Becky Lyman of Code Pink debates Lee Wolf of the San Francisco State Young Republicans in a demonstration / counter-demonstration at the Berkeley Marine Recruitment office, 64 Shattuck Square on Wednesday.  

Code Pink demonstrators say they think it is inappropriate to have a military recruitment office in a town that has passed a number of anti-war resolutions. They further argue that recruiters lie to young recruits about what they’ll get out of joining the military. 

Wolf, who has also counter-demonstrated with the UC Davis Young Republicans at the Woodfin Suites Hotel in Emeryville, the target of demonstrations because of its labor practices, told the Daily Planet that he was applying to the Marines and would become an officer in the intelligence services when he graduates college in May. When he was not debating Lyman, Wolf was filming Code Pink demonstrators. 

“Now more than ever we need those who are willing to serve and fight the war on terror and in Iraq,” Wolf said. 

The law barring construction and substantial renovations of existing buildings perched atop active earthquake faults doesn’t apply to the University of California, one of its lawyers said Thursday. 

That’s because the only mandatory provisions in the Alquist-Priolo Act refer only to city and county governments, John M. Sanger told Alameda County Superior Court Judge Barbara Miller. 

Sanger is one of two San Francisco attorneys defending the UC Board of Regents in litigation now underway in a Hayward courtroom that seeks to overturn Board of Regents decisions paving the way for a massive construction program at and around Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium. 

Three attorneys representing the City of Berkeley, Panoramic Hill Association, the California Oak Foundation, City Councilmember Dona Spring and other Berkeley residents are challenging approval the Southeast Campus Integrated Projects (SCIP). 

Harriet Steiner, Stephan Volker and Michael Lozeau are pitted against Sanger and partner Charles R. Olson in a case that focuses on two seminal laws governing real estate development in the state. 

By the close of court Wednesday it was all over but a tour of the site by Judge Miller and the lawyers, a day of final argument next Thursday and the judge’s decision—due within 30 days after the lawyers have had their final say. 

At issue are the Alquist-Priolo Earthquake Fault Zoning Act, legislation first passed in 1972, and the California Environmental Quality Act, adopted in 1970. 

The former governs construction on or near earthquake faults which have been active within the last 11,000 years, while the later governs impacts of construction projects and their remedies. 

Alquist-Priolo 

Passed in the wake of the disastrous Feb. 9, 1971 San Fernando earthquake—a magnitude 6.6 temblor that collapsed two hospitals and killed 65 people—Alquist-Priolo bars new construction within 50 feet of an active fault and limits additions or alterations to existing buildings within the zone to 50 percent of a structure’s value. 

The fight over Alquist-Priolo is critical to the future of the Barclay Simpson Student Athlete High Performance Center—the four-story office and gym complex the university wants to build along the stadium’s western wall. 

The site is occupied by a recently fenced grove of coastal live oaks and other trees, several occupied by protesters who hope to save what the university acknowledges are more than three dozen specimen-quality trees.  

The judge’s rulings will determine if the university is bound by the law, and, if so, whether or not the 50 percent ruling should be fixed at a level the city and its allies contend would block its extensive renovation plans. 

Another crucial issue is whether the gym-and-office complex is part of the stadium or a separate building. Olson and Sanger have contend the structures are separate, noting that earlier plans that would have installed them in a six- or eight-floor structure replacing part of the stadium’s western wall were rejected. 

If the judge holds that Alquist-Priolo applies to the university and that the gym and stadium are one, the issue of the stadium’s value becomes critical. 

Project foes contend the stadium’s worth should be set at its current market value—arguably somewhat tarnished by the building’s age and the fact that the Hayward Fault slices through its walls, in Steiner’s phrase, “from goal post to goal post.” 

The university claims that replacement costs should be the standard, give a fat 50 percent margin that would encompass new seating, a lavish new elevated press and luxury skybox array, permanent lighting banks and other renovations—even with new gym added to the mix. 

Beaming up 

Sanger acknowledges that one aspect of the gym construction project will result in an addition or alteration: installation of a new “grade beam” at the base of the western wall to strengthen the structure. 

The university says the beam is needed to prevent possible collapse during excavation of the athletic and office center, and that the cost is trivial compared to the stadium’s value.  

Some of the session was taken up with dueling diagrams, displays on the courtroom screen of drawings each side used to bolster their claim that the gym was or wasn’t part of the landmarked stadium. 

Unlike CEQA, which has spawned a torrent of legislation and higher court rulings, there’s only one binding Alquist-Priolo decision, and it doesn’t deal with the critical issues before Judge Miller. 

Adding to the complexity of the case is the wording of the law itself. 

In court Wednesday, Lozeau pointed to the law’s preamble, which declares the state legislature’s intent “to provide policies and criteria to assist cities, counties, and state agencies in their exercise of responsibility to prohibit the location of developments and structures for human occupancy across the trace of active faults.” 

Sanger responded by pointing the statue’s specific implementation sections where the common phrase is “cities and counties shall ...” with nary a mention of the state or its agencies. 

CEQA claims 

California passed its law months after Congress passed the National Environmental Protection Act, legislation encompassing federal projects with similar environmental protections. 

At its heart are environmental documents that evaluate the impact of construction on biological, geological, historic, cultural, esthetic and other “resources,” spelling out mitigations for any adverse effects, and looking at alternatives that would avoid them. 

The most thorough going report, the one generally required of major projects, is the environmental impact report (EIR), a document which can run more than a 1,000 pages. 

The SCIP EIR is a massive document which includes the stadium upgrade, the gym, a nearby underground parking lot, renovations of Piedmont Avenue and some historic buildings, demolitions of other buildings, a new office and meeting complex joining functions of Boalt Hall law school and the Haas School of Business and repairs to the existing buildings of both schools. 

Adding to the complexity as well as the mass of paperwork stacked on tables along the jury box in Miller’s court is the fact that the SCIP EIR is a sub-document of yet another EIR. 

In legal lingo, the SCIP projects are “tiered off” the university’s 2020 Long Range Development Plan, which itself generated its own lengthy EIR. 

The result is a confusing maze of paperwork as impacts are sought first in one document then the other. Both documents also deal with multiple projects, adding to the twists and turns of the paper trail. 

The final two days of the hearing focused on the SCIP EIR’s sections devoted to project objectives, alternatives and the findings cited to justify the approval of both the EIR and the SCIP projects themselves. 

Poison pills 

Olson said the projects were bound together to maximize synergy, design and fundraising. “I admitted it was unusual,” he told the court, but the university had done it twice before in recent years. 

But the judge noted that descriptions of objectives included in the earlier bundled projects “are a little more concrete than some of the rather vague objectives included in the current projects.”  

While the project foes have charged that the EIR failed to give serious consideration to relocating the stadium elsewhere—perhaps to Albany, Richmond or the Oakland Coliseum, Olson said CEQA doesn’t require the university to look for other sites. 

“The university has the unfettered ability to define its own projects,” he said. 

Volker said that when it came to justifying some of the most hotly disputed projects, the EIR relied on the least objective, least measurable rationales—namely “to enhance historic places,” “to create extra-ordinary new spaces,” and “to increase the functionality of existing spaces and facilities.” 

“The objects are designed to eliminate a range of alternatives,” Volker said, and particularly, were used as “poison pills” to kill off any possible alternatives to its plans for the stadium. 

At the meeting where the regents’ Committee on Grounds and Buildings approved the SCIP EIR, Vice Chancellor Ed Denton had told the board keeping the stadium at its present site was critical because of the fond memories it stirred in the hearts of alumni. 

“There was no good-faith discussion of alternatives” said Steiner, and the stadium alternative—relocating to Golden Gate Fields in Albany—“was designed to be eliminated.” 

Thus, she said, the university failed to provide that reasonable alternative mandated by CEQA.

Accused by the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office of lying about where he lives to maintain his seat on the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board, Rent Board Member Chris Kavanagh stepped down temporarily from his post while he battles the charges in court. 

Kavanagh, 49, pleaded not guilty at his Sept. 27 arraignment in Oakland Superior Court. He faces five felonies relating to election fraud. 

“He’s voluntarily stepping down,” Rent Board Executive Director Jay Kelekian told the Daily Planet Tuesday. Kelekian said he had encouraged Kavanagh to do so. 

Kavanagh made his decision public in an Oct. 2 letter addressed to Rent Board Chair Jesse Arreguin, in which he said that continuing to sit on the board had become “a distraction … and risk[s] impacting the critical work and mission of the Rent Stabilization Board.”  

Kavanagh requested the leave between Oct. 2 and the end of the year. “I will return to the board if the charges are resolved before the end of the year,” Kavanagh wrote in the letter, further asking for his $500 board stipend to be held in escrow. 

That stipend was the target of a grand theft charge against Kavanagh, accusing him of illegally accepting the stipend and benefits accorded by the city.  

Other charges include registering to vote where he is not eligible; voting where he is not eligible to vote; filing false nominating papers and perjury. Kavanagh was arrested by Oakland police Sept. 21 and freed on $30,000 bail two days later. 

“I continue to believe that when all the facts are presented that I will be cleared of the charges and allowed to continue representing the citizens of Berkeley,” Kavanagh wrote. 

Kavanagh is scheduled to return to Alameda County Superior Court Oct. 26 to have a preliminary hearing date set.  

At issue is a cottage on 63rd Street where Kavanagh’s name is on the lease. The question of Kavanagh’s residency was sent to the district attorney in 2003, but the office did not charge him at the time. Kavanagh’s possible residency in Oakland came to light again this year when a new owner of the 63rd Street property attempted to evict Kavanagh from the property. 

Kavanagh has told rent board members that he lives in Berkeley and that his girlfriend lives in Oakland. 

Local Green Party members put out a statement last month calling on Green Party member Kavanagh to step down immediately if he was not a Berkeley resident.  

Reached Thursday, School Board member John Selawsky, one of the signatories of the September statement, said the party steering committee had not met to formulate a collective response.  

Speaking for himself, he said he was disappointed that the issue is still unresolved. “He has a right to his day in court,” Selawsky said, adding, however, that he believes public officials should be held to higher standards than private citizens.  

There’s a new sign posted at the Albany Waterfront Park announcing an “Albany Bulb Clean-up Project” beginning Monday, Sept. 24, and going on for two weeks. It warns that “heavy equipment” will be used but assures that the “cleanup will not have a permanent impact on the Albany Bulb’s landscape or usability.” That is meant to be reassuring. On past occasions when bulldozers were used they tore up wide swaths of lush vegetation. Robert Barringer, who called the Bulb home for years, recalled how “they took down a lot of trees and shrubs and they laid them out like corpses.” As for impact on “usabilty,” that’s a very big question.  

To numerous dog lovers the Bulb is a place to let their dogs run free, to artists it’s a place to let their creativity expand, for the urban ecologists it’s a place to plant and nurture a tree, for youngsters it’s a place to skateboard—oops, the folks in City Hall didn’t know somebody built a skateboard ramp there a couple of months ago—and for a handful of people who, by choice or necessity, have no other homes, it’s a place to live—to be free and to be safe. Will this cleanup truly not affect any of these people and others who use the Bulb? Not likely.  

On Friday police went through the park telling campers that they would have to leave. Even if they had broken the news gently, it must have been pretty traumatic for people with no place to go. “They came carrying guns ... with a really bad attitude,” according to K.C., a homeless woman who has been there with her dog for over a year. Some of the campers began packing up their belongings. They talked about possible places where they could safely stay other than city streets and doorways. They called on Osha Neumann, one of the Bulb artists and also a lawyer who has defended many poor and homeless people.  

Neumann immediately wrote a letter to a number of city officials, including the mayor, city administrator and city attorney, pointing out that “this eviction is not only inhuman, it is illegal. Enforcing Albany’s camping ordinance against the homeless when there are no shelter beds available constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment.” The city of Albany has no homeless shelters. Neumann cited a number of precedents supporting his allegations.  

On Monday the clean-up began. East Bay Conservation Corps crews rolled in to remove garbage and debris from abandoned campsites. The campers didn’t know when the ax would fall, or that only abandoned campsites were being cleared. They didn’t dare go far away. K.C. made coffee as she always does for whoever came by her campsite. Folks were angry, scared. Watching a pelican soaring and swooping, flying free, people wondered where the world had a place for them.  

K.C. used to breed and train service dogs for people with disabilities. She became homeless when the building she was living in was sold from under her. She has been happy living on the Bulb. When she first became homeless, she says, “For the first time I was really scared.” Instead she found herself welcomed, she felt cared for without losing her independence. If she’s evicted from the Bulb she has no place to go. Shelters will not allow dogs, and she doesn’t have the means to get into regular housing: “Once you’re out here, you’re stuck.”  

Pelican and his partner Berkeley are in their twenties, idealistic, and living on the Bulb by choice, “because it’s beautiful.” Rather than working at a routine job, Pelican wants to “live free and give to the community.” Berkeley shares his vision of the Bulb as a place for “renewal.” She points to the polluted air and water, raging traffic in the distance and Chevron across the bay and talks about working to recreate a welcoming environment for future generations. Together with campers and friends in the community they are cleaning up, planting trees and composting.  

Meanwhile, Albany city officials, having been informed that they can’t simply evict the campers, have been trying to figure out what to do. Reached by phone Monday afternoon, Assistant City Attorney Judy Lieberman explained that the usual procedures after informing people that they’re not allowed to camp, is to go out with Berkeley mental health workers and talk to the people about options and services available. Berkeley and Albany have a joint mental-health district, she explained, which seems to justify their sending homeless people to Berkeley, but it’s not clear what mental health can do for people who need a place to live. She acknowledged that Berkeley doesn’t have enough shelter beds.  

Asked what the city was doing after having told people they must leave without offering any alternative, she insisted that they were not rousting people. “We are not rousting anyone, but kind of standing by.” She quoted what she described as the official police statement, that they are “not taking enforcement posture.” At the suggestion that it would be kind to let people know that they had at least a temporary reprieve, she admitted, “Maybe I will talk to our maintenance crew and see ... if we can convey the message.”  

Albany Mayor Robert Lieber, also contacted on Monday afternoon, was equally vague. He confirmed that Berkeley mental health would be called in to counsel the campers. At this point, he said nobody was being moved. He was asked if the people were now no longer being told they have to leave. Reminded that a few days ago they were told to leave, he replied that “we were going to do that today, but as far as I know that actually hasn’t taken place.”  

Asked if there were plans to make it happen, he conceded, “I think we will. It’s a huge  

problem,” and he alluded to “what happened at Golden Gate Park.”  

Admittedly there are fewer than ten people involved here, but there are countless homeless people on the streets of Berkeley and El Cerrito. Was he worried they would all flock to the Bulb? He didn’t think so. The mayor did give assurances that the art would definitely not be destroyed. However, he considers the skateboard ramp a problem.  

One might be tempted to feel a little pity for the city of Albany. They’re stuck with this piece of land that didn’t even exist fifty years ago and they don’t have the money to manage it. They would like it to become part of the Eastshore State Park, which is part of the state park system. But again money is an issue.  

For the time being the eviction is on hold. Speaking to K.C. on Wednesday, she reported that the mental health people who came by on Tuesday afternoon were accompanied by police, so no one would speak to them. The clean-up operation has also stopped. The East Bay Conservation Corps crew were sent to an occupied campsite, she said, and refused to demolish it. She had high praise for the young people on the crew who “felt this was not right and wouldn’t do it.”  

Furthermore, she said, the contractors who were supplying the heavy equipment were backing off, apparently saying this was getting “too political.” With winter approaching and the city determined to evict them, the future of the Bulb campers is anything but secure.

As late as a little over a year ago, the name of the rising African-American political family dynasty in East Oakland was Hodge. But what appears on the surface to be a growing family feud in East Oakland politics may mean that might soon change. 

Call it the Hodges and Brooks feud. 

Alameda County Department of Social Services Civil Rights Coordinator Darleen Brooks, the sister of Oakland City Councilmember Desley Brooks, has announced she is running against Marcie Hodge for the Area 2 Peralta Community College District Trustee seat. It was only a year ago that Marcie Hodge lost to Desley Brooks for Brooks’ District 6 City Council seat. 

The Hodge family has been in Oakland elected office for more than a decade. 

Marcie Hodge’s older brother, Jason, was elected to the board of the Oakland Unified School District in 1996, choosing not to run for re-election after the district was taken over by the state in 2003. 

In 2004, while he was still on the school board, Jason Hodge briefly entered the race for the District 7 Oakland City Council seat after reports that incumbent Larry Reid was not running for re-election. But Jason Hodge stopped campaigning when Reid announced that he was still running. With Hodge’s name remaining on the ballot. Reid easily won re-election 68 percent to 20 percent to the District 7 City Council seat in the March 2004 balloting. 

Still, with name recognition built up from two terms on the school board and because he did not actively campaign against Reid in 2004, Jason Hodge remained one of the early favorites for the District 7 City Council seat whenever Reid actually did retire. 

Meanwhile, another Hodge did run and win an East Oakland election in 2004. Jason’s sister, Marcie, easily defeated Johnny Lorigo for the vacated Area Two Peralta Board of Trustees seat, 66 percent to 33 percent. 

A little over a year into her Peralta term, Marcie Hodge announced she was running against incumbent Desley Brooks for her East Oakland City Council seat. 

The Marcie Hodge City Council campaign was a distinctly family affair. Jason Hodge served as her campaign chair and often as her media spokesperson, her mother, Yvonne, served as her campaign treasurer, and for a while, until county election officials ruled it was an improper mixing of religion and state, the campaign was run out of the East Oakland church where her mother is pastor. 

Marcie Hodge had counted heavily on political and financial support from Oakland City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente in her race against Desley Brooks, and, in fact, there were some reports that De La Fuente, who has often feuded with Brooks on the council, originally approached Marcie Hodge to run against Brooks. 

De La Fuente, in fact, hosted an initial fundraiser for Marcie Hodge in the 2006 District 6 Council race. But De La Fuente, who was running for mayor of Oakland at that time, was counting on serious opposition in his race only from fellow Councilmember Nancy Nadel, and presumably could let extra money go Hodge’s way. 

After former Congressmember Ron Dellums entered the mayoral race, De La Fuente was forced to concentrate almost completely on his own election, and expected support for Marcie Hodge from outside the sixth district appeared to dwindle. Hodge faded, eventually losing badly to Brooks, 53 percent to 35 percent. A third candidate, Nancy Sidebotham, received 12 percent of the vote. 

Now, if she chooses to run for re-election next year, Marcie Hodge will have to contend with Desley Brooks’ sister, Darleen, for her own Peralta seat. 

For a period, Hodge had a rocky tenure on the Peralta board that might make her appear vulnerable to a challenge. 

In 2005 and 2006, Hodge made a series of charges in Peralta board meetings against the district’s Office of International Affairs, alleging that the office was mismanaging and misappropriating money. The charges grew so heated that after a particularly contentious September 2005 meeting, trustees voted 5-1-1 two months later to censure Hodge for “behavior that is out of compliance with the laws and regulations governing trustee conduct and the established policies of the Peralta Community College District.”  

Because the Hodge-Brooks council race was not close, it was difficult to tell if the censure had any effect on District 6 voters. And since that time, Hodge appears to have repaired her relations with fellow board members. 

However, polite relations and endorsements are two entirely different matters. Peralta trustees have a recent history of endorsing challengers to fellow incumbents. Last year, several trustees endorsed challenger Abel Guillen over incumbent Alona Clifton. Guillen defeated Clifton 55-44 percent in the November 2006 election. 

Point towers and pointed tensions dominated Wednesday’s DAPAC meeting, and by the time the session ended, a resolution for downtown Berkeley’s future skyline remained elusive. 

Members of the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee were slated to approve two sections of the new plan for an expanded downtown area. 

