyond a reasonable doubt, the site for the proposed training facility fulfills the requirements of the Alquist-Priolo Act. Why are you letting the City of Berkeley waste its money in what amounts to a frivolous lawsuit? This position is especially troubling in light of the fact that the center will enhance the safety of the student-athletes and Cal employees who currently toil in the bowels of a seismically vulnerable Memorial stadium. 

I submit to you that Cal can retain its image as a bastion of free speech and a beacon of liberal education and still field a championship-caliber football team. The two are not mutually exclusive. Frankly, the idea of the nation’s premier liberal university featuring a dominant football team would make Cal utterly unique in the college landscape. Such a combination would cause great consternation amongst the college football cognoscenti and befuddle those institutions that disdain big-time athletics. That is the kind of iconoclastic thinking that befits the unique institution that is the University of California. 

I urge the council to reconsider its position and work with the University of California, the institution that is not only the lifeblood of the City of Berkeley, but the very reason for its existence. 

William Butler 

• 

POLICY, NOT POLICE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

“Thank goodness, things are nothing like that bad around here.” My colleagues and I have been jailed, sued, beaten, even hog-tied for building a sand castle in the UC volleyball court once in People’s Park, for standing silently with candles in a non-violent protest of homeless sweeps, and for simply carrying a sign which stated “No Park No Peace.” 

This community can’t afford to forget that we are jailing people every day for having no place to live, for not being able to afford to pay “quality of life” fines, and for non-violent protests of these and other ridiculous policies. 

We don’t need more police; we need smarter policy makers. 

Carol Denney 

 

• 

VAN HOOLS ON TELEGRAPH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have been a street vendor on Telegraph Avenue for the past 15 years. Recently my life and the lives of my co-workers have been made very difficult by AC Transit. 

The new buses (Van Hool) have their tail-pipes at ground level, where as the old smaller buses had them at roof level. Each time one of these Van Hool behemoths drives past, their exhaust causes clouds of filth to be blown over our merchandise (I make and sell children’s clothes), all over the public on the sidewalk (especially little children) and into any of the stores silly enough to leave their doors open. This situation is not healthy for anyone. 

I would be more tolerant of this if these buses were full or at least well used. They are not. Each day we—myself and my fellow street vendors—watch bus after double-bus drive by almost empty—many of them actually empty and a large percentage being driven very aggressively and in excess of the speed limit. 

If anyone would like to witness this phenomenon for themselves, I would invite them to come to Telegraph and Channing between 5 and 6p.m.—stand on the west/exhaust side of the street for full effect. You will witness that it is not uncommon to have up to three double-buses at once on the four block section between Dwight and Bancroft, on which there are an average of less than six commuters per bus—and this is at rush hour. Could someone please explain to me how this is helping the environment—even if these buses did run on a slightly quicker schedule (at a cost of $400,000,000)—they would still need passengers to make any improvement to our environment. 

I have called AC Transit’s “Customer Relations Line” (891-4700) six times over the last two months and have been promised that I would be called back numerous times—to date this has not happened. I have found the staff on the “Customer Relations Line” to be rude and unhelpful. During my last conversation with them, I mentioned that I would be contacting the media and was told by AC Transit staff to “go ahead and do that.” 

In summation, I am requesting that AC Transit do the following: 

1. Limit the number of buses driven up Telegraph to the number needed. 

2. Consider returning to the single bus (with tail pipe in the air) on this route. 

3. To slow the buses down in the very busy area of the top four blocks of Telegraph. 

4. To consider filling the buses they already have before spending four hundred million dollars on a service that is not currently hardly being used. 

5. To consider sending the staff of their “Customer Relations Line” on some sort of people skills class. 

Philip Rowntree 

 

• 

EDITORIAL ROLLER COASTER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Reading Daily Planet editorials is like riding a roller coaster: lots of twists, and you never know where you’ll end up. 

The Aug. 14 piece is classic. It starts by trying to excuse Chris Kavanagh, who has under oath claimed to be a Berkeley resident since the late 1970s, but as it turns out has resided in a “charming cottage” in Oakland since at least 2001. On this point, the Planet is wrong on some of the facts, since you assume that Kavanagh has actually signed leases in both cities and that he spends roughly equal time in each. But the facts seem to be that he has signed only one lease—in Oakland. He has no lease in Berkeley, and has instead given multiple “residence addresses” (first on Tunnel Road, next on Dwight Way, and most recently at the Elmwood Post Office). The landlords and property managers at these places deny that he has lived there. Interestingly, not even Kavanagh has publicly defended his earlier claims to a Berkeley residence. Maybe his attorney has educated him about the penalties for perjury. 

Then the editorial does a 180-degree turn and hits a double bulls-eye. Your first target is developers like David Teece who have gotten mega-rich by building city-subsidized housing that is exempt control by the Rent Board. You are dead-on correct in saying that this hurts small Berkeley landlords, who get no subsidies, pay full property taxes, and are subject to the most stringent rent control regulations in the country. 

Then comes your last paragraph, which compares Kavanagh to “the other cynical baby boomers who have stockpiled and sublet rent-controlled units in Berkeley and Manhattan even though they can and do live elsewhere.” Moderates in Berkeley have been taking a lot of heat for saying the same thing over the past few years: whatever the justification for rent control in the ’70’s, the program today does not protect those who most need protection. Instead it subsidizes people who were lucky enough to have moved into a unit 10 or 20 years ago, and who often hang on to their sub-market pied a terres, renting them at uncontrolled rates to newcomers. This is flatly against Rent Board regulations, but the current pro-tenant Board has done nothing to stop it. 

Another Rent Board member (Eleanor Walden) has now been officially accused of a similar scam: accepting Section 8 subsidized housing at one address, while acting as a “master tenant” of a rent controlled unit in another place. Her case is up for hearing at the Rent Board in September. I wonder how the Board will deal with this obvious conflict of interest. 

A lot of people think that Berkeley’s housing policies encourage this kind of petty (and major) corruption, and are unfair both to smaller landlords and homeowners. Thanks for daring to open the subject. I’d like to see more of this on your news pages as well.  

Kathy Snowden 

Member of BPOA 

• 

MISINFORMATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Really, Becky, it’s not a service to the community to continue spreading misinformation about the student athlete center in the pages of your own newspaper.  

The parking garage would not be for student athletes. It would simply replace parking that already exists, no more, no less, for employees coming to work, for people visiting the optometry clinic the law school, the business school. Students don’t drive to the stadium area, they walk or ride bikes for heaven sakes. There would be no net increase in traffic. In fact, the stadium retrofit calls for 10,000 fewer seats, thus ten thousand fewer people on football days.  

On those six to eight football days a year, the garage would provide around 500 places for people to park, places that already exist in the stadium area...but would be removed in a redesign of the landscaping. That redesign will create a park-like setting around the north end of the stadium with many more and healthier trees than exist today. It doesn’t help anyone in this discussion to continue spreading exaggerations and misinformation. Let’s play fair and hope that the ultimate result is a better relationship between the university and the city that share this little bit of earth called Berkeley. 

Linda Schacht  

 

• 

SCRAPING EVERYTHING CLEAN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Yes, the duplicitous insect has crawled off the merry-go-round of developer-friendly sock puppets. Or so some people think. The accuracy of their perception makes little difference because the Berkeley Planning and Development Department will continue to be a place where strong emotions come into public view. 

Population pressure pushes up our property value. This we like. We may think about adding an in-law unit or a granny flat. In each of us is a “little developer” because humans are builders. Yet we also grieve for what we may lose, such as green space and charm. Our cities, our stock market, our diets—the drama of greed and grief takes shape in all of these. In a 100 years, Berkeley will look more like San Francisco. In 100,000 years, the glaciers will, as they have in the past, scrape everything clean. 

Robert Gable 

 

 


Commentary: West Berkeley Air Quality: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

By L A Wood
Tuesday August 28, 2007

The lyrics “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” have certainly been true in West Berkeley where foundry emissions and their noxious odors are a daily reminder of our local air quality crisis. Current levels of airborne chemicals and metal particulates have given zip code 94710 the shameful distinction of having some of the highest levels of asthma in the county.  

Although West Berkeley is located at the eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay, it has much poorer air quality than is found in larger California cities such as San Jose or even San Francisco. Despite numerous local advocacy groups, and even several lawsuits, this environmental outrage has only grown. The shocking truth is that today’s residents of the Oceanview district know little more about the health impacts from these industrial emissions than locals knew a quarter of a century ago.  

The deepening concern over these persistent toxic emissions has residents and workers in our community pointing blame at the area’s number one polluter, Pacific Steel Casting. Other citizens identify this problem with our inept regional air authority, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, and still others with the City of Berkeley’s failed zoning practices that have allowed housing and offices to be located in close proximity to the steel foundry.  

Although all these entities are culpable, it is clearly the air district that bears the most responsibility. For decades, BAAQMD has fostered a regulatory climate in West Berkeley of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” and in doing so, has perpetuated an ongoing health quandary.  

 

Regulatory hot spot 

Modern-day air regulation came into existence more than 50 years ago as did our regional air district, BAAQMD. From the very beginning, the air district’s mandate has been mired in politics, allowing industrial polluters to “regulate” themselves, and as in Berkeley, to avoid any real public review or accountability.  

BAAQMD, like so many other regulatory agencies, has lost sight of its prime objective to protect the public’s health and instead has preferred to protect private industry from any substantial changes. Pacific Steel Casting, at Gilman and Second Street, is a prime example of the air district’s failure to regulate.  

Proof of this lies in the fact that over the past five years PSC’s production levels have increased enormously as have their airborne contaminants such as manganese, zinc, nickel, copper, cresols, phenol, benzene and formaldehyde. Yet, these emissions continue to be poorly monitored and inadequately contained. UCB’s School of Public Health calculates that in recent years, PSC’s toxic air emissions have risen 160 percent.  

Under growing public pressure, BAAQMD has only recently begun to acknowledge this issue surrounding PSC’s emissions. For those living and working near PSC, the air district’s response has come very late in the game. In answer to its critics, BAAQMD has now required PSC to update its 16-year-old Health Risk Assessment (HRA). One can only wonder why the district took so long to determine that a new assessment was needed for the foundry. Certainly, every regulatory definition of emissions “hot spot” should have triggered this health review years ago, especially given Pacific Steel’s expanded operations, new pollution sources, and increased emissions.  

Unfortunately, an updated HRA will never provide reliable answers to the many questions regarding adequate health protection of the community. The promised risk assessment, now months overdue, is tainted by the fact that it lacks any independent or impartial review. Paid for by the polluter, PSC, this “selective” investigation will only continue to justify the foundry’s polluting activities. Rarely do HRAs accomplish any more than this. 

 

The smoking gun 

Residents and workers, who have been left gasping for some regulatory relief, may now be finding this in the form of a community grant from BAAQMD. Perhaps to get some relief of its own from the public’s growing anger, the air district agreed several months ago to fund an air study centered on the foundry’s metal particulate emissions.  

The district’s grant of $25,000 was awarded to Global Community Monitoring (GCM), an international environmental justice group. Despite decades of complaints and health concerns about Pacific Steel’s emissions, the West Berkeley Community Monitoring Project provides the first systematic air sampling in Oceanview. 

Since May, a small team of volunteers, in conjunction with GCM, has climbed all over residential rooftops in West Berkeley, positioning portable air samplers downwind from PSC. The project has been sampling PM 10 particulate matter (10-micron diameter) for evidence of several metals common to PSC’s emission inventory.  

It certainly didn’t take a giant leap of logic to hypothesize that air sampling would reveal a hefty dispersion of metals from the foundry across the Oceanview area. Most who live in that district are all too familiar with the odor plumes that waft out more than a mile from the steel mill. The monitoring team now wants to know if the particulate metals travel like the odor plumes and at what concentrations. 

This unprecedented effort by GCM is now beginning to answer some of these questions and has produced some astonishing data. Although laboratory results are still preliminary, the nearly two-dozen samples processed so far have shown that concentrations of PSC’s metal contaminants were highest at locations closest to and downwind from PSC. Lower, but still excessive, levels of these contaminants have also been measured more than a half a mile from the stacks of PSC. It should be noted that the monitoring project has dispelled the long-held belief that the Highway 80 is the source of Oceanview’s airborne metal emissions. 

It is not surprising that manganese and nickel are showing up in high concentrations. According to the California Air Resource Board’s data, Pacific Steel Casting is the only significant industrial source of manganese in the Oceanview area. PSC also accounts for 99 percent of all industrial nickel emissions from the more than thirty West Berkeley industrial sources that come up on CARB’s radar. A health consultant for Berkeley’s community monitoring team, Mark Chernaik, Ph.D., has stated that the levels of manganese found in sample was 10 to 20 times higher than deemed safe by the World Health Organization. Nickel was found in a sample to be “up to 330 times the U.S. EPA reference concentration for this contaminant.”  

Early indications of the GCM monitoring project suggest that BAAQMD’s assumptions about the levels of PSC’s airborne metal particulates and the dispersion of these emissions may be grossly underestimated. Perhaps the GCM project will now shift public awareness from the foundry’s noxious odors to the potential dangers produced by PSC’s metal particulate emissions that cannot be detected by sight or smell.  

To find out more about the West Berkeley Community Monitoring Project, please attend a press conference being held at 11 a.m. today (Tuesday, Aug. 28) at 1340 Eighth St., which is one of the sampling locations. You will have an opportunity to view the air sampling equipment and speak with the monitoring team about the project and the lab results of the samples analyzed so far. The West Berkeley project is approximately halfway complete and is scheduled to run for several more months. Additional information can also be found at www.berkeleycitizen.org/monitoring.html or at www.gcmonitor.org. 

 

L A Wood hosts a website on Berkeley affairs at www.berkeleycitizen.org. 

 


Smart Growth

By Steve Meyers
Tuesday August 28, 2007

In a recent editorial, Becky O’Malley described “smart growth” as “the unproven theory that making already-developed urban areas ever denser will prevent sprawl into the hinterlands.” While this is often cited as a benefit of smart growth by its advocates, it is only one aspect of smart growth, and the least important from the perspective of Berkeley. 

First, I agree with Ms. O’Malley that building more apartment buildings in Berkeley will have little if any effect on sprawl outside of the East Bay. Suburban sprawl is mainly driven by demand for detached single-family homes. The people who are moving into the new apartment buildings (rental and condo) in Berkeley are overwhelmingly not families with children who would otherwise live out in Contra Costa country. It is likely true, however, that most of these new residents work or study in Berkeley, and would have lived outside Berkeley if the new housing had not been built here. Thus, their commuting (most likely driving) is now less than it would have been otherwise, which is a good thing for the environment. 

This is a modest benefit, and hardly something to get too excited about. Among smart growth advocates (of which I am one) and Berkeley’s planning staff, there is too often a tone that Berkeley needs to “sacrifice” for the good of the region and the planet. I think this is the wrong emphasis. Smart growth is good mainly because it can help make Berkeley a better city—if it’s done right. 

First off, we need to recognize why growth (especially more housing) is important to Berkeley’s future. Berkeley is one of the most desirable places to live in the country, especially for progressive folks who enjoy a vibrant atmosphere. Since there is little if any room to build single-family houses in Berkeley and its immediate environs, the price of existing homes has been bid up to where they are unaffordable for most people (who does buy these modest houses going for well over $500,000 anyway?). If multi-unit housing is not built in Berkeley, over time the demand will push up rents and condo prices. Vacancy rent control would only slow the process. Combined with the sky-high price of single-family homes, a policy of little or no growth would mean that Berkeley would become more of an upscale city, and lose the diversity that makes it more interesting than a town like Palo Alto. 

A smart growth approach says that the best place to build new housing is along major boulevards and in the downtown. 

This is marked contrast to the “dumb growth” that prevailed here in the 1960s, when numerous apartment buildings were put up within residential neighborhoods, creating an ugliness that we still live with today. The smart growth strategy likely encourages residents of new housing to use of mass transit instead of cars, though probably less than claimed by many smart growth advocates. Undoubtedly though, it creates a more vibrant street life and support local businesses. 

This basic approach seems to have widespread support in Berkeley (even among critics of certain new developments). Apart from the minority that would prefer very little new housing at all (“Berkeley is too crowded and has too much traffic already”), I think it’s fair to say that the debate is not about smart growth, but rather about how best to do it. I believe that discussion would be advanced if those who are opposed to the scale and magnitude of current development trends stop attacking smart growth, and if those who support the trends stop making questionable claims about the impact of development in Berkeley on suburban sprawl. 

 

Steve Meyers is a Berkeley resident.


Letters to the Editor

Friday August 24, 2007

DOUGHBOYS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

On a humorous note: For many years now, my favorite character on TV ads was the Pillsbury Doughboy. He was sweet, naive, and incredibly cute. But when Karl Rove surfaced as Bush’s brain, I felt Rove had tainted my adoration of the “Boy” by his unfortunate physical similarity to my favorite character. Now that Rove has hopefully gone back into obscurity, I can regain my adoration for the wonderful, squeaky Doughboy whom I now can continue to love. 

Robert Blau 

 

• 

GETTING IT STRAIGHT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have been reading Mr. Hardesty’s letters with great interest and am working to absorb his arguments about the role of guns in the deterrence of crime. Let me see if I’ve gotten this right: The reason there is so much gun violence is that there are too few guns. 

Peter Josheff 

 

• 

DISCOVERING THE EAST BAY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I wanted to thank you for all the wonderful historical and activities information about Berkeley and the East Bay, packed into the Aug. 21 issue of the Planet. 

At various times I have gone to the Berkeley Visitors Bureau when needing exactly such helpful information. Unfortunately, other than a slick and generally useless pamphlet, they had little to offer. Planning activities for new arrivals, visiting friends and family is never simple, but the Aug. 21 issue of the Planet will make things much easier. I would like to suggest that you reformat the issue so that it might become a visitors (and locals’) guide book. Perhaps you could get the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce or even the city to contribute to the cost of such a project. Heaven knows, our taxes are spent for plenty of less worthy projects. In fact I would happily purchase such a guide. 

That said, I must admit that after reading the current issue cover to cover, I rushed out and sequestered three more (free) copies of the Planet for my “archives.” 

Peter Klatt 

 

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EASTSHORE STATE PARK 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I assume that Joe Eaton’s omission of Eastshore State Park from his list of viewing spots in his article, “Finding Nature by the Bay,” is because he too recognizes that it is not open to the public except for a single path that almost no one has used in the past three years, most likely because it is so unpleasant. I have written to you before about this subject and I don’t want to harp on it, but the years pass while the area of the park remains closed to all of us here in Berkeley who once enjoyed it. Neither Joe Eaton or Ron Sullivan or Marta Yamamoto ever mentions it, and for all I know they may have supported the closing of the area along with those special interest groups that took control of it. As I said before it is a huge area that has more than enough room for humans and nesting birds to share together in peace and harmony, and I can’t see any real environmental or ecological reason to exclude the former from it. 

