Proposed laws and services aimed at people exhibiting “inappropriate street behavior” make up the Public Commons for Everyone Initiative, to be discussed at a forum Saturday. -more-
A Berkeley man slain by a fusillade of high-powered automatic rifle shots fired from a passing van early Saturday morning had himself been arrested two years earlier as one of six suspects in a similar slaying in Richmond. -more-
Planning Commissioners Wednesday approved a modified plan and rezoning agenda that will open up the northern end of West Berkeley to car dealerships. -more-
The courtroom battle over UC Berkeley’s stadium-area building boom pitted the city’s hired legal gun in a Tuesday showdown against the university’s own sharpshooter-for-hire. -more-
Fulani Offuti has been an hourly worker in the Parks and Recreation Department for 11 years, working most recently in James Kenney Park’s inclusionary program, where disabled and able-bodied children are integrated into recreation activities. -more-
More than 25 uniformed Berkeley police officers crowded into a courtroom today for opening statements in the trial of a man accused of attempting to murder Berkeley police Officer Darren Kacalek more than two years ago. -more-
At over 25 meetings held during two days this past week, parents, teachers, students and community members showed up to question, comment and prophesy on the role of the new superintendent who will replace current Berkeley Unified School District superintendent Michel Lawrence in February. -more-
Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board member Chris Kavanagh pleaded not guilty today to five felony counts stemming from allegations that his real home is in Oakland and that he falsely claims he lives in Berkeley in order to hold office and collect city benefits there. -more-
Code Pink took to the streets of Berkeley Wednesday to try to drive the U.S. Marine Recruitment Center out of the city. -more-
Berkeley still has a long way to go before it can eliminate health inequalities, according to city officials who spoke at Tuesday’s Community Action Forum at St. Paul AME Church. -more-
Flames destroyed most of a large carport behind one of Berkeley’s tenancy-in-common (TIC) buildings last Friday, consuming two cars in the process. -more-
One of the two students who were injured in a series of unrelated accidents at Berkeley High Wednesday was back in the classroom Thursday, said Berkeley Unified School District spokesperson Mark Coplan. -more-
The wisdom of Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums’ policy of keeping his distance from the politics of the Oakland City Council gets its first real test this Tuesday when the council considers Dellums’ appointments to the powerful Port of Oakland Board of Commissioners. -more-
Today (Friday, September 28) is the last day for eligible persons to put their applications in the mail for the two available units of Berkeley’s public housing, Berkeley Housing Authority Director Tia Ingram reminded the BHA board at its Wednesday evening meeting. -more-
I’m not one for making holiday plans too early. I cringe at Halloween displays in stores on Labor Day, and abhor hearing ho-ho-ho’s anytime before Thanksgiving. -more-
“Independent Living isn’t doing everything by yourself—it’s being in control of how things are done.” -more-
Kavanagh Will Plead Not Guilty -more-
Friends and family of Gary W. King rallied outside of Oakland City Hall Monday afternoon to call for the prosecution of the police sergeant who shot and killed the 20-year-old Oakland resident last Thursday. -more-
After her mother’s death in 1999, journalist Emily Yellin came across the wartime diary and hundreds of letters her mother had written home from the Pacific while working with the Red Cross. Within days, Yellin could see that “My mother’s story served as a window through which to see the story of all the women in World War II.” -more-
Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive Director Kevin Consey will leave his post in January, the museum announced Friday. -more-
Berkeley police are investigating two deaths on Saturday as the city’s third and fourth homicide of 2007. -more-
Planning commissioners meet Wednesday to hold their second and final vote on the zoning ordinance and plan amendments paving the way for car dealers to set up shop in West Berkeley. -more-
The courtroom battle over UC Berkeley’s stadium-area building plans has shifted from shaky ground to the broader environment—though a bomb threat delayed Friday’s session. -more-
Representatives of the Wayans Brothers-Pacifica Capital Urban Development Partnership have said that they did not know, when they signed an exclusive negotiating agreement (ENA) with the City of Oakland to purchase old Oakland Army Base property, that the Port of Oakland was planning a bayfill and container cargo storage in waters directly across from that property. -more-
A meeting, billed as a forum to discuss the West Berkeley Community Benefits District (WBCBD), has been delayed, according to Michael Caplan, the city’s acting economic development director. -more-
Berkeley Developers Ruegg & Ellsworth will ask the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) Thursday for a use permit to redevelop the former Tower Records building at 2517 Durant Ave. -more-