With brisk efficiency—including a sharp rebuke of DAPAC Chair Will Travis for an interruption—committee member Victoria Eisen steered the committee through adoption of the plan’s access chapter.  

The 26-page document aims to discourage single-occupant car use, boost mass transit ridership and encourage pedestrians—if need be, even by increasing congestion for motorists. 

Committee members voted 17-0-2 for adoption, with Gene Poschman and Lisa Stephens abstaining. Travis then turned to what the agenda listed as “an opportunity to define and endorse a ‘preferred’ Land Use Alternative.’” 

Drafted by Matt Taecker, the planner hired with UC Berkeley funds to steer the planning process, the proposal calls for a much taller cityscape that DAPAC’s own drafting committee has proposed. 

“Staff has been working very hard to bring together something that draws together the best from all” of the proposals, he said. 

But Taecker’s plan brought back the “point towers” which the committee had repeatedly rebuffed, albeit in smaller numbers than the 14 he had originally proposed, along with significant height increases for most of the rest of Berkeley’s city center. 

Sparks began to fly, with the first and heaviest pyrotechnics coming from Juliet Lamont, who, like Travis, was appointed to the committee by Mayor Tom Bates. 

Lamont had been one of the architects of an alternative chapter drafted by an informal group of committee members, a document which differs significantly from Taecker’s version. 

Former Planning Commissioner Rob Wrenn, who chaired the UC Hotel Task force that drafted a proposal for the university’s plan for a hotel at the northeast corner of the Shattuck Avenue/Center Street intersection, inspired the proposed chapter’s key theme of granting height bonuses only in exchange for concessions beneficial to the city. 

That version, which Lamont helped draft along with Wendy Alfsen and Planning Commission Helen Burke, allowed a base maximum height of three stories downtown that could increase to eight in return for a variety of reasons—including the mandatory state density bonus, which gives increased size in return for developing affordable housing. 

“We worked very hard” to forge a compromise, Lamont said. “We went to people in DAPAC and beyond, into the community. And we tried to get people to move off their positions. We said over and over that it was a compromise. While I appreciate what the staff put into their plan, it is really hard to see it as a compromise based on what’s been discussed so far.” 

The staff proposal, she said, was destined to re-ignite polarizations that the subcommittee had worked hard to heal so they could forge a document that would appeal to the broader community. 

By throwing in the point towers and a call for significant increases in height, “the biggest hot button issue in Berkeley,” the staff plan was certain to ignite dissent and could “spur people to launch a referendum,” she added. 

Declaring that it was realistic to expect the plan to win approval in the city, La-mont said, “I would like to get away from these 16-story towers.” 

The downtown plan is being prepared to serve the needs of two outside agencies: The University of California, which is expanding is off-campus presence into the heart of the city, and the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), a regional governmental agency which sets quotas for new housing levels. 

The university has final say over the plan because of the terms of the settlement agreement that ended a city lawsuit challenging the university’s expansion plans through 2020. 

ABAG can, in theory, shut off some state funding to the city if policies aren’t adopted to permit expanded numbers of new residences—though the policy doesn’t have to require the units to be built. 

City Planning Director Dan Marks has told DAPAC members he wants to concentrate new housing downtown because of strong resistance to increased density in the city’s other neighborhoods. 

Taecker’s proposal failed to discuss the mandatory state bonus and how it would apply to his proposed building heights—a point quickly made by Jesse Arreguin and Planning Commissioner Gene Poschman, who has been working on the density bonus question for several years. 

Were the 16 stories before or after the bonuses? And what about other potential bonuses? 

Likewise, was the 120-foot height limit around the BART station pre- or post- bonus? And the 100-foot limit in much of the rest of downtown’s commercial areas? 

“It all comes down to tall buildings,” said Arreguin, who called for a closer look at the volunteer subcommittee’s three-plus-five proposal. 

“We need more discussion,” he said, adding that he would have preferred starting it a year and a half ago. 

Arreguin and Lisa Stephens said they were concerned that the staff proposal didn’t give due attention to concerns about affordable housing. 

Dorothy Walker, a retired UC Berkeley administrator and the committee’s most ardent proponent of fast-tracking high residential density in the downtown, said the issue was people, not building heights. 

Though she wanted more people than the staff plan called for, she said she was willing to vote for it as a compromise. She also urged commissioners not to worry about concerns of current residents. Instead, she said, planners should think more about “the people who are not here” and not worry about “kickback” from angry residents. 

Terry Doran, a former school board member, said he thought fears of backlash were exaggerated. As for Wrenn’s proposal, “I personally am offended by a wall of eight-story buildings in the street.” 

What unites Walker with many of her opponents is a passionate belief that Berkeley needs more housing for people of modest means. 

Steve Weissman, describing himself as a strong believer in density, rejected the point-tower proposal. 

Noting that Berkeley wasn’t a featureless terrain, “I strongly believe that a cluster of 16-story buildings is not going to happen in Berkeley because of what people are saying and because of what it would do to the feeling of the place.” 

Weissman offered an argument quickly picked up by others: The committee should work for a compromise that would result in a strong majority, rather than a narrow, polarizing draft. 

“I agree that our goal should be to come up with a plan where we can have a super-majority vote,” said Wrenn. 

Members also questioned whether the plan should call for an increased number of offices, given that many could wind up occupied by the university—effectively removing them from the city’s tax base while providing no increase in housing to meet ABAG’s quotas. 

Wrenn said he also worried about a plan that would turn the downtown into a cash cow for city government, which could then take funds raised in the city center and disperse them to other parts of the city. 

He also said that the staff’s ready acceptance of a proposal to add a second 22-story hotel downtown should be placed on hold until the developer agreed to part with concessions in return for the right to build a skyline-piercing edifice. The push for concessions in return for height was a constant theme during meetings of the UC Hotel Task force he headed. 

At one point, Eisen moved to approve the staff proposal, but soon withdrew the motion in the face of strong opposition. 

It was Helen Burke who offered an option eagerly seized on by Travis. Why not, said Burke, create a committee to draft a compromise chapter? 

When Travis announced his picks—heavily weighted toward Walker’s end of the continuum—he relented, then called for volunteers, leaving members the opportunity to apply by e-mail. 

With that, the meeting ended.

The administration of Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, left for practically politically dead by some local media outlets, rose dramatically from the grave on Tuesday night to win its second major political victory of the year, securing the nearly-unanimous City Council confirmation of its two Port Commission nominees. 

The Dellums’ administration’s first major victory occurred earlier this year when both union and management representatives publicly credited Dellums with negotiating the settlement that ended the Waste Management trash workers lockout. Late last month, as a result of that negotiated settlement, Waste Management officials announced that Oakland residents would receive an automatic credit on upcoming bills for service lost to Oakland neighborhoods during the July lockout. 

Council confirmed West Oakland environmental health activist Margaret Gordon on a 6-1 vote (Councilmember Desley Brooks voting no) and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 595 Business Manager Victor Uno on a 7-0 vote. Just before the votes, Councilmember Larry Reid had announced his support for both Gordon and Uno, but was in the foyer outside Council chambers when the vote was taken. 

Some had questioned Gordon’s qualifications because her background is in environmental health and not business or management or development or labor, as most Port Commission appointees have been in the past. Gordon will replace labor leader David Kramer on the Commission, while Uno takes the seat formerly occupied by developer .John Protopappas. 

Dellums was not present in Council chambers during or following the vote, but later released a prepared statement that said, “Both Margaret Gordon and Victor Uno embody my sincere interest in addressing the critical and wide-ranging issues facing our city’s port. The overall success of the Port is a key component of the Model City vision, and I commend the council for recognizing the importance of appointing individuals who are capable of understanding both the economic and the environmental impact of the various Port facilities.” 

Gordon herself, while clearly elated by her confirmation, told reporters afterwards that she would have to see how effectively she will be able to communicate her views on the seven-member Commission. 

Gordon and Uno will both take office at the Commission’s next meeting on Oct. 16. 

Uno’s confirmation to the seven-member Port of Oakland Commission was never in doubt, but Dellums pulled the two nominations from the agenda for the last council meeting before the summer break after it appeared Gordon did not have the five votes necessary for confirmation. Only Councilmembers Nancy Nadel (in whose West Oakland district Gordon lives), Jean Quan, and Jane Brunner had announced their support for Gordon. 

A San Francisco Chronicle article on Dellums’ endorsement of Senator Hillary Clinton for president, published on the morning of the council commission vote, said that “the endorsement by Dellums came as new polls show that his support may not carry the clout it once did. Little more than a year after his election, Oakland voters have become disenchanted with the mayor’s leadership. The city continues to suffer from a high homicide rate and violence. A David Binder poll of 500 likely voters taken last month showed Dellums has lost considerable confidence of Oakland’s voters regarding his ability to deal with tough issues like crime and unemployment, and more than half of those surveyed would not vote for him again as mayor.” 

Presumably, either Oakland councilmembers did not read the Chronicle article or the poll numbers, or else had alternate sources of information on the strength of the Dellums administration. 

One of those sources was reportedly an intense lobbying effort of councilmembers by the mayor in the weeks between the July postponement and the Oct. 1 vote. Dellums and Gordon met personally with opposing councilmembers to explain the nominee’s qualifications and answer questions, and, in some cases, Gordon herself returned for a second interview. 

In remarks from the dais shortly before the vote, at least two Councilmember said that the interviews had convinced them of Gordon’s qualifications. 

“I didn’t know Ms. Gordon very well before she was nominated,” At-Large Councilmember Henry Chang said. “After I talked with her I was very impressed with her and her knowledge of the port.” 

And Councilmember Pat Kernighan said that she talked with Gordon “a couple of times,” noting that “she brings a great breadth of experience on health and air quality issues. If the port is to grow, it has to meet increasingly stringent air quality regulatory requirements. Ms. Gordon sees the growth of the port as important.” 

In announcing her opposition, Brooks said that “we need to move in a direction that enhances the port as one of the economic engines of this city.” Brooks said that while she did not believe that Gordon’s presence on the Commission would advance that goal, “I told the mayor I hope he will prove me wrong, and I look forward to him proving me wrong.” 

But Kernighan’s, Chang’s, and Brooks’ remarks were anticlimactic, the outcome a foregone conclusion after Council President De La Fuente, the reported leader of the opposition to Gordon on the Council, led off the debate announcing that he had switched, and would vote for her. 

“I’ve spoken to the mayor a couple of times, and he is absolutely committed to this nomination as a way to bring a balance on the commission,” De La Fuente said, to applause from Gordon supporters in the audience. “We have a responsibility to work with the mayor.” In the only reference to his earlier opposition, De La Fuente added that “if we have the courage to change our minds, that’s what we should do.”

Representatives of eight Native American tribes say UC Berkeley has failed to provide adequately for the return to their tribes of remains and artifacts it holds at UC Berkeley’s Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology.  

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) coalition will hold a demonstration today (Friday) at noon at Sproul Plaza on the UC Berkeley campus to call attention to what they see as the university’s refusal to adequately implement the law, which mandates that federally funded museums identify native human remains and cultural items in their collections and return them to the tribes. 

According to the coalition, the university-mandated reorganization of a semi-autonomous NAGPRA unit at the Hearst Museum has made it more difficult to establish claims that are the basis of the repatriation of native remains for burial.  

Native religious beliefs and the 1990 NAGPRA law that requires repatriation are both violated when remains are not returned to their tribes, Lalo Franco of the Tachi Yokut Tribe in Santa Rosa told the Planet on Thursday.  

For the university, however, the dissolution of the NAGPRA unit is a simple reorganization of functions, integrating the oversight into other museum functions.  

“The reason the university reorganized [the unit] was because it was not an effective unit,” university spokesperson Marie Felde told the Planet on Tuesday, adding that the number of personnel devoted to NAGPRA and the museum’s ability to comply with the law has not changed with the reorganization. 

Integrating the unit into the other museum functions “is the way all the other museums are doing it,” she said.  

Franco said, however, that the disbanded unit was led by Native Americans who understood the significance of the fragments and worked closely with the tribes to help them prepare their claims. 

Now there are no Native Americans at the museum responsible for NAGPRA, he said. 

“These are human beings,” Franco said. “They have a right to be reburied.” 

Corbin Collins, spokesperson for the coalition, characterized those who are seeking the remains as “just ordinary people.” It took the combined expertise and understanding of the Native American scholars in the now-dissolved NAGPRA unit to lay the basis for the claims, he said. 

After preparation at the museum level, claims go to a body that represents the statewide University of California, which includes the two archeologists that recommended the dissolution of the NAGPRA unit, Collins said.  

Franco argued that there is a fundamental clash between researchers and those who view the fragments as human beings. The researchers simply view the collections as “valuable research material,” he said. 

NAGPRA coalition members have been asking for a meeting with Chancellor Robert Birgeneau to create dialog around the issue, Collins said. 

Associate Chancellor John F. Cummins responded. “The chancellor did not want to meet with the coalition. He wanted to meet with individual tribes,” Collins said. 

Spokesperson Felde underscored that Cummins was “more than happy to meet with individuals. It’s important to note it isn’t like anyone is unwilling to meet,” she said. “The associate chancellor is quite open to meeting.”

Rights activist and devout Episcopalian Jane Jackson passed away peacefully Sept. 26 in her beloved Santiago de Cuba. She is survived in the U.S. by her two daughters and their families, by her daughter and her family in Havana, and by all those whose lives she made better during her lifetime of struggle for the rights of people everywhere. Jane was a brilliant, tenacious, determined champion of justice. It is impossible to list all the world’s, the country’s and her neighborhood’s problems to which Jane gave her time, energy, money and love trying to solve.  

To name just a few, Jane fought for civil rights in the United States, ending the Vietnam War, ending apartheid in South Africa, human rights for people with AIDS, and enabling the fullest possible participation for people with disabilities. She strove to prevent and then to end the Iraq War. She stayed up nights finding ways to ease the burden borne by Cubans. She fought for the rights of prisoners, people in nursing homes, medical marijuana users and so many more, including many people she just happened to meet who needed help.  

Born to an affluent family in 1934, Jane’s initial struggle was with dyslexia, which complicated but could never stop her logical mind from satisfying her irrepressible drive to learn. As a young woman she began to suffer bouts of dizziness, diagnosed decades later as Meniere’s Syndrome. Adopting the wheelchair for which she is now best known, she plastered it with social justice bumper stickers and globetrotted for the next 30 years, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.  

So, whenever you see a curb cut, or better yet four curb cuts in the same intersection, whenever you see a person in a wheelchair using a lift on a public bus, or riding BART because the elevator actually worked, Jane is one of the people to thank. We will miss her unavoidable, undeniable presence, usually found on the front lines wherever people are struggling for justice.  

A celebration of her life will be held at 1 p.m. Saturday Nov. 17 at St. James Episcopal Church, 1540 12th Ave., Oakland. Stories, memories and other expressions may be sent to janejackson7555@aol.com or to Jane Jackson, 275 E. 12th St., Oakland 94606.  

Donations in her name may be made to Episcopal Relief and Development c/o St. James Episcopal Church, 1540 12th Ave., Oakland, CA 94606, or to the donor’s favorite charity.  

With very minimal overhead, Episcopal Relief & Development funds immediate crisis relief and a wide variety of long-term development projects identified by local people in communities around the world who will directly benefit by these projects. Housing and water system construction, job training programs and many other projects use local labor and materials, generating a beneficial economic ripple effect in the communities where the money is spent. Its work is unrelated to differences within the Episcopal community on the issue of gender rights, except that those differences may hinder Relief and Development’s ability to raise funds for its work. Thank you for considering a donation to this important organization.  

Libby McMahon is Jane Jackson’s daughter. 

I-M-P-E-A-C-H-! will be spelled out at the Berkeley Marina Sunday, thanks to the efforts of Brad Newsham and some 1,500 others. 

When Newsham, 56, was a young man in 1974, he stood outside the White House as Richard Nixon got into the helicopter for his last official ride, having resigned under pressure of impeachment. 

Newsham told the Daily Planet he wants to see that scene repeated with the impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney. He has become one of the forces in the impeachment movement—to which he’s added a California twist he calls Beach Impeach. 

There’s been three Bay Area Beach Impeach events so far, during which more than 1,000 people lay their bodies down to spell out “I-M-P-E-A-C-H-!”  

Sunday’s event is set for 11 a.m. at Cesar Chavez Park. Volunteers can show up at 7 a.m. to help lay out the outlines of the letters in string, Newsham said.  

Most people come as individuals but some groups have adopted letters for Sunday’s event. The Green Party has asked people to wear green and will fill the letter “I;” Code Pink has taken “C” and is asking supporters to wear pink; The World Can’t Wait, dressed in “Guantanamo orange” according to Newsham, will fill in the exclamation point. 

Among the notables planning to be at the event are former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, the first member of the House of Representatives to file impeachment proceedings, and peace activist Cindy Sheehan. 

Two helicopters will photograph the event at noon. The World Can’t Wait  

is auctioning off one seat on one of the  

helicopters. See: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/ 

eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=200157884385. 

Run For Peace 

The Berkeley Marina is going to be a busy place Sunday. Before the Beach Impeach event, United Nations supporters are gathering there at 9 a.m. for the “Run for Peace,” sponsored by the East Bay United Nations Association. Councilmember Linda Maio will be giving out prizes at that event. For more information, visit www.run4peace.org. 

Run Cynthia Run 

Local Green Party members say they believe Cynthia McKinney will announce that she is a candidate for the Green Party nomination for president on Thursday night at an event in West Oakland (after the Daily Planet’s deadline).  

McKinney is slated to speak tonight (Friday) in Berkeley beginning at 6 p.m. at the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar St. and will also be present at the Beach Impeach event Sunday. 

“I hope she says she will actually run for the party’s nomination,” John Morton of the Green Party told the Daily Planet Thursday morning. Morton, who lives in Oakland, said he supports McKinney personally “because there’s a war going on and most the people in America do not want to continue the war.” 

While the president and the “obedient congress” run the war, “How can we sit by and not offer another option?” Morton asked. 

Haiti 

A Bay Area delegation to Haiti will report on the current political situation there, including the role of the United Nations military, which they say is occupying the country. The event is 2-4 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 7 at the Epworth United Methodist Church, 1953 Hopkins St., Berkeley. 

Burma 

On Monday Berkeley’s Peace and Justice Commission passed a resolution asking the City Council to urge “the government of Myanmar/Burma to immediately cease the use of violence in suppression of nonviolent protests by its citizens, cease the detention of political prisoners and release those currently held, restore communications within and outside of the country … and enter into sincere negotiations with leaders of the movement for democracy and human rights in Burma/Myanmar.” 

There is a demonstration today at in San Francisco at 2 p.m. at the Chinese Consulate, 1450 Laguna St. urging the Chinese government “to step in and help resolve the situation peacefully,” according to a flyer publicizing the event. 

Watada on trial 

The U.S. Army announced Wednesday its intent to retry First Lt. Ehren Watada October 9 at Fort Lewis, Wash. Watada is the first military officer to publicly refuse deployment to Iraq. 

Watada’s first court-martial ended in a mistrial. 

“The court-martial of Lt. Ehren Watada is another incidence of erosion of the precious Bill of Rights, in this case, that of the soldier. He stood for us; and we must continue to stand with him,” said Watada’s father, Bob Watada, in a written statement. 

Members of the Asian-Pacific Islanders Resist/Watada Support Committee will travel to Ft. Lewis next week to support Watada. For more information call Betty Kano at 527-1401.

This week Berkeley High School students sat for the first of three sets of the California Exit Exam for the new school year. 

Approximately 200 juniors, seniors and students who have transferred from out of state took the English and math exams on Tuesday and Wednesday.  

Students can’t graduate from high school until they have passed the exit exam. 

The juniors and seniors who took the exam are ones who didn’t pass the exam in previous attempts, said Berkeley Unified School District spokesperson Mark Coplan. 