I wrote to the Sierra Club and East Bay Regional Parks and the Audubon Society asking them to comment on the situation, but I have received no replies. I know for a fact that none of the groups that the Audobon Society sponsors for nature viewing have ever visited this so-called park, most likely because the single trail is so unpleasant and unaffordable to such viewing. 

In the past three years since the area has been closed there have been, as far as I have been able to see, no new birds nesting there, and I can’t see any reason for maintaining the fence and the restrictions. It is public land and I don’t feel it’s right that a minority should take control of it and exclude the public from it. 

Pete Najarian 

 

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GRIZZLY PEAK 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I truly appreciate the attention your newspaper is drawing to the remarkable features of the East Bay, but I can’t let your article about Grizzly Peak’s 75th anniversary go without commenting on the incredible amount of litter and debris that typically festoons this world-class stretch of road. We are so lucky to have it, yet the beauty of driving it and discovering the incredible views is badly tarnished by the sight of trash and debris strewn along the roadway and against the embankments. 

People come from around the world to visit Berkeley, and those who venture up to the top of the hills they’ve heard so much about must think we are a bunch of pigs for the way we treat the surroundings we are so blessed to have. I drive this road almost daily, and I am always torn by the beauty of it contrasted by the ugliness left by those who trash it. It has become an embarrassment to drive visiting friends and relatives up to the greatest view the Bay Area has to offer, while attempting to muster some sort of explanation for the garbage strewn about. 

Is this really the best we can do? Is there no accountability? Can’t we at least post some of those “$1,000 Fine for Littering” signs? And maybe enforce them too? I’d love to hear commentary from the agencies with jurisdiction of the area between Centennial Drive and Fish Ranch Road. 

Michael Minasian 

 

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A PRESIDENT WITH EXPERIENCE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am glad to see how concerned people are that our presidential candidates have enough experience. After all, those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. We have already elected one redneck president whose only experience consisted of less than two years of school, a few terms in the Illinois House of Representatives and one term in Congress. If we are not vigilant, this presidential election cycle may result in us repeating that history with a candidate like Barack Obama, who has considerably more education, but only slightly more experience in Illinois state government and Congress than Abraham Lincoln.  

Thomas Stephen Laxar 

El Cerrito 

 

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CHRIS KAVANAGH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

On Aug. 14, you published a letter from Leslie Fleming purporting to defend Chris Kavanagh. She didn’t identify her own “credentials,” but she spilled a lot of ink attacking the personal and political “credentials” of other letter-writers. 

I am one of those attacked by Ms. Fleming. She’s got her facts wrong in several ways, but I won’t bother to correct her. Nor will I question her motives, because I don’t want to join her in a tactic that is all too common in Berkeley—namely, that when you can’t answer an argument, you launch a personal attack instead.  

By ignoring the hard facts of the Kavanagh case, Fleming admits their truth. The truth is that despite filing multiple statements, under oath, claiming he lives in Berkeley, Kavanagh doesn’t. There’s no gray area—Kavanagh doesn’t have “two leases,” for example. He has one, and it’s in Oakland. The owners and managers of both the Berkeley addresses he has used deny that he has ever lived in either place. And there’s no evidence that he is just “visiting” a girlfriend or anyone else at the Oakland address. Kavanagh, and only Kavanagh, is the sole tenant at the Oakland address. He was the only tenant on the lease, and he was the only tenant fighting eviction (with the help of lawyers getting paid by the Rent Board, no less). If there really is some other co-tenant, no one, including Kavanagh, has ever produced any evidence she exists. 

These hard facts raise public policy issues that I addressed in my Aug. 3 opinion piece. But like so many ideologues, Ms. Fleming tries to avoid the serious issues by questioning the motives of people on the other side. These issues go far beyond our dysfunctional Rent Board, and include the corruption at the Housing Authority, the proliferation of subsidized “non-profit” high rises, the sad state of downtown and Telegraph businesses, the near strangulation of nearly all our roads, and a persistent budget crisis. Ignoring the issues, and attacking the messengers, won’t make them go away. 

What Berkeley needs most is a new style of argument, one that results in less noise and more light.  

David Wilson 

 

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HEALTHY LIVING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Your Aug. 17 Healthy Living column read like an ad for xylitol. I don’t question Mrs. Harmon’s position, but her style is questionable, and I wish she answered her own questions, “If xylitol really keeps down decay, why hadn’t I heard about it, and why aren’t the toothpaste companies rushing to market it?” 

Ken Geis 

 

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KENNETH FOSTER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am writing about the case of Kenneth Foster who is scheduled for execution in Texas on Aug. 30. The unjust law under which Mr. Foster was convicted also exists in California as “murder felony,” a law that can convict a suspect of murder through indirect circumstances rather than direct involvement.  

In this instance Kenneth Foster sat in a car 80 feet from an altercation between Michael LaHood and Mauriceo Brown. Mr. LaHood was killed, and eventually Mr. Brown was executed. Now Mr. Foster will pay for a crime he didn’t commit with his life. Please contact Governor Perry in Texas to try to stop this unjust execution and help reverse the State of California’s “felony murder” that operates in a similar fashion. 

Summer Brenner 

 

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SLOW AT THE THROTTLE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Newspapers seem to be a little slow on the throttle at nailing down important issues. A point in case: Republicans are trying to steal California’s electoral votes with a ballot initiative that even a stone could see through. Has your readership been enlightened yet?  

The anti-immigration movement, composed primarily of white males, and with vestiges of the KKK, are demonizing and targeting Mexicans and Latinos for no other reason than an innate prejudice and intolerance. How long are the news services going to let these cretins, who mask their bigotry and ignorance under the guise of flag and country, get away with their charade? 

Ron Lowe  

Grass Valley 

 


Commentary: Berkeley Housing Authority’s Plan To Dump its Waiting List

By Lynda Carson
Friday August 24, 2007

On Aug. 22, Berkeley Housing Authority board members were scheduled to vote on a resolution to terminate it’s existing housing assistance waiting list. There was little to no advance warning that this was about to occur, and it caught the housing community by surprise. 

On the surface, Berkeley’s plan to terminate it’s current housing assistance waiting list appears to be little more than a political statement claiming that things are better, when in reality this plan does not seem to be a real solution to the past problems in the agency. 

The plan to dump over 5,000 people from the Berkeley Housing Authority (BHA) waiting list is a slap in the face to all of the elderly, poor and disabled families who have done everything right to get on the list, and stay on the list. 

Worse yet, it appears that the newly installed board members of the BHA have not come up with a viable plan or proposal that would guarentee that a new waiting list would be properly maintained in the future. Destroying the BHA’s housing assistance waiting lists does nothing to resolve the present crisis for those needing assistance, and only makes the present scandal worse because destroying the current waiting list precisely hurts those that it was meant to assist. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), “Public Housing Authorities (PHAs) may establish local preferences for selecting applicants from its waiting list. As an example, PHAs may give a preference to a family who is homeless or living in substandard housing. Or for those who are paying more than 50 percent of their income for rent, or have been involuntarily displaced. Families who qualify for any such local preferences move ahead of other families on the list who do not qualify for any preference. Each PHA has the discretion to establish local preferences to reflect the housing needs and priorities of its particular community.” 

Preferences mean that people are being bumped out of line all the time in housing authorities all across the nation for various reasons, and this is nothing new to those familiar with the way housing authorities are being operated. It certainly does not mean that the PHA’s waiting lists need to be destroyed or purged, and that everyone in line should be dumped from the waiting lists only to have to start all over again. 

After the Huricane Katrina disaster demolished the gulf states, housing authorities across the nation ignored their current waiting lists to give preference to disaster victims who relocated to their regions, and it created a whole new set of problems and resentment for those that were bumped out of line by Katrina’s victims. This same sort of scenario would play out in Berkeley, if a new list bumped everyone out of line, and new people were given their place. In addition HUD says, “During the application process, the PHA will collect information on family income, assets, and family composition. The PHA will verify this information with other local agencies, your employer and bank, and will use the information to determine program eligibility and the amount of the housing assistance payment. If the PHA determines that your family is eligible, the PHA will put your name on a waiting list, unless it is able to assist you immediately.” 

Whether the waiting lists in Berkeley have been properly maintained or not through the years, as long as the current people on the waiting lists meet the eligibility requirements for housing assistance, and no one improperly bumps them up in line ahead of others, there should be no problems and the current waiting lists could easily be updated if necessary when openings occur. 

Currently the BHA website says, “The BHA is not currently processing applications from the wait list for new vouchers. This is because the BHA does not have funding available to provide new vouchers at this time. You will be contacted in writing, by mail, when your name reaches the top of the wait list and funds available for additional vouchers to be issued.” If there are no funds available for those already on the current waiting lists and the BHA is not processing applications regardless of one’s status, one can only wonder what is the point in spending tens of thousands of dollars to create a whole new waiting list... As is, thousands needing housing assistance in Berkeley have already patiently waited for as long as 8 years, and many have done everything required of them by the BHA to update their files when a change in status occurs. They should not be punished and told to go to the back of the line because of staff mismanagement in the agency. 

Since the proposed purge is not being mandated by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), or being demanded by any other over-sight agency as a means to save the BHA, this all sounds like another political blunder and a big waste of time and money during a very crucial period for the BHA’s scarce resources, and needy clients. 

People should keep in mind that when the Oakland Housing Authority last opened up their waiting list during January of 2006, an astounding 40 percent of Oakland’s low-income families filed applications for housing assistance. 

If the BHA purged their current waiting lists and started taking new applications over the proposed five-day application period, they can expect way more than 5,000 low-income families to fill out applications for the new waiting list. When considering that it would take (new) BHA staff members a minimum of 15 minutes or more to prepare a new file for each client that just signed up for the new waiting list, this dubious venture may easily end up costing around $75,000 or more before the dust settles. 

Creating a new waiting list for the BHA would only guarentee that everyone on the current list has to start all over at the back of the line. It would be cost prohibitive, and it is not a guarenteed solution to problems of incompetence or mismanagement that has plagued this much needed agency through the years. The City of Berkeley needs to respect those who are already on the BHA’s waiting lists, and stop wasting precious resources for political reasons that do not offer solutions. 

 

Lynda Carson is one of the founding members of Save Berkeley Housing Authority. 


Commentary: Oak-to-Ninth Referendum Raises Democratic Issues

By Akio Tanaka
Friday August 24, 2007

Last Friday the Oak-to-Ninth Referendum Committee held a rally in front of Oakland City Hall to mark the one-year anniversary of the turn-in of the 25,000 petition signatures requiring that the Oak-to-Ninth Development Agreement be put to a vote of the public. 

Although this referendum is about one development project in the City of Oakland, it raises issues that should concern all citizens living in a democracy, not just the voters of Oakland.  

One issue is the corruption of the democratic process by money in which politicians sell off public assets to the moneyed interests in return for campaign contributions.  

Oak-to-Ninth is a 64-acre Tideland Trust land that belongs to the public. A previous City Council voted to put parks and other public spaces there by passing the very well considered Estuary Policy Plan in 1999 and Voters of Oakland passed measure DD in 2002 to initiate the financing of the park. But the will of the voters was co-opted. Don Perata, who had received financial support from the developer, arranged the necessary legislation, SB1622, to allow Tidelands Trust land to be sold. Then, a new City Council, led by De la Fuente and Kernighan, shepherded through an Ordinance which approved developer Signature Properties’ plan to build 3,100 condo units on the property. The 64 acres of public waterfront that Oakland voters had supported as a park was sold by the City Council for mere $18 million to a private developer.  

The second issue is the abridgment of the voters’ constitutional right to petition the government.  

Oakland City Attorney John Russo first rejected the petition claiming that it did not include the correct version of the ordinance. The petitioners used the ordinance that was passed by the City Council on July 17, 2006 but the ordinance was modified after its passage. So the problem is not that the petitioners used the wrong ordinance but that the City Council did not follow its own City Charter in passing the ordinance.  

The city attorney then objected to the petition based on the assertion that some petition gatherers were unqualified for technical reasons; however, the First Amendment to our Constitution is very clear: 

“Congress shall make no law abridging the…right of the people...to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” 

The laws that put restrictions on petition gatherers abridge the petition process. Such restrictions permit moneyed interests to sandbag petitioners in lengthy and costly litigation. The right of the petitioner to have his/her signature counted outweighs all else.  

Our republic is in a crisis. Both of our major parties have been bought off by corporate money, and the current administration has gutted our Constitution. We need citizen awareness and participation to reverse the corruption of our political process. We should demand that our elected officials represent the voters who elect them rather than moneyed interests. 

This fight is not just for us but also for our future generations. We should make a stand that our children would be proud of. We need a new dawn in our democracy. We can start by standing up to the corrupt political process and on the way bequeath to our children a beautiful water front park for all of Oakland to use and be proud of. 

 

Akio Tanaka is an Oakland resident.


Commentary: Mark Rhoades: Just Following Orders?

By Sharon Hudson
Friday August 24, 2007

Becky O’Malley’s Aug. 10 editorial, “Planners Come and Go, But the Department Never Changes,” blamed departing city planner Mark Rhoades’ malodorous planning style on three factors: the loss of municipal revenues created by Proposition 13, policies set by Rhoades’ bosses, and the natural tendency of regulatory agencies to be hijacked by those they regulate.  

While her points are well-taken, Ms. O’Malley inaccurately minimized Mr. Rhoades’ personal culpability, implying that “the system” is so corrupt that individual actors bear little responsibility for their roles in it. This is not only untrue and harmful, it is also offensive to every honest person in the world, because we all live within systems that reward dishonesty, but most of us act ethically nonetheless. 

The Planet’s Aug. 17 front-page story, “Controversial Planner Hailed On Departure,” was also an odd choice. An incestuous handful of developers and parasitic consultants bemoaning the loss of “their boy” in the planning department is no more than a “Dog Bites Man” story. The “Man Bites Dog” story was that over a hundred victims of Rhoades, from all kinds of neighborhoods and political backgrounds, attended another party to celebrate Rhoades’ departure. Rarely is a municipal employee is so unpopular that his departure causes public celebration. So that’s the news. 

Ms. O’Malley correctly wrote that Mr. Rhoades “[tried] to evade the public will by any means necessary,” which is supported by Rhoades’ own words at the developer party. This was Mr. Rhoades’ personal ethical choice, fueled by his personal planning ideology. I do not accept the Nuremburg Defense: “I was just following orders,” revived by Ms. O’Malley as “Prop. 13 made me do it.” Nor do I accept the notion that Rhoades was simply taking orders from the City Council or his bosses. He was an eager, proactive policy maker.  

Mark Rhoades was proud to be a self-described “change agent.” He helped write a 2003 want ad for planners, promoting Berkeley as a place “where planners set the pace,” and where they could test their “New Urbanist” philosophies. At the time, I wrote that Berkeley citizens, the City Council, and their land use commissioners might be surprised to learn that it is not they, but our staff planners, who “set the pace” in Berkeley.  

Mark Rhoades was a “smart growth” extremist who “set the pace” by helping developers maximize building sizes. Density—not protection of the public, nor obedience to the law, nor creating a livable city—was his goal. “Creative” interpretation and selective enforcement of laws and policies was his method. When a development project came his way, Rhoades twisted the zoning ordinance and other applicable laws beyond all recognition to permit the largest possible project. Then he smoothly “sold” his interpretation of the law to the Zoning Adjustments Board and later—upon inevitable appeal—to the City Council. The new interpretation then became policy by this precedent.  

Rhoades knew that the best time to control a project was at the beginning, not the end. At the end, it was difficult for the council to turn down a project, even when displeased with aspects of Rhoades’ handiwork. So the council ratified Rhoades’ policies ex post facto by approving these projects. But this project-based policy making was consistently “Rhoades-up,” not “council-down.” When Rhoades became too “creative” for the council, he easily outmaneuvered them. After all, Berkeley taxpayers paid him handsomely to figure out how to do so, while council members are paid a pittance to represent the people.  

So Rhoades was a clever, disarming, and energetic ideologue who made policy by taking advantage of a philosophical and power vacuum left by an underpaid and inattentive City Council and overworked, amateur commissioners. He needed nothing more than that, but he had more.  

More than a few council members were happy to allow Rhoades to make policy when it served their favored developers. Without Rhoades, they would have had to change the laws themselves by the normal, unpleasantly public, and oh-so-time-consuming democratic process. Rhoades was able to create land use policy quickly, behind the scenes, without public process. This is why Rhoades was unusually popular (and chummy) with the big developers and their “smart growth” allies.  

Rhoades’ most tangible legacies are his abuse of the state density bonus law to create huge, neighborhood-busting buildings, and a downtown full of small, low-quality units occupied by students. Rhoades’ less visible legacy is the loss of trust between citizens and their government. His actions tainted other departments and greatly reduced taxpayers’ willingness to support the city. He also leaves behind junior planners following in his slippery footsteps, and a flock of imperious developers who have grown both rich and accustomed to having their interests placed above the public good. Both will be hard to reform or remove.  

All residents of Berkeley, except those few large developers, were losers during Rhoades’ tenure. Everyone suffers from loss of the commons, loss of good housing and demographic diversity, loss of historic resources, loss of respect for the law, loss of trust in government, and loss of tax dollars on appeals and lawsuits. Those near developments also suffer loss of livability, views, open space, greenery, parking (both commercial and residential), and community. The lives of neighborhood leaders are devastated. This too impacts everyone, because time spent fighting bad planning is not spent contributing positively to the city.  

Yes, the council committed a crime against the people of Berkeley by allowing a renegade planner to abuse the citizens of this town for ten years, although the ratio of negligence to complicity on the council is hotly debated. And senior planning staff were also happy to let Rhoades do the work and take the heat. But regardless of the winks and nods that come from above, adult human beings and public servants are responsible for their own integrity. Let history provide a lesson:  

In 2001, a Southside institution wanted to build a six-story building with two floors of UC Extension classrooms in our residential neighborhood. Naturally Rhoades supported this with his full bag of tricks. When it came to light that this new building would be a huge expansion of an illegal use, within a history of illegal uses, Rhoades spontaneously invented a little piece of “law” to persuade the ZAB to ignore the illegalities, and continued to support the project vigorously. Eventually Rhoades’ little crusade was ended by the council, the legal staff, and Dan Marks—after Rhoades had made losers of everyone: the institution he misled, the neighborhood he betrayed, and the taxpayers who paid for it all.  