On Wednesday I had a rare opportunity to sit in a chair at an undisclosed location in the country for a couple of hours. I took along the New Yorker which had just arrived in my mailbox and my reading glasses, as well as some binoculars in case any birds showed up. -more-
There’s been a completely unnecessary uproar over MoveOn’s ad about General Petraeus. It almost makes one wonder if there isn’t some Cointelpro-like infiltration going on in the anti-war movement, except that I know that people like us can always manage to shoot ourselves in the foot with no help from anyone. What’s unnecessary about it? -more-
Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) has been argued and debated ever since AC Transit unveiled a proposal for a BRT project between Berkeley, Oakland and San Leandro. The subject has polarized the community into pro-BRT and anti-BRT factions—and, of course, those who have never heard of it. It is therefore timely to provide some guidance on how to analyze this proposal—and others like it. -more-
I stopped reading the Bay Guardian after the paper endorsed Tom Bates in Berkeley’s 2006 mayoral election. I’d thought the Guardian stood for neighborhood integrity, affordable housing and democratic governance. Also, for in-depth, pre-endorsement research of political candidates. But its editors embraced Bates—the big developers’ back-room buddy—without bothering to send me so much as an e-mail about my own candidacy. That experience made me wonder how much I should trust the Guardian, especially when it ventures outside San Francisco. -more-
Friends! The hour of judgment is at hand for our planet. Doom is knocking on our door in the form of catastrophic climate change. Global warming not only threatens our so-called way of life, it threatens the very existence of the planet itself! Here in Berkeley, we must do more than our fair share to offset this crisis. Why more than our fair share? Quite simply because other communities cannot be relied on to do even their meager fair share in cutting back on carbon emissions. We must make up for what others fail to do on a global scale through our own heroic self-sacrifice. We cannot afford to wait until 2050 to meet our modest carbon emission reduction goals. Many of us who passed this measure will not even be alive then to implement it. By 2050 it will have been too late for this planet I fear, possibly far too late for all of the extinct species whose blood will be on our hands. This is no time for buying absolution through carbon credits or for half-assed symbolic measures which mostly have a feel good significance. -more-
The recent spinal cord injury to Kevin Everett, a special teams player for the Buffalo Bills of the National Football League, highlights the frustrations felt by thousands of families across the United States. Everett’s prognosis continues to improve due to extraordinary emergency care delivered immediately after his accident. And, though he does not know it yet, his fan base grew considerably at the moment he was stilled upon colliding with his opponent. Large portions of the spinal injured community now follow his recovery. Their discontent stems from the reminders of neglect shown to the legacy of another high profile injured individual. -more-
It was with some sadness that I read the recent contributions of Jeff Ogar and Matthew Shoemaker in the letters to the editor section of the Daily Planet. They both provided true-life examples that serve to underscore the concerns I expressed in my Sept. 14 commentary, “Anger and Football Hysteria.” Each man seems to be convinced of two things: First, that I am a bad person, not just someone with views different from their own; and second, that I simply could not love trees and also support the Cal Bears football team. -more-
Loose nukes sink…” well, just about anything. The official story is that on Aug. 30, the U.S. Air Force (AF) “mistakenly” loaded six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles on a B-52 at Minot, North Dakota and flew them to Barksdale, Louisiana for decommissioning. The mistake was discovered and the munitions officer at Minot was suspended pending an investigation. -more-
Our friends at the Oakland Tribune published an editorial this week with the opinion that “Oakland Not Ready For Control Over Schools” and urging, therefore, that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger veto Assemblymember Sandré Swanson’s AB45 bill that might speed up a return to local school control. -more-
Would a neighborhood by any other name still sell as sweet? An entertaining aspect of reading real estate listings in Berkeley has to do with the identification of neighborhoods. -more-
One of the limitations, frustrations, confusions, and overall learning experiences any gardener encounters here is water. Understand that I use “learning experience” as an expletive. -more-
I know you’re out there: you who fear tools. Confirmed abdicators of all things mechanical. Live prey to all members of the Phylum Contractazoa. You who hide in corners until the power is brought back on again by mysterious means. I am here to help but there IS a price. Immersion therapy is not easy but it is simple and you can only change if you really want to change. -more-