“There were also a couple of former Berkeley High students who met all of the requirements for graduation last year, with the exception of the Exit Exam,” he said. “One of these students actually returned from her family’s new home in Texas to take the exam because her BHS diploma meant that much to her.” 

Seniors are allowed to take the test up to three times this year. Juniors can take it twice and the sophomore class will take the test once in February. 

Senior Lashawnda Thompson said that she was taking her math test for the second time. 

“I passed English, but my math is not that good,” she said. “Today’s exam was pretty good and I hope I pass.” 

Another senior, who did not want to give her name, said that she was taking the math test for the fourth time. 

The results are usually available within two months.

On Wednesday morning, Berkeley parents, teachers and elementary school children walked or rode on bikes to school to make a statement about global warming, obesity and to mark International Walk to School Day. 

Alameda County used the event, observed in 38 countries, to launch the Safe Routes to Schools program. 

“One reason why parents fear to let their kids walk to school is because of strangers or bullies. That has to stop,” said Nora Cody, director of Alameda County’s Safe Routes to Schools. “We are also trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, childhood obesity and asthma. All the studies about creating behavior changes show that you need to change the environment. We want to address any barriers that prevent that.” 

Countywide, 50 schools signed up to participate in the day, coordinated by the Safe Routes to Schools Alameda County Partnership, comprising the Transportation and Land Use Coalition, Alameda County Public Health Department and Cycles of Change. 

The partnership received $1 million in funding from the Alameda County Transportation Improvement Authority, Caltrans, Kaiser Permanente and the Laurel, Hewlett and Bayer foundations. 

At Berkeley Arts Magnet (BAM), 78 students walked to school Wednesday while 30 rode their bikes. Twenty students used cars and the rest arrived by school bus. 

Walking ”school buses” were set up at six locations within the one-mile non-busing-zone radius of the school. 

“We had two busy intersections to cross,” said Maureen Jerrett, the BAM task force representative for Safe Routes to School. “First, Virginia and Oxford, with over 25,000 cars a day, and then Virginia and Shattuck, with over 34,000 cars a day. Besides promoting the health benefits of physical fitness and reduced congestion around the schools, our walk increased the visibility in our neighborhoods that kids use these roads to walk to school and need to arrive safely.” 

City officials from the health department, Berkeley police department officers and volunteers from the YMCA were also on hand to help the students. 

According to the Safe Routes to School handbook, cars are responsible for 50 percent of the Bay Area’s greenhouse gas emissions. 

“Travel to school accounts for approximately 25 percent of morning traffic,” Jerrett said. “In one generation, the number of kids walking and bicycling to school has dropped from 70 to 18 percent.” 

Beth Gerstein, who walks her two children to school everyday, said that the exercise makes them more alert. 

“Those are some of the best moments with my kids,” she said. “Why waste the gas? We live in Berkeley. It’s got a fantastic climate and a mile is not that much anyway.” 

Brothers Connor and Cameron Henritzy said they had walked for 40 minutes from Shasta Road to get to school that morning. 

“We drive all the time except for today,” Cam-eron said pointing proud-ly at his “I walked to School Today” sticker. “I am a little tired but it was fun because I got to see a mom and a dad deer. I saw things I have never noticed before.” 

Thousand Oaks, the largest elementary school in Berkeley, asked students to chart with color-coded dots the ways they got to school. 

“A rapid and good natured competition grew between walkers and school bus users,” said Amber Evans, the school’s Safe Routes to School coordinator. “Bikers outnumbered scooters or carpoolers 2 to 1.” 

The two biking trains, which leave daily from Monterey Market and just south of Gilman on Santa Fe, added six families who have never biked to school before on Wednesday. 

Thousand Oaks plans to have Walking Wednesdays every last Wednesday of the month starting this Halloween, when kids traditionally parade along Solano Avenue in costume. 

Photograph by Mark Coplan. 

Alisha, a shy 6-year-old from Nepal, cannot recognize or write her own name.  

She also gets confused between the words “dog” and “dad,” as well as among a dozen other similar words. 

The Berkeley public school first-grader showed improvement during her recent Reading Recovery lesson, an early intervention literacy program that helps children who are struggling to read and write at grade level. 

Starting this fall, elementary school teachers in the Berkeley Unified School District are being trained in Reading Recovery after an eight-year hiatus of the program from the district. 

The current training will also include special education teachers for the first time, allowing interaction with more students. 

“All the children in the reading recovery program have been identified by their kindergarten teachers as being far below basic,” said district literacy coach Tom Prince, who also doubles up as the reading recovery teacher-leader. 

Developed by Dame Marie Clay from the University of Auckland, Reading Recovery has been called an effective intervention strategy by the U.S. Department of Education. 

Prince told the Planet that the reintroduction of the training program was a response to the change in the 2004 Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act which allowed special education teachers to work with children who have difficulties and offer them an intervention before they officially went into special education. 

“What they are hoping is that a student gets a high quality intervention for a period of time so that they can make progress in class,” Prince said, as he observed a training session Tuesday from behind a one-way screen at Malcolm X Elementary School. 

“It takes a maximum of 20 weeks to get to the classroom average level. The program works because we only train really experienced classroom teachers who have already had successful literacy training. The one-on-one enables teachers to find the competencies each child has and without wasting any time helping them move from the things they know to the next step.” 

Funding from the district as well as the individual school sites helped to build a model classroom at Malcolm X complete with desks, blackboards and other first grade paraphenalia. 

Every Tuesday, 11 teachers face the one-way glass which looks into 108B—the tiny classroom wired for sound— and scribble notes enthusiastically. 

“Is the child engaged?” asked Prince, as Emerson literacy coach Jamie Carlson read aloud from the book “What Can Fly” and gave sound prompts to Alisha, who speaks English as a second language. 

“She’s not clear about her verbs,” pointed out Ellen Bernstein, the reading recovery teacher at Malcolm X who has taught the program for eight years. 

At the end of her kindergarten year, Alisha had scored zero on text knowledge. “Now that she’s in Reading Recovery, within just a matter of weeks she will be at level 3, which is the required level,” Prince said. 

Carlson praised the program. “I have been in the classroom for years and I know you don’t have the kind of strength there you need to give individual students,” she said. “Teachers are thrown into the classroom with a year’s training and that is not enough. Staff development is hit or miss.” 

The program, offered to children who were at the bottom 20 percent of their kindergarten class in the Berkeley public schools for the last nine years, has helped 75 percent of them catch up to the classroom average.  

Bernstein said that she had left the Oakland Unified School District because it had discontinued Reading Recovery. 

“I am glad Berkeley understands the importance of individualized programs,” she said. “I have never had a child who made no progress in Reading Recovery.” 

John Muir principal Gregory John said that the program had helped kids perform well in reading in the district’s Developmental Reading Assessment. 

Research has shown that Reading Recovery reduces the achievement gap. “Ninety percent of the kids in our program are African American or poor or speak another language,” Prince said. “Reading Recovery doesn’t fix everything for everybody, but It’s the best first step they can get. Because the effects of poverty are so great on children, they need additional support as they go on to second and third grades.” 

Accused by the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office of lying about where he lives in order to maintain his seat on the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board, Rent Board Member Chris Kavanagh stepped down temporarily from his post, while he battles the question in court. 

“He’s voluntarily stepping down,” Rent Board Executive Director Jay Kelekian told the Daily Planet on Tuesday. Kelekian said he had encouraged Kavanagh to do so on a temporary basis. 

In a letter addressed to Rent Board Chair Jesse Arreguin, Kavanagh said that continuing to sit on the board had become “a distraction to the board and to the program and risk[s] impacting the critical work and mission of the Rent Stabilization Board.”  

Kavanagh asked for the leave between Oct. 2 and the end of the year. “I will return to the board if the charges are resolved before the end of the year,” Kavanagh wrote in the letter, further asking for his $500 stipend to be held in escrow. 

Grand theft was among the specific charges leveled by the district attorney, charging Kavanagh with illegally accepting the stipend and benefits accorded by the city.  

Other charges, all felonies, include registering to vote where he is not eligible; voting where he is not eligible to vote; filing false nominating papers and perjury. 

“I continue to believe that when all the facts are presented that I will be cleared of the charges and allowed to continue representing the citizens of Berkeley….,” Kavanagh wrote. 

Kavanagh is scheduled to return to Alameda County Superior Court Oct. 26 to have a preliminary hearing date set.

Most everyone attending Saturday’s forum on Mayor Tom Bates’ Public Commons for Everyone Initiative agreed on one part of the proposal: Berkeley needs more public toilets for everyone. 

Attended by more than 70 people, including advocates for the homeless and mentally ill, city commissioners, Gray Panthers, city staff, Chamber of Commerce officials and merchant association representatives—and welcomed as they entered the North Berkeley Senior Center by an ad hoc group singing “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime”—participants were clearly divided around the other elements proposed in the initiative. 

The proposal is designed to improve the experience of shoppers in the city’s commercial districts through a combination of laws and services aimed at people whose behavior on the street is considered problematic.  

The behavior targeted includes lying on sidewalks, urinating in public, tying dogs to parking meters, possessing unauthorized shopping carts and more.  

Proposed laws aimed at these behaviors include eliminating warnings to people lying on sidewalks before ticketing them, enforcing existing laws prohibiting such acts as parking bikes at parking meters and unauthorized possession of milk crates, and making urination or defecation in public an infraction, more easily prosecuted than a misdemeanor.  

Proposed services to curb the unacceptable behaviors include increased availability of public bathrooms, funded by a hike in parking meter fees and increased supportive housing, using existing low-income housing and mental health funds. (Please see sidebar.) 

In June, the City Council approved a broad outline for the initiative, which city staff is now taking to various city commissions and to the community for comment. Saturday’s meeting was part of the process to get feedback, according to Lauren Lempert, a $50,000, six-month contract city employee charged with consolidating the loosely worded plan into a set of laws and proposals for services.  

Credited with authoring the proposal, Bates was out of the country on Saturday. Instead, Councilmember Kriss Worthington, acting mayor while Bates is away, spoke briefly, encouraging “positive solutions to help the poor and homeless.” 

Anti-panhandling added 

A number of those who have followed the PCEI process expressed surprise that city staff had added panhandling to the array of behaviors that would be targeted. Panhandling was not specified as a targeted activity in the June 12 council proposal. 

Gray Panther Avis Worthington addressed the community, questioning whether aggressive panhandling is a problem in Berkeley. “I have never been aggressively panhandled,” she said. “The only person who ever hassled me on the street was a jock.” 

Similarly, Pat Mullen, recently retired after 25 years working at the central public library, said she has never been panhandled aggressively downtown. “We have all the protective laws we need already on the books,” she said, adding that city funds should be spent on food and shelter for people who need it, rather than jailing people. 

This view wasn’t unanimous, however. Pointing out that he is a 6’ 5” inch male, Willard Park area resident John Caner shared another perspective: “Walking down Telegraph, I still feel uncomfortable [when panhandled],” he said. 

Lying on sidewalks 

Among the most controversial of the proposals is the rewording of an existing ordinance to eliminate warnings police now are required to give before citing people lying on the sidewalk.  

“It has to do with access,” Lempert said. “People need access to the sidewalk.” 

Diana Hembree, a north hills resident, said the reason some people lie down on sidewalks during the day is the danger of the streets at night for people without homes. “Some people walk all night and sleep during the day,” she said. 

A number of people who spoke against the punitive aspects of the ordinance said the concern should be limited to keeping space available on the sidewalk for people walking and using wheelchairs.  

Peace and Justice Commissioner Phoebe Anne Sorgen argued that the laws on the books that include warnings are adequate to keep the sidewalks clear,  

Speaking for the Telegraph Avenue Business Improvement District, Roland Peterson shared a different view. “I ask that you eliminate all warnings. That’s the way the laws are,” he said. “I can’t drive a car at 50 miles an hour on University Avenue, on Telegraph or Shattuck and expect the police to give me a warning. I’m a threat to the safety and well-being of the community. I would say the same thing about any law that’s passed. Do not give warnings.” 

Caner also shared his perspective on lying on the sidewalk and added a “no-sitting” element to it. “Telegraph Avenue needs special treatment. We should address lying and sitting on Telegraph,” he said. (On June 12 the council voted in to delay consideration of an ordinance against prolonged sitting on the sidewalk in favor of assessing the impact of other laws on street behavior.) 

Right to poop 

The various factions in the room appeared unified around the question of public bathrooms—more are needed and they should remain open night and day, people said. Moms with young children and adults with bladder problems as well as advocates for the homeless spoke up about the need. 

“We do have a visitor restroom program if you look like me and you desperately need to use a restroom. If you look like me, you can go into a store and they’ll let you use the restroom,” said Judy Nakadegawa, underscoring that commercial restrooms are available to a select group of people. Moreover, maintaining public bathroom facilities would create needed jobs, Nakadegawa said. 

Lempert said the city is exploring extending hours at public restrooms and subsidizing businesses along Telegraph Avenue to open their restrooms to the public.  

She also said she is investigating Seattle’s automated self-cleaning public toilets.  

However, according to a Sept. 15 Seattle Times story by Linda Shen, headlined “Were high-tech toilets worth $6.6 million?”, these toilets have been a disappointment. 

The article cites a report comparing “the $360-per-toilet, per-day cost to lease and maintain them [to] the $16 a day it costs to operate a humble port-a-potty.” The article goes on to say that that the self-cleaning floor was turned off two years ago. “ Dirt tracked in from outside turned into mud, and the most innocent piece of paper in the unit turned to sludge….” A photo accompanying the story shows someone attempting to pry open the stuck mechanical doors. 

While one may have anticipated opposition in the business community to raising meter fees, no one spoke up against it. Downtown Business Association Executive Director Deborah Badhia told the Planet last week that the fee hike was acceptable to her organization. 

The increase of 25-to-50 cents per hour will bring in new city earnings of $1–$2 million.  

The proposed ordinance would change the prohibition against public urination/defecation from a misdemeanor to an infraction, which city officials say will increase the number of citations given. The council specified in its June 12 vote that it would not change the law until adequate public bathrooms were in place. 

Lempert suggested other areas where increased parking meter money could be spent, including reinstating the Quarter Meal program at Trinity Church (among the cutbacks in the 2007-2008 budget), expanding the youth shelter program, which is open only during winter months, and developing peer outreach programs. 

Selective enforcement 

While Lempert stated several times that the law would not be selectively enforced, Zachary Running Wolf pointed out that there is now no way Berkeleyans can hold individual officers accountable for their actions when it appears selective enforcement has taken place. 

Following a California Supreme Court decision and a Berkeley Police Association lawsuit, the city is no longer holding police complaint hearings.  

Other ideas 

Terry Kalahar, who works with homeless people through the city’s Health and Human Services Department, suggested a way to get people more services without costing the city more money. New hires—psychiatrists, social workers, case managers, peer support personnel—need to agree to work swing shifts if they are hired, he said.  

“Berkeley Mental Health services shut down at 5 p.m.,” he said. “Put [workers] out on the street where people are.” 

One participant suggested the city create an auto park for homeless persons. Another said the city should not approve new restaurants without their bathroom facilities being open to the public. Someone said the city should open up senior centers for the homeless at night, including the bathrooms.  

Hire people to escort those intimidated by the sight of poor people, suggested Commissioner Sorgen, calling such persons “paid public commons guardians.” 

If the idea is to get more people downtown, “the city should stop the fear-mongering,” said Bonnie Hughes, noting that she’s been putting on events in downtown Berkeley for 17 years and has never been afraid of people on the street. 

Noting that the Downtown Berkeley Association represents 900 businesses, Deborah Badhia underscored DBA support for the initiative, including “places to sit and restrooms.” 

Badhia added, “We respect the city for putting together a package of services to try to find the linkages between agencies to make our streets a safer place. We do get complaints from our business owners.”  

While all the proposals remain simply suggestions at this point, Osha Neumann, an attorney who works with many poor and homeless individuals, said that as a result of the June 12 council recommendations, “Police took their marching orders and they have been enforcing, not only ‘strict enforcement’ of laws, but laws that don’t exist. They believe they got their marching orders from council to clear people out of town. They tell people on Telegraph Avenue they can’t sit, they can’t lie.”  

Further discussions on the initiative will take place 7 p.m., Oct. 4 at the Housing Advisory Commission, South Berkeley Senior Center, 2939 Ellis St., and at 6:30 p.m., Oct. 11 at the Community Health Commission, at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. The City Council will address the proposal Nov. 20. 

Public Commons for Everyone Initiative Explained 

On June 12 the City Council approved elements of the Public Commons for Everyone Initiative (PCEI) for discussion purposes. They include: 

• Expand prohibitions against smoking in commercial zones. 

• Install signage with directions to public bathrooms.  

• Draft language for an ordinance citing public urination and defecation as an infraction and refer the draft to the Police Review Commission; delay implementation of the ordinance until there is an increase in the number of public toilets and the hours existing public toilets are open. 

• Plan for new public seating and for commercial area economic development; plan how to discourage people from giving money to people on the streets by having them redirect donations to nonprofits. 

• Expand supportive housing opportunities linking the city’s Housing Trust Fund (for affordable and low-income housing) with funding for mental health services; refer this to the Housing Advisory Commission. 

• Solicit feedback and proposals from the Mental Health, Homeless, Community Health, Police Review, Housing Advisory, and the Human Welfare and Community Action commissions and “key community stakeholders” for consideration by the council. 

• Compile information on the number of citations issued, prosecuted and convicted on quality-of-life citations currently happening in Berkeley, as well as adjoining jurisdictions. 

• Delay consideration of any ordinance banning sitting on the sidewalk for one year until the results of other recommendations are evaluated. 

• Implement community-involved policing features such as increasing police beat walking and communication with businesses, residents and the whole community and implementation of a dedicated cell phone or pager when feasible. 

• Write a plan (and take it to the Police Review Commission) to adhere to and enforce existing local and state laws pertaining to street behavior including: 

- Removal of dog feces. 

- Hitching animals to fixed objects. 

- Littering. 

- Lying on the sidewalk. 

- Public consumption of alcohol. 

- Yelling and shouting. 

- Obstructing or restricting use of the sidewalk. 

- Bicycle license and registration required. 

- Riding a bicycle on the sidewalk. 

- Parking a bicycle against a window or on a parking meter. 

- Unauthorized possession of a shopping cart, recycling container or milk crate.  

• Increase the number of parking meters and parking meter fees to generate income for PCEI and allied programs. The action was amended to include directions to staff to explore new ways to raise revenue in addition to parking meters.  

• Hire a six-month full-time employee [this has been done] and ask the city manager to draft program plans for diversion, street outreach teams, and community policing with input from the relevant commissions. 

Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium oak grove tree-sitters, who first took to the branches last Dec. 2 on Big Game morning, seemed at first to have suffered a legal setback on Monday afternoon when a Fremont judge issued a preliminary injunction. 

But just what the ruling means for the protesters remained in some doubt by this newspaper’s deadline.  

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Richard Keller issued a preliminary injunction that bars only tree-sitter David Galloway from occupying a perch in the grove. 

Asked what effect this may have on his clients, attorney Dennis Cunningham, who represents the tree-sitters, said “It remains to be seen. The only client of mine named [in the injunction] has decamped from the trees. He is subject to the order but not in violation of the order. All my clients have not been brought before the court, so it’s up to the university to make the next move.” 

UC Berkeley Police Capt. Mitch Celaya told the Planet following the ruling Monday that his department was not going to take any action against the tree-sitters that day. 

Galloway, 36, said that the judge had issued an injunction against him because he’d taken a propane stove up in the trees which had raised safety concerns. 

“The injunction against me says I can’t go in the trees, hang any banners or participate in any activities,” he told the Planet from outside the boundaries of the oak grove fence. 