Compare this with the actions of the zoning officer who held Mr. Rhoades’ position from 1962 to 1982, Robert Humphrey. Mr. Humphrey respected and protected the community. On the several occasions over the decades when Humphrey became aware of similar (but smaller) violations by the institution in question, he forced the institution back into compliance with its approved use. He administered the law; he did not make it, flout it, or ignore it to suit his personal goals.  

The baseline for ethical public service is to work for the people and implement the law. Planners like Mark Rhoades give us less under pretense of giving us more. Berkeley should not tolerate it.  

Ms. O’Malley is correct: Rhoades is more a symbol than a cause of what is wrong with Berkeley city government. But we must look not only at how systems shape individuals, but at how individuals shape systems. The bottom line is that the big developers toasted Rhoades, while hundreds of regular citizens just like the readers of this newspaper were irreparably damaged by him, while being forced to pay his salary. That sums up both the man and the system. 

 

South campus resident Sharon Hudson is an advocate for improving urban quality of life.


Commentary: Trying to Re-Frame the Question of Artists in Berkeley

By Thomas Lord
Friday August 24, 2007

Is there such a thing as optimistic fatalism? I’m talking about artists in Berkeley, of course. Here are some observations that occur to me: Of course, nobody who is upstanding should be brutalized by a civil process into quitting their residence or business place—we all ought to demand civility and generosity towards artists in those proceedings and transactions which increasingly force them to relocate out of town. It is a sad period of time in the history of Berkeley. 

Yet, let’s face it: property values are neither random nor irrelevant. Development potential is not something invented in City Hall—it is a natural phenomenon which the city can only moderate, not halt. Let us dispassionately contemplate, just for a moment, the taboo thought: that “tomorrow” all artists in Berkeley find themselves sufficiently square deals and quit the town, migrating to Oakland, Richmond, Emeryville, even Walnut Creek and Union City. What will come of this deep disruption of a long-standing and much appreciated element of our social fabric, here in Berkeley? 

My hunch comes in two parts: the immediate consequences and the long term consequences. Immediately, I suppose, we will all (and the artists themselves, most of all) experience tremendous loss. The social networks that are the Berkeley artists’ social scene will be “stretched out” over a larger geography. Ties will be broken and generally patterns that have been vibrant will fade. Yet, longer term... what happens after that? 

I think that, longer term, Berkeley will benefit and become even more of a cultural hub than it already is—at least if we play the zoning game and development game well. There are two reasons: 1) enriching your neighbor enriches you; 2) Berkeley can have a thriving arts scene even with a scarcity of workspaces for artists. “Enriching your neighbor” means that as artists are pushed out of Berkeley into neighboring communities, they help begin to “infect” those neighbors with some of the best aspects of Berkeley culture. A slight dispersal of artists greatly expands the number of people here in the 510 region who have ready access to artists. Culturally speaking, if we set aside our city pride for a moment, in pushing out more and more artists we are also, in some sense, sending out our cultural diplomats. What if these seeds take root? Then Berkeley will find itself surrounded, on all sides, by culturally enriched neighbors. We will be lucky to have such problems! 

The second point, that “Berkeley can have a thriving arts scene even with a scarcity of workspaces,” is trickier. I suggest that, given the extreme development pressure, we pick something to focus on, culturally. We are forced away from being the sleepy bayside town, in contrast to the surrounding metropolis, where artists can find cheap rent and a bohemian lifestyle is guaranteed for all. Sad but true. So, as a new focus: Berkeley should focus on being a place of cultural consumption. That is to say, we should focus on fashioning our town as the “artists market,” much as their farmer’s markets or dock-side fish markets. Some specific suggestions might help clarify this idea: 

Yes, Berkeley zoning should ensure that, in perpetuity, there are artist studio spaces available here below “market rates” for adjacent property. Such artificially priced spaces are our cultural “commons,” where we hope that pretty and useful things will grow. But, civilly, if we are talking about manipulating prices, the question arises: how do we fairly, justly allocate these community resources? 

Enter the “consumption oriented” view: Bless any artist who can make a permanent home base in Berkeley but, in our zoning, let’s not try to make home bases for artists. Rather, how about studio spaces that can be rented, below market rates, but only for a maximum of a few years at a time and only on the condition of maintaining a public part of the space, where people can observe (and ideally participate in) art being produced? 

Cynically you could call this “zookeeping of artists” or optimistically it could be an element of Berkeley-as-culutural-marketplace. Consumers and producers alike travel to a market place—the producers usually produce elsewhere. Berkeley’s geography and “research center” economics suggest it is bound to become more marketplace than production site. Our civic policy should reflect that. 

 

Thomas Lord is a Berkeley resident.


Commentary: Empty Van Hool Buses on Telegraph

By Glen Kohler
Friday August 24, 2007

A closely-spaced motorcade of double-size Van Hool buses now trundles up and down Telegraph Avenue at all hours. I regularly observe the middle and Berkeley end of Bus Line No. 1 doing business on Telegraph and occasionally getting paint at Kelley-Moore at Telegraph and 42nd. Morning, noon, and night, I see an average range of six to 16 passengers occupying these cavernous vehicles. Telegraph Avenue in Oakland is in poor condition already. The greatest damage to city streets is done by buses, according to the paving engineer hired by City of Berkeley that I spoke to when North Shattuck Avenue was last repaved. And we all see how little budget there seems to be for street maintenance and repair in Berkeley and Oakland. Considering how much fuel is being consumed to deploy so many heavy buses to move so few passengers, BRT deserves a good deal more before-the-fact public disclosure and scrutiny than it has received.  

Listening to public input is not an AC Transit forté. The public agency is determinedly deaf to shouts of dismay from citizens who don’t want Telegraph to become any harder to negotiate than it already is. As much so as when both the riding public and bus drivers strongly criticized the elimination of bus lines in Oakland, and the use of more Van Hool buses. Top management “stayed the course” by moving ahead with reduction of services to areas that had no other transit service, and what has been called a sweetheart contract with the Belgian bus manufacturer. Today, as it touts its Telegraph Avenue project, AC Transit is removing bus stops elsewhere. 

Fran Haselsteiner wants us to know that BRT has been “fully vetted” by the public. But the many voices raised in opposition to this plan today suggest that “fully vetted” means something less than “exhibited to all in full public view.” Much like other schemes that affect hundreds of thousands of people—the aborted land grab at the Ashby BART and the stalled land grab at North Shattuck Avenue come to mind—BRT has suddenly emerged full-blown after the tritest gesture to public process. Now Fran urges us to sample the bliss from assurances by architects of this scheme that 9,300 new riders “may” accrue from its implementation. This bit of prefabricated spin—quintessetial pie-in-the-sky—misses the mark among level-headed Berkeley and Oakland citizens who oppose BRT. 

Here’s what bugs me about BRT: 1) It is grossly wasteful and destructive to our infrastructure, as described above. 2) AC Transit does not own Telegraph Avenue and has no right to push everyone who uses the street into one lane. Neither does Berkeley or Oakland. Telegraph was constructed and is maintained (!) with citizens’ money; the citizens own it. 2) Depriving the citizenry of full use of their street flies in the face of democratic principle and process. I choose to ride my bicycle for 80 percent of my transit needs. As a property manager I drive my car on Telegraph to obtain paint and supplies in Oakland. I don’t need AC Transit or Fran to “discourage” me by making the experience even more unpleasant and time-consuming (and thereby more gas-consuming) than it already is.  

If AC Transit is after more riders, let’s start by admitting that pre-BRT capacity is more than adequate for the foreseeable future. How about asking for state and federal transit money to offer low-cost or free bus service instead of clogging up our main intercity artery? There is already BART between the two cities. Restore bus service to some neighborhoods. That will increase ridership for sure, not ‘maybe’. 

BRT looks like a high-visibility bid for state and federal funds. The more insistently its spokespeople attempt to refute the obvious disadvantages of this plan, the more I wonder how much money is involved and where it is intended to go. 

 

Glen Kohler lives in Berkeley’s South Campus area. 


Commentary: Normalcy is Dead in South Berkeley

By Sam Herbert
Friday August 24, 2007

There is no “normal” left in Berkeley. Lethargy, a surfeit of political correctness, and confusion of common sense have led to its demise. I spend less time than I used to in community activism. It is not that the issues that plague South Berkeley have diminished in any way. My resignation comes from recognition that there are more individuals committed to defeating “normal” than I can battle. Conditions have changed little in the 11 years I’ve lived in Berkeley. The players change on both sides of the law, but the challenges remain. The dangers posed by the out-of-control illegal drug trade are still here. Shootouts are still commonplace in Beat 12. The focus of criminal activity in and around 1610 Oregon St. bleeds out—often literally—onto satellite sites, including other houses on the 1600 block Oregon Street; McGee Street (especially the four corners and the intersection of Oregon/McGee); the 1500 block of Oregon Street, with daily drug sales at the corner of Oregon/Sacramento and the apartments on the other side of Oregon; gunfire exchanges with residents of the Rosewood Apartments, on Russell and Oregon Street habitués; and now excursions onto Stuart Street as well.  

We are expected to accept that the car stolen by a thief in San Francisco, and abandoned in our neighborhood, was coincidental. We are told that it is coincidental that another stolen car, driven by two serial robbers in Oakland, was driven to the house across the street from 1610 Oregon by mere accident. It was likewise sheer coincidence that the female robber ran straight into a nearby house and stripped naked, jumping into the bathtub to escape capture by both Oakland and Berkeley police. Right. All just our version of “normal” here in South Berkeley. 

In the interests of full disclosure, my family has suffered less than many others. Let’s see…since I moved to Berkeley, we once had a rapist scale the back fence behind our yard, running from the police. He was captured, so I’m not sure if that counts. Another time, a man racing around the block crashed his car into the side of 1700 Oregon, and took off on foot. His escape route led through our yard as well. I have had a rose bush out front yanked out of the ground. Twice, individuals associated with the Moore household (1610 Oregon St.) tried to run me down with cars. A death threat was made against me, the very evening of the day I testified against local drug dealers in court. Worst of all, my son was attacked, along with a school friend, when the two boys walked down to the corner store for ice cream. It was an attempted robbery, and they managed to get away with a minor beating, but traumatic nonetheless. It destroyed whatever small hope I harbored that my son could grow up in normalcy. 

As I write this I am out of the area, visiting my elderly father and only sibling. They live in a (relatively) safe and (relatively) quiet neighborhood, with what I consider to be normal expectations of public safety. As many will tell you—and do—bad things happen to people everywhere, so Berkeley is no exception. That is true, as far as it goes, but there the similarities stop. In my dad’s community, neighbors have reasonable expectations of acceptable social conduct from everyone, and they don’t go out of their way to make excuses or exceptions for anyone. Further, they expect their law enforcement officers to behave like police officers, not like social workers. Last but not least, they expect their city government officials, and judicial agents, to prosecute the law as written, fairly and even-handedly for all. Berkeley residents could only WISH to experience that level of normal. We in Berkeley are left, out on our own, for most operative public safety needs. 

This disparity, in my opinion, comes from diminished expectations of support from city leaders. That condition comes direct from explicit admonitions from certain individuals, like Captain William Pittman telling neighbors at a ROC meeting that police involvement would only extend for two weeks, following a series of shooting events in our Beat. Beyond that? Captain Pittman answered, “Afterwards then, you are on your own.” Great. Or when a neighbor complained to Maudelle Shirek about the frequency of violence in our district, and asked what she should do, Ms. Shirek answered, “I think you should move.” This, from our elected city councilmember. Another pernicious element in eroding public confidence in city leadership, was the chronic undercharging by the COB district attorney’s office. Crimes that would have been presented to the courts as serious felonies were dismissed outright, or charged as minor crimes only. Not only was this a very demoralizing factor, but it led to a constant revolving door of criminals shunted back onto our streets. 

Neighbors in my father’s neighborhood speak with each other first, and civilly, if they have a dispute. If that is unsuccessful in resolving the problem, they rely on law enforcement and other city officials for assistance. They don’t stab their boyfriend in the back of the head over a small domestic squabble. They don’t pour Roundup over a neighbor’s 20-year-old planting and kill it, when they don’t agree with the owner’s politics. They don’t train their pit bulls to fight, and attack anyone who comes on their property. They don’t turn a blind eye to drug dealing by minors, and sponsor violence in the neighborhood. They don’t throw a molotov cocktail at the front of a neighbor’s house, setting their fence on fire, as retaliation for the administration of a legal judgment (against drug dealers in the neighborhood). Retaliation is not an acceptable method of resolving one’s dispute. Period. 

In Berkeley, by contrast, many of the residents have given up hope. They tolerate the intolerable; they accept the unacceptable. The children are the worst casualties of this deplorable atmosphere, being forced to grow up with the constant fear of unprovoked attack. One of these youth is celebrating his 21st birthday today. He was attacked as a young teen for the unthinkable crime of electing to leave a pickup ball game in the park nearby, when some of the players got too rough for a friendly game of pickup football. He was beaten into a coma, and was fortunate to survive with no lasting injury. His younger brother was jumped and beaten twice now already, both in the commission of a robbery. He was badly injured, but has survived with only the emotional scars. Only the emotional scars…as if they were not enough. 

Excuses made for (what I consider) actionable neglect by the City of Berkeley, to keep residents safe, fall into three categories. First, and most general, is the dismissive attitude that tells us that our problems aren’t really all that bad, and that it “happens everywhere.” If that one-size-fits-all excuse fails to dissuade critics, the second-tier defense is “aim to shame.” A finger-wagging lecture is delivered telling us how we need to “make allowances, exceptions” for the poor and underprivileged. The unspoken assumption seems to be that, if we are on the sunny side of the law, then we must be endowed with an over-abundance of privilege and resources. It’s a total crock of bologna, of course; I guarantee you I am poorer than most (if not all) of the drug dealers who habituate my neighborhood. If that excuse falls flat as well, then the be all/end all argument is pulled out of the drawer. Claims of racist callousness are leveled at the victims, in an effort to cut short any and all criticism. It usually works, too, although not by its own virtue. 

And if normalcy in Berkeley is dead and gone, for all and for good, who does one blame? I hold Councilmember Max Anderson and his predecessor, Maudelle Shirek, directly responsible by virtue of their hostility and outright opposition to community concerns. The elected city representative of District 3 ought to be the person we turn to for help. Instead, they have wielded a cynical, negative influence against true remediation of community problems. During her tenure with the City Council, Maudelle Shirek was almost entirely absent. She only came to one community meeting (of the ROC group) once, and lectured us about our responsibilities to other people’s children then. That one visit, and a more visible presence during the last election, were the only times she was in our neighborhood. No, I take that back. Ms. Shirek was seen visiting with Lenora Moore, owner of the worst drug house in our neighborhood, and her long-time friend. And we wonder how that residence is still in operation, with 30 years worth of criminal activity. 

Max Anderson was elected to City Council with the full support, and full coffers, of well-connected friends. He outspent rival Laura Menard 10-to-1 in the campaign. Once elected, he made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with anyone who couldn’t be counted as an unquestioning supporter. Max Anderson has avoided open exchanges with his constituents, and has shown blatant neglect of the issues of concern to us. His voice, when forced to interact with us, has been one of a bigot and a bully. We have no representation in South Berkeley. Not in our neighborhoods. Not in Beat 12. Not in District 3. Not in our city. 

And without effective representation, there is no “normal.” 

 

Sam Herbert is a South Berkeley resident.


Commentary: Commemorating the Life of Peace Activist Brian Willson

By Mark Coplan
Friday August 24, 2007

Long-time peace activist Brian Willson became an international symbol of nonviolent resistance when he was run over by a train carrying weapons to Central America at the Concord Naval Weapons Station, near Concord, California, on Sept. 1, 1987. Brian miraculously survived, but lost both his legs and received a severe head injury. A subsequent investigation revealed that the government train was speeding, that the military drivers could see him for over 650 feet, and that they never applied the brakes as the train ran over him. He had been sitting on the tracks in a widely publicized protest against U.S. military intervention in Central America.” (Excerpt from The Road to Transformation: A Conversation with Brian Willson, by John Dear). 

From this tragedy the small group of veterans, peace activists and pastors who called themselves Nuremberg Actions were joined by peace activists from around the world. 

In the time that followed, many of us came to the weapons station to take part in a 24-hour vigil that lasted for over three years, blocking every weapons train that attempted to pass, in an extraordinary action that was recognized around the world. Many came to live on the small stretch of railroad track that a court order allowed us to maintain, for a week, a month or a year, or just for the night. Others felt compelled to come once a week or once a month to share in the community, drawn by the spiritual energy left by the thousands who came to witness in those years, including Wavy Gravy, Martin Sheen, Daniel Elsberg and Jessie Jackson, as well as other religious leaders from around the world. From churches and peace centers in San Francisco, Santa Rosa, Mendocino and many other communities, so many peacemakers regularly made the difficult pilgrimage out to the other side of Concord. I had the opportunity to live on those tracks for a year as the media coordinator for Nuremberg Actions, one of the most profound experiences of my life.  

Sept. 1 marks the 20th anniversary of the assault on Brian that woke up the world to what was happening at the Concord Naval Weapons Station and the role that Nuremberg Actions would play in the long term witness of the weapons being shipped to Central America and other places. 

Brian Willson, David Hartsough, Ken Butigan, Greg Getty and I welcome any of you able to join us on Sept. 1 at that sacred spot from 10 a.m. to noon to remember, reflect and re-affirm our commitment to peace and justice. No program per say, just a typical circle at the tracks with music and friends, hugs and reflections, and a chance for old friends to catch up on where our lives have gone these past 20 years. For more information, write to NurembergReunion@comcast.net 

 

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


Columns

Green Neighbors: The Survival of the Birch Beer Canoodle

By Ron Sullivan
Tuesday August 28, 2007

A birch is about as exotic as a banana here, and maybe they’re both ubiquitous in people’s front yards for similar nostalgic reasons—or maybe instead because they’re so outrageous when you know where you are.  

They’re both thirsty, so it’s good to keep them in the well-watered zone of the garden. A cluster of birches looks natural with a patch of lawngrass and/or a fern, an understory flower or two. It doesn’t take acres to evoke the Eastern North American forests in their most tender-looking moods.  

By some standards, of course, birch is tough as nails. Most of the several birch species need plenty of water but other than that, they’re sturdy; they stand up just fine to New England, Alaskan, and Siberian winters and they’re resourceful enough to use as pioneer plants on “reclaimed” culm dumps and other mining scars. The sight of white-barked paper birches on a black anthracite spoilbank is one of those Proustian guilty pleasures for me. I know it’s devastation, but those trees look so starkly handsome I still have to smile.  