You old hippies, you probably remember sticking an avocado pit on some arrangement of toothpicks over a jar of water to make it sprout. The tree, if it survived to that stage, made a decent houseplant when it wasn’t turning sickly yellow and dropping leaves and getting all etiolated like a wispy fishing rod because it was stuck in a dark corner and watered too seldom and/or too often by turns and potted in a bucket of backyard clay in the first place and the only fertilizer it ever got was when the cat peed in the pot. -more-
I think I can’t be Mabel, because I know so many things, and she so little. Besides, I’m I, and she’s she.” Whatever you know—or think you know—about Alice in Wonderland, the Rev. Dodgson’s voyage into the mind of a young girl dropped down a rabbit hole into a dream world of playing cards, mad tea parties and hookah-smoking caterpillars—you’ll be delightfully surprised and newly enlightened by Ragged Wing Ensemble’s completely kinetic staging of Andre Gregory’s (My Dinner with Andre) adaptation (with “the Manhattan Project”—a bid to add Einstein and Oppenheimer to Freud and the Surrealists as Lewis Carroll knock-offs?) at Envision Academy in the Julia Morgan-designed old YWCA building at 1515 Webster in downtown Oakland. It’s going into its last two weekends with a full head of steam, as if the revved-up cast had eaten of the caterpillar’s mushroom and obeyed the tag on the little bottle that reads “Drink Me.” -more-
Subterranean Shakespeare’s CD, Shakespeare’s Greatest Hits (“Two years in the making!”) is something of an instant Berkeley minor classic, what with Michael Rossman (he of the Free Speech Movement) belting out “The Ballad of Tom O’Bedlam” (which Robert Graves and Edith Sitwell both credited to the Bard) or tootling flute on other numbers with The Rude Mechanicals, or funnyman Ed Holmes and poet G. P. Skratz doing up the Scottish Weird Sisters’ “Double, double, toil and trouble” with Andy Dinsmore as World Music. This 17-track wonder features a plethora of local names that have—and haven’t—trod the boards Bardic, in every musical style and sundry. And this coming Monday, Oct. 1, there’ll be a CD release party, 8 p.m. at the Berkeley Unitarian Fellowship Hall, Cedar and Bonita streets. Rossman will croon, Bob Ernst will wail on mouth harp, Tom Waits’ sidekick Mark Growden and his band rave up Will, Michael Peppe do the 129th Sonnet as Wm. Shatner, Ed Holmes get witchy. -more-
Ten years ago Robert Colescott represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. Rarely was there a solo exhibition at the American pavilion and it was even more amazing that this honor was awarded to an African American painter. The show was very well received and after it closed at the Giardini Publici it travelled to museums in this country and was seen at the Berkeley Museum in 1999. -more-
Would a neighborhood by any other name still sell as sweet? An entertaining aspect of reading real estate listings in Berkeley has to do with the identification of neighborhoods. -more-
One of the limitations, frustrations, confusions, and overall learning experiences any gardener encounters here is water. Understand that I use “learning experience” as an expletive. -more-
I know you’re out there: you who fear tools. Confirmed abdicators of all things mechanical. Live prey to all members of the Phylum Contractazoa. You who hide in corners until the power is brought back on again by mysterious means. I am here to help but there IS a price. Immersion therapy is not easy but it is simple and you can only change if you really want to change. -more-
The title character of Berkeley native Eisa Davis’ Pulitzer Prize-nominated play Bulrusher, as produced by the Shotgun Players at the Ashby Stage, says, “I guess I can tell everybody else’s future because I don’t know my own past ... didn’t die like I was supposed to, so I’ve got a one-way ticket to the Land of Could Be.” -more-
“If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filling dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit.” -more-
Moe’s Books will host an event tonight (Tuesday) at 7:30 p.m. to celebrate the publication of Viz Interarts: Event, A Trans-Genre Anthology with readings by Laura Moriarty, who teaches at Mills College and helps direct Small Press Distribution; haiku poet and teacher Gary Gach; writer, editor and publisher Mary Burger and spoken word artist and Sister Spit promoter Michelle Tea. The anthology’s 250 large-format illustrated pages contain writers and artists such as Dadaist Tristan Tzara, the late Objectivist poet Carl Rakosi (whose poem is collaged by Anne Waldman), George Hitchcock of Kayak, well-known Beat and New York School poets, Situationists and Fluxus artists, Language poets and well-known Bay Area poets and writers of the present, like Michael Palmer, Norma Cole and Joanne Kyger. -more-
You old hippies, you probably remember sticking an avocado pit on some arrangement of toothpicks over a jar of water to make it sprout. The tree, if it survived to that stage, made a decent houseplant when it wasn’t turning sickly yellow and dropping leaves and getting all etiolated like a wispy fishing rod because it was stuck in a dark corner and watered too seldom and/or too often by turns and potted in a bucket of backyard clay in the first place and the only fertilizer it ever got was when the cat peed in the pot. -more-