“I have decided not to go up there because of the injunction and because of the injury in my arm,” he said. 

He added that the injury had occurred when the police had chased him up the trees when he was playing a drum inside the grove. 

“I don’t think a stove in the trees is any more dangerous than a stove in the house,” said Loretta, an on-ground support. 

“We usually send fresh food up there. The stove was used as a last resort.” 

Galloway added that the stove had been brought down from the trees a week ago. 

Judge Keller rejected extending the order to a second named defendant, Colin Schehl, because he hadn’t been legally served. The judge also declined to bar “DOES 1 through 50, inclusive”—which would have given the university blanket authority to act against unnamed individuals. 

“They still have the same authority they had before to arrest people for trespass and illegal lodging,” said Doug Buckwald, one of the many supporters of the ongoing protest. 

The judge did say he agreed with the contention of university officials that the protest poses a threat to public health and safety. 

His order barred Galloway from occupying any trees on university property or maintaining a platform, hammock, sleeping equipment, ropes or fire in the branches. 

During a Sept. 12 hearing, Keller had refused the university’s request, stating that he hadn’t heard enough evidence to convince him to grant the motion. His ruling Monday was narrow enough to give some satisfaction to protest supporters. 

But Zachary Running Wolf, the Native American who led off the tree-sit by ascending a redwood in the grove at the start of the protest, said he was afraid that the university will use the ruling to take harsh action against his fellow activists. 

“I’m afraid that they’re going after our ground support,” he said. But Buckwald said the judge’s order specifically excluded supporters. 

The trees became the center of national attention Jan. 23, the day after three venerable women ascended a ladder to stage their own symbolic tree-sit. 

It was on the 23rd that a dramatic photo of platform-perching Save the Bay co-founder Sylvia McLaughlin, Berkeley City Councilmember Betty Olds and former Mayor Shirley Dean—accounting among themselves for 245 years of political acumen—graced the news pages of the New York Times. 

The same venerable trio also appeared in Judge Keller’s court for the first day of session last month, along with Running Wolf. 

Dozens of arrests have occurred at the site, including at least two which led to the deportations of protesters who were foreign nationals. 

Meanwhile, the battle over the grove is continuing this morning, Tuesday, in another forum, the Hayward courtroom of Judge Barbara Miller, where challenges from several plaintiffs are confronting the legality of a collection of projects the university plans at and near the stadium. 

One is the four-story semi-subterranean gym and office complex the university wants to build where the grove now stands. 

The tree-sitters said they planned to be on their best behavior when Judge Miller comes to visit them on Thursday. 

“There’s definitely a kind of uneasy peace right now,” said Loretta. “It depends on the mood of the day. But I am glad the injunction wasn’t targeted against everybody. So it was a good day.”

Last week, essential workers at two of Berkeley’s largest institutions said they were headed toward walkouts. By Monday afternoon, one strike threat had ended but the other was moving forward. 

Registered nurses at 13 Sutter hospitals, including the Alta Bates Summit Medical Center campuses in Oakland and Berkeley, are still planning a two-day strike for Oct. 10 and 11. 

But teaching assistants at UC Berkeley and the other University of California campuses won a new contract Monday—pending ratification by the full membership of United Auto Workers Local 2865. 

“We feel very good,” said Daraka Larimore-Hall, head of UC Santa Barbara’s bargaining unit who has been in Oakland for marathon bargaining talks that began Wednesday. 

“We are very happy to recommend ratification to our membership,” he said, though declining to offer details of the new accord. 

In addition to pay, negotiations focused on long waits for child care openings, health benefits and fee remissions and a demand for equal treatment of summer session with other terms of the school year. 

Though the current contract expired at midnight Sunday, the union’s bargaining committee extended the pact on an hour-by-hour basis until the bargaining committee voted for acceptance at 9 a.m. 

“We have a full contract with a two-year term,” said Larimore-Hall. “We’ll be presenting it to the membership and we expect ratification in a week to 10 days.” 

The union represents 6,615 members, including teaching assistants, tutors and readers who voted to affiliate with the UAW in 1999 after would-be members demonstrated their potential clout in a strike called during finals week the previous December. 

Local 2865 is now the largest university student union in the country. 

In an instance of perhaps unintentional irony, the main UC Berkeley web page featured a link Monday afternoon entitled “Asking the boss for a raise: A matter of moods.” 

Nurses at impasse 

While one strike threat has ended—at least for now—the threat of a major hospital strike, albeit a brief one, looms large. 

In addition to the 13 Sutter hospitals, two hospitals from another chain north of Sacramento are also on walkout list, said Charles Idelson, spokesperson for the California Nurses Association (CNA). 

Another non-Sutter hospital had been slated for the labor action until the end of last week—Oakland’s Children’s Hospital & Research Center—“but they are no longer on the list because there was important progress made during bargaining Friday,” said Idelson. 

CNA officials gave Sutter their 10-day notice that same day, paving the way for what could be another hard-fought confrontation, given the past history of the union and the Sacramento-based health care consortium. 

Three years ago, Sutter locked out its nurses after a one-day walkout—keeping them out an additional four days, their places filled by temporary hires recruited well before the walkout began. 

Often-rancorous bargaining sessions followed, complicated by antagonisms generated by the lock-out. 

Idelson said relations aren’t any better now. “They’ve said they’ve made their last, best and final offer and have no interest in negotiating further,” said the union official. 

The last time around, the CNA was joined in its walkout with Licensed Vocational Nurses and other workers from United Healthcare Workers—West. Asked if that union would join in the action, Idelson referred a reporter to that union. 

Calls to representatives of the second union were not returned by Monday’s deadline. Carolyn Kemp, the spokesperson for Berkeley’s Alta Bates Summit campus also did not respond.  

Efren Garza, a charge nurse at the Herrick Hospital campus in Berkeley, said pay isn’t an issue in current negotiations. “Right now, we’re focused on safe staffing ratios, retiree benefits and pensions,” he said. 

One key concern is to have a dedicated nurse assigned to patient admissions and transfers so that nurses assigned to patients needing acute and critical care don’t have to divert their time from patient care.

U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton won the running battle she held over the weekend for the attention of the Oakland electorate with her Democratic Presidential rival, Senator Barack Obama, announcing the endorsement of Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums during a hastily convened Monday afternoon appearance at Laney College.  

Clinton also announced that Dellums has agreed to serve as the national chair of her Urban Policy Committee.  

The intense jockeying by the two top-polling Democratic candidates showed the importance they give to Oakland’s multi-ethnic, mostly Democratic electorate in next February’s California Democratic primary. 

Obama had originally scheduled the opening of his downtown Oakland campaign headquarters for Monday, but moved the event to Sunday morning in the hopes of upstaging a Clinton downtown Oakland speech and rally held Sunday afternoon. 

But on Monday, Clinton stood next to Dellums in an upstairs assembly room above the Laney College Student Center in front of a crowd of about a hundred people to hear the Oakland mayor announce that after carefully studying the platforms and speeches of all of the candidates, he decided to back Clinton “because of substance, not symbolism. She has spoken brilliantly and powerfully to the issues that are of importance to Oakland and all of urban America: crime and violence, affordable housing, global warming, and universal access to health care.”  

The substance-not-symbolism remark by Dellums appeared to be a not-so-veiled reference to speculation that the African-American mayor might be persuaded to endorse Obama solely because the Illinois senator is the first African-American candidate in United States history to have a serious chance of winning a major political party’s nomination. 

Dellums also said that Clinton has embraced the recommendations of last year’s report by the Dellums Commission on the crisis among American’s young men of color. The commission, chaired by Dellums, was organized by the Health Policy Institute (HPI) of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. 

Dellums said he believes that as president, Clinton will attack the problems of racial inequality in health care and education, and “too many people of color in our prisons,” adding a quote from the senator in which she said that “to continue down this path is unacceptable, intolerable, and un-American.” 

During her half-hour speech following Dellums’ remarks, Clinton praised the mayor, saying that as an ex-Marine who was at the forefront of the Congressional battles of the 1970s to end the war in Vietnam, “no one ever questioned his patriotism or his support for the troops.” Referring to current attempts to end the war in Iraq in which war opponents have been branded as unpatriotic, Clinton added that “American patriotism combined with speaking out against the war are needed now, more than ever. As president, I am going to draw upon Ron’s wisdom and experience in this area to end the war in Iraq.” 

Clinton said that she was tired of hearing people say “we can’t end global warming, we can’t end the problems of crime and violence in this country, we can’t provide universal health care.” Saying that the late African-American author James Baldwin had once remarked, at the height of the civil rights movement, that “those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by those who are busy doing it.” Clinton said “I believe it’s time we begin saying ‘yes, we can,’ and get about showing the world that we will.” 

Both Dellums’ and Clinton’s speeches were well received by the audience, a mixture of college officials and staff members, mayoral staff members, and local politicians, with applause and shouts of encouragement interrupting both speakers several times. But the event was not without controversy. Although a large number of students crowded in front of the student center seeking a chance to get a glimpse of Clinton, only a handful of them were allowed inside and upstairs to the assembly, and those that did were forced to stand along the railing at the side of the meeting room while the dignitaries and staff members took the seats. 

That seemed at odds with Laney President Frank Chong’s opening remarks that said the students were present because Clinton “wanted everyone to have the opportunity to hear her remarks.” 

Reginald James, a student of both Laney and College of Alameda and one of two student members of the Peralta College District Board of Trustees, said in an interview that he “didn’t like” the fact that the students were either left outside or relegated to the sidelines. “Why have the event on campus if you are not going to include the students?” he asked, adding that there were other, larger venues available on the campus that could have accommodated a larger crowd. 

Laney College and Clinton campaign officials were not available following the event to talk about who had made the decision on the accommodations. 

Fired in 1999 when, as KPFA’s general manager, she stood up to national Pacifica management, Nicole Sawaya will take the position of the boss she battled in the bloody KPFA vs. the Pacifica Foundation Board fight.  

Sawaya, who has worked for 13 years in noncommercial radio, was named Pacifica executive director on Saturday. She begins work part time on Nov. 12 and full time Dec. 5. 

“She has the combination of skills it takes—radio, political and broadcast skills,” Oakland attorney Dan Siegel told the Planet. Siegel is counsel for Pacifica and interim Pacifica executive director until Sawaya comes on board. 

The Pacifica Foundation holds the license to five listener-sponsored radio stations across the country, including Berkeley’s KPFA. Other stations are in New York, Houston, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. 

When the news came to KPFA, “The station went into a huge festive mode,” Lemlem Rijio, acting KPFA director, told the Planet. “She’s someone who understands and is deeply committed to the mission of Pacifica and can actualize it.” 

Sawaya has been station manager at KZYX in Philo, Calif., KPFA and KALW in San Francisco. She has a five-year contract with Pacifica, advertised with a salary scale starting at $80,000 per year.  

Rijio said Sawaya would bring stability to the station. Greg Guma, executive director since early 2006, had told the board that he considered his tenure a transitional one, Siegel said. Guma turned in a letter of resignation several months ago; his last day was Sept. 28. He was not immediately available for comment. 

The non-renewal of Sawaya’s contract in 1999 heated up the crisis at KPFA, a station already in revolt against Pacifica’s heavy-handed management. 

In his book, Easy Listening: Pacifica Radio’s Civil War, historian Matthew Lasar tells of Sawaya’s fight with management over the budget which some believe led to Pacifica’s non-renewal of her contract in March 1999.  

“During a 1998 national board meeting, she outraged the national office and much of the governing board by suggesting that if station budget cuts were necessary, KPFA could tighten its belt by reducing its annual tithe to the Pacifica national office…,” Lasar wrote.  

Lasar said Sawaya wasn’t like the managers before her. “Sawaya seemed to enjoy KPFA for what it was at least as much as what it could be turned into. For that she won the staff’s undying gratitude,” Lasar wrote. 

Retired KPFA programmer Larry Bensky was among those who refused Pacifica management’s gag order at the time and denounced Sawaya’s firing over the air waves, which led to his firing. (He was hired back soon thereafter.) 

In a phone interview Monday, Bensky recalled that Sawaya had been part of a “very exciting era” at the station, where collaboration within the station and between stations was in motion. 

“I think she’ll have a much more difficult job now,” he said, noting that collaboration among the stations on national programming is “almost nonexistent,” with the only two nationally broadcast programs—Democracy Now! and Free Speech Radio News—originating outside of Pacifica. 

With the nation in pre-presidential mode, national broadcasting “is one of the things I hope she’ll focus on,” Bensky said. 

Siegel praised Sawaya. “She has a good sense of what radio is and how to do high-quality news and public affairs,” he said. 

However, Sawaya may be spending much of her time fighting internal personnel fires, Siegel said. There are battles brewing at New York’s WBAI, Los Angeles’ KPFK, where the general manager just quit, and KPFA, where there’s tension between management and unpaid staff and between management and those who have occupied time slots for long periods of time, Siegel noted. 

“Pacifica has to come to grips with losing its listeners and support,” Siegel said. “It has to rebuild, attracting a younger demography and more diversity, racially and ethnically.”  

Lydia Brazon, head of the hiring committee for the national board, said there had been seven people who interviewed for the position, but Sawaya’s experience was unique.  

“She distinguished herself by her broadcast experience,” Brazon said. “In fact, her entire career has been in community radio.” 

Moreover Brazon said Sawaya knows what it means to work with large, changing nonprofit boards of directors. (The national board is made up of members representing locally-elected boards from each of the affiliated stations.) “She understands who we are,” Brazon said. 

In an e-mail that circulated widely on the internet, Lasar shares his enthusiasm for Sawaya’s appointment. “This is Pacifica radio’s second chance, folks. It is time for leadership to take notice.” 

Sawaya did not return calls for comment. 

Homicide detectives have arrested a pair of alleged gang members for the May 6 West Berkeley beating death of Agustine [CQ] James Silva Jr., 19, of Antioch. 

The murder was Berkeley’s first for the year. Three more have followed. 

Two 19-year-old suspects—Juan Carlos Cruz of Oakland and Victor Lozano Ramirez of San Pablo—have been charged with the killing based on DNA evidence found at the scene of the crime. 

Police have identified both the suspects and their alleged victim as members of Los Monkeys Trece, a Northern California subgroup of the Surenos gang. 

The crime reportedly occurred after the three stopped in Berkeley looking for a secluded place to party. 

Both suspects were already in custody at the time of their arrests, and in a prepared statement, Berkeley Police Department spokesperson Sgt. Mary Kusmiss said Cruz was being held in Alameda County Jail at Santa Rita as the result of an arrest by Oakland police. Ramirez had been arrested by East Bay Regional Park Police for assault with a deadly weapon. 

Neither crime was related to the Berkeley killing, Sgt. Kusmiss reported. 

Police learned of the crime when they were called to the abandoned railroad tracks between Second and Cedar streets at 6:30 a.m. by a man who had discovered the body on his way to work at a nearby business. 

After paramedics were unable to revive the victim, he was declared dead at the scene. Following an autopsy, the Alameda County coroner’s office ruled the death a homicide caused by multiple blunt force trauma injuries. 

According to the police statement, DNA evidence recovered at the murder scene linked the two men to the killing. 

Los Monkeys Trece (the 13 Monkeys) has been identified as a Northern California subgroup of the Surenos. 

Surenos are one of two broad divisions of Hispanic gangs, drawn from the ranks of new immigrants. The Nortenos, their chief rivals, are born in the United States. 

Both are affiliates of prison gangs drawn along similar divisions, with the Mexican Mafia created by immigrants and Nuestra Familia from U.S.-born inmates. 

Surenos (literally, southerners) incorporate “13” or “XIII” in their graffiti, drawn from the letter M’s 13th place in the alphabet. Nortenos (northerners) use 14 and XIV from N’s alphabetical ranking.

The Berkeley Police Department (BPD) is looking for two men who sexually assaulted a 27-year-old woman early Friday morning. 

The attacked occurred in a private parking lot just east of the Top Dog restaurant on Durant Avenue, said UC Assistant Police Chief Mitch Celaya. 

The assault wasn’t reported for another 12 hours, according to police records. 

Celaya said that although the victim had called UCPD first, the case had been forwarded to BPD since the parking lot fell under their jurisdiction. 

“Berkeley police thought that it happened at a campus parking lot, but that was not the case,” he said.  

Celaya did not specify the nature of the sexual attack nor the gender of the victim, but Berkeley Police Lt. West Hester was able to provide the additional detail. 

According to Celaya, the victim met the suspects at a local bar in the South Campus area.  

After leaving the bar near closing time early Friday morning, the victim was sexually assaulted, after which she was able to flee. 

The victim described one of the suspects as a 22- to 25-year-old light-complected black male, 5’10” to 6’ in height, 160 pounds, with an athletic build, brown eyes, medium length black hair, and wearing a dark top and light-colored pants. 

The second suspect was described as a dark-complected black male, 22 to 25 years old, 140 pounds, with short black hair and brown eyes, and wearing a light-colored shirt and dark pants.  

Both suspects spoke English with distinctive foreign accents, and they were driving a late ’90’s small foreign sedan. 

Anyone with information about this crime is asked to call the Berkeley Police Department at 981-5900. 

Like Superman, Berkeley’s citizen downtown planners will be leaping tall buildings Wednesday night—though they’re already well past the traditional single bound. 

The Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee (DAPAC) is scheduled to adopt one of the plan’s most critical sections, the land use element, at the meeting which begins at 7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 

At issue will be two competing versions, one written by committee members and one by city staff. 

The city’s professional planners, with the urging of UC Berkeley and Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates, have been pushing for a significantly taller downtown than DAPAC members have recommended in a proposal they have dubbed the “preferred alternative.” 

If staff has its way, 10-story, 120-foot-tall buildings will become the standard maximum height around the BART station, along with five much taller buildings—three 16-story, 180-foot “point towers” plus two 22-story, 225-foot hotels. 

By contrast, committee members have urged a standard maximum of eight floors, and then only as a result of providing a combination of public benefit features, such as green construction and low-income housing residences or funding. 

The committee has already indicated its blessings for one of the two proposed hotels, the so-called UC hotel project being shepherded by the university for the northeast corner of Shattuck Avenue and Center Street. 

The second possible high-rise hotel would be the proposed addition to the landmarked Shattuck Hotel, though no permits have been sought yet for that project. 

Point towers 

City staff had pushed hard the idea of building 14 16-story “point towers” downtown as a way of concentrating housing that might run into objections in lower-profile neighborhoods. 

City Planning and Development Director Dan Marks told the committee he was pushing to concentrate new housing downtown to meet regional governments’ quotas because other neighborhoods often mobilized against high-density projects. 

After repeated tries for the full 14 towers ran into strong and ongoing resistance, the staff proposal on Wednesday’s agenda features fewer high-rises—but its overall effect would create a significantly different skyline from the one proposed by the committee itself. 

While cutting down on the number of towers, the staff proposal calls for standard height limits of 100 feet in the urban core —generally from the corner of Hearst Avenue and Oxford Street on the north, dipping down south along University Avenue to just south of Milvia Street, and encompassing the higher BART Plaza zone and extending south along Shattuck to the mid-block between Bancroft Way and Durant Avenue. 

West of the two higher-rise zones, a 65-foot maximum would apply with a 35-foot minimum, stretching down to Martin Luther King Jr. Way. 

The 65-foot zone would extend all the way to Dwight Way, with the exception of the residential neighborhoods to the east and west of Shattuck, where a 45-foot maximum and no minimum would apply. 

Along the southern Shattuck Avenue 65-foot zone, one 120-foot building would be allowed if the developer committed to providing a grocery store with at least 30,000 square feet of space. 

A 45-foot limit would apply in the residential neighborhoods in the southeast and southwest areas. 

The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) has issued increased quotas for housing for member governments which place the greatest demands on communities located on transit lines. With BART, the railroad and AC Transit all providing commuter service to the city, Berkeley has a higher quota than many other communities. 