Lots of birches have tan or reddish bark and they’re generally good-looking too, but the emblematic birch, the one that gets photographed against blue-white snow or a brilliant green spring understory has white bark. Here, it’s usually the North American native paper or white birch (Betula papyrifera), gray birch (B. populifolia) in those postcard photos and the European white birch (B. pendula) in our gardens.  

This time of year, people often panic at the sight of blackened, soot-covered, and bug-riddled leaves on their birches. All the birch species I know of are susceptible to aphids, and aphid droppings—one of several such excretions called “honeydew” because they do in fact taste sweet—grow various kinds of mold and mildew readily, on the leaf surfaces and on any object beneath them.  

(That’s pretty much what’s going on with those poor beleaguered tuliptrees on University Avenue, by the way. Yes, they should be replaced, but a few at a time and not during nesting season please! It’s a shame: they’re beautiful trees but they’re really happier in a more lush situation like a lawn.)  

My earnest counsel about aphid-infested birches? Do nothing. The trees are deciduous and will drop their leaves in a month or two anyway, bugs and all. Meanwhile you have the ideal ladybird beetle nursery and that’s what you’ll want around next spring when the aphids return. Look at whatever leaves are in reach and see if you don’t have some of those ferocious black alligator-looking ladybeetle youngsters there. The kids eat more aphids than the adults do, as kids are wont. Cherish them. 

While I’m dishing advice and barking orders: I’ve notice that some people have the unsavory habit of topping their birches, cutting the top several feet of the tree right off. What’s up with that? Aside from destroying the natural grace of the tree, it’s slow murder, and what branches do arise from the mutilated trunk will be weakly attached—originating only from the edge of the trunk—and so prone to snapping off when they grow heavy enough to be more than twigs. Stop that right now.  

Aside from the Robert Frost poem about “a swinger of birches” and the birchbark canoe whose survival John McPhee eloquently celebrated, birches figure in our culture, or at least our décor, largely as a signifier of the demi-wilderness, the cabin in the woods that’s just a bit beyond dirt flooring, the sort of thing LL Bean touts. The elegant white bark gets used for picture frames and occasional furniture.  

Once upon a time it made paper, just as I thought it must when I was a kid. Historic “frontier” documents exist that are scrawled and signed on a wide strip peeled right off the tree. It seems irresistible for the sort of folks who write on living trees, too, as the “Fred + Chloe 4 ever” eventually becomes something like a keloid, black and prominent against the white, ready to embarrass Fred + Chloe’s kids unto the third generation. 

My own cultural madeline featuring birches—aside from making strictly decorative porridge and bread out of the ripe catkins to go with the mulberries we gorged on in summer—is birch beer. Cook’s Illustrated site www.cooks.com/rec has a recipe for real beer-type birch beer made with birch sap and yeast. What I remember, though, is a red soda somewhat like root beer but less heavy. Apparently it’s a Pennsylvania Dutch thing, judging by its distribution.  

My sister Ellen took a load of it along with a few pounds of garlic ring bologna and Utz’s potato chips down to Orlando a couple of weeks ago to celebrate her daughter’s graduation from nursing school. The exotic-or-nostalgic cuisine got an enthusiastic reception there. Now I’m wondering how well it would make it through the average airport.  

And I miss my sister, too. 

 

Photograph by Ron Sullivan. Birch trees in their unmangled natural form. These, like many trees this year, are showing early fall color. 

 

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.


Column: The Public Eye: Two Great Iraq War Documentaries by Berkeleyans

By Bob Burnett
Friday August 24, 2007

Berkeley residents have made two superb documentaries about the long-term impact of the war in Iraq: No End in Sight and Soldiers of Conscience. 

No End in Sight asks why did the occupation fail? It considers Bush administration decisions that turned the Iraqis against the United States and guaranteed the rise of the insurgency. Soldiers of Conscience asks: What is this war doing to us? It studies the impact of Iraq military service on the lives of four soldiers and, by extension, all Americans. 

No End in Sight reprises questions addressed in recent books and articles, notably Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor and The Assassins’ Gate by George Packer. The documentary examines six decisions that guaranteed the occupation would fail: not sending enough troops to keep the peace; moving responsibility for the occupation from the Department of State—where advance planning had been done—to the Department of Defense—where no planning had been done; not stopping the looting; not establishing an interim Iraqi government; De-Ba’thification—prohibiting all members of Saddam’s Ba’th Party from holding public office; and disbanding the Iraqi Army. 

Berkeley resident Charles Ferguson—the director, producer and writer of No End in Sight—dissects these decisions by interviewing many of the principals: notably former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, former Iraqi Ambassador Barbara Bodine, former Iraq Czar Jay Garner, former Iraq Army liaison Paul Hughes, former head of the National Intelligence Council Robert Hutchings, and Senior DOD Executive Walter Slocombe. What emerges is a familiar story: the White House was locked into their view of Iraq and didn’t want contradictory information. No End in Sight tells this tragic story from the perspective of Americans who wanted to do the right thing, who believed our mission was to free the Iraqi people and to establish a model democracy. Many of the interviewees were career civil servants but some are the men and women who risked their lives in Iraq; notably Marine Lieutenant Seth Moulton whose poignant words end the film: “Don’t tell me that [this] is the best America can do. That makes me angry.” 

Soldiers of Conscience was produced and directed by Berkeley residents Gary Weimberg and Catherine Ryan. The documentary considers the moral/psychological impact of military service in Iraq. It begins with a remarkable statistic: in World War II only 25 percent of American soldiers who had a chance to fire their weapon at the enemy, actually did so. The military saw this as a problem and developed “reflexive fire training,” a technique to condition American soldiers to kill without thinking. In the Korean, Vietnam, and Gulf wars, the firing rates went up until 85 to 95 percent of American soldiers were willing to fire on the enemy. No one has compiled statistics for the Iraq war but the firing rate is believed to be near 100 percent; the film’s grim images of Iraqi dead and wounded appear to confirm this. 

Soldiers of Conscience observes, “The problem with reflexive fire training is that it bypasses the moral process.” Camilo Mejia, one of four U.S. soldiers whose experience is the heart of the documentary, chillingly recalls shooting a young Iraqi without thinking. 

Mejia, Joshua Casteel, Kevin Benderman, and Aidan Delgado all decided they were conscientious objectors and requested an end to their military service. Casteel and Delgado were quickly ushered out. Mejia and Benderman first served time in jail. Interestingly, both Casteel and Delgado changed after serving at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Benderrman and Mejia came to their decision after returning to the United States and reflecting upon what they’d seen and done in Iraq. 

While Soldiers of Conscience provides fascinating insight into the moral dilemmas posed by military service in Iraq and the brave decisions made by four soldiers, it leaves unanswered an important question: what are the long term moral/psychological affects of reflexive fire training? Statistics indicate that record numbers of Iraq war veterans suffer from psychological ailments, most notably Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. (The Army suicide rate is also at a 26-year high.) This has burdened the agencies charged with helping our veterans. It also has had a negative impact on our economy, as many of the psychologically impaired returnees cannot resume their former occupations. 

No End in Sight and Soldiers of Conscience demonstrate that America practices decision-making that bypasses the ethical process. We teach “reflexive fire training” so that our soldiers will kill without thinking. No End in Sight proves that high-ranking Bush administration officials made snap decisions about the occupation of Iraq without adequately considering the long-term consequences—they fired without thinking. 

That’s what’s profoundly disturbing about both of these excellent documentaries: they provide further evidence that America abandoned critical thinking in Iraq. 

No End in Sight is playing at Berkeley’s Shattuck Cinemas. To view Soldiers of Conscience see www.socfilm.com. 

 

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

 


Column: Undercurrents: Parsing the Case Against Your Black Muslim Bakery

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday August 24, 2007

There was always something that seemed extraordinarily fortuitous about the supposed quick solving of the Chauncey Bailey murder case. 

To believe the public statements over that frantic weekend following the 14th Street shooting death of the Oakland Post editor two weeks ago, you would have to believe that with no prior suspicion that Your Black Muslim Bakery associates had something to do with Bailey’s death, the Oakland Police Department were lucky enough to raid bakery properties less than 24 hours after Bailey’s death, discovering the murder weapon which the alleged murderer was stupid enough to bring home with him rather than disposing it in any number of ways one might easily imagine. 

Police investigators are often lucky. Perpetrators are often stupid. That both occurred during the most high-profile Oakland murder in more than 30 years—one that would have brought enormous pressure on police and city officials the longer it went unsolved—is something that might have given one pause. 

But anyone who attended the packed Friday afternoon press conference at OPD headquarters the afternoon following the bakery raid, or who has read the press coverage in the weeks afterwards, knows that there has been little pause in the press or in the public, once OPD officials announced that evidence relating to the Bailey murder had been found by police during the bakery premises raid. Any trail of inquiry other than those that led to Your Black Muslim Bakery went out the public door with the Saturday story leaked in the Oakland Tribune—and confirmed the following Monday by OPD Deputy Chief Howard Jordan—that a 19-year-old handyman at the bakery, Devaughndre Broussard, had confessed to Bailey’s murder. (The San Francisco Chronicle later reported that “Broussard was seen throwing a shotgun out the window of a raided home on 59th Street in Oakland, and a match was made between the weapon and shell casings found near Bailey’s body, police said.”) And when Mr. Jordan told reporters that OPD investigators did not believe Mr. Broussard’s story that he, Mr. Broussard, acted alone in the murder, with Mr. Jordan carefully adding that, “We don’t believe he acted on his own. We’re still working on how that plan was developed,” the popular assumption was that this meant that Broussard acted under orders, and that those orders came from Your Black Muslim Bakery officials. 

But Mr. Broussard has since recanted that confession, signed without his counsel being present, and yesterday, the Tribune reports Broussard’s attorney, LeRue Grim, is saying that bakery leader Yusuf Bey IV, not Broussard, is the person behind Bailey’s death. 

“You would think he is the main guy responsible for all of this,” the Tribune quotes Mr. Grim. “That is just logical, he is in charge of the whole place.” 

The Broussard confession has also been tainted by the fact—confirmed by OPD officials—that OPD investigators allowed Mr. Bey IV, who was also arrested during the bakery raid, to talk privately with Mr. Broussard in the interrogation room at police headquarters shortly before Mr. Broussard made his confession. According to the Tribune, OPD Sgt. Derwin Longmire confirmed that Bey IV, 21, spoke with Broussard and said, “Yusuf Bey IV was allowed to speak to Broussard as part of the investigative strategy.” 

The Bey IV-Broussard meeting inside police headquarters while both were under arrest seems a strange type of “strategy” for police investigators. The tossing of the murder weapon by Mr. Broussard did not automatically link him directly to the murder of Chauncey Bailey, but the discovery of the weapon on a property “associated” with Your Black Muslim Bakery provided police with a link between the bakery and the murder. That immediately gave OPD investigators considerable leverage over the seven individuals arrested in the Aug. 3 police raids, the two people who were under warrant but eluded arrest, and anyone else associated with the bakery. 

Mr. Broussard’s original confession—in which he absolved anyone else but himself of responsibility for or participation in Mr. Bailey’s murder—took other bakery members off the hook, at least for the time being. Was the Bey IV-Broussard jailhouse meeting then a “mistake” by police investigators, making them lose leverage against other bakery associates they earlier had? Or was obtaining the confession part of a police strategy to ramp up pressure on Mr. Broussard, forcing him to implicate other bakery associates, as his attorney is now doing? I don’t have any answers to those questions, but maybe that will become manifest as more things are revealed about the investigation. 

Meanwhile, while we ought to listen to Mr. Broussard’s attorney, we ought to be careful about what we take for information, and what we take for spin. 

Mr. Grim came into this case at a difficult time, with his client already having signed a confession, first, and then repudiating it by saying that police had beaten it out of him. Mr. Grim’s job, as a defense attorney charged with defending his client, has been to stir up as much doubt as he can about the original confession, and to try to point the finger of guilt away from Mr. Broussard. He has done a good job of it in a bad situation. But because Mr. Grim now infers that Mr. Bey IV may be “the main guy responsible for all of this” does not necessarily mean that Mr. Broussard believes that or will eventually testify to it, much less that it is actually true. 

Let us boil down what we know or reasonably believe to be fact, at this point. 

First, Chauncey Bailey was working on an article for the Oakland Post that was critical to certain members of Your Black Muslim Bakery, critical enough to anger them.  

Second, the Bailey murder weapon was found by police on one of the premises associated with Your Black Muslim Bakery. (This a fact one can reasonably assume, since Mr. Grim has not disputed it.) 

From these two sets of facts, which were introduced at the Friday OPD press conference following the bakery raids, many have concluded that one or more bakery associates killed Chauncey Bailey. Some—maybe many—have also concluded that the killings were ordered by top bakery officials. 

But while those conclusions certainly could be true, the two sets of facts that we have earlier outlined don’t necessarily make those conclusions true. 

While there is a likelihood that the presence of the murder weapon on bakery property means that someone associated with the bakery was responsible for Mr. Bailey’s murder, it does not leave out the possibility that the weapon was planted there after the shooting by someone not associated with the bakery, but who wanted to implicate the bakery. (I am not suggesting that this scenario is true; I am only trying to see what is proven, so far, by the facts and evidence on hand.) 

And while one can reasonably conclude that if it is determined that a bakery associate murdered Chauncey Bailey, such a murder came under the orders of bakery officials, one can also conclude, just as reasonably, that history has provided a possibility that just the opposite could also be the case. 

In 1965, former Nation of Islam minister Malcolm X was shot and killed by three gunmen in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, New York. The gunmen, who were captured on the scene and identified by eyewitnesses to the shooting, were revealed to be members of the Nation of Islam. Because Malcolm X had left the Nation of Islam under difficult circumstances, and had been publicly feuding with the organization ever since, there was a widespread conclusion that Malcolm X’s murder was carried out under orders by top NOI officials. 

But that, in fact, was never proven, and many of Malcolm X’s supporters now believe it not to be true. 

In a note in Malcolm X’s autobiography, published after his death, co-author Alex Haley said that following his split with the Nation, Malcolm X had been poisoned during a trip to Europe. According to Mr. Haley, Malcolm X told him that while he (Malcolm) believed that NOI officials may have wanted him dead, he (Malcolm) did not believe the NOI had the capability of making an attack on European soil, and that there was a death plot against him from an entity with a longer reach. 

From that revelation, many of Malcolm X’s supporters began to believe that Malcolm X’s assassination was ordered by some group or organization other than the NOI, which used NOI members to commit the act in order to throw suspicion on the NOI and away from the real perpetrators. 

In the same way, someone who wanted to kill Chauncey Bailey could have used an associate or associates of Your Black Muslim Bakery to commit the act, in the hope that once the public learned of Your Black Muslim Bakery involvement in any way, the public would think that the orders came from bakery officials, and would concentrate all efforts on proving that. 

The Your Black Muslim Bakery story, after all, was not the only story Chauncey Bailey was working on, nor the only sensitive area he had dug into. 

Am I saying I believe this scenario is true, that the bakery was set up to take the fall for the Chauncey Bailey murder? Am I defending Your Black Muslim Bakery? 

Absolutely not. 

I am saying that I want to know who killed Chauncey Bailey and, if it was under orders, who gave the orders. Public opinion now points in the direction of Your Black Muslim Bakery and only Your Black Muslim Bakery, both as the perpetrators and the order givers, but the available evidence that has been so far publicly presented does not (yet) justify such a conclusion. Unless and until it does, I am going to continue to wait, and watch, and keep an open mind, and try not to miss anything important. Hope you do so, too. 


Architectural Excursions: General Vallejo Practiced the Art of Living Well

By Daniella Thompson
Friday August 24, 2007

We all need a sanity break from Berkeley every now and then, but not everyone can fly off to the Seychelles or to Switzerland when the urge to flee is upon us. 

Happily, beauty and calm are within easy reach in northern California. Only 55 miles away, the Sonoma Valley offers a myriad historic, visual, and gustatory attractions. Many of these are concentrated in the lovely town of Sonoma, which was built around Mission San Francisco Solano—the last and northernmost of California’s 21 missions. 

Established in 1823, after Mexico had obtained its independence from Spain, the mission was secularized in 1834 by Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo (1907–1890), whose title at the time was Military Commander and Director of Colonization of the Northern Frontier. 

Vallejo would soon become Comandante General of Alta California. Even after California had joined the Union, Vallejo continued to be active in public life. A member of the first State Constitutional Convention, he was elected to the first Legislature as State Senator. 

Nothing marked the difference between Vallejo’s Mexican and American periods more sharply than his residences. As Comandante General, he lived in La Casa Grande, a traditional two-story adobe house overlooking the central plaza. As State Senator, he settled in what he proudly called his “Yankee Home” and “Boston House.” 

In 1850, Vallejo purchased a 500-acre tract of open land half-a-mile west of the Sonoma plaza. The land included a free-flowing spring called Chiucuyem (Tears of the Mountain) by the Native Americans. Vallejo bestowed a Latin version of the name on his new estate, christening it Lachryma Montis. 

The house erected at Lachryma Montis in 1851–52 was designed and prefabricated in New England, shipped by sailboat around Cape Horn, and assembled on site. The style is Carpenter Gothic—the American wood-frame version of Victorian Gothic Revival, which had come into vogue on the East Coast in the previous decade. 

Despite its generous size, General Vallejo’s home appears like a dollhouse thanks to quaint details such as steeply pitched, dormered roof gables; lacy bargeboards “dripping” from the eaves; green-shuttered windows; and porches festooned with grape arbors. 

Perfectly symmetrical, the house points its parlor wing to the south, leading forth with a Gothic lancet window on the second floor and a slender bay window directly below. The hall is entered from twin porches flanking this wing on east and west. Behind the hall on the ground floor is the main wing, containing the dining room, the General’s study (he once owned the largest library in the state), and two rear bedrooms. 

Two narrow staircases—front and back—climb to the second floor, where the large master bedroom is located over the parlor. Behind it are a small sewing room turned nursery and two bedrooms that were once occupied by the Vallejos’ youngest daughters, Luisa and Maria. With the exception of the nursery, all the rooms in the main house—seven in all—contain white marble fireplaces venting through five chimneys. 

Many house museums are furnished with generic period artifacts collected here and there. Not so the Vallejo house, which is filled with genuine family heirlooms, from furniture and paintings to musical instruments and clothing. For the General’s bicentennial birthday on July 4, his embroidered silk vest was put on display in the parlor. 

All these treasures came down to us from Luisa, the fifteenth of sixteen Vallejo children, who inherited the estate and lived here until her death in 1943. Luisa sold the property with its contents to the State of California in 1933 and was the first curator of Lachryma Montis, which was turned into a state park. 

Typical of mid-19th century houses, the Vallejo residence has no bathrooms—the family made do with washstands and chamber pots. As a precaution against fire, the kitchen was located in a separate building in the rear. A simpler version of the main house, this cookhouse also served as the servants’ dining room, the cook’s sleeping quarters, and a storage loft. It is separated from the main house by an old grape arbor planted with an old Flame Tokay vine that still bears fruit in abundance. This vine is the legacy of Agoston Haraszthy (1812–1869), a Hungarian immigrant who founded the Buena Vista winery in 1857 and is known as the Father of California Viticulture. Two of Haraszthy’s sons married two of the General’s daughters. The Flame Tokay was one of thousands of cuttings Haraszthy shipped from Europe to California. 

West of the main house sits the enchanting El Delírio, a diminutive garden pavilion surrounded by trellis work and fronted by a cast iron swan fountain. Here Vallejo wrote his five-volume history, Recuerdos Historicos y Personales Tocantes à la Alta California, 1769–1849. 

Behind the cookhouse is a large reservoir lined on one side by a brick-paved wooden pergola. A sizable population of turtles inhabits these waters, and a thicket of prickly-pear cactus dominates the far shore, where a winding stone staircase leads to a reconstruction of the Hermitage. This one-room hut was built for the use of Vallejo’s son Platon during his school vacations and later became the domain of the youngest son, Napoleon, who kept a menagerie that at one time included 14 dogs, several cats, and a parrot. 

Returning to the main courtyard, you’ll want to visit the museum located in the half-timbered brick building displaying a gigantic carriage lantern. This structure, prefabricated with imported components, was used for storing wine and produce before being converted to residential use and named the Chalet. 

The $2 admission fee also covers other sites in the Sonoma State Historic Park, including Mission San Francisco Solano de Sonoma, the Sonoma Barracks, the Toscano Hotel, and Vallejo’s Petaluma Adobe. 

General Vallejo’s domain might inspire you to emulate his gracious lifestyle. Fortunately, just one block to the west one can dine opulently and memorably in Sonoma’s most highly acclaimed restaurant, The General's Daughter. Built in 1870, this Italianate structure was the home of Natalia Vallejo and her husband, the vintner Attila Haraszthy. The food and wine are fabulous. Bring plenty of money. 

 

 

Getting there:  

Lachryma Montis 

363 3rd Street West (off West Spain St.) 

Sonoma, CA 95476 

(707) 938-9559 

 

The General's Daughter Restaurant 

400 West Spain Street (at 4th Street) 

Sonoma, CA 95476 

(707) 938-4004 

 

Photograph: Daniella Thompson 

General Vallejo’s house was prefabricated and shipped from New England in 1851. 


Metonymy in the Garden: Containing Yourself

By Ron Sullivan
Friday August 24, 2007

Glenn Keator talked to the Merritt College Aesthetic Pruning Club’s annual symposium last week about planting in containers, and here are some of the things he said and evoked: 

Container planting is great in urban spaces where there’s no room for a conventional garden or access to the dirt. It’s also a good way to dress up a dirt garden: a container plant can call attention to a spot, or can be displayed when it’s in bloom or in season and then moved offstage afterwards.  

Container planting can be used to solve—even if temporarily, still usefully—difficulties posed by soil deficiencies like intractable clay or hardpan. You can have plants to enjoy or harvest while you work on drainage or toxicity problems.  

Container plantings are also portable, a great thing if you’re in a temporary housing situation whether renting or in a dorm.  

That’s also an advantage because you can move the plants to take advantage of sun as the seasons change, or to shelter tender plants using the eaves and thermal mass of a building when we get the odd 30-degree Fahrenheit spell in January.  

Another speaker noted that one can use container plants in some situations as a privacy screen to turn an otherwise visible deck into a personal solar-powered spa-lette to eliminate tan lines for an arguably special occasion.  

I myself must disrecommend this stratagem in particular to anyone who is as melanin-challenged as I am, as I am reaching the stage of having little bits of myself whacked off between semiannual skin-cancer checkups.  

I must also note that that speaker has not so far demonstrated the reported effects to any neutral third party, as a truly scientific finding would require. Not that I’m volunteering. 

Container gardening has some rules that differ greatly from dirt gardening. 

First: Don’t just dig up some dirt from the yard (or take some from a handy construction site) to fill your pots. Native soil, especially in most of the Bay Area, just doesn’t work for potting; it’s too dense and sticky. Seems a shame not to use all that free dirt, but there it is.  

You need what’s called a “soilless mix” or just plain “potting soil,” available in sacks at nurseries and variety stores like Long’s on Broadway.  

This stuff is theoretically nearly sterile, at least pasteurized, so it doesn’t foster pathogens like some fungi that attack potted plants and won’t have plant-eating nematodes and such annoying inhabitants either.  

Plants in the ground are susceptible to these too of course, but there’s something about being pent up in a container that concentrates the forces of plant-preying evil. 

Part of that something is drainage, which soilless mixes are designed to improve. They’re mostly larger particles than our clay. (Clay has particles so fine they trap water in the spaces between them, by the functional equivalent of surface tension.)  

There are plenty of brands to choose from, most roughly equivalent. Keator did have an unkind word for American Soil’s private mix, in which he has found big ol’ clay lumps.  

More about containers next week.  

 

 

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her  

“Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Daily Planet’s  

East Bay Home & Real Estate  

section. Her column on East Bay 

trees appears every other Tuesday  

in the Daily Planet.


Arts & Events

Arts Calendar

Tuesday August 28, 2007

TUESDAY, AUGUST 28 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Wonderland, A Fairytale of the Soviet Monolith” Black and white photographs by Jason Eskenazi on display at the Graduate School of Journalism, North Gate Hall, UC Campus.  

FILM 

Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker “Five” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Tell on on Tuesdays Storytelling with Tim Ereneta, Maryclare McCauley, Neshama Franklin and Bruce Pachtman at 7:30 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Cost is $8-$12 sliding scale. www.juiamorgan.org 

Sinan Antoon, author of “I’jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody” at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Bookstore, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

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

Singers’ Open Mic with Kelly Park at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Randy Craig Trio, jazz, at 7:30 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

Sophie Milman at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $8-$14. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Jazzschool Tuesdays at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 29 

FILM 

International Latino Film Society “O casamento de Romeu e Julieta” at 7 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5-$6. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Eco-Amok: An Inconvenient Film Fest “Habitat” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

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  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Doug Arrington & His Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Kleptograss at 8 p.m. at Strings, 6320 San Pablo Ave., Emeryville. 

Swingthing at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Swing dance lesson at 7:30 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Fred O’Dell and the Broken Arrows at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Orquestra Liberacion at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Mo’ Fone at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Rick Di Dia & Aireene Espiritu, Blind Willies at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

Ed Reed at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $6-$12. 238-9200.  

THURSDAY, AUGUST 30 

EXHIBITIONS 

Kala Art Institute Residency Projects, Part 3 opens with a reception at 6 p.m. at 1060 Heinz Ave. Exhibition runs to Oct. 6. 549-2977. www.kala.org 

FILM 

Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker “10 on Ten” at 7 p.m. and “The Wind Will Carry Us” at 9 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Earl Shorris describes “The Politics of Heaven: America in Fearful Times” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

The Meditations, reggae, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12-$15. 525-5054.  

Dry Branch Fire Squad at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761.  

Paul Perez Project featuring Frank Martin at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

LaWanda & Greg, modern folk, rock at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

Will Franken, Jascha Ephraim at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082  

Katura, Afro-Cuban, at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12-$15. 849-2568.  

Allan Hodsworth at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

FRIDAY, AUGUST 31 

THEATER 

Aurora Theatre “Hysteria” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St., through Sept. 30. Tickets are $40-$42. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.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 

“Citizen Josh” with monologoist Josh Kornbluth, Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Repertory Theater, 2025 Addison St., through Sept. 2. Tickets are $25-$30. 647-2949. 

Masquers Playhouse “The Shadow Box” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond, through Sept. 29. This show is not recommended for children.Tickets are $15. 232-4031. www.masquers.org  

TheaterInSearch “Epic of Gilgamesh” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., through Sept. 2. Tickets are $12-$20. 262-0584. 

Viaticum “The Carnal Table” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 3 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. through Sept. 2. Tickets are $10-$15. 848-3338. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Hit the Road, Jack...” A mixed-media group show. Opening reception at 7 p.m at Eclectix Gallery, 7523 Fairmount Ave., El Cerrito. 364-7261. 

FILM 

From the Tsars to the Stars: A Journey through Russian Fantastik Cinema “The Heavens Call” at 7 p.m. and “Zero City” at 8:45 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Los Boleros, Havana dance party, at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

 

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

Melvin Seals & JGB, The Jolly Gibsons at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $17-$20. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Judea Eden Band at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Mike Eckstein and Vanessa Lowe at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Matthew Hansen, James Deprato, Sean Hodge at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

Jeff Jernigan at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Pacuzo, Digust of Us, alt, jazz, latin, at 9:30 p.m. at the Stork Club Oakland, 2330 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $5. 444-6174. 

Lifesavas at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $8-$10. 548-1159.  

Shim Sham Rebellion at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Allan Hodsworth at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, SEPT. 1 

CHILDREN  

“Aesop’s Fables Puppet Show” Sat. and Sun. at 11 a.m. and 2 and 4 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. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash with David Alpaugh and Lynne Knight at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Roseanne Dimalanta & Ray Obiedo’s Latin Project at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

M’Balou Kante at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Guinean dance workshop at 8:30 p.m. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Sotaque Baiano, Brazilian, at 8 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Heaven with Your Boots On, Kevin McCarthy at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. 

Jonathan Segel, Victor Krummenacher, P.A.F. at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

Allegiance, Set it Straight, SBV, Down Again, at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, SEPT. 2 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Philips Marine Duo at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Naked Barbies record release party at 4 p.m. at The Starry Plough. all gaes. 841-2082.  

La Kay, Haitian, at 5 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Doomhawk, Red Herring, Pet Club 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. 

MONDAY, SEPT. 3 

EXHIBITIONS 

“The Face of Place” mixed media by Janet Brugos opens at L’Amyx Tea Bar, 4179 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. www.lamyx.com 

“Found Photos” An exhibition of photographs by Yvette Hoffer shot 50 years ago in Europe on exhibit at Downtown Restaurant, 2102 Shattuck, through Oct.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Don Coffin and Paul Ellis, Celtic, jazz, at 7 p.m. at Le Bateau Ivre, 2629 Telegraph Ave. 849-1100. www.lebateauivre.net 

 

 

 

 


Arts and Entertainment Around the East Bay

Tuesday August 28, 2007

‘VIATICUM’ AT LIVE OAK 

 

Viaticum (The Carnal Table), on stage at Live Oak Theatre Thursday through Sunday, is described as “a tasty bit of hell” and subtitled “A Tragic Farce in Ten Fits,” like Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark. Author-director Helen Pau has served up a veritable platter of scenes, vignettes and monologues of the amusingly outré, on Kim A. Tolman’s extravagant set—part Gothic crypt, part king-size chessboard—where the aptly-named Strange family cavort and extemporize, becoming pirates, nuns, secret agents. Like a De Chirico painting, the vanishing point is infinity, and the motifs crowd together, helter-skelter. Features skydiver David Usner as paratrooper/adventurer Saul Strange at his “birthday party turned Last Supper,” with Michaela Greeley excellent as his astringent wife Jean. 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday; 3 p.m. Sunday. 

 

ED REED SINGS LOVE STORIES AT YOSHI’S 

 

Ed Reed, jazz singer extraordinaire and a Richmond resident, will make his Yoshi’s debut at the Jack London Square club Wednesday evening, with shows at 8 p.m. ($12) and 10 p.m. ($6). The quartet backing him up will include the co-producers of his maiden CD, Ed Reed Sings Love Stories (samples at edreedsings.com). Berkeley High graduate and New York multi-instrumentalist Peck Allmond and radio personality-producer Bud Spangler on drums, as well as John Wiitala on bass (another album alumnus) and Matt Clark on piano.  

“It’s Bud’s debut at Yoshi’s, too,” Reed said. “He’s been behind the scenes there for records he’s produced, but never playing onstage before.”  

Reed’s CD, on his and his wife Diane’s label, has been getting airplay around the country, and Reed has been booked later this fall at the Jazz Standard in New York and for a benefit in Boston, headlined by George Benson. His standing gig has been Tuesday evenings (excepting tonight) at the Cheese Board pizza parlor on Shattuck in North Berkeley, where he and pianist Brian Cooke both bring in new material weekly, exploring the American songbook.  

The Yoshi’s show, however, puts Reed in the premiere jazz room in the Bay Area. Well-known jazzwriter-musician Lee Hildebrand wrote Reed up last week in the Chronicle and “the phone’s been ringing ever since,” Reed said. “When I went to work at Kaiser [where Reed’s a counselor], everybody applauded! I’m excited about Yoshi’s. When I was growing up in L.A., I performed in the weekly talent shows at the Lincoln Theatre, where the comic used to come out with a big black gun and shoot you, if the audience didn’t like you. And I got shot a lot! They’d really jeer you. I’m glad I had that kind of rigorous apprenticeship—but Yoshi’s ... that’s got to be a step up!”


Books: Delightful Characters of Bygone Berkeley

Tuesday August 28, 2007

By RICHARD BRENNEMAN 

 

If, in the year 2107, someone were to write a book like Richard Schwartz’s latest effort, he could well be one of its subjects. 

Eccentrics, Heroes, and Cutthroats of Old Berkeley is a guiltless pleasure, a delightful collection of tales about some of the city’s most fascinating and wrongly forgotten characters. 

A builder by trade, Schwartz is Berkeley’s resident amateur historian, the author of two previous works of community history. 

After his Berkeley 1900 account of the city at the dawn of a new century and Earthquake Exodus, 1906 with its account of Berkeley’s response to the Great Earthquake of 1906, Schwartz moves on to profile in words and contemporary images some of the folks who help the city’s justifiable reputation as home to some of the most colorful, cantankerous and fascinating folks on the nation’s Left Coast. 

Take Emperor Norton for example—that genteel and majestically delusional soul and legendary San Franciscan whose funeral in 1880 drew 30,000 mourners. 

Self-proclaimed Emperor of North America and Protector of Mexico, he was also a familiar figure in the city across the bay from the seat of his realm, conducting reviews of UC Berkeley military cadets and upstaging a real-life emperor who’d come to lecture on a university stage. 

Then there was John E. Boyd, an oft-lauded and occasionally arrested homespun essayist and sometimes city-official-cum-town-drunk—in addition to his self-anointed role as Boss Baggage Buster of Beautiful Berkeley. 

A vivid stylist whose wordsmithing some thought comparable to Twain’s, he also became a cinematic hero, a rescuer on horseback in the 1906 film A Trip to Berkeley, which still plays on the Pacific Film Archive’s silver screen. 

Courts closed when he died, the City Hall flag flew at half-mast and Odd Fellows Hall filled with mourners. 

The opening essay tells the tales of Irish immigrant Martin Murrey Dunn, who owned some of the choicest acreage in the Berkeley hills, and of Dave, the fire horse who loved him. 

In affably agreeable prose, Schwartz describes the unique role of the horse in fighting fires and of the affection that bonded the highly intelligent animals and their human trainers and partners in firefighting. 

Part of the land where Dunn raised his horses is today occupied by the Claremont Hotel, built eight years after his death. 

 

Land battles 

In Berkeley of late, all the serious politics have been about land use, often pitting neighbor against neighbor, and neighborhoods against developers and officialdom. 

The landmarks ordinance, the Gaia Building, UC Berkeley’s construction boom and Western Berkeley rezoning have generated endless debate, litigation (threatened and often realized) and political campaigns while consuming reams of print and barrels of ink. Even that most venerable of Berkeley battles, the contest over the fate of that plot of land dubbed People’s Park, has been heating up again. 

So it should come as no surprise that confrontations about human real estate “improvements” have deep Berkeley roots—replete with threats, a murder and a feisty homeowner who literally laid her life on the line. 

The most compelling of Schwartz’s land battle stories is the saga of Mary Townsend, a real-life pistol-packin’ momma. 

A small woman with a pleasant smile who made her living as a domestic worker, Townsend had seen her share of life’s miseries. Widowed by the Civil War and burdened with a ne’er-do-well son, she had become a highly respected figure in 1870s, and owned a home on Shattuck Avenue south of Channing Way. 

And then a man memorialized in two Berkeley streets, Frances Kittredge Shattuck, teamed with James Barker to entice the Central Pacific Railroad to run a line up Shattuck from Oakland. 

While most property owners accepted the railroad’s buyout offers, Townsend and neighbor Peter Maloney refused, since the property sought by the railroad would put the tracks right at their front doors. 

Momentarily stymied, the railroad curved the tracks to avoid the two lots, then enticed the county to launch condemnation proceedings. 

Rejecting further settlement offers which included a swap for an unusable lot and angered by the railroad’s refusal to pay for moving her house, she took legal action and a Solomonic court split the legal baby in an 1877 decision, giving the railroad an easement on the lots, while leaving legal title to the land and a $1,030 award to Townsend. 

But railroad baron Charlie Crocker refused to pay, and threatened to leave town with his tracks unless Townsend’s neighbors coughed up the cash. They did. 

It took another two decades for the battle to erupt anew, this time over the city’s move to pave between the tracks to keep down dust. Before it ended, Townsend had moved her house onto the tracks, lain across the rails and shoved a pistol into the chest of the town marshal. 

The rest of the story is for the reader to discover.  

Schwartz’s 17 chapters are like kernels of hot, buttered popcorn—crunchy and delightfully tasty, and almost impossible to devour one at a time—with the last one vanishing with regret at the feast’s end and with appreciation for the pleasure they brought. 

This reader, for one, didn’t stop until the whole volume had been consumed. 

Though “amateur” has evolved into something of a condescending slur, Richard Schwartz restores the word to some of its earlier luster. 

Only in athletics does the word retain its original meaning as a “lover,” someone whose passion for the beloved is motivated by love, not money. 

Schwartz is a passionate amateur of Berkeley history, approaching his discipline with both passion and rigor and crafting his words with affection and humor coupled with the more orthodox demands of accuracy and attribution.  

Infectious enthusiasm combined with the larger-than-life natures of many of the characters he profiles prove an irresistable combination. 

He offers us stories of folks whose names deserve their places on the city’s roster of streets—though one subject’s horse did leave its moniker, Prince, on the South Berkeley street that a certain Daily Planet writer calls home. 

 

Photograph of Emperor Norton.