Because ABAG wants to reduce urban sprawl, the impact on Berkeley is much greater than on more distant suburbs, even those on transit lines. 

Willingness to commit to allowing more housing doesn’t mean the units will be built—only that the city will make the permits available if they are sought. 

DAPAC members have consistently signaled their reluctance to approve the highest density urged by Bates and Marks, and committee Chair Will Travis has generally found himself on the losing side of votes on the density issue. 

Wednesday’s crucial vote comes as DAPAC is rapidly winding down.  

In most other areas, staff and citizenry are more in agreement. 

Deadline nears  

DAPAC is fast approaching its deadline, with its City Council mandate expiring Nov. 30. Wednesday’s meeting will be the 42nd of the full committee, not counting the many meetings of subcommittees charged with formulation and drafting individual plan chapters and policies. 

The joint effort to create a new downtown plan resulted from the settlement of a city suit against UC Berkeley over its 2020 Long Range Development Plan, which extends university growth off campus and into the city center. The university can reject the plan even after its adoption by the city’s Planning Commission and City Council. 

Two new names were added to Berkeley’s list of late-night dining spots after the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) approved their permits Thursday. 

The board extended the hours of the proposed Muse Art House and Mint Cafe at 2525 Telegraph Ave. to midnight on weekdays and 1 a.m. on weekends but declined to approve granting a hard liquor license. 

At the last meeting, the board had decided that the cafe could remain open until midnight on weekends and 10 p.m. on weekdays, turning down owner Ali Eslami’s request to stay open until 2 a.m. on weekends and midnight on weekdays in response to neighborhood concerns about noise and rowdiness. 

After Eslami said that the hours imposed by the zoning board would kill the project, the board expanded its hours to ensure that it stayed on Telegraph. 

It also asked Eslami to end the music an hour before the restaurant closed every day. 

Modeled on the Red Poppy Art House in San Francisco, the establishment proposed to house an interdisciplinary artist space which will host collaborative exhibitions, classes and small concerts. 

Eslami had told the Planet in an earlier interview that the business wouldn’t be able to make a profit without a permit to sell hard liquor and extended hours. When the cafe opens in January, it will only be able to serve beer and wine. 

Bobby G’s 

The board approved extended hours and live entertainment for Bobby G’s Pizzeria at 2072 University Ave.  

The 61-seat restaurant, which is known for its pizza, panini and other gourmet foods, will now serve beer and wine and stay open until 11 p.m. on weekdays and 1 a.m. on weekends. 

The board also approved a permit for live entertainment which includes acoustic blues, jazz and bluegrass music as background music for the restaurant. 

Owner Robert Gaustad told the board that a noise study had confirmed that sound did not travel to the apartments on the second floor unless it was extremely loud. Gaustad himself lives in one of the apartments. 

Gaustad added that there would be no admission charges and that the music would end at 11 p.m. on week nights and midnight on weekends. 

He stressed that he would only sell high-quality beer and wine to keep out troublemakers. 

Currently, restaurants which stay open late downtown include Au Coquelet, Anna’s Jazz Island and Jupiter. 

2518 Durant Ave. 

The board unanimously approved a blanket use permit for a combination of commercial uses at the former Tower Records site at 2516 Durant Ave. 

The site, which is located in a predominantly commercial area south of the UC Berkeley campus, has been sitting empty since Tower Records filed for bankruptcy in 2004. 

Representatives from Berkeley developers Ruegg & Ellsworth said that the 11,000 square feet ground floor space would be converted into four commercial spaces and the 3,097 square feet basement storage area would become a karaoke club. 

The use permit is similar to the one approved for the Wright’s Garage project, which attracted controversy because of noise, traffic and parking impacts. 

Board member Jesse Arreguin said he was concerned about the policy of granting blanket approvals without knowing what kind of businesses would go into the property. 

2837 Fulton St. 

The board voted 6-2 to continue the request for a use permit to construct a new three-story dwelling unit at the rear of an existing building at 2837 Fulton St. due to neighborhood concerns. 

Parents of students at LeConte Elementary School—which is located adjacent to the property—expressed concerns about shadow impacts from a proposed addition on the school’s playground. 

Board members and former Berkeley public school educators Jesse Anthony and Terry Doran voted against continuing the project and said that the proposed construction would not impact the students adversely. 

Applicant Ken Lowney of Lowney Architecture was asked to work with the neighbors and the LeConte community about the shadow impacts and other aesthetic issues which had kept the board from approving the project. 

In what would appear to be the most stinging rebuke possible to the conduct of the Alameda County Registrar of Voters Office in the November 2004 Berkeley Measure R Medical Marijuana initiative election, a California Superior Court judge has ordered that a new Measure R election be held in November of next year, and that Measure R proponents be reimbursed for litigation and recount costs. 

“Respondents County of Alameda and [Registrar of Voters] Dave MacDonald have engaged in a pattern of withholding relevant evidence and failing to preserve evidence central to the allegations of this case,” Judge Winifred Y. Smith wrote in her Sept. 25 order. “That evidence has now been determined to be irretrievable due to respondents’ mishandling of the DRE (direct electronic recording) machines.” 

“This case demonstrates the importance of strong judicial oversight of elections,” said Gregory G. Luke of Strumwasser & Woocher, attorneys for the plaintiffs in a prepared statement. “Government has naively embraced electronic voting technology, accepting soothing pronouncements by Diebold and others that their technology is foolproof. As it has been revealed that the technology is dangerously vulnerable, local election officials have been trying to reassure the public that their own oversight will protect the integrity of the ballot. Now we see that not only are the machines vulnerable, but some election officials cannot be counted on to protect the vote.” 

The Measure R sponsoring committee, Americans for Safe Access, was the plaintiff in the case, as well as three Berkeley residents who co-sponsored the measure, James Blair, Michael L. Goodbar, and Donald Tolbert. Defendants included Alameda County, former Registrar of Voters Bradley Clark, and the City of Berkeley.  

Smith’s order grew out of the hotly contested November 2004 election in which a group called Americans for Safe Access put a measure on the Berkeley ballot after the Berkeley City Council voted to impose limits on pot dispensaries in the city. Measure R proposed eliminating limits on the amount of medical marijuana that could be possessed by patients or caregivers. In addition, it would have allowed existing dispensaries to move anywhere within the city’s retail zones. 

In the vote, which was held using Alameda County’s old Diebold touchscreen electronic voting machines, the measure lost by 191 votes, 25,167 to 24,976. 

Measure R proponents requested a recount in December 2004, asking that the new count be done using the internal counting mechanisms and tally logs of the individual Diebold machines used in the elections. Instead, the county registrars office only allowed a recount of the tally printouts. Critics of DRE voting machines have said that if a miscount or improper count is the result of internal problems within the machines, that miscount will be printed out on the tally sheets, and simply recounting the tally sheets themselves will not reveal the internal errors. 

The Superior Court ruled that after the Measure R proponents filed their lawsuit, county election officials should have preserved the Diebold machines in case the court ordered an internal recount. 

However, when Alameda County ceased using the Diebold DRE machines and switched to a different system, county election officials sold the machines used in the 2004 election back to Diebold. According to Smith’s order, county officials “apparently returned the DRE units to … Diebold … without taking any precautions to preserve the data on the machines. The County acknowledged in discovery responses that the individual DRE units had generated and stored audit logs and redundant vote data, and that such data was on the individual DRE units at the time of the recount and thereafter. The County also admitted in discovery that it did not copy, upload or transmit the data from the individual machines to any data storage medium or location before transferring the machines to Diebold.” 

While Judge Smith has ordered the Measure R election be held again, the text of the measure when it appears on the ballot in November of next year may differ from the text of the original November 2004 measure. Because so much time has passed since the original election, and the medical marijuana situation may have changed in Berkeley, the court ordered the City of Berkeley to provide it with any proposed modifications to the measure by October 19. The court noted, pointedly, however, that “substantive changes to the text of the measure are not appropriate and should not be suggested.” 

Preserving California’s Japantowns will call upon Berkeley’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) Thursday to nominate the city’s pre-World War II Japanese heritage sites to the State Office of Historic Preservation. 

The project—spearheaded by historian Donna Graves and community organizer Jill Shiraki—is the first statewide effort to document historic resources from pre-World War II Japantown. 

Graves is scheduled to give a presentation on Berkeley’s historic Japantown to the commission Thursday and discuss the possibility of the city participating in a funding request to the California historic preservation office for a more intensive survey. 

Although more than a hundred Japanese enclaves existed prior to World War II, the project is committed to researching 43 communities to ensure that the many regions, distinctive economic characteristics and cultural features associated with diverse Japantowns are represented. 

Urban development, closing of old businesses and the loss of the Nisei (second) generation Japanese who rebuilt their communities after World War II have sparked debate about historic preservation in California. 

“During the war, many Japantowns were lost and a lot of businesses were not able to return,” said Shiraki, the organization’s project manager. 

“In terms of Berkeley, we were surprised to find that nearly 60 percent of the buildings that housed Japanese businesses before the war still exist. There are some significant buildings which we are hoping to landmark.” 

The organization is currently working with the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA) to nominate the Chiura Obata Studio at 2525 Telegraph Ave. as a local landmark. 

Opened in 1941 by UC Berkeley professor Chiura Obata, the art studio later housed the Blue Nile Restaurant which closed down in 2005. 

The property is currently being renovated by Ali Eslami who wants to develop it into the Muse Art House and Mint Cafe. 

Other important structures on the list include the former University Laundry on 2530 Shattuck Ave. and the San Pablo Florist Nursery on 1806 San Pablo Ave. which is currently an abandoned auto-repair shop. 

More than a hundred pre-World War II Japanese residences, laundries, florists, groceries and shoe repairing shops are scattered all over Berkeley, Shiraki said. 

A pre-war community directory published by Japanese-American newspapers was pivotal to the survey’s success. 

“You often think that a Japantown will be concentrated in one place but cities established before the war have clusters of the Japanese-American community spread throughout them,” she said. 

“Since it’s over 60 years. the history has often disappeared but we hope our efforts to revive the lost culture will be a model for other communities. We want to inform citizens about preservation and get their support.” 

Wood smoken nuisance ordinance 

The commission will also discuss the city’s proposed wood smoke nuisance ordinance at the request of Berkeley’s Planning & Development’s Toxic Management Division. 

The Berkeley City Council amended the Berkeley Municipal Code in January 2003 to ban construction of new open-hearth fireplaces and to require major modifications to existing fireplaces, as well as to require abatement on new commercial wood burning ovens due to a request to all local municipalities from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD). 

However, according to a report submitted by the Community Environmental Advisory Commission in June, existing open-hearth fireplaces in Berkeley were left unregulated and remained a potential source of unhealthy smoke. 

Additionally, the report stated that wood smoke creates an acute as well as a long-term health problem for the community, including children and people with preexisting respiratory or heart problems. 

The commission’s proposal adds to the existing ordinance by outlining conditions, that, if met, would create a nuisance condition.  

The determination that wood burning device operations were a nuisance would allow a neighbor to file a complaint with the local court.

For many years I resisted the growing of roses. My mother, a passionate rose grower, employed a gardener whose name, extraordinary to recall, was Budd. Mr. Budd was my introduction to the professional horticulturist. I do not remember seeing him busy with spade or hoe. As with my father’s relationship with Peter-who-cleaned-the-car, work seemed to consist of employer and employed standing side by side, gazing at potential problems, in my mother’s case perhaps a grandiflora (of which she later grew an impenetrable 10- foot hedge, not as difficult as it looks) that needed to be shifted, or for my father, an engine requiring carburetor adjustment, my mother’s loquacity occasionally interrupted by a gruff Hampshire “argh” or “um,” my father’s silence only broken by the cough of partial combustion.  

It was I, another of her employees, or willing slaves, who from an early age was bidden to run down to the village shop for what was lacking in her batterie de cuisine, for my mother was a formidable cook in the country style, on friendly terms with the local poacher, so that roast pheasant and jugged hare appeared on the dining table from time to time, and since we lived on the coast, fish, the freshest I have ever tasted, was bought wriggling off local boats. 

We lived in a village called Warblington, which consisted of the above shop, a bus stop called Green Pond because there was a green pond there, and among a sprinkling of houses Budd’s home, a long Elizabethan cottage with age-blackened beams. (I’m not making this up you know. England is quaint. Or was. Today I suppose Budd’s cottage has been snapped up by a chartered accountant or wine broker and turned into a bijou residence.) 

The shop was all of a quarter of a mile from our house, a world away, a journey fraught with the terror that only a very large dog, even one behind a fence, can instill in the heart of a small biped, and made hazardous with ditches between road and sidewalk. Once one had reached Budd’s cottage, one was safe, because even though the sidewalk had petered out, the shop was right there next to it. 

Taking a different lane home to avoid the dog, one encountered flanking the gate of a pretentious mansion two lions couchants that had to be propitiated with tufts of grass stuffed into their maws, a ritual that miraculously turned them to stone. 

My mother would send me off (no money was carried, all households had accounts) with the words, “Now when you get there, say ‘Mummy would like half a pound of currants please.’” This, I realized later, when such instructions went on far beyond the years of necessity, would have been excellent training for someone set on a career on the stage. There was no need to say who mummy was. Everyone in the village knew everyone else. 

Looking back, I see that it was always summertime then. When I moved to Berkeley, I was delighted to find it is always summer here too, even in February, with warm sun and blue sky. People in climates where winters are long and gray are vulnerable to depression. Here, all we have to do to alleviate depressing symptoms, say the experts, is to gaze for thirty seconds or so twice a day, with no intervening glass of window or spectacles, on our own blue heaven. 

There are other remedies of course, one of which is a book on my kitchen shelf. When I’m feeling low, which is rarely, and the sky is overcast, I open this book randomly, and invariably my mood rises. The book, Farmhouse Fare, is of recipes compiled, or so I thought, by members of the Women’s Institute, a daunting body of married ladies which my mother declined to join because its members disapproved of divorce. This reason surprised me since my father showed no inclination to stray from her epicurian standards. Perhaps that is how she kept him in line. 

In fact, my memory has betrayed me. Rather, the recipes are culled from those sent by country wives to a magazine called The Farmer’s Weekly. It makes no difference. Take Savoury Ducks, made from liver and bacon. Or Turnip Brose, where turnips are cooked with oatmeal “until the brose forms little knots.” My favorite is Hatted Kit, in parentheses “A very old Highland dish,” for which milk is rushed to the side of the cow, which apparently puts a hat on it. 

Very soon I’m rolling about with mirth, all gloom forgotten. Still, scoff though one might, at the same time the recipes are a healthy reminder that life lived entirely off the land is hardscrabble rather than romantic, and that women in rural areas band together to compensate for an aloneness that is a function of geographic distance. Home grown is the common denominator. All the recipes, however humble or rich the ingredients (so much cream!), are distinguished by a buoyancy of presentation in itself inspiriting. 

My mother’s cooking, equally rustic in its origins, led me eventually to lift my self-imposed ban on growing roses. After all, she grew what became my own passion, vegetables, just as robustly. Besides, I had fond memories of trips enlivened by my mother’s screeching the car to a halt in order to scoop up horse manure conveniently deposited by the road (a bucket and shovel were permanently kept in the boot, or trunk). 

And contrary to common opinion, roses are not difficult to grow well. As a wonderful gardener from Berkeley Horticultural Nursery once wrote, roses clamor for attention because they love showing off. Attention means regular watering and plenty of it, a constantly replenished nourishing mulch , and lavish amounts of horse manure from our race track or other local stables that do not use toxic sprays. If one wants roses like those in the small garden of a friend, where dozens are crammed far too close and all blooming like mad pictures of health, do as she does and never prune. Cut off dead and crossing branches. Cut plenty of blossoms for the house, just above a five-leaf stem. New growth will emerge from the axil and the shrub will keep its shape. Be sure to dead-head in the same way until fall, when scarlet hips appear. Rich in vitamin C, these are worth collecting where citrus is scarce.  

As in many families, there is one neurotic member of Rosaceae (which includes a diversity of edible fruits, such as apples, plums, and berries), the hybrid tea. Unless its numerous demands are met it is unlikely to perform reliably and even if it does it is sure to come down with black spot, rust, and powdery mildew. Many rosarians rise to the challenge. Others avoid it altogether. 

There is scarcely a lack of alternatives. Give the floribundas, the climbers, the numerous varieties of old roses enough love, and they will adore giving back. Just like mothers and daughters. 

Players on the Berkeley High School women’s field hockey team often spend more time riding a bus to their games than playing them. There are few nearby opponents and sometimes they have to ride as far as San Jose. 

So. 

“Usually on the bus we do homework together,” said Eden Maloney, the team goalkeeper. “The seniors help out the younger students.” 

“The ride can get bumpy, so the part of homework that has to be neat, we do that between games,” said Sarah Neuhaus. 

“Sometimes we sing,” said Jenny Miner. 

Coach Heather Zona said the hockey team has one of the highest grade point average of the high school teams. 

Maloney arrived at a recent practice with a pile of schoolbooks—Living in the Environment and, from a Bible-as-literature course, a Bible and a thousand or so page book on the Five Books of Moses and a pocket Latin dictionary. 

You have to be smart to begin with to play field hockey or even understand the rules, for example: “It is legal to raise the ball to make an aerial pass provided that the ball is both raised safely and brought down safely and that the opposition players are farther than five meters from the player raising the ball.” 

The game is 4,000 years old. Drawings of it are on ancient Egyptian tombs. It was played by Greeks, Romans, Persians, Arabs and faraway Aztecs, suggesting it is a creation of the collective unconscious, an inborn human desire to hit a ball with a stick. 

It is played on a basically football-sized field with 11 players on a side. Scores are something like 2-1 or 3-2. The idea is to dislodge the ball from the opponent and for the team to keep possession of it, passing it back and forth for the longest time on the theory that the side with the ball the longest is most likely to score the most goals. Finesse is used rather than force.  

Coach Zona, who still plays field hockey on an adult team, demonstrated a common maneuver for controlling the ball, hitting it from the right with the flat of the stick, and since the stick has only one flat side (no reason to make it easy) twisting the stick to hit back from the left. She did this quickly back and forth while explaining the art of her sport. 

“It’s an opportunistic game. Good players don’t just run up and attack the ball, though they will if they have to. They wait and watch for an opportunity,” she said. “But they’re not just waiting for opportunity to knock. They’re looking out the window and seeing it come up the walk.” 

Berkeley High has 60 teams and 1,000 participants, one for every three students, and a sports budget of $220,000 a year. 

Competitive sports build character, said Kristin Glenchur, the school’s athletic director. 

Specifically: “It’s an organized competitive environment that puts kids in flight or fight situations where they make decisions on the spot,” she said. “A classroom doesn’t have that level of urgency and that whole body-mind thing that happens.” 

Photograph by Michael Howerton 

Two members of the Berkeley High field hockey team (in white) fight for the ball with a player from Marin Catholic during a recent match.

UC Berkeley’s biofuel bonanza—$635 million in expected corporate and federal funding—got off to an early start Monday with word of an unexpected $10 million advance from Washington. 

Each of three national Joint Bioenergy Research Centers, including one headquartered at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, will focus on using genetic technology to extract fuel from cellulose. 

Undersecretary of Energy for Science Raymond L. Orbach said $9.97 million each will go to LBNL and the other centers, which are based at Madison, Wis., and Oak Ridge, Tenn. 

The news comes less than two weeks after the UC Board of Regents gave their approval to lease a lab site in Emeryville for what the lab has dubbed Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI, pronounced jay-bay). 

With the additional funds announced Monday, total federal funding for the JBEI will reach $135 million. 

The lab will involve scientists from UC Berkeley and its affiliated Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia national labs as well as experts from UC Davis and Stanford. 