Singer Kim Nalley Wows Downtown Jazz Festival

Tuesday August 28, 2007

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor 

 

It takes guts for a singer to do a retrospective on the work of Nina Simone. Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn—Simone’s modern jazz contemporaries—had far more rich and melodious voices, but Nina had a presence, a duality that was both soft and mysterious and inviting as a Carolina deepwoods night and sharp and scary and sudden as a razor held aloft. The jazz and blues divas of her era lived their songs, but Nina embodied them. She was America’s practicing priestess vodoún—stately and black, simultaneously baring herself naked and frighteningly aloof—and modern singers attempt to take us down her path at their peril. 

Well, either Kim Nalley has no fear, or she is damn good at not showing it. 

In an hour-and-a-half tribute to Simone at the Berkeley BART Plaza on Sunday afternoon, pointedly taken without intermission, Nalley did not try to recreate Nina—who could, after all?—but interpreted her life and music in a way that made us appreciate both Nina’s pain and her greatness, in the way the soft, midnight moon reflects the long-departed light of a burning sun. 

The concert was part of last weekend’s Downtown Berkeley Jazz Festival. 

As remarkable as the concert itself—given with Nalley’s traditional sultry, sensual range—is that the singer was able to pull it off in the outdoor plaza while competing with passing buses, chattering children, and the occasional hip-hop beat coming from open car windows on Shattuck Avenue. That, if anything, marks the distinct difference between Nalley and Nina. Simone was the epitome of the proud diva, famous for sometimes halting her performances in mid-stanza to turn her eye on a couple conversing in low tones in the front row, fixing them with an icy stare, and remarking, coldly, “Oh, don’t mind me. I’ll wait until you’re finished.” Nalley has a different type of performance presence, drawing listeners into a special singing circle surrounding her that seems to magically mute any outside thoughts or sounds. 

Interspersed with a running commentary that was also a lesson in history—both African-American and American in the whole—Nalley took the plaza audience from Nina’s early takes on 19th century African-American folk ballads (“In the Evening by the Moonlight” by the once-popular but now long-forgotten African-American composer James Bland, better known for his minstrel standards “O Dem Golden Slippers” and “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny”), to the traditional woman’s lament “House of the Rising Sun” (Nalley reminded us that while male rock artists covered this song after Nina re-popularized it, only a woman’s touch makes you understand that this was about entrapment as a worker in a New Orleans whorehouse), to the blues standard “Trouble in Mind.” 

Nina Simone was more than a singer—she was an accomplished composer and concert pianist—and Nalley re-created one of her most famous and controversial original compositions, “Mississippi Goddamn,” conceived in those dark and bitter times following the bombing of Montgomery Alabama’s 16th Street Baptist Church and the assassination of Mississippi NAACP Field Director Medgar Evers. “Mississippi Goddamn” was in a bouncy, irreverent, defiant mode (“a show tune for which the show has not yet been created,” Nalley quotes Nina as saying), and the Carnegie Hall concert audience who heard its world premiere must have thought, at first, that Nina was kidding. “Midway through the song,” Nalley tells us, just before she breaks into the line about the bloodhounds on her trail, “you can hear the point on the recording where the audience realizes she’s serious.” 

The song, Nalley explains, turned Nina from a performer to a civil rights protester, eventually leading to her targeting by the FBI, and eventual exile from America. 

Also notable in Nalley’s rendition was Nina’s interpretation of the Screaming Jay Hawkins signature piece “I Put a Spell on You,” in which both Nina’s and Nalley’s raw sexuality and spirit-woman wickedness are given full play, and in the closing, rousing “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” gospel great, with a rolling piano accompaniment by local pianist Tammy Hall that made even the atheists in the Berkeley audience want to jump up and shout. 

A San Francisco transplant and UC Berkeley graduate, Nalley is a locally based band leader, producer, and vocalist who appears regularly at Bay Area venues. For those who missed the Berkeley BART Plaza concert, Nalley has thoughtfully provided us with a CD that compiles her musical tribute to Nina, “She Put a Spell on Me: Kim Nalley Sings Nina Simone,” that includes many of the songs performed on Sunday. 


Green Neighbors: The Survival of the Birch Beer Canoodle

By Ron Sullivan
Tuesday August 28, 2007

A birch is about as exotic as a banana here, and maybe they’re both ubiquitous in people’s front yards for similar nostalgic reasons—or maybe instead because they’re so outrageous when you know where you are.  

They’re both thirsty, so it’s good to keep them in the well-watered zone of the garden. A cluster of birches looks natural with a patch of lawngrass and/or a fern, an understory flower or two. It doesn’t take acres to evoke the Eastern North American forests in their most tender-looking moods.  

By some standards, of course, birch is tough as nails. Most of the several birch species need plenty of water but other than that, they’re sturdy; they stand up just fine to New England, Alaskan, and Siberian winters and they’re resourceful enough to use as pioneer plants on “reclaimed” culm dumps and other mining scars. The sight of white-barked paper birches on a black anthracite spoilbank is one of those Proustian guilty pleasures for me. I know it’s devastation, but those trees look so starkly handsome I still have to smile.  

Lots of birches have tan or reddish bark and they’re generally good-looking too, but the emblematic birch, the one that gets photographed against blue-white snow or a brilliant green spring understory has white bark. Here, it’s usually the North American native paper or white birch (Betula papyrifera), gray birch (B. populifolia) in those postcard photos and the European white birch (B. pendula) in our gardens.  

This time of year, people often panic at the sight of blackened, soot-covered, and bug-riddled leaves on their birches. All the birch species I know of are susceptible to aphids, and aphid droppings—one of several such excretions called “honeydew” because they do in fact taste sweet—grow various kinds of mold and mildew readily, on the leaf surfaces and on any object beneath them.  

(That’s pretty much what’s going on with those poor beleaguered tuliptrees on University Avenue, by the way. Yes, they should be replaced, but a few at a time and not during nesting season please! It’s a shame: they’re beautiful trees but they’re really happier in a more lush situation like a lawn.)  

My earnest counsel about aphid-infested birches? Do nothing. The trees are deciduous and will drop their leaves in a month or two anyway, bugs and all. Meanwhile you have the ideal ladybird beetle nursery and that’s what you’ll want around next spring when the aphids return. Look at whatever leaves are in reach and see if you don’t have some of those ferocious black alligator-looking ladybeetle youngsters there. The kids eat more aphids than the adults do, as kids are wont. Cherish them. 

While I’m dishing advice and barking orders: I’ve notice that some people have the unsavory habit of topping their birches, cutting the top several feet of the tree right off. What’s up with that? Aside from destroying the natural grace of the tree, it’s slow murder, and what branches do arise from the mutilated trunk will be weakly attached—originating only from the edge of the trunk—and so prone to snapping off when they grow heavy enough to be more than twigs. Stop that right now.  

Aside from the Robert Frost poem about “a swinger of birches” and the birchbark canoe whose survival John McPhee eloquently celebrated, birches figure in our culture, or at least our décor, largely as a signifier of the demi-wilderness, the cabin in the woods that’s just a bit beyond dirt flooring, the sort of thing LL Bean touts. The elegant white bark gets used for picture frames and occasional furniture.  

Once upon a time it made paper, just as I thought it must when I was a kid. Historic “frontier” documents exist that are scrawled and signed on a wide strip peeled right off the tree. It seems irresistible for the sort of folks who write on living trees, too, as the “Fred + Chloe 4 ever” eventually becomes something like a keloid, black and prominent against the white, ready to embarrass Fred + Chloe’s kids unto the third generation. 

My own cultural madeline featuring birches—aside from making strictly decorative porridge and bread out of the ripe catkins to go with the mulberries we gorged on in summer—is birch beer. Cook’s Illustrated site www.cooks.com/rec has a recipe for real beer-type birch beer made with birch sap and yeast. What I remember, though, is a red soda somewhat like root beer but less heavy. Apparently it’s a Pennsylvania Dutch thing, judging by its distribution.  

My sister Ellen took a load of it along with a few pounds of garlic ring bologna and Utz’s potato chips down to Orlando a couple of weeks ago to celebrate her daughter’s graduation from nursing school. The exotic-or-nostalgic cuisine got an enthusiastic reception there. Now I’m wondering how well it would make it through the average airport.  

And I miss my sister, too. 

 

Photograph by Ron Sullivan. Birch trees in their unmangled natural form. These, like many trees this year, are showing early fall color. 

 

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.


Berkeley This Week

Tuesday August 28, 2007

TUESDAY, AUGUST 28 

Full Moon Walk at John Muir National Historic Site Walk up Mt. Wanda to see the moon rise over Mt. Diablo. Bring water, flashlight and good walking shoes for the steep trail. Reservations required. 925-228-8860. 

“Baraka” a film of images from 24 countries showing the beauty and destruction of nature and humans at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donation $5. www.HumanistHall.net 

Young People’s Symphony Orchestra Auditions at 4 p.m. at the Crowden School. For information on what to prepare and to make an appointment call 849-988. www.ypsomusic.net 

End the Occupation Vigil every Tues. at noon at Oakland Federal Bldg., 1301 Clay St. www.epicalc.org 

Free Sewing Class for Youth at Sew Your Own, from 3 to 6 p.m. at Bolivar Drive, Aquatic Park. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

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. 

Family Storytime for preschoolers and up at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704. www.ecologycenter.org 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. 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. 

Street Level Cycles Community Bike Program Tues., Thurs., and Sat. from 2 to 6 p.m. Open bicycle repair lab at Waterside Workshops, 84 Bolivar Drive, Aquatic Park. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 29 

Walking Tour of Jack London Waterfront Meet at 10 a.m. at the corner of Broadway and Embarcadero. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

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. 

Red Cross Blood Drive from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at East Pauley Ballroom MLK Student Union, UC Campus. To schedule an appointment go to www.BeADonor.com  

Bayswater Book Club meets to discuss “Needs Assessment in Public Health” by Peterson and Alexander at 6:30 p.m. Call for location. 433-2911. 

Ice Cream Social for Seniors at 1:15 p.m. at North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. 981-5190. 

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 30 

Berkeley/Albany Mental Health Services Implementation Progress Report A Public Hearing at 7 p.m. at the Mental Health Auditorium, 2640 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way at Derby. Copies of the report are availble, call 981-7698. 

Berkeley School Volunteers Orientation from 4 to 5 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. Come learn about volunteer opportunities. 644-8833. 

Get Involved with Your Local Green Party Meeting at 7 p.m. at the Grassroots House, 2022 Blake between Shattuck & Milvia. www.berkeleygreens.org  

Young People’s Symphony Orchestra Auditions at 4 p.m. at the Crowden School. For information on what to prepare and to make an appointment call 849-988. www.ypsomusic.net 

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. 

Baby and Toddler Storytime at 10:15 and 11:15 a.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave, Kensington. 524-3043. 

FRIDAY, AUGUST 31 

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing on Fridays until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com 

Compost for Berkeley Residents from 11:45 a.m. to 2:45 p.m. at Berkeley Marina Maintenance Yard, 201 University Ave., next to Adventure Playground, Berkeley. 981-6660.  

“This is my Home” a film on the struggle of displaced public housing residents in post-Katrina New Orleans, at 7 p.m. at Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way, under the Sather Gate Parking Garage. 848-1196. 

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310. 

SATURDAY, SEPT. 1 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around Preservation Park to see Victorian architecture. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of Preservation Park at 13th St. and MLK, Jr. Way. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

Art & Soul Festival, with live music, children’s entertainment, arts and crafts, and food from local producers, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sat.-Mon. at Frank Ogawa Plaza, downtown Oakland. ArtandSoulOakland.com 

Politcal Affairs Reading Group will discuss “Class, Race and Women’s Equality: A Strategic View” by Sam Webb at 10 a.m. at Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library for Social Research, 6501 Telegraph Ave. 595-7417. www.marxistlibr.org 

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 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

SUNDAY, SEPT. 2 

Poetry Garden Celebration from 1 to 3 p.m. on the corner of Milvia and Lincoln at Berkeley Arts Magnet School. Open mic for poetry performance and paper and pencils for on the spot poetic inspiration. Children especially welcome. 548-1707. mccoatty@hotmail.com  

Birdwatching Bicycle Tour of the Eastshore State Park Meet at 8:40 a.m. at El Cerrito Del Norte BART station. Trip ends at Aquatic Park in Berkeley. Bring bicycle lock, lunch and liquids. Kathy_Jarrett@yahoo.com 

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 

“Evil is Not Good for You: The Dangers of Demonization” with Walter Truett Anderson at 10 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302, ext. 306. 

Solo Sierrans Sunset Walk in the Emeryville Marina. Meet at 5 p.m. behind Chevy’s for an hour walk on a paved trail. 234-8949. 

Kensington Farmers’ Market from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 303 Arlington Ave., Kensington. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

MONDAY, SEPT. 3 

Free Boatbuilding Classes for Youth Mon.-Wed. 2-6pm at Berkeley Boathouse, 84 Bolivar Drive, Aquatic Park. Classes cover woodworking, boatbuilding, and boat repair. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

Dragonboating Year round classes at the Berkeley Marina, Dock M. Meets Mon, Wed., Thurs. at 6 p.m. Sat. at 10:30 a.m. For details see www.dragonmax.org 

ONGOING 

Campaign for Earthquake Victims in Peru To find the collection site closest to you call Paco at 229-8350 or the Consulate of Peru 1-877-490-7378. 

 

 

 

 

Submit calendar listings at least ten days before the event to calendar@berkeleydaily 

planet.com 

Please include a telephone number for the public.


Correction

Tuesday August 28, 2007

Due to overzealous use of the spell-checking function, the name of Pacific Film Archive house pianist Jon Mirsalis was inadvertently printed as Jon Misrules in an Aug. 24 story about avant-garde cinema. We regret the error.


Arts Calendar

Friday August 24, 2007

FRIDAY, AUGUST 24 

THEATER 

Aurora Theatre “Hysteria” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St., through Sept. 30. Tickets are $40-$42. 843-4822.  

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 

“Citizen Josh” with monologoist Josh Kornbluth, Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Repertory Theater, 2025 Addison St., through Spet. 2. Tickets are $25-$30. 647-2949. 

Masquers Playhouse “The Shadow Box” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond, through Sept. 29. This show is not recommended for children.Tickets are $15. 232-4031. www.masquers.org  

TheaterInSearch “Epic of Gilgamesh” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., through Sept. 2. Tickets are $12-$20. 262-0584. 

Viaticum “The Carnal Table” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 3 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. through Sept. 2. Tickets are $10-$15. 848-3338. 

FILM 

From the Tsars to the Stars: A Journey through Russian Fantastik Cinema “First on the Moon” at 7 p.m. and “To the Stars by Hard Ways” at 8:45 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

John Curl reads from his new novelistic memoir, “Memories of Drop City: The First Hippie Commune of the 1960s and the Summer of Love” at 7:30 p.m. at The Book Zoo, 6395 Telegraph Ave., at Alcatraz, Oakland. 654-2665. 

Greil Marcus describes “The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com  

An Evening with Drew Dellinger, poetry, at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church, Reidenbach Hall, 2501 Harrison St., Oakland. Tickets are $20. 451-4926. www.earthlight.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Goat Hall Productions Cabaret Operas “The Playboy of the Western World” and “Dionysus” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 7 p.m. at Oakland Metro Operahouse, 201 Broadway at Jack London Square, Oakland. Tickets are $15-$25. 415-289-6877. 

E.W. Wainwright’s African Roots of Jazz perform “The Social Evolution of Jazz” at 8 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6100. 

Unsmokables, vocal and instrumental improvisation at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $7-$10. 849-2568.  

Eric Swinderman, In Pursuit of Sound at 7 p.m. at Bobby G’s Pizzeria, 2072 University Ave. 665-8866.  

Pete Escovedo & Ray Obiedo Latin Jazz Project at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $15. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Wellman-Savage Unit featuring Walter Savage-bass, Angela Wellman-trombone, at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. at the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, 1616 Franklin St. Cost is $15. 836-4649. 

Brave Combo, rock, polka, jazz, Tex-Mex, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12-$15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Walter Pope at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

The Waybacks at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Robin Galante, Mario DeSio and Kwame Copeland at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Jazzschool Summer Program Youth and Faculty Concerts at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

GG Elvfis & The TCP Band, The Abuse 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. 

Sentinel at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Sila & the Afro Funk Experience at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $10. 548-1159.  

Beep! Trio at 5 p.m., Bill Ortiz Band at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Steve E Nix, Rock and Roll Adventure Kids at 9:30 p.m. at the Stork Club Oakland, 2330 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $5. 444-6174. 

James Carter at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, AUGUST 25 

CHILDREN  

Puppet Theater Fesitval “Why Mosquitos Buzz in Our Ears” Sat. and Sun. at noon and Pinocchio: The Hip-Hopera 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 

Mark Axelrod “Sticks and Stones Not Only Break Bones” oil paintings, and Linda Braz “Explorations” mixed media installations and sketches. Party and benefit auction at 7 p.m. at The Gallery Of Urban Art, 1746 13th St. Oakland. 706-1697. 

Works by David Delany Reception at 1 p.m. at Alta Galleria, 2980 College Ave., Suite #4. 421-1255. www.AltaGalleria.com  

“Downhome Show” paintings by Janet Berrien, Debbie Clausen, Chris Peterson and Odette Larde. Reception at 6 p.m. at Fourth Street Studio, 1717D 4th St. 527-0600. 

FILM 

Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker “Where is the Friend’s Home?” at 6:30 p.m. and “Homework” at 8:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Danny Caron at 7 p.m. at Bobby G’s Pizzeria, 2072 University Ave. 665-8866.  

Jeff Zittrain, Americana rock, at noon at Cafe Zeste, 1250 Addison St. at Bonar, in the Strawberry Creek Park complex. 704-9378. 

Carne Cruda and Rico Pabon at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $6-$8. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Kenny Washington & His Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Baba Ken & Kotoja at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. African dance lesson at 9 p.m. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

DJ Real and Paulette at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Loosewig Quartet at 1 p.m., Sonanado Project at 5 p.m. and Agualibre at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

WCS Songwriter Showcase Grand Finals at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Royal Hawaiian Serenaders at 9 p.m. at Temple Bar Tiki Bar & Grill, 984 University Ave. 548-9888. 

Jazz Fourtet at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $5. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

The Strange Angels at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7. 558-0881. 

Winters & Davis, Montana at 9:30 p.m. at the Stork Club Oakland, 2330 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $5. 444-6174. 

The Botticellis, Winter’s Fall, Pickwick at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

Nausea, Moral Decay, In Disgust 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 26 

EXHIBITIONS 

Berkeley Art Center 24th Annual National Juried Exhibition Opening reception at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut Street in Live Oak Park, between Eunice and Rose. 644-9873. 