The original $125 million award was announced in Washington June 26 by Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, with LBNL’s Jay Keasling standing at his side. 

Keasling is also one of the leading researchers in the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), the $500 million research program funded by BP, plc, the former British Petroleum. 

He also runs his own private firm conducting similar research and located in the same Emeryville building which the regents approved for the JBEI lab. 

EBI researchers will be housed temporarily in existing buildings on the UC campus, including the doomed Calvin Lab, which is slated for demolition as part of the university’s stadium area redevelopment program. 

Scientists from the EBI program will move into the Helios Building at the lab, which is now in the planning stages.  

Here’s a quick and simple suggestion: Let’s just change the name to the “Public Bathrooms for Every Body Initiative.” As we predicted in this very space in the very last issue, that’s all it’s really about in the end (no rude pun intended). On Saturday, a lovely autumn day, tirely too many of the usual suspects were entombed in the North Berkeley Senior Center to talk about the politicians’ latest proposal to curry favor with some elements of what they perceive to be Berkeley by cracking down on undesirable street behavior. All agreed that urination and defecation in all the wrong places is undesirable. 

Acting Mayor Kriss Worthington opened for the electeds. Laurie Capitelli was there—stayed in the audience for almost the whole event, didn’t say anything. Darryl Moore came in late, but stayed to the end. Linda Maio dropped in at the end with a cute kid, presumably a grandchild, in tow. The other councilmembers were noticeably absent, including the mayor, who’s in England, where they have plenty of well-located public conveniences, there called Public Toilets, which would sound vulgar here. 

The meeting wasn’t a public hearing in the usual sense. It was billed as a “town hall meeting,” presumably because it wasn’t held in the town hall like real public hearings are. This is consistent with the Orwellian tone of the whole endeavor. 

Attendees, or should we call them guests, sat in a circle or at tables, as if they were at dinner. Former city employee Taj Johns played Mother, warning them to speak one at a time and not to interrupt each other.  

The featured presenter was Lauren Lempert, the consultant hired with the $50,000 the council has appropriated to discuss the topic. Lempert did her best to frame the issue with pre-composed PowerPoint slides, but was much hampered by the fact that her projector and the screen provided weren’t quite compatible and the words leaked out over the edges. And the guests weren’t much help. A couple of them had the nerve to ask for a copy of the full text of the proposed action instead of just a copy of Lempert’s PowerPoint slides. 

This just in: PowerPoint is the new butcher paper. Contrary to my prediction, butcher paper tablets and markers are OUT. PowerPoint transcription is IN. Or at least I think it’s PowerPoint, but it’s been at least 10 years since I departed the world of high-tech sales pitches so I might not know the lingo any more. I still do recognize a sales pitch when I see one, however. 

Whatever the device was, it allowed Ms. Lempert (JD,MPH) to transcribe the oral remarks of the speakers in real time. They were (mostly) projected on the hard-to-read screen, and are possibly preserved somewhere in cyberspace for future contemplation. Not surprisingly, her typing wasn’t always 100 percent accurate—mine wouldn’t be either under the circumstances. I went through a period of trying to take notes as a reporter on a portable computer, and I discovered that it’s a barrier to intelligent listening.  

And using such a well-educated and presumably well-paid person as a stenographer is foolish. It would have been much better to tape the comments and transcribe them later if desired.  

The whole thing was a colossal waste of public money and everyone’s time. I spotted at least four other people among the 40 or so there that I’d normally see at the Farmers’ Market at that time of a Saturday, and it’s time better spent.  

On the other hand, part of the pleasure of going to the market is socializing, and the gathering functioned as a cheery reunion for many of us who struggled unsuccessfully to prevent the last round of poor laws from being passed. (A federal judge threw them out, thank goodness.) One companera corrected my memory about how long ago it was: It’s been 13 years, not just eight, since Bates and company tried this the first time.  

Many of us are a good bit greyer than we were then, as is Mayor Bates, but we’re still in good voice. I didn’t keep count, but my rough estimate is that there were about 40 speakers. About 35 of them were worried about what mischief they thought might be in the works. Most of these said, as I predicted, that more funding is needed for remedial services for the badly-behaved. 

Two or three tactful representatives of the Downtown Berkeley Association did their best to make nice in an unsympathetic crowd. The new director of the Chamber of Commerce was up-beat. Roland Peterson, who works for some Telegraph business association, said things were better there now.  

Only one person spoke as a private citizen. She said her parents used to go downtown to sit on benches, but now most of the benches had been taken away because street people used them too much. She wanted more benches with fewer street people on them. 

Everyone, without exception, thought more bathrooms were needed. One very brave young mother from the hills admitted that she has a chronic urinary problem, and has occasionally been forced to pee in the bushes when she couldn’t make it to a bathroom. 

Bottom line (again, no rude pun intended): A lot of money and time would be saved if the City Council could see its way clear to providing more public bathrooms in commercial areas in the near future. The $50,000 already spent on the consultant would have paid for quite a few months of PortaPotty rentals. Is there a courageous councilmember who would propose putting a Public Bathrooms For Every Body Initiative on the agenda right now? Once there are enough bathrooms, we can talk about how to persuade everyone to use them.  

MISQUOTED ON  

TELEGRAPH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I was misquoted in the recent Daily Planet article, “Community Says Yes to Public Bathrooms for Everyone,” as saying “Walking down Telegraph, I still feel uncomfortable [when panhandled].” I never mentioned panhandling. What I said is “I am a 6-foot-5 male and sometimes feel uncomfortable walking down Telegraph Avenue. And when my teenage nieces visit they definitely feel uncomfortable.” I was then correctly quoted as saying that Telegraph needs special relief from both sitting and lying on the sidewalk. It is my opinion that lying and sitting on the sidewalk are a major problem on Telegraph Avenue, not panhandling. I think it is largely because of folks lying and sitting on the sidewalk that neighbors such as myself infrequently visit and shop on Telegraph Avenue.  

John Caner 

• 

THE AIR BEAT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Helicopter pollution over South Campus seems to be at a nearly four-decade high. Is there someone that really believes that this regular militarized leaf-blowing helps to construct a more peaceful community? 

Jeff Jordan 

• 

BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

When I grow up and get old and bitter I’ll move to Grass Valley where I’ll write letters accusing everyone who disagrees with me of racism and then I’ll send the letters to Berkeley where they will print them because they like that sort of thing there. 

In one recent diatribe, Ron Lowe warned that legislation to end automatic citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants “is a racially charged attempt to overturn the Anglo-American common law principal, dating back to 1608, which allows citizenship to all people born here.” 

Curiously, this ancient principle is not the law in England, or Scotland, or Ireland... or in those mean and nasty countries such as Sweden, France, or Norway. In fact, no country in Europe gives citizenship to the children of illegal aliens.  

It’s time for the United States to join the modern community of nations where citizenship means something more than just an accident of geography. 

Mark Johnson 

• 

CLOUDWALKER’S ISSUES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I would like to respond to Ms. Cloudwalker and her recent shopping experience in Berkeley in reference to the letter to the editor about the young black kids who were hassled by the Berkeley police officers. She stated that she observed three young black men standing around one of which had his hand on his crotch inside his pants for two hours. My question to her is, what was she doing watching a young man with his hand on is crotch—for two hours? I would like to suggest that perhaps Ms. Cloudwalker may have serious subconscious voyeurism issues that needs the attention of perhaps a mental health specialist. 

Robert White 

• 

CONN RESPONDS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In his letter “Taking Issue With Conn,” Chong Jones claims that my sources for charging that former Laotian CIA asset, General Vang Pao are “cut and paste” and unless I “can prove that Vang Pao was a drug lord” I must retract them. He then debunks Alfred McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin in South East Asia. He mentions my other source, Frontline’s “Drugs, Guns and the CIA,” but never addresses it.  

Smart move.  

First, his review of McCoy’s book is not one I think most readers would agree, and as for McCoy’s statement that the Church Committee found no evidence that the CIA was involved in aiding the drug trade, so what? The committee was wrong.  

Now let’s look at what Frontline found. 

Ron Rickenbach, who headed up the air arm of the U.S. Aid and International Development program told Frontline that he personally witnessed the off loading of raw opium from small U.S. Air America aircraft, which was then put on larger craft for transshipment to southern Laos and Thailand. Air America was on contract with the CIA. Rickenbach said the CIA knew the opium trade was going on, but that the Agency felt it was a necessary evil in the fight against communism. 

The traffic in opium eventually got so big, according to Richenbach, that the United States decided to create Sing Quan, Vang Pao’s personal airline. The CIA took an Air America C-47, painted it, and gave it Vang Pao. From that point on, the large shipments of opium flew on Sing Quan, which quickly became known by the nickname, “Opium Air.”  

Frontline interviewed pilots Fred Platt and Neil Hansen, both whom flew the opium on Air America planes, and journalist John Everingham, who reported on the control Vang Pao’s military had over the trade. 

Lastly, Leslie Cockburn interviewed Tony Poe, the CIA agent who worked with Vang Pao. Poe, an OSS and World War II veteran, and the Agency’s key man in Laos until he was forced out because he refused to tolerate Vang Pao’s corruption, explicitly implicates Vang Pao in drug running.  

Why should this surprise us? Vang Pao was a lieutenant in the French colonial army, fighting to keep Laos part of France’s colonial empire in Southeast Asia. Actually, compared to that kind of betrayal, maybe running opium is not such a big deal. 

Conn Hallinan 

P.S.: The transcript of “Guns, Drugs, and the CIA” can be read on the PBS website. 

• 

HOUSING SHORTAGE? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Chris Kavanagh’s plight once again highlights the supposed housing shortage that many say is the mandate for the various rent control programs in the Bay Area. Yet in North Oakland I can point out seven vacant houses in a two block radius of my home. The particular ones that I can think of have been vacant for more than five years each. The number of vacant properties in West Berkeley and North Oakland is astounding. The positive impact of the various inclusionary zoning schemes currently being proposed would be dwarfed by the benefit of the additional housing stock ‘created’ by limiting the amount of time a house could sit as a vacant blight. This would simply be the fastest and most cost effective way of increasing the supply of housing that I can think of. 

Tom Nemeth 

• 

BUS RAPID TRANSIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Vincent Casalaina complains in his recent letter that Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) will “disrupt our lives.” This city has heard this complaint many times from affluent homeowners who live near the proposed BRT line, but it has not heard the stories of the bus riders whose lives will be improved by BRT, because most of them are so busy with their work and families that they cannot afford the luxury of being politically active. 

Here is the story of a potential BRT rider who a member of Friends of BRT talked to on the 1-R bus. This story is completely true, though the names have been changed. I hope that when the city make decisions about BRT, it will consider its effect on people like this commuter, even though they are not as affluent and vocal as members of local neighborhood associations.  

Maria and her husband Gerardo are parents of a 6-year-old son named Rodrigo. Maria works as a cook at a restaurant on Telegraph Avenue near the UC campus. She would like to live closer to where she works, but because she can’t afford the rents in Berkeley on her current pay, she takes the 1R to get to work from her home in East Oakland. She plans an hour each way for her commute. 

Maria says she would like to be able to use BART, but the station is too far from where she lives and works. To get to a BART station, Maria would first have to pay for a bus ride, and then a BART ticket on top of that. “It’s cheaper for me to take AC Transit and get all the way to Telegraph Avenue,” she says. “BRT would be so nice. I would be able to get to work even faster than if I were to take BART, saving the time it would take to walk from BART or to transfer on to a bus.” 

Occasionally, if she’s late and her husband doesn’t need the car, Maria drives to work. However, she says driving can be harder than taking the bus, because she often has to park far from where she works to find a space where she can leave her car all day. 

When asked what she would do if BRT were here and she could save 20 minutes extra each day, she responded “I’d spend more time with my family, of course!” 

Charles Siegel 

• 

CORRECTION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Lauren Lempert, the mayor’s point person for the “Public Commons for Everyone Initiative,” made a great show at the Peace and Justice Commission meeting that the Daily Planet’s $50,000 estimate of her salary was wrong. 

I noticed she was sitting beside Assistant City Manager Jim Hynes, so I turned around and said, “Well, then, how much?” Hynes admitted to the whole curious room that she was being paid $6,800 a month for a nine-month contract. 

Your paper was wrong only in that its estimate was a little too conservative. Lauren Lempert owes the paper, your reporter, and the attendees at the Peace and Justice Commission an apology. It should also be noted that Lempert and Hynes missed the public comment period entirely, showing up late with a very fine speech about craving public input. The Peace and Justice Commission, with two abstentions, firmly turned down the opportunity to target the poor for Christmas. 

Carol Denney 

• 

FLOURIDE IN THE WATER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Apropos of Yolanda Huang’s Sept. 14 letter to the editor, in the late 1970s when EBMUD began to flouridate its drinking water, East Bay Committee Against Flouridation (later Safewater) worked to prevent this practice I believe that the group eventually disbanded due, in part, to attrition and the ease (despite the expense) of purchasing spring water at local stores or home-delivery. The website (www.ewg.org/reports/caflouride) and its links, which Ms. Huang provided, focus on current safety concerns, including tooth mottling from excess flouride consumption, particularly in infants and children and increased cancer incidents. These issues and others are among the same safety issues Safewater raised 30 years ago. These concerns have not been resolved; rather they are being re-visited by the National Research Council and various physician groups. 

Recently some popular restaurants announced their new practice of serving water from the public water supply, in lieu of bottled water to reduce transportation-related energy use and resulting greenhouse gas effects. It is likely that the current generation of restaurant owners, many of whom may not have been here at the time, are unaware of the flouridation issue and that flouride is added to tap water that they serve. In the 1970s it was not possible to remove flouride from drinking water as it has been possible to remove other contaminants, such as chlorine. Perhaps since then a technique has been devised to do so. While many people understand environmental costs of transporting drinking water by air, sea, and land, not so many are aware of potential adverse effects of flouridated water. 

It is not a complicated issue. The basic questions are these: Should drinking water be medicated in any case? And, particularly when there is any question of its safety? 

Barbara Witte 

• 

24/7 HOMELESS SHELTERS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I propose that all homeless shelters in Berkeley be required remain to be open for their guests 24/7. I understand that the BOSS shelter kicks everyone out every morning to roam Berkeley all day until they reopen at night. 

It is irresponsible to draw large numbers of shelter clients to a shelter and then kick them out every day. If the shelters want those people at night, they should provide a place and for them to be during the day. 

If the shelters don’t want to see their clients during the day, they shouldn’t draw them to Berkeley to spend the night. 

Hotels manage to clean hotel rooms even when guests have not checked out. Shelters can too. 

David Lerman 

• 

BRICK WALL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Rich Crowl’s recent letter seems to chide you for your editorial about Berkeley Repertory Theater not advertising in the Daily Planet. Just tell him that you once said, I think, that there’s something like a brick wall between your advertising and editorial departments.  

Bob Marsh 

Bob Marsh  

• 

PUBLIC COMMONS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As a life-long activist and low-income tenant in the North Berkeley neighborhood, I want to convey my strong opposition to the “Public Commons for Everyone” initiative on two counts: 1) Its hypocritical, false promise to be a commons for “everyone”—except the poorest and neediest among us. 2) The efforts by real estate developers (mostly non-Berkeley corporations) to further gentrify North Berkeley for private profit. 

I have watched North Shattuck become so upscale over 27 years that I hardly recognize it anymore and cannot afford to shop, eat, or hang out in my own neighborhood. This proposed blank check by some city officials to the developers would surely turn the area into another Fourth Street (but without adequate parking) and will result in urban flight and hardship for many residents—and not only for our homeless and street people, but for many of us who can barely afford to live here now. 

I urge Dona Spring, my Councilmember, Mayor Bates, and every city official who cares about ALL the people of Berkeley to act with the compassion and respect for ordinary citizens that Berkeley is known for, and to treat those less privileged in our midst in the same way that we speak out for peace, justice, and human rights around the world. 

Please vote against special interests and for the lives of Berkeley residents. 

Marianne Robinson 

• 

PUBLIC COMMENT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Mayor Bates’ Public Comment proposal for the Oct. 9 City Council meeting has some very promising qualities. However, certain aspects seem unworkable. We refer to his proposal that the audience of willing speakers be polled on each and every Consent Item to determine the numbers pro or con. In view of the fact that there are often dozens of Consent Items this process would seem to be unduly time-consuming. It appears this would not be conducive to efficient Public Comment Procedure, clearly, one of the mayor’s priority goals. 

SuperBOLD suggests adopting the following alternatives as amendments:  

1. If there are a large number of persons desiring to speak, the presiding officer may suggest that persons in favor of Consent Items which remain on the calendar, forfeit their right to speak so as not to prolong the meeting. 

2. At the presiding official’s discretion, the official may grant up to 10 minutes to a speaker who desires to speak on multiple agenda items, so that the speaker shall address all items at one time before the body’s consideration of those items. Such comments shall be made under the Public Comment on Non-Agenda Items. (From the City of Benicia.) 

We also urge that Public Comment on Non-Agenda Items be held after Public Comment on Consent Items rather than pushed to the end of the meeting. Unless meetings are extended by the vote of the council, we fear that some councilmembers may leave before Public Comment on Non-Agenda Items which the mayor may have scheduled to occur after the official close of the meeting. This has happened in the recent past and drastically reduced the value of such Public Comment. 

Public Comment rules should apply, not only to the City Council, but to the Board of Library Trustees, all commissions, committees and other legislative and advisory bodies of the City of Berkeley. This creates a uniform standard which these bodies can follow and the public can readily understand. 

Ceasing experimentation with procedures for Public Comment and adopting procedures which allow all willing speakers to address each legislative body and advisory body, will protect the City of Berkeley from the lawsuit threatened by the First Amendment Project in the Spring of 2006. 

Jim Fisher, Gene Bernardi, Jane Welford 

SuperBOLD Steering Committee 

• 

UNICEF CARDS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley currently volunteering for the United Nations Association-UNICEF Center in Berkeley. I have been a volunteer for several weeks, and have been very impressed with the broad selection of UNICEF cards and gifts the center now offers to the community. It truly has been a rewarding experience to see customers excited about being able to purchase UNICEF cards and similar products again, and know that their purchase is supporting the United Nations Children’s Fund. 

Towards the end of last year, an article was published in the Daily Planet explaining how the UNICEF center was closing because we were no longer selling UNICEF cards. Although this was the case for a while, we are definitely back in business and are eager to relay the news to the East Bay community. 

We are a small center and value all of our customers, many of whom might think our center is closed. We would like to let everyone know we are here and are selling great UNICEF cards and products. Our center is run entirely by volunteers of all ages and nationalities within the community, spanning from high school to senior citizens. We are open Tuesday through Saturday, 12-5. 

Colleen McElroy 

• 

SEARCHING FOR CRIMINALS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

One night last week, beginning around midnight, I heard a helicopter circling my South Berkeley neighborhood. It shone a spotlight down, sweeping the streets and backyards throughout. This happens frequently enough that I didn’t feel too apprehensive until it continued on for a full half-hour. I called the BPD non-emergency number, and was told that they were looking for robbery suspects. That may or may not be the truth; I have strong suspicions that the suspects sought may be connected with some or all of the recent homicides, Oakland/Berkeley/Richmond. It was creepy, regardless. I slept poorly all night, waking at every small noise outside. 

By the by, I was alarmed and disgusted that the cover page of Berkeley High School’s newspaper, the Jacket, carried a “hit piece” about the death of Gary King Jr. in their Sept. 28 edition. The first paragraph of the article describes King’s death as “murder,” and it goes downhill from there. The tenor of the full article blames Sergeant Pat Gonzales for the shooting death of this ex-Berkeley High alum, exclusively. King is cast as this blameless victim of police brutality. 

I realize that the Berkeley High Jacket is a student paper, and students are given more latitude in expression than the standards applied to adult reporters. Still, it is intolerable that any student would be allowed to publish such scandalously libelous claims. It does a disservice to the students reading the article, it posts illegal (tortuous) claims against Sgt. Gonzales, and it tortures the truth. The incidental connection with Berkeley High makes it seem like Mr. Ward’s status as a graduate of Berkeley High should exempt him from criminal prosecution, or even suspicion. The fact that he pulled a gun on this officer is glossed over as unimportant. Are there any adults supervising this paper? It seems to me they ought to be held accountable for permitting the promulgation of such treacherous filth.  

And yes, I mean it.  

Sam Herbert  

• 

QUALITY OF LIFE  

FOR THE ELDERLY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have followed the many letters to the editor and other public discussions regarding the Public Commons for Everyone Initiative dating back to this past spring. However, not one of these very spirited and mostly thoughtful analyses has addressed how this initiative could significantly improve the quality of life for the “out and about” active elderly members of our community, which number over 10,000 in Berkeley. 

I have a photograph of my parents, Adolph and Marion Roe, taken in the late 1970s of them sitting on the benches adjacent to the corner of Shattuck and Center streets, just one of their resting places on their daily walks around downtown Berkeley. They lived at Francisco and Shattuck and ranged from Rose and Shattuck all the way south to Dwight Way and Shattuck. They went on foot to Safeway, Bill’s Drugs (now Longs), The Coop (now Andronico’s), Virginia Bakery, the hearing aid store, Bentley’s (no longer in business), Edy’s (also defunct) and Herrick Hospital. All along the way they could stop and rest on any bench on Shattuck Avenue and perhaps meet up with a friend or just enjoy the weather. 

Their favorite place to meet, sit and chat was at the benches provided by the Bank of America at Shattuck between Vine and Cedar streets near the French Hotel. These benches were ideally located for elderly people or young families to stop and take a rest while running errands in that stretch of Shattuck. But street people soon appropriated those benches for their exclusive use. First to sit and smoke, and then to harass passersby with aggressive language, drunken behavior, spitting, parking shopping carts, and occasionally using them as a toilet. My parents who were in their late ’70s were effectively chased away, along with their friends and other frail, elderly citizens. This little park-like setting became trashed and eventually Bank of America removed the benches to stop the antisocial behavior of the street people. 

Throughout the debate on the Public Commons Initiative, I’ve often thought that all of Berkeley’s residents are entitled to use the streets in comfort and safety. I am struck at how the street people who have made our public spaces into dysfunctional personal spaces have such vocal and committed representation in Berkeley’s public and political life. There are so many of us who aren’t being heard—elderly, frail, healthy others, workers, young parents, little children—who need access to safe, pleasant and orderly places to sit and rest during our day. I myself am approaching the age where I need to have a safe and pleasant place to sit and regroup for ten or more minutes without being harassed or displaced by antisocial behavior from other people. 

This is a critical issue considering Berkeley’s desire to “green” the city. As it is now, sitting on a bench or waiting for a bus along Shattuck Avenue, especially south of University Avenue, is usually a very unpleasant experience My seven months pregnant daughter and her 3-year-old recently took the bus from Shattuck and Vine southwards at 10 a.m. on a weekday and a street person at that corner yelled obscenities at her and her child the entire time they waited. 

We, the community as a whole, need an improvement in and a share of the benefits of Berkeley’s public spaces, which really have not been available to us for many years. I urge the mayor, the City Council and the city manager to move this initiative forward and include in their design and implementation the needs of all Berkeley’s residents, not just those who shout the loudest or longest. It is a much-needed improvement which will significantly improve the quality of life in our city for all. 

Evey Baughn 

• 

NEW SUPERINTENDENT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

What I want in a new school superintendent: 

1) Someone who really believes that education should be child centered—from this I mean, decisions should be from the point of view, “Does it help the child learn, grow, develop and become a whole person,” not whether actions or policies make it easier for administrators to do their job.  

2) Someone who is a good judge of character, meaning they value people who are really competent, experienced, and have the necessary knowledge to do a really good job. Competence and capability to do a good job should be more important than loyalty, obedience, and the ability to spin the talk. It shouldn’t take three years to get rid of incompetent staff. 

3) True commitment to diversity. I value folks of all colors because hopefully, a rainbow of people bring in the full color spectrum of experience, ideas, perspectives and cultures. However, if the commitment to diversity is skin deep but adverse to diversity of opinions, ideas, perspectives, then that’s not true diversity.  

4) Someone who is friendly. 

5) Someone who is excited by the learning process, because at the bottom, Berkeley public education is about learning. If the person we hire as superintendent left the classroom after the minimum two years, that says something about this person’s interest in teaching, and in helping students to learn. We have a very high achievement gap, a high drop out rate in the high school, and middle class families of color are either moving out of Berkeley or putting their kids into private schools, especially at the high school level. Someone who is committed to the learning process as the primary function of a school district, of course would be committed to running an effective and efficient administrator because the more efficient and effective and smaller the administration portion of our school district, the larger the share for our classrooms. 

I suggest that others in Berkeley also write the Planet, and tell the school board, what we want in a new superintendent. 

Yolanda Huang  

• 

WONDERSTRUCK 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I wonder when our top officials will understand the value of human life. Last year I wrote a letter to the editor regarding the ready availability of guns to the general public. I am wonderstruck that guns continue to be sold to any and everybody who can afford to buy them and who can provide some information about themselves, true or false. Most pawnshops carry guns; I am told their sale is brisk. 

When guns are used for murder, friends or family of the murderers try to protect them, saying, they were on drugs; they didn’t know what they were doing.? No one speaks about the loss an innocent person’s life or of the loss to the family of the victim. 

If some people enjoy killing just for the sake of killing, we must design a way of stopping such people. We, who are law-abiding citizens want to feel safe while we follow the laws of the land. 

Romila Khanna 

Albany 

The Berkeley Daily Planet published a political cartoon last week which showed a half-dozen snarling dogs surrounding a hunk of meat. The dogs were labeled as Berkeley property owners and the meat “Kavanagh.” There may indeed be a few local property owners who take some small degree of pleasure in the predicament in which Mr. Kavanagh finds himself. These would most likely include those who have been forced to sit and listen to his smug, self-righteous pontificating at rent board hearings where he has positioned himself on the moral high ground and has routinely treated landlords like lying crooks simply because they operate rental property in Berkeley. Now it appears the criminal justice system is telling Mr. Kavanagh to take a look in the mirror if he wants to know who the lying crook really is. 

When the citizens of Berkeley enacted rent control in 1980, the initial registration fee to be charged was $12 per unit. This was the estimate of the likely cost of rent control. If one applies the Consumer Price Index to that fee, it would now be about $30, which would make the Rent Board budget about a half-million dollars. Their current budget, however, is not $500,000 but more like $3,500,000. A rent-controlled apartment which rented for $350 in 1980 would rent for a tad under $900 today, an increase of 156 percent. The Rent Board’s budget over the same period is up over 1,300 percent! 

While the City of Berkeley struggles to keep its budget intact, the Rent Board sees the Berkeley property owner as the politically incorrect sugar-daddy upon whom greater and greater fees can be imposed with impunity. But money isn’t everything—even for landlords. The fees only tell part of the story. The broader tale would center on an inquiry as to why the Rent Board needs 18 employees and over $3.5 million when, for several years now, they have had virtually nothing to do. The original ordinance, still in force as modified, gave the Rent Board three tasks. None of them are now necessary.  

The first of the tasks assigned them was setting the Annual Rent Adjustment (AGA), an increase (or decrease) to be applied across the board to all controlled units. The law has since been modified so that the AGA is now automatic, set at two-thirds of the CPI increase. The Rent Board no longer oversees and deliberates on the annual adjustment to rent. All that is now necessary is for a staff member to look up the appropriate CPI index, divide by three, multiple by two and proclaim the result. Fifteen minutes a year, max.  

Second, the Rent Board is charged with creating, monitoring and administering a process whereby individual property owners can seek an Individual Rent Adjustment (IRA). A decade ago there were hundreds of IRAs a year. The process was often long, involved and complicated. Recently, however, the rules promulgated by the Rent Board have made the granting of IRAs almost impossible. Hearing examiners have been put on temporary assignment to other city agencies for lack of work. There are very few IRAs processed.  

The third charge of the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board is to maintain a registry of legal rents for all controlled units. Early on, they required annual submission of rents, an elaborate process to be sure. Later they only asked for changes to the registered rent. However, in 1995, the state Legislature overrode the Berkeley rent control law and dictated that the rent for voluntarily vacated units may be raised to market level (and thereafter recontrolled). Owners must now inform the Rent Board only of the rents for newly rented units. Processing these four-line forms is really the only chore left that the Rent Board has to do. It could be handled by a single part-time employee. But even this is totally unnecessary. When owners were required to keep the rent the same between tenants, registration was clearly necessary to assure that they did so. Now, however, every sitting tenant knows his/her legal rent and the legal rent for every new tenant is the rent to which they agree, so they too know their legal base rent. What purpose does registration serve?  

So essentially the Rent Board has nothing to do. Except maybe landlord bashing. From the property-owner point of view, the cartoon in the Planet last week could just as accurately have had the dogs labeled “Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board” and meat labeled “Berkeley Landlords.” And if the Planet ever chose to publish such a cartoon, it would not be inaccurate if the snarlingest dog of all were labeled Chris Kavanagh. Is there a bit of schadenfreude among Berkeley property-owners these days? Maybe.  

Albert Sukoffopini is a Berkeley resident.

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The Daily Planet should be deeply ashamed of the political cartoon that appeared in this newspaper on Sept. 28, depicting Berkeley landlords as a pack of vicious dogs. On the dog’s collars is written: “Berkeley’s Anti-Rent Control Landlords.” The dogs in this cartoon all have sharpened teeth and tongues hanging out. They are salivating and have an angry and dangerous look in their eyes. They are all looking at a steak labeled “Chris Kavanagh.” 

This is the worst and most dangerous kind of demagoguery. Throughout the sad history of the 20th Century, whenever governments or private organizations wished to stir up hatred against any group, it was nearly always preceded by political cartoons like this one—depicting the enemy as savage beasts. It is much easier to get people to condone and participate in acts of violence against your enemy if you first reduce them in people’s eyes to something inhuman and justifiably exterminated. 

During World War I, U.S. government propaganda posters depicted Germans as “The Beastly Hun,” a savage Neanderthal-like creature. During World War II, the Nazis depicted Jews as giant rats in their political cartoons. And growing up in the South in 1950s, I saw plenty of Ku Klux Klan cartoons depicting black people as gorillas, looking just like the dogs in the Planet cartoon of last Saturday, with sharpened teeth and a menacing look in their eyes. 

This is not a trivial matter. If history is any guide, depicting whole groups of people as savage, vicious beasts is a very dangerous thing. 

And finally, Berkeley landlords are not responsible for Chris Kavanagh’s legal troubles. Mr. Kavanagh is not a helpless victim or a lifeless object, like the steak in the Planet cartoon, having no responsibility for his misfortunes or control over his circumstances. Mr. Kavanagh is an intelligent and articulate man. He knew what he was doing when he ran for Berkeley rent control board claiming to be a Berkeley resident. 

At the risk of sounding banal in the extreme, the existence of independent media and its continued survival is critical. Independent media is invaluable. Particularly in today’s climate of media consolidation it is crucial that institutions such as the Planet are able to continue to thrive and survive. Berkeley is home to the free speech movement. Just as the Planet is a veritable institution in Berkeley, so is KPFA radio. Both have staff that render their services as labors of love whether paid staff at the Planet or unpaid staff at KPFA radio. The dedication and work of the staff at each of these institutions dovetail. For example on Mon. Oct. 1 KPFA interviewed Planet reporter J. Douglas Allen-Taylor on the current state of the city of Oakland and Mayor Ron Dellums. Planet editor Becky O’Malley has engaged in written exchanges with KPFA Sunday host Peter Laufer and has appeared on his show. The Planet covered the 1999 infamous KPFA lock out extensively. 

The unpaid staff (volunteer workers ) at Berkeley’s venerable KPFA radio received an unhappy surprise on Aug. 13, when a memo went out declaring that the unpaid workers’ organization was no longer recognized by station management. 

The Unpaid Staff Organization (“UPSO”) has existed for seventeen years to represent the interests of the more than 200 volunteers who produce the majority of the program hours at KPFA. Unpaid staff produce nearly all of KPFA’s music shows, and a substantial portion of its news and public affairs programs as well. KPFA’s volunteer staff is the crux of the station’s programming. Without their work the station, as we know it, could not survive. Without their work KPFA would have to air canned, prerecorded programs. 

The Aug. 13 memo, signed by interim General Manager Lemlem Rijio, declares, “Currently, there is no management-recognized ‘unpaid staff organization.’” Rijio’s memo says that station management acted because the UPSO had not functioned for nearly two years. Not mentioned was the fact that an election committee was in the process of conducting a vote to refill the posts of incumbents who had ceased to serve the UPSO. Rijio’s memo was issued only four days before the ballot due date of the UPSO election. Currently there is a petition circulating for unpaid staff to sign affirming signers wish to have the UPSO act as their representative body. The management memo of Aug 13 “pulls the rug out from under people who get very little for their dedication and hard work,” said Shahram Aghamir, a producer on KPFA’s “Voices of the Middle East” program. KPFA’s Local Station Board passed a resolution calling on management to rescind the memo and continue the long-standing policy of recognizing UPSO as the representative of the station’s unpaid workers; the Board vote was 13 yes, zero no, and five abstaining. 

Central to this is what management’s action portends for the future. Again to quote Aghamir, “This act by the GM is the canary in the coal mine.” The immediate effect of the Rijio memo was to complicate the upcoming election for Local Station Board members, possibly preventing some unpaid staff from voting in that election. Since her move to attempt to disenfranchise much of KPFA’s labor pool, in addition to the LSB resolution, the national election supervisor for Pacifica (KPFA’s parent organization) has ruled that the established UPSO guidelines for eligibility to vote in the 2007 LSB election must prevail, overturning Rijio’s memo. Still the management action may hamper the possibility of UPSO working to gain new benefits for unpaid staff, such as a formal grievance procedure comparable to that of the station’s unionized paid staff, or the option to buy health insurance at the station’s group rate. As of today, Rijo has taken no action per the LSB motion which speaks volumes about her lack of respect for the majority of KPFA’s programmers. 

More difficult to assess will be the impact of the disrespect management showed the station’s unpaid workers by withdrawing recognition of their organization. There is a story here about worker organizing, and that its a story made more interesting and perhaps more unique by the fact that these workers aren’t even paid. No, their livelihoods are not imperiled. But their passion and the efforts they put into their work, efforts that are often made at great personal sacrifice and due to intense beliefs about the importance of what they do, is being threatened. And as we know, especially in Berkeley, it is often the things that people do around and in between their paycheck gigs, that really does change the world and establish the alternative networks that sustain us in this difficult society. 

Coincidentally, the Rijio memo went out the same day as management at another media institution attacked a union: the Media News Group newspaper chain declared its “derecognition” of the Northern California Media Guild as the representative of employees at Media News Group’s ANG newspapers. But many KPFA listeners and workers plus readers of the Planet will surely be surprised and dismayed that KPFA management engages in the same behavior as the managers of a profit-driven media conglomerate. 

So if we care about alternatives to the mainstream, then we have to care about and value unpaid work. Because precious few of us are ever going to be paid a sustainable wage to do these things. So when an alternative institution like KPFA of 50 plus years duration turns on its heels and says “you’re not real workers”—“you don’t have the privilege of collective bargaining over your working conditions, your supplies and your equipment like the REAL workers", it’s a tremendous slap in the face to people’s blood, sweat and tears, not just at KPFA, but really all the cooperative networks that people build up in their spare time to do important work. If a progressive beacon like KPFA can’t support basic worker organizing in their midst, then who will? 

Tracy Rosenberg is interim director of Media Alliance. Ruthanne Shpiner is KPFA representative to the UPSO council. 

MOVEON.ORG 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

What Becky O’Malley says about Move On may or may not be true, but she must admit that if it hadn’t been the “Betray Us” nonsense, the folks who make sure that that sort of thing overwhelms real issues would have just invented another equally meaningless tempest. 

The bottom line for folks who believe the general actually did betray his country is not to blame Move On for stating the truth, but to stand up to the media goons who marginalize it. 

As you correctly stated, the spineless presidential candidates and members of Congress who condemned this particular act of free speech should have instead come out swinging (as did Bill Clinton) right away.  

The more they cave in, the more likely it is they’ll be next on the “swift boat” to election hell. 

Dale Sophiea 

• 

OAK GROVE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Some questions about the Cal tree controversy: 

1) If this stand of oaks is truly the last of its kind within the Berkeley city limits, why is that? 

2) What part, if any, did the city government play in the removal of all those other trees? 

3) What is the city doing to create new groves of oak trees so that this one is not the only one? 

4) If it is really all that dangerous for a building to sit atop the Hayward Fault, is the city condemning as unsafe all those buildings atop the fault and under its jurisdiction? 

5) How many members of the Panoramic Hill Association bought homes that they knew straddled the fault? Why? 

Andy Rodriguez 

• 

WHAT THE..? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

This is with regard to Becky O’Malley’s Sept. 28 editorial, “Bashing the Poor is Back in Style.” 

Becky, you’ll forgive me, but what the hell are you getting at? Let’s break down your column: 

• You watch the birds. Hummingbirds. Chickadees too. Pretty, pretty birds. 

• You read the New Yorker. You’re not pleased with the hoity-toity nature of both writing and subject. 

• You turn back to the Stellar’s jays. 

• You attempt an epiphany: “And there’s a political lesson to be learned too. Solutions to perceived problems, come in cycles just as hemlines do.” 

• You insert some cynical pap about what will and will not be done about the city’s homeless. 

• You conclude with a giant sigh. 

This column was disorganized and cryptic. What is it you’re trying to tell us, and can you just distill it down? If not, please just occupy yourself with watching the birds. 

Allison Landa 

• 

SHADY CHARACTERS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

San Francisco Supervisor Ed Jew was suspended for corruption. The next day, here in Southern California, Lynwood Mayor Louis Byrd and three councilmembers are recalled. We’ve learned recently that Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Burke lives out of a mansion in Brentwood far from her South L.A. district and everybody who is “somebody” around here acts like it’s funny.  

I’ve been following the controversy about Berkeley Rent Commissioner Chris Kavanagh because I used to live in the Bay Area. Let’s be fair. There is no comparison between the Chris Kavanagh’s sins and the crimes committed under the general culture of corruption in California’s “liberal” Democratic cities. Democratic State Senator Don Perata, has forgotten more shady deals than you or I or Chris will ever know. Nevertheless, for some “mysterious” reason, nothing sticks to “Teflon Don.”  

Remember the 2003 election for Mayor of San Francisco? It was a cliff-hanger between Democrat Gavin Newsom and Green Party upstart Matt Gonzales. Democrats spent lots of money and brought in heavy hitters to boost their pretty candidate while pundits screamed it would be “crazy” to elect a Ralph Nader “greenie.”  

From my vantage point it appears every California coastal city could use a few people like that fearless, incorruptible “crazy” Ralph Nader.  

Chauncey Bailey, distinguished African-American editor of the Oakland Post, was assassinated on a downtown street in broad daylight. Links between the accused killer and a black nationalist institution called Your Black Muslim Bakery should prompt soul-searching about Oakland’s legendary Black Power tradition, but most likely won’t change my fellow blacks who are “True Believers” in the unholy alliance between Democratic Party Machines and the worst elements of the civil rights/Black Power movements leading to the promised land.  

I see the same phenomenon in Los Angeles where the Martin Luther King/Harbor Medical Center in Watts closed because of gross incompetence by the Los Angeles Democratic Party Machine. The Los Angeles Unified School District is a never-ending train wreck.  