“Everyday Magic” paintings by Jan Wurm and Suma Shawn, and drawings and welded steel sculpture by Joseph Slusky, opens with a reception at 5 p.m. at the Community Art Gallery, Alta Bates. Ashby Ave. 204-1667.  

Berkeley’s “Other” Revolution: Celebrating 35 Years of Independent Living, Disability Access, and Disability Rights. Photographs by Ken Stein on display in the windows of Rasputin Music, 2401 Telegraph Ave., between Channing Way and Haste. 525-2325. 

“Art in the Park” Exhibition hosted by the City of Alameda, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Jackson Park, 2430 Encinal Ave., Alameda. arpd@ci.alameda.ca.us  

FILM 

From the Tsars to the Stars: A Journey through Russian Fantastik Cinema “Solaris” at 6 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Down Home Music Opening in Berkeley with Barbara Dane, Tri Tip Trio Zydeco Band, Laurie Lewis & Tom Rozum, Eric & Suzy Thompson, Los Cenzontles, Nina Gerber and others from 12:30 to 5 p.m. at 1809 B Fourth St. 204-9595. 

Oak Grove Music Festival Celebrating 268 days of tree occupation, from 1 to 7 p.m. at the Memorial Oak Grove, Piedmont at Bancroft. 938-2109. www.SaveOaks.com 

Breslin and Alex, folk-rock, at 8 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $10-$12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

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

Edo Castro at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. 

Will Blades/Eddie Marshall Duo at 1 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Dani Torres, flamenco, at 5 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

Americana Unplugged: The Good Luck Thrift Store Outfit at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Unreal Band, David Elias, Sabrosa and others from 1 to 7 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082.  

MONDAY, AUGUST 27 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Express Open mic theme night on “dreams” at 7 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Maria Mikheyenko, Russian songs, at 7 p.m. at Le Bateau Ivre, 2629 Telegraph Ave. 849-1100. www.lebateauivre.net 

Musica ha Disconnesso at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

Tiempo Libre at 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200. 

TUESDAY, AUGUST 28 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Wonderland, A Fairytale of the Soviet Monolith” Black and white photographs by Jason Eskenazi on display at the Graduate School of Journalism, North Gate Hall, UC Campus.  

FILM 

Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker “Five” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Tell on on Tuesdays Storytelling with Tim Ereneta, Maryclare McCauley, Neshama Franklin and Bruce Pachtman at 7:30 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Cost is $8-$12 sliding scale. www.juiamorgan.org 

Sinan Antoon, author of “I’jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody” at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Bookstore, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

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

Singers’ Open Mic with Kelly Park at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Randy Craig Trio, jazz, at 7:30 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

Sophie Milman at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $8-$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 29 

FILM 

International Latino Film Society “O casamento de Romeu e Julieta” at 7 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5-$6.. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Eco-Amok: An Inconvenient Film Fest “Habitat” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

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  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Doug Arrington & His Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Kleptograss at 8 p.m. at Strings, 6320 San Pablo Ave., Emeryville. 

Swingthing at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Swing dance lesson at 7:30 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Fred O’Dell and the Broken Arrows at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Orquestra Liberacion at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Mo’ Fone at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Rick Di Dia & Aireene Espiritu, Blind Willies at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

Ed Reed at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $6-$12. 238-9200.  

THURSDAY, AUGUST 30 

EXHIBITIONS 

Kala Art Institute Residency Projects, Part 3 opens with a reception at 6 p.m. at 1060 Heinz Ave. Exhibition runs to Oct. 6. 549-2977. www.kala.org 

FILM 

Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker “10 on Ten” at 7 p.m. and “The Wind Will Carry Us” at 9 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Earl Shorris describes “The Politics of Heaven: America in Fearful Times” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

The Meditations, reggae, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12-$15. 525-5054.  

Dry Branch Fire Squad at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761.  

Paul Perez Project featuring Frank Martin at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

LaWanda & Greg, modern folk, rock at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

Will Franken, Jascha Ephraim at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082  

Katura, Afro-Cuban, at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12-$15. 849-2568.  

Allan Hodsworth at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

 

 


Around the East Bay

Friday August 24, 2007

HOPE BRIGGS SINGS AT YERBA BUENA 

 

Soprano Hope Briggs, now a Berkeley resident, will present a recital at the Yerba Buena Performing Arts Center, at 701 Mission St. in San Francisco, as part of the AfroSolo Festival on Sunday, August 26th at 3pm. She will be performing works by Strauss, Faure, show tunes, and an exciting contemporary arrangement of spirituals, Lyric Suite, accompanied by Ron Valentino. Tickets from the Yerba Buena box office, (415) 978-2787.


The Tale of Gilgamesh at The Ashby Stage

By Ken Bullock
Friday August 24, 2007

Entering the Ashby Stage for George Charbak’s TheaterInSearch production of the (very) ancient Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, the spectators see a seated, veiled figure, sculptural, atop a model ziggurat, surrounded by gaping masks of bearded Assyrians on the back walls, as strains of the oud (evocatively played by Larry Klein) resound through the hall. 

“I put Gilgamesh into a museum,” Charbak has remarked. This is immediately evident when a kind of docent, kind of redactor (Ana Bayat) appears, posing as many questions in crisp BBC intonation as putting this (literally) Ur-tale, a modern discovery (and translation, with the deciphering of cuneiform), into a not-so-comfortable but very wry context, as she unveils the figure of our hero (Roham Shaikhani), “one of the very finest pieces,” who begins to animate himself like a statue come to life, with the crazy glint and skewed gaze, relentless histrionic gestures and grimace of an actor caught in the nitrate emulsion of silent film (our own modern “antiquity”), like a prehistoric horsefly in amber.  

Calling Gilgamesh an epic poem—“or tragic joke”—the narrator-docent credits the eponymous hero with the invention of cuneiform, religion, god (or at least an integrated pantheon!), science, literature, lit crit, porn—and the relationship between literature and immortality ... “The man who saw everything, who looked in the face of a mystery [as the still-seated figure of Gilgamesh glares, with one finger lifted] ... He was beautiful and strong, they said ... and because he was from the gods, he crushed his own people, who were left wondering, whispering about his own words.” 

With a clap of the hand, “his own people” (Michael Green and Elias D. Protopsaltis) appear, an ongoing, polymorphous burlesque team (out of Beckett or Pinter), deadpanning their way through the drifts of “the snows of yesteryear”—viz., ancient tragedy, an incomprehensible sensibility they handily convert to modern angst and colloquial wit. 

Gilgamesh wrangles with everybody, especially his recondite and smothering mother, Ninsun, who interprets his dreams of a rival and/or boon companion, who falls into his life like a star, disturbing his work (“This means he’ll never abandon you.”).  

Bella Warda, cofounder of Oakland’s Darvag Theatre Company, plays Ninsun deliciously, later doubling as the seductive and jealous goddess Ishtar, who does away with Gilgamesh’s boon companion she can see only as rival—two heroic lads stuck on each other with schoolboy crushes.  

(It’s good to be reminded that there were originally jealous female deities where later the self-proclaimed masculine Els and Allahs would dominate, again, the silent film histrionics are cleverly tipped in and voiced, backdating and outdoing DeMille.) 

Enkidu (a wild-eyed, preoccupied Hayedeh Doroudy-Ahl) eventually appears as the primitive dream-companion, and Babak Mokhtari humorously bores a reclining prostitute (Samera Esmeir) with preBiblical extravagance, exhorting her to seduce the wild man, distract him so that his animal companions will abandon him.  

A funny, stylized sex scene follows, and all goes according to plan, ending with Gilgamesh and Enkidu fighting to the death—that is, until they become captivated with each other. 

This excursion into the deepest past that can be given a voice literally becomes an excursion, as the two buddies take a road trip, overcoming monsters and slaying the bull from the skies, which Ishtar has inveighed the sun-god to turn loose. 

After Enkidu’s demise at the invisible hands of the goddess, Gilgamesh in grief embarks on a journey to discover where the dead go, what happens in the wake of mortality, and is seen as “a beggar! A tramp! A hobo!” by Green and Protopsaltis’ revolving mechanicals. He’s let himself go so (clearly, he’s forgotten the tips his mother gave him once for the perils of the road), gets drunk and cries on the shoulder of a very sympathetic innkeeper (Esmeir again), with whom he dances before losing “the rose that erases anguish, the rose of his youth,” filched by a passerby. 

The languid web of words that shuttles back and forth with humorous insouciance over this disturbing tale of domination undercut by mortality strikes contemporary chords, especially chiming with the discordant sounds of set declarations on the media—and often referring to the “land between two rivers” and its neighbors.  

But Charbak—who has “insisted” his players “make the words their own,” adopts a not-quite so ancient irony regarding myth (in every sense of the word), an irony that dates back to the Socratic dialogues of Plato, resurfaces in Islamic poetry, and was the guiding light of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, never making a one-to-one identity between the stage and the world (as represented on other, equally staged media), making his Gilgamesh paradoxically original yet older-than-old shoe.  

Whether it’s Enkidu, dead, telling his grief stricken friend the ultrabanal result of dusty mortality, or Gilgamesh himself exclaiming to his taped and cheering populace, “I want to be famous--but I already am famous, am I not? I have decided to last forever ... I need weapons!” or who “slaughtered all the trees just to hear the sound” behind him—his most ancient of stories ends in splendid ambiguity: “You who hold in your hand the meaning of life—what is this? Another riddle? ... Why is this man knocking at the doors of history for 5,000 years? Why?” 

 

 

Gilgamesh 

 

The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. 

8 p.m. Fri.-Sat., 2 p.m. Sun. Through Sept. 2. Tickets $12-$20. 262-0584.


Kornbluth at Berkeley Rep

By Ken Bullock
Friday August 24, 2007

“We’ve been exporting democracy to other countries around the world—and maybe we ran out! ... a soupcon of democracy, as they like to say at Chez Panisse ... I’m a monologist—and democracy is a dialogue. At least!” 

Josh Kornbluth is back onstage in Berkeley—on the Thrust Stage at Berkeley Rep, to be specific—for a short run of his new self-reformulation, Citizen Josh, which opened some weeks back at The Magic Theater in San Francisco. And his monologue, which seems like a digression from (or back to) any other of his monologues, is fuller than ever of Berkeley names, places and events, constantly looping around to Josh wondering at the asymmetrical sculpture that towers in Ohlone Park, climbing to its vertiginous apex and getting cell phone reception to call his old college advisor, a continent away ... 

As usual, a Kornbluth reformulation is a little like a new recipe on a cooking show by a less carefree (though just as insouciant)—and less goyish—Julia Child: it involves all the ingredients of the past, whisked up together in the bowl of performance, tasting a little different than before, but still the same old comfort food. 

This time around, Josh is on another mission to redeem the past—his and America’s—by fulfilling his decades past graduation requirements through turning his monologue into his senior thesis—or is it vice versa? As the monologue (or monograph) verbally unfolds, he wends his way a bit crab like in and out of the slightly skewed incidents and encounters that influenced him to get out of physics and into poli-sci, off the East Coast and into his East Bay neighborhood and schtick, nicely syncopated with his growing-up-Red family routines. 

And of course the self-deprecating route is just as important as the personal, if a little offbeat, triumph where it all ends up, like a kind of gathering-up of diaspora of personal history, a big reunion at an anniversary—or graduation, though that was long ago, on another coast ... and without a diploma in the proffered scroll. 

“In my freshman year, my test scores were not reflecting the brilliant quality of my mind ... Cold Fusion, like a woman who dumped me!” So Josh personalizes his exit from science, taking up poli-sci by impulsively following his new advisor, former Berkeleyite Sheldon Wolin—“I knew not why”—down the byzantine corridors that resemble his own interweaving subplots and asides. 

Before the semi-triumphant finish, which brings the audience to an epiphany that they’re part and parcel of their entertainer’s commitment to recovering his actual sheepskin, Josh has brought in a cast of dozens, at least; by implication, teeming masses, including his unregenerately Red parents, his preemie brother (introduced afterwards in the audience), whom his father saved by holding and pacing the ward, the brave African American students caught between guardsmen and white mobs in the integration experiment at Little Rock, Lonnie Hancock and Don Perata (a wry sketch of a master politico working a not-too-friendly room) each finally facing an irritable gaggle of Berkeley activists in the state capitol, the Free Speech movement ... and whoeverelse he can recover from the history of Western Civilization for a temporary fit. 

A San Francisco reviewer referred to Josh’s digressions as “parables,” though they just might be footnotes to his overdue thesis, the kind that aim to impress by casting an eclectic net very wide. That said, there’s something the same about the Kornbluth format, almost a matter of timing, when Josh can wink at his audience and they collectively come up with the way he’s going to end a sentence, in one big shout.  

Whether this is due to preaching to the choir too much, a certain kind of showbiz shrewdness (“Give ’em what they want,” as Billy Wilder opined while contemplating the overflow crowd at much-disliked movie mogul Harry Cohn’s funeral), or less preparation than some of his previous shows (or maybe those old formats are starting to catch up), it serves to reaffirm the faithful and leave lukewarm at best those who see in him a cute, cut-rate Woody Allen of Bay Area preoccupations. 

But Josh is Josh, and as his brand of Jewish humor sometimes dictates, it’s sometimes the arresting detail or an off-kilter aside that makes it all work, not necessarily the well-meaning dash at proving the whole greater than the sum of its parts. 

 

Citizen Josh 

 

Berkeley Rep, 2025 Addison St. 

8 p.m. Thurs.-Sat., 2 p.m. Sun. Through Sept. 2. Tickets $25-$30. 

647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.com


Avant-Garde Cinema, Then and Now: Kino Celebrates Film’s More Eclectic Figures

By Justin DeFreitas
Friday August 24, 2007

A recent driving tour through the wilds of Northern California and Southern Oregon only reaffirmed what I already knew: that Bay Area cinephiles are lucky, especially in these dull summer months of big-budget drivel, to live in a place where film artistry is not only appreciated, but relatively plentiful.  

If you’re looking for something a bit different, you have a decent chance of finding it at a local venue. And if it’s still not forthcoming, there’s always the home theater. And if you’re looking for something still more different... 

Kino has just released the second volume in its Avant Garde series, featuring films drawn from the collection of the late film collector and preservationist Raymond Rohauer. Rohauer is best known today as the man who rescued the cinematic legacy of Buster Keaton, saving the great comedian’s films from disintegration at a time when they were all but forgotten. But Rohauer’s foresight was not limited to commercial cinema. He also had an appreciation for more aesthetically challenging work, helping to preserve the works and reputations of significant artists from the edgier side of cinema history. 

These films will challenge your preconceptions about the nature of experimental cinema. If your notion of avant-garde film is bad poetry and pretentious close-ups of the human eye ... well, actually there is a bit of that here. More than a bit, really; most of the films in this set feature at least one ominous eyeball. But there’s far more than that here, including a few flat-out masterpieces, films that retain their power more than half a century since their creation. 

The disc begins with Willard Mass’ Geography of the Body (1943), a seven-minute journey across the fascinating terrain of the human body. The film consists of close-ups of the body that at times render it unrecognizable, accompanied by a poetic spoken-word travelogue, rendering the body as a foreign landscape. The film is a tribute to sensuality, providing a new appreciation for that which is often taken for granted.  

The Mechanics of Love (1955), by Maas and Ben Moore, expands the subject matter to the use of the body, juxtaposing it with shots of everyday objects and machinery. The technique brings to light the mechanistic aspects of the human body as well as the sensuality of the inanimate.  

The centerpiece of the set is the seminal avant-garde manifesto Traité de Bave et D’Eternité (Venom and Eternity, 1951), Jean Isidore Isou’s controversial diatribe in which he attempts to transform the language of cinema by destroying the notion of narrative imagery. “Is (the film) a springboard or is it a void?” asked Jean Cocteau. “In 50 years we’ll know the answer.” Well, I have my answer, and I’d say the word “void” is generous, but what do I know? Stan Brakhage called the film “a portal through which every film artist is going to have to pass.” 

Brakhage himself is amply represented with four films on the disc. The Way to Shadow Garden (1954) is a disturbing work, with a soundtrack made up entirely of electronic buzzes and screeches for an Oedipal tale in which the protagonist gouges his eyes out. Meanwhile The Extraordinary Child (1954) is a light, silly tale about a baby born fully grown. 

Other films run the gamut from a cinematic crossword puzzle which viewers are invited to solve based on a montage of clues (accompanied by music by Pacific Film Archive house pianist Jon Mirsalis), to silent domestic melodramas, to stylized visions of the human psyche. But the highlights of the set are two of the shorter films.  

The first is The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), a 12-minute adaptation of the short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Directors James Watson and Melville Webber, heavily influenced by the bravura visual stylings of German Expressionism, employ a battery of effects in depicting the paranormal paranoia of Poe’s Gothic horror. Striking set design and mesmerizing optical effects combine to create a surrealistic nightmare.  

The second is Jean Mitry’s Pacific 231 (1949), a kinetic masterpiece that juxtaposes stirring imagery of a train thundering along the French railroads accompanied by a dramatic orchestral score. The footage includes rapidly edited images of the journey, from close-ups of wheels and gears, to the maze of telegraph wires overhead, to the quickly passing landscape, all pieced together in a thrilling montage of power and velocity. Orson Welles once criticized the ponderous style of director Michel Antonioni by declaring that a great shot is not improved by holding it for 10 minutes. Pacific 231 embodies that notion, never resting on a single shot for more than a few seconds in its frenetic rush to its final destination. 

 

AVANT-GARDE 2: EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA, 1928-54 

Featuring 17 films from France, Germany and America. Notes by critic and historian Elliott Stein.  

341 minutes. $29.95. www.kino.com. 

 

Photograph: A locomotive barrels along the French railways to a dramatic orchestral score in the stirring avant garde masterpiece Pacific 231.


Avant-Garde Cinema, Then and Now: Kiarostami’s ‘Five’ At Pacific Film Archive

By Justin DeFreitas
Friday August 24, 2007

Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami has always toyed with a minimalist aesthetic, an approach he derived from the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. It is a technique that calls for patience, both from the filmmaker and his audience, with long, meditative shots that allow characters and themes to gradually reveal themselves before the camera.  

With Five, Kiarostami’s most unabashedly experimental work, he takes the technique to its logical conclusion, and the result is a work that, for all its formal distance and stubborn simplicity, is surprisingly moving and profound. The film screened last night at Pacific Film Archive and will be repeated Tuesday night at 7:30 p.m. 