In the South Bay, San Jose is still recovering from the adventures of disgraced Mayor Ron Gonzales.  

Richmond’s Green Mayor Gayle McLaughlin was elected after inner-city voters finally had enough. Reform will only come from an independent progressive and inclusive party like the Green Party. Republicans are a cruel joke and Democrats are as incapable of reforming themselves as they are of stopping Bush.  

Alex Walker 

Los Angeles 

• 

BUS RAPID TRANSIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

All this fuss and a potential $400,000 promotion about a rapid bus on Telegraph... What we need to get us out of cars are reliable and quick ways of getting us where we’re going via buses. When we need to wait 15 to 30 minutes for a bus to turn up AND we sometimes need to transfer to a second bus and wait a similar time, the incentive to switch is pretty low. 

After my first year as a daily bus rider I would suggest the following: 1) Greater frequency of buses; 2) A for-real published schedule; 3) A small fleet of jitney buses for those routes and hours where ridership is low and intersperse them with the larger buses for rush hours and/or heavily trafficked routes. We all see those huge Van Hools and sometimes the double ones with six or seven passengers taking up all that space, gas, and air. Not exactly an example of green consciousness. 

Suggestion: The AC Transit’s top decision making executives who probably never ride a bus should spend one week coming and going from their home to work, talking to the passengers about what they like or don’t about the current fleet and the system. And be sure to take a trip that requires at least one transfer. 

My own assessment is that the new Van Hools are very hard to maneuver for older or disabled people with their climb-up seats and lack of any seats at the front end of the bus, plus their jerkiness in stopping and starting. 

If you have a good efficient system people will come and it won’t be necessary to waste $400,000 to make something that is not an alternative to cars into a PR campaign which is bound to fail. 

Joan Levinson 

• 

CHEERS TO EDNA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Cheers to Edna Spector for her Sept. 25 commentary advocating “a massive human population collapse, hopefully leading to the voluntary extinction of the human race.” But I fear even her bold prescription is too little, too late. Even in dire poverty and privation humans stubbornly pursue the urge to breed, and population reduction will be a slow, ugly process of migrations away from submerged coastlines and massive starvation as fertile farmlands dry up. I submit that the best hope for the planet would be the timely arrival of another asteroid to eliminate this murderous, forest-burning, ocean-fouling, sky-polluting cancer on the earth we jokingly call Homo sapiens. Meanwhile, I heartily endorse her proposal that Berkeley should become the model for creating free euthanasia clinics around the world.  

Jerry Landis 

• 

JAMES KENNEY STAFFING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In your recent article about the Inclusion Program at James Kenney Park, Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Director William Rogers stated, “At no time do we require one staff member to push two wheelchairs,” and characterized James Wells as “misrepresenting” occurrences in the Inclusion Program.  

While it may be true that he does not “require” this, when the fall term of the Inclusion Program began on Sept. 4, the staff member assigned to one of the youth who uses a wheelchair had not returned from medical leave and thus was not available to push his wheelchair. That week, we were also short another staff person who declined to come to work at the last minute, leaving a gap. With two staff out that first week (and no provision made to replace them), all staff had to take responsibility for extra children. While I have not seen Mr. Wells push two wheelchairs. I have seen another staff person pushing two wheelchairs when we were shorthanded—I begged him to stop for fear that he would injure himself or one of the children.  

If I were Mr. Rogers, I would offer Mr. Wells an apology.  

Sharyn Dimmick  

Recreation Activity Leader,  

James Kenney Park  

• 

GOOD STUFF AT UCB 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The building-construction department at UC Berkeley might not meet your approval, but the rest of the university is indisputably a world-class educational institution. And anyone of us can use it everyday for free. On any given weekday there are about 20 or more lectures that are open for anyone to attend. Not infrequently they are presented by world-class figures. I myself have heard talks by Richard Dawkins, Tim White (early bones), Stephen Hawking, Jack Horner (dinosaurs), David Remnick (New Yorker), Molly Ivins, Howard Zinn...you get the idea. 

And, to repeat, all this for free (not counting your tax dollars, of course). It used to be a bit tricky knowing who would be talking about what and when and where. Happily, this is no longer a problem. A meticulous and altruistic local, Lowell Moorcroft, goes through all the available information and posts each week’s talks on his website: www.calendar.yahoo.com/lowellmoorcroft. 

Most lectures are in the afternoon, a few in the evening. In addition to bio-science, astronomy, etc. you will find talks on politics, history, philosophy, and now there are talks on environment/energy research almost daily. All good stuff. 

And my heartfelt thanks go to Mr. Moorcroft. 

Victor Herbert 

• 

BRT DEBATE RIGHT ON TARGET 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The question of whether Berkeley wants to see BRT as it’s currently being proposed by AC Transit disrupt our lives and our city lies at the heart of the debate that has been going on in these pages and throughout the city. Alan Tobey is the one who has it wrong. Why should we spend any more time, energy and, yes, money on BRT if it’s never going to happen in Berkeley? 

I think a much better solution is to look at how we can make public transit better today. Let’s help AC Transit find ways to speed up the buses and get more people to ride them. Let’s not create an environmental and social disaster that will surely follow from making Telegraph Avenue into the same stop and go nightmare that plagues streets like College Avenue. 

Let’s make Rapid Bus a reality today by fully implementing the two things that AC Transit promised us with the new bus service on Telegraph. Let’s make sure that buses have traffic signal priority at every light, slowing the buses as little as possible at the traffic lights all along the route. Then, let’s make sure that every bus stop has real-time bus arrival information.  

Once we’ve done the easy stuff, let’s implement what AC Transit’s Jim Cunradi stated is the key to further improvement in bus speed—proof of payment. The reason the proof of payment system speeds up the travel time is that it greatly decrease the time needed to board and discharge passengers by eliminating the bottleneck at the fare box. This system allows all bus doors to be used for loading and unloading simultaneously. 

The next big step in increasing the ridership of Rapid Bus would be to decrease the time between buses, and decrease the size of each bus, from the 12-minute headway for the 60-foot buses currently on Telegraph to something approaching the projected BRT headway of less than five minutes with much smaller buses. 

All these things can be done without dedicating a lane of traffic to BRT. We can keep cars and buses moving in mixed use lanes while at the same time increasing the speed and frequency of the buses. Its a solution that costs a fraction of BRT and will greatly increase the likelihood of people switching over to a faster and more convenient transit system. 

Vincent Casalaina 

• 

DEFENDING YOUR FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Your Sept. 28 story, “Code Pink Protests Marine Recruitment Center,” quotes Dianne Budd, one of the protesters, as saying of her actions, “It’s my First Amendment right. Who’s going to stop me?” 

Ms Budd is correct; her actions in protesting the Marine recruiting activity are indeed her right, and no one will try to stop her. But has she no curiosity whatever about the fact that she enjoys that right just by being an American, when so many of the world’s people have no such right? If she ever stopped demonstrating and protesting long enough to ask that question, she might discover that the answer has something to do with the United States Marines. 

Mark Halpern 

• 

A TRUE WIN-WIN SOLUTION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I just read Matthew Shoemaker’s recent letter (“Take a deep breath, Doug”, Sept. 28) written in response to my commentary. While I appreciated the conciliatory words, it is unfortunate that his message was undercut by a persistent condescending tone. Tone really does matter, and it typically serves as a reliable indicator of our sincerity. 

Even so, Mr. Shoemaker did raise some issues that I want to address. First, I am the director of the community-based organization called Save the Oaks at the Stadium (SOS). We have been engaged in education and outreach about the threat to the trees in Memorial Oak Grove for about a year and a half now. The tree sitters, who began living in the trees in December of 2006, are not part of this organization and I do not represent them. They speak for themselves, and make their own decisions about what actions they will take to protect the trees. 

Second, Mr. Shoemaker completely misconstrues my first commentary by characterizing it as an “us vs. them” argument. My criticism was directed at a particular kind of behavior that is disrespectful and destructive, no matter what side of an issue you are on. I hope he will reread it with that idea in mind. 

Third, there is a viable compromise available to the university and the community in this situation, which presents the opportunity for a true win-win solution. The new gym/office complex could be built at an alternate location (for example, Maxwell Field, beside Edwards Field, or at the University Art Museum site) and the irreplaceable urban woodland containing over a hundred beautiful, healthy trees and all the animals and birds that live there would be preserved. 

Finally, while I do appreciate Mr. Shoemaker’s offer of an intoxicating beverage, it is really not necessary. I am quite willing to meet with anyone to discuss these issues—UC administrators, Berkeley city officials, community members, football players, fans, students, alumni. I welcome the opportunity to listen to your views and share my own.  

Doug Buckwald 

• 

BRT LOOSE ENDS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I want to assure Frank Greenspan that I intended no sarcasm in my remark about his idea of putting BRT on the ballot. I’d welcome a vote. I’m quite serious: If a majority of Berkeley really doesn’t want the BRT, then the project should be abandoned and the federal funds given to some town less tied to the automobile. Doug Buckwald claims there are places where BRT destroys retail business. I know of none. Here on these letter pages, I challenged him to name a place where BRT has been the bane of business. He hasn’t replied; perhaps he’s been too distracted by the oaks and the football fans. 

Not all the stores on Telegraph display that nasty “No BRT” sign. I saw none at the new Upper Playground across from the Hat Shop. The Playground sold me a T-shirt with a picture of an AC Transit bus. It wasn’t a BRT, but it did show a headsign “1 Telegraph.” I wore it proudly to How Berkeley Can You Be. 

Steve Geller 

• 

POLICE NEEDED 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In the last issue, David Walsh wrote a letter expressing concern about police hassling black youth in downtown Berkeley. I wasn’t there so I can’t speak to the incident he wrote of, but I can say that on a recent shopping trip to downtown Berkeley I witnessed a group of black youth standing around, one of whom for two hours kept his hand on his crotch underneath his pants. I wish there had been a couple police officers nearby to hassle him, regard him with “menacing looks” and later to lead him off in handcuffs. Likewise when I had to make my way to the door of the Berkeley Main Library amid a group of teens yelling obscenities to each other and glaring aggressively at passers by: a couple menacing police officers would have helped a lot there.  

I once followed an inebriated man who had stolen a ladder in my neighborhood, reporting his whereabouts to police. When they finally stopped him, (after he’d sold the ladder to a passerby) a young white woman, a good Berkeley liberal, stood nearby, expressing to me her consternation that here yet once again the police were harassing a black man who had done nothing! It is important to be aware that when police act to arrest/question someone, not all the facts of the case are necessarily apparent to a casual observer.  

Deborah Cloudwalker 

Oakland 

• 

BEACH IMPEACH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

According to the latest nationwide poll, 76 percent of Democrats want Cheney impeached. I think if you polled Berkeley citizens that number would be through the roof. The Berkeley City Council voted for impeachment last year, so did the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the voters of San Francisco. Our Representative Barbara Lee, along with 20 other representatives, has done the right thing in cosponsoring House Resolution 333 to impeach Cheney. But Congress, and in particular, Nancy Pelosi and John Conyers, unilaterally took impeachment “off the table,” as if they have the power to eliminate our Constitutional right to impeach criminals in public office. We set the table. We want Cheney impeached now, for his many crimes and before he commits an even bigger one: bombing Iran—which it looks like he’ll do shortly, with or without Congressional approval. How can we be silent in the face of this menace? How can we express our outrage? How can we get Cheney impeached? Well, we’re not going to take this standing up. Instead, about 1,000 people are going to lay down at Cesar Chavez Park in the Marina this Sunday, Oct. 7, at 11 a.m., to spell “IMPEACH” in 100-foot-high letters. Helicopters will be flying overhead to film and photograph this human message to the world. This is the fourth Beach Impeach event and the first in Berkeley. Thousands of people have participated; it’s a glorious way to spend a couple of hours in the sun, with families, kids, neighbors, grandparents, dogs—everyone acting in unison to call for impeaching the vice president—because if we want to save our democracy he’s got to go. Register at www.beachimpeach.org (where you’ll also see film and photos of previous Beach Impeach events.) 

Cynthia Papermaster 

• 

GREEN BINS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I would like to offer some advice to those who are worried about food scraps in the green bins, both large and small. Use Biobags. They are made of cornstarch and are completely biodegradable. We have used them in our home compost system for years, and the 10-litre size works quite well in the small green bins. These are available at Elephant Pharmacy and on the Internet. 

I keep my small green bin on my counter. It’s not esthetically pleasing, but there are many worse things. I am quite happy with the new system. The quantity of our trash has been greatly reduced.  

Jenifer Steele 

The only thing that really changes the problem of homelessness is housing. The rest of these comments are just for your entertainment. 

Here are my top concerns. I will borrow from the best sloganeering of the twelve step programs to outline why the Public Commons for Everyone Initiative (PCEI) is a waste of precious city resources: 

1. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” There is nothing, nothing new in the PCEI plan, except that it’s been repackaged and given a cynical name. The city already tried Measure O and failed at it, and now that collective memory fades about how stupid that idea was, this new plan is launched. 

2. “If nothing changes, nothing changes.” The city adopted eight principles and a work plan to end chronic homelessness in Berkeley. PCEI is inconsistent with this very constructive plan, and does nothing new under the sun. Increased enforcement doesn’t work. Berkeley Mental Health cannot and does not serve this population of people. Berkeley Mental Health is at full to overflowing capacity at all times. I know homeless people who have been on a waiting list for psychiatry for 6 months. They’re not who works with the homeless. Ask the people who do. 

3. “Being a part of something is more important than being the center of attention.” The administration is going through the heroic motions of saving the businesses and public spaces on and around Telegraph Avenue even though there is already a solution in the works. Look at the plan passed in May of 2006 about how to end chronic homelessness. Follow the eight steps. Do it without involving the police department. It’s about housing. 

4. “Look for a way in, not for a way out.” Stop saying that 75 percent of homeless people are from somewhere else. Some people think that’s thinly veiled racism. Stop running from the people who sell the Street Spirit: They’re the ones who are doing pretty well, all things considered. Talk to people who are homeless, talk to the people who serve them. Study this problem, learn about its causes, and be about peace in solving it. 

5. “Frequently wrong, but rarely in doubt.” The confidence of the administration in moving forward with a half-baked plan that ignores the city’s established priorities for ending chronic homelessness is suspect. I understand pressure from the business community, but the business people deserve a real plan, based on what works, not what will pacify and distract them in the short term. 

6. “Anger is fear in a party dress.” This plan has a retaliatory look and feel, and is based on the frustration and anger of some community members who can’t believe we haven’t solved homelessness yet. You can call this plan any cynical name you like, promise business leaders that they can have the cell phone number of every beat cop in the city, but the fact of the matter is that this plan is based on barely concealed fear of homeless “street behavior.” If people who live outside had housing the behavior that creates this climate of fear would move indoors to the private sphere.  

7. “There is no right way to do the wrong thing.” We could spend another three hours on a Saturday discussing the particulars of this plan, how to allocate scarce resources, who to talk to, how to implement, but would we be one inch closer to solving the problem of people who have no place to live, and no assistance in changing that fact. There aren’t enough places that people who are very low income can afford. This county has just begun a long process to address one small part of the housing for homeless people, and Berkeley needs to focus its energy on adding its promised units of housing—350 over the next 10 years—to solve this problem. Bathrooms are great, smoking prohibitions are probably a new way to ticket homeless people that we haven’t considered before, but the rest of this plan is taking up space in the public discourse that could be used to actually do something useful to end homelessness. 

Patricia E. Wall is the executive director of Homeless Action Center. 

On this 138th anniversary of the birth of Mohandas K. Gandhi, and the first International Day of Nonviolence, as declared by the United Nations June 16 (celebrated in Berkeley with Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading at Moe’s), Peace For Keeps is pleased to hopefully propose a worldwide 50th anniversary celebration of the creation of Peace Symbol Feb. 21, 2008. In the wake of Sunday’s second annual Gandhi Statue Birthday Reading at the Gandhi Statue behind the San Francisco Ferry Building, great do’ers of great do’s—Yoko Ono, Kevin Wall, Richard Branscom, Earthdance, Sage Productions, Wavy Gravy, Green Century—are being contacted to make a deep winter of love 2008 (What a year, huh!) planetary do. 

The Peace Symbol was designed by World War II conscientous objector Gerard Holtom for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s march from London to the Aldermarston nuclear facility Easter Weekend, 1958. Ultimately determined by British semaphor for N and D, the Peace Symbol was inspired by the great Francisco Goya painting “The 3rd of May,” of the peasant, arms raised in plea, before a Napoleonic firing squad at the Principe Pio in 1808.  

Considered by critics from Andre Malraux to Kenneth Clark as Goya’s or even Spain’s greatest painting, it is recognized in every way as an imaginative “journalistic” and revolutionary work. “The undiminished and unrivaled prototype of all modern views of war,” wrote Goya biographer Robert Hughes.  

France’s war in Spain (1806-09) produced the definition of guerrilla war—for this was an early war involving the (R.C. plagued) Spanish public, who idiotically wished to have their idiot terrible Emperor, Ferdinand VII, (how about an Oscar nomination for Randy Quaid for his Ferdy in Milos Forman’s Goya’s Ghosts?) returned to power. (The image is on the advertising for this most recent Forman-Saul Zaentz collaboration; producer Paul Zaentz said they were not aware “The 3rd of May” was the inspiration for the Peace Symbol.) 

Following the 50th anniversary (a day for each nation to adopt its Peace Symbol song?), wouldn’t it be nice to have a 71 day peace walk from London to Madrid (not the best time of year, but it would only spring better by the end) culminating in a full mettle 200th anniversary recognition of “The 3rd of May” (the birthday of Pete Seeger and Kris Welch), hopefully with a “Power to the Peaceful” concert in the bullring or the soccer stadium? 

Or another worldwide day TO END VIOLENCE AND WAR.  

And to make the statement that the killing of one is no less horific than nuclear holocaust. Our people are everywhere, no?  

What a year, huh! 

Be my quest! 

Arnie Passman is a Berkeley resident.

While the protest that you staged in front of my office on Wednesday, Sept. 26th, was an exercise of your constitutional rights, the messages that you left behind were insulting, untrue, and ultimately misdirected. Additionally, from the comments quoted in the Berkeley Daily Planet article, it is clear that you have no idea what it is that I do here. Given that I was unaware of your planned protest, I was unable to contest your claims in person, so I will therefore address them here. 

First, a little bit about who I am: I am a Marine captain with over eight years of service as a commissioned officer. I flew transport helicopters for most of my time in the Marine Corps before requesting orders to come here. Currently, I am the officer selection officer for the northern Bay Area. My job is to recruit, interview, screen, and evaluate college students and college graduates that show an interest in becoming officers in the Marine Corps. Once they’ve committed to pursuing this program, I help them apply, and if selected, I help them prepare for the rigors of Officer Candidate School and for the challenges of life as a Marine officer. To be eligible for my programs, you have to be either a full-time college student or a college graduate. I don’t pull anyone out of school, and high school students are not eligible. 

I moved my office to Berkeley in December of last year. Previously, it was located in an old federal building in Alameda. That building was due to be torn down and I had to find a new location. I choose our new site because of its proximity to UC Berkeley and to the BART station. Most of the candidates in my program either go to Cal or to one of the schools in San Francisco, the East Bay, or the North Bay. Logistically, the Shattuck Square location was the most convenient for them. 

Next, you claim that I lie. I have never, and will never, lie to any individual that shows an interest in my programs. I am upfront with everything that is involved at every step of the way and I go out of my way to ensure that they know what to expect when they apply. I tell them that this is not an easy path. I tell them that leading Marines requires a great deal of self-sacrifice. I tell them that, should they succeed in their quest to become a Marine officer, they will almost certainly go to Iraq. In the future, if you plan