Five consists of five long takes set alongside the Caspian Sea, each shot with an essentially motionless camera. The first watches as the waves toy with a piece of driftwood, pulling it tumbling toward the water, then pushing it back onto shore. The second shows people walking to and fro along a boardwalk with the crashing waves in the background. The third views the sea from a distance as indistinct shapes on the shore become animate, revealing themselves to be dogs lounging at dawn on the beach. The fourth again watches the waves as an army of ducks passes one-by-one before the camera. And the fifth, the only one to employ editing to achieve its effect, focuses on the moon as reflected in a pond while it vanishes and reappears from behind storm clouds, a flirtatious dance performed to the cacophonous soundtrack of toads, until the rain washes it all away. Each episode concludes with a gentle fadeout backed by an understated score that serves as a unifying thread. 

It is particularly noteworthy that the focus all the while is on the water. Wood and ducks and dogs and frogs and people are transitory figures that simply flutter past, ephemeral players that strut and fret across the frame as the timeless, relentless surf pounds away at the shore. 

But this is only one interpretation. As Kiarostami explains in Around Five, a documentary on Kino’s DVD release of the film, the approach starts with his belief that cinema has trained audiences to be mentally lazy, to expect a film to overtly state its meaning in simple terms. But Kiarostami does not believe in literary narrative. Life does not reveal its secrets so easily, why should cinema? Instead, like Ozu before him, he strives for a participatory cinema in which viewers bring their own interpretations to the work. Each episode lulls the viewer into a meditative state (Kiarostami himself stated that viewer should feel free to take a nap during the film), drawing us into the moment and creating a space for quiet reflection. And without the director imposing a pat interpretation on the film, we are free to bring our own experiences and perspectives to the work, infusing it with a wealth of ideas that far surpass any the director could have summoned on his own. 

The notion is that by simply opening up the lens and allowing life to unfold before it, the director immediately relinquishes control, embracing accident, fate, luck and serendipity in the creation of a work that contains more of the mystery, complexity and beauty of life as it really exists. 

 

Photograph; Driftwood caught in the surf in Abbas Kiarostami’s meditative Five.


Architectural Excursions: General Vallejo Practiced the Art of Living Well

By Daniella Thompson
Friday August 24, 2007

We all need a sanity break from Berkeley every now and then, but not everyone can fly off to the Seychelles or to Switzerland when the urge to flee is upon us. 

Happily, beauty and calm are within easy reach in northern California. Only 55 miles away, the Sonoma Valley offers a myriad historic, visual, and gustatory attractions. Many of these are concentrated in the lovely town of Sonoma, which was built around Mission San Francisco Solano—the last and northernmost of California’s 21 missions. 

Established in 1823, after Mexico had obtained its independence from Spain, the mission was secularized in 1834 by Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo (1907–1890), whose title at the time was Military Commander and Director of Colonization of the Northern Frontier. 

Vallejo would soon become Comandante General of Alta California. Even after California had joined the Union, Vallejo continued to be active in public life. A member of the first State Constitutional Convention, he was elected to the first Legislature as State Senator. 

Nothing marked the difference between Vallejo’s Mexican and American periods more sharply than his residences. As Comandante General, he lived in La Casa Grande, a traditional two-story adobe house overlooking the central plaza. As State Senator, he settled in what he proudly called his “Yankee Home” and “Boston House.” 

In 1850, Vallejo purchased a 500-acre tract of open land half-a-mile west of the Sonoma plaza. The land included a free-flowing spring called Chiucuyem (Tears of the Mountain) by the Native Americans. Vallejo bestowed a Latin version of the name on his new estate, christening it Lachryma Montis. 

The house erected at Lachryma Montis in 1851–52 was designed and prefabricated in New England, shipped by sailboat around Cape Horn, and assembled on site. The style is Carpenter Gothic—the American wood-frame version of Victorian Gothic Revival, which had come into vogue on the East Coast in the previous decade. 

Despite its generous size, General Vallejo’s home appears like a dollhouse thanks to quaint details such as steeply pitched, dormered roof gables; lacy bargeboards “dripping” from the eaves; green-shuttered windows; and porches festooned with grape arbors. 

Perfectly symmetrical, the house points its parlor wing to the south, leading forth with a Gothic lancet window on the second floor and a slender bay window directly below. The hall is entered from twin porches flanking this wing on east and west. Behind the hall on the ground floor is the main wing, containing the dining room, the General’s study (he once owned the largest library in the state), and two rear bedrooms. 

Two narrow staircases—front and back—climb to the second floor, where the large master bedroom is located over the parlor. Behind it are a small sewing room turned nursery and two bedrooms that were once occupied by the Vallejos’ youngest daughters, Luisa and Maria. With the exception of the nursery, all the rooms in the main house—seven in all—contain white marble fireplaces venting through five chimneys. 

Many house museums are furnished with generic period artifacts collected here and there. Not so the Vallejo house, which is filled with genuine family heirlooms, from furniture and paintings to musical instruments and clothing. For the General’s bicentennial birthday on July 4, his embroidered silk vest was put on display in the parlor. 

All these treasures came down to us from Luisa, the fifteenth of sixteen Vallejo children, who inherited the estate and lived here until her death in 1943. Luisa sold the property with its contents to the State of California in 1933 and was the first curator of Lachryma Montis, which was turned into a state park. 

Typical of mid-19th century houses, the Vallejo residence has no bathrooms—the family made do with washstands and chamber pots. As a precaution against fire, the kitchen was located in a separate building in the rear. A simpler version of the main house, this cookhouse also served as the servants’ dining room, the cook’s sleeping quarters, and a storage loft. It is separated from the main house by an old grape arbor planted with an old Flame Tokay vine that still bears fruit in abundance. This vine is the legacy of Agoston Haraszthy (1812–1869), a Hungarian immigrant who founded the Buena Vista winery in 1857 and is known as the Father of California Viticulture. Two of Haraszthy’s sons married two of the General’s daughters. The Flame Tokay was one of thousands of cuttings Haraszthy shipped from Europe to California. 

West of the main house sits the enchanting El Delírio, a diminutive garden pavilion surrounded by trellis work and fronted by a cast iron swan fountain. Here Vallejo wrote his five-volume history, Recuerdos Historicos y Personales Tocantes à la Alta California, 1769–1849. 

Behind the cookhouse is a large reservoir lined on one side by a brick-paved wooden pergola. A sizable population of turtles inhabits these waters, and a thicket of prickly-pear cactus dominates the far shore, where a winding stone staircase leads to a reconstruction of the Hermitage. This one-room hut was built for the use of Vallejo’s son Platon during his school vacations and later became the domain of the youngest son, Napoleon, who kept a menagerie that at one time included 14 dogs, several cats, and a parrot. 

Returning to the main courtyard, you’ll want to visit the museum located in the half-timbered brick building displaying a gigantic carriage lantern. This structure, prefabricated with imported components, was used for storing wine and produce before being converted to residential use and named the Chalet. 

The $2 admission fee also covers other sites in the Sonoma State Historic Park, including Mission San Francisco Solano de Sonoma, the Sonoma Barracks, the Toscano Hotel, and Vallejo’s Petaluma Adobe. 

General Vallejo’s domain might inspire you to emulate his gracious lifestyle. Fortunately, just one block to the west one can dine opulently and memorably in Sonoma’s most highly acclaimed restaurant, The General's Daughter. Built in 1870, this Italianate structure was the home of Natalia Vallejo and her husband, the vintner Attila Haraszthy. The food and wine are fabulous. Bring plenty of money. 

 

 

Getting there:  

Lachryma Montis 

363 3rd Street West (off West Spain St.) 

Sonoma, CA 95476 

(707) 938-9559 

 

The General's Daughter Restaurant 

400 West Spain Street (at 4th Street) 

Sonoma, CA 95476 

(707) 938-4004 

 

Photograph: Daniella Thompson 

General Vallejo’s house was prefabricated and shipped from New England in 1851. 


Metonymy in the Garden: Containing Yourself

By Ron Sullivan
Friday August 24, 2007

Glenn Keator talked to the Merritt College Aesthetic Pruning Club’s annual symposium last week about planting in containers, and here are some of the things he said and evoked: 

Container planting is great in urban spaces where there’s no room for a conventional garden or access to the dirt. It’s also a good way to dress up a dirt garden: a container plant can call attention to a spot, or can be displayed when it’s in bloom or in season and then moved offstage afterwards.  

Container planting can be used to solve—even if temporarily, still usefully—difficulties posed by soil deficiencies like intractable clay or hardpan. You can have plants to enjoy or harvest while you work on drainage or toxicity problems.  

Container plantings are also portable, a great thing if you’re in a temporary housing situation whether renting or in a dorm.  

That’s also an advantage because you can move the plants to take advantage of sun as the seasons change, or to shelter tender plants using the eaves and thermal mass of a building when we get the odd 30-degree Fahrenheit spell in January.  

Another speaker noted that one can use container plants in some situations as a privacy screen to turn an otherwise visible deck into a personal solar-powered spa-lette to eliminate tan lines for an arguably special occasion.  

I myself must disrecommend this stratagem in particular to anyone who is as melanin-challenged as I am, as I am reaching the stage of having little bits of myself whacked off between semiannual skin-cancer checkups.  

I must also note that that speaker has not so far demonstrated the reported effects to any neutral third party, as a truly scientific finding would require. Not that I’m volunteering. 

Container gardening has some rules that differ greatly from dirt gardening. 

First: Don’t just dig up some dirt from the yard (or take some from a handy construction site) to fill your pots. Native soil, especially in most of the Bay Area, just doesn’t work for potting; it’s too dense and sticky. Seems a shame not to use all that free dirt, but there it is.  

You need what’s called a “soilless mix” or just plain “potting soil,” available in sacks at nurseries and variety stores like Long’s on Broadway.  

This stuff is theoretically nearly sterile, at least pasteurized, so it doesn’t foster pathogens like some fungi that attack potted plants and won’t have plant-eating nematodes and such annoying inhabitants either.  

Plants in the ground are susceptible to these too of course, but there’s something about being pent up in a container that concentrates the forces of plant-preying evil. 

Part of that something is drainage, which soilless mixes are designed to improve. They’re mostly larger particles than our clay. (Clay has particles so fine they trap water in the spaces between them, by the functional equivalent of surface tension.)  

There are plenty of brands to choose from, most roughly equivalent. Keator did have an unkind word for American Soil’s private mix, in which he has found big ol’ clay lumps.  

More about containers next week.  

 

 

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her  

“Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Daily Planet’s  

East Bay Home & Real Estate  

section. Her column on East Bay 

trees appears every other Tuesday  

in the Daily Planet.


Berkeley This Week

Friday August 24, 2007

FRIDAY, AUGUST 24 

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing on Fridays until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com 

“Holy Land: Common Ground” A screening of Ed Gaffney and Alicia Dwyer’s documentary about Palestinian-Israeli cooperation in the midst of conflict at 8 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Suggested donation $10. 524-3359.  

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. www.circledancing.com 

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph. wibberkeley@yahoo.com 548-6310, 845-1143. 

SATURDAY, AUGUST 25 

San Pablo Park Centennial Festival with a dedication of a plaque commemorating Frances Albrier and a new mural, live music, crafts and community booths, food and activities for children, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at 2800 Park St., bewteen Russell and Ward. 981-6640. 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland “New Era/New Politics” highlights African-American leaders who have made their mark on Oakland. Meet at 10 a.m. and the African American Museum and Library at 659 14th St. 238-3234.  

Oakland Heritage Alliance Walking Tour of Sheffield Village Meet at 10 a.m. near the traffic island at the southeast corner of Revere Ave and Marlowe Drive to disover this pre-WWII community. Cost is $10-$15. 763-9218.  

Family to Family Volunteer Day at the Alameda County Community Food Bank Learn about the face of hunger in our community for parents and children ages 5 and up, from 9 to 11 a.m. at the Food Bank, 7900 Edgewater Drive, Oakland. Registration required. 635-3665, ext. 308. 

Back to the Schoolhouse Health and safety information for children ages 6-12 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Jack London Square. Activities include fingerprinting by the Oakland Police Dept., interactive games and live entertainment. www.jacklondonsquare.com 

San Antonio Community Resource Fair, with games, arts and crafts, community information from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at San Antonio Park, 1701 E. 19th St., Oakland. www.sannoakland.org 

Jazzy Tomatoes at the Saturday Berkeley Farmers’ Market with music and tomato dishes from noon to 3 p.m. at Center St. at MLK Jr. Way. 548-3333. 

Nevin Park Groundbreaking Ceremony and 15th Annual Iron Triangle Community Picnic with a New Orleans style procession at 11 a.m. and picnic at noon at Nevin Park, Macdonald Ave. and Sixth St., Richomnd. 307-8150. Jacqueline_vaca@ci.richmond.ca.us 

Solo Sierrans Hike in Huckleberry Botanical and Redwood Regional Parks Meet at 10 a.m. at Huckleberry Staging Area south of Sibley, about 1/2 mile on Skyline Blvd. in Oakland for a leisurely six-hour hike with some steep climbs, views and trees. 925-691-6303. 

Hopalong Animal Rescue Come meet your furry new best friend. Cats and kittens avalable for adoption from noon to 3 p.m. at Your Basic Bird, 2940 College Ave. 267-1915, ext. 500. 

Ear Acupuncture for Stress Relief and Detox from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Pharmaca, 1744 Solano Ave. 

Girls Fast Pitch Softball tryouts for Bears Softball Assoc., on Sat. and Sun. For information call 748-0611. www.bears-softball.com 

Fast Pitch Softball for Adults at noon on Saturdays in Oakland. For information call 204-9500. 

Hamster Adoption Fair Learn about these little pets and help one find a good home, from 1 to 4 p.m. at RabbitEars, 303 Arlington Ave., Kensington. 525-6155. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732.  

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755.  

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, held every Sat. from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552. 

SUNDAY, AUGUST 26 

Oakland Heritage Alliance Walking Tour of Jingletown Meet at 10 a.m. next to Mary Help of Christians Church, east 9th and 26th Ave. Cost is $10-$15. 763-9218. www.oaklandheritage.org 

“Peace with Justice: Prison Reform” with Laura Mangini at 10:30 a.m. at Easter Hill United Methodist Church, 3911 Cutting Blvd. Richmond. 233-0777. 

“Art in the Park” Exhibition hosted by the City of Alameda, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Jackson Park, 2430 Encinal Ave., Alameda. arpd@ci.alameda.ca.us  

Oak Grove Music Festival Celebrating 268 days of tree occupation, from 1 to 7 p.m. at the Memorial Oak Grove, Piedmont at Bancroft. 938-2109. www.SaveOaks.com 

Auditions for “Little Mary Sunshine” at 1 p.m. at Masqueers Playhouse 105 Park Place, Point Richmond. Please prepare a 32-bar up-tempo showtune. 415-465-5550. 

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 

Tour of the Berkeley City Club, Julia Morgan’s “little castle” at 1:15, 2:15, and 3:15 p.m. at 2315 Durant Ave. Free, donations welcome. 883-9710. 

Sew Your Own Open Studio from 5 to 9 p.m. at 84 Bolivar Drive, Aquatic Park. Our workshop has industrial and domestic machines and tools which you can come learn to use or work on your own projects in a social setting. Cost is $3 per hour. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. Call to confirm. 841-8732.  

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

MONDAY, AUGUST 27 

Potter Creek Concerned Neighbors A meeting of neighbors and businesses against the formation of the West Berkeley Community Benefits District (CBD) at 7 p.m. at Ecole Bilingue de Berkeley (French School), 1009 Heinz Ave. at 9th. 

Free Boatbuilding Classes for Youth Mon.-Wed. 2 to 6 p.m. at Berkeley Boathouse, 84 Bolivar Drive, Aquatic Park. Classes cover woodworking, boatbuilding, and boat repair. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

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. For details see www.dragonmax.org 

Rally for Justice for Woodfin Workers at 6 p.m. outside Emeryville City Hall, then show your support at the 7 p.m. City of Emeryville Appeal Hearing. www.woodfinwatch.org 

Auditions for Contra Costa Chorale at 7:15 p.m. at Hillside Community Church, 1422 Navellier St., El Cerrito. 527-2026. 

TUESDAY, AUGUST 28 

Full Moon Walk at John Muir National Historic Site Walk up Mt. Wanda to see the moon rise over Mt. Diablo. Bring water, flashlight and good walking shoes for the steep trail. Reservations required. 925-228-8860. 

“Baraka” a film of images from 24 countries showing the beauty and destruction of nature and humans at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donation $5. www.HumanistHall.net 

Young People’s Symphony Orchestra Auditions at 4 p.m. at the Crowden School. For information on what to prepare and to make an appointment call 849-988. www.ypsomusic.net 

End the Occupation Vigil every Tues. at noon at Oakland Federal Bldg., 1301 Clay St. www.epicalc.org 

Free Sewing Class for Youth at Sew Your Own, from 3 to 6 p.m. at Bolivar Drive, Aquatic Park. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

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. 

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. 

Family Storytime for preschoolers and up at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704. www.ecologycenter.org 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. 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. 

Street Level Cycles Community Bike Program Tues., Thurs., and Sat. from 2 to 6 p.m. Open bicycle repair lab at Waterside Workshops, 84 Bolivar Drive, Aquatic Park. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 29 

Walking Tour of Jack London Waterfront Meet at 10 a.m. at the corner of Broadway and Embarcadero. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

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. 

Red Cross Blood Drive from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at East Pauley Ballroom MLK Student Union, UC Campus. To schedule an appointment go to www.BeADonor.com  

Bayswater Book Club meets to discuss “Needs Assessment in Public Health” by Peterson and Alexander at 6:30 p.m. Call for location. 433-2911. 

Ice Cream Social for Seniors at 1:15 p.m. at North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. 981-5190. 

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 

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. 

Stitch ‘n Bitch at 6:30 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

THURSDAY, AUGUST 30 

Berkeley/Albany Mental Health Services Implementation Progress Report A Public Hearing at 7 p.m. at the Mental Health Auditorium, 2640 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way at Derby. Copies of the report are availble, call 981-7698. 

Berkeley School Volunteers Orientation from 4 to 5 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. Come learn about volunteer opportunities. 644-8833. 

Get Involved with Your Local Green Party Meeting at 7 p.m. at the Grassroots House, 2022 Blake between Shattuck & Milvia. www.berkeleygreens.org  

Young People’s Symphony Orchestra Auditions at 4 p.m. at the Crowden School. For information on what to prepare and to make an appointment call 849-988. www.ypsomusic.net 

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. 

Baby and Toddler Storytime at 10:15 and 11:15 a.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave, Kensington. 524-3043. 

ONGOING 

Campaign for Earthquake Victims in Peru To find the collection site closest to you call Paco at 229-8350 or the Consulate of Peru 1-877-490-7378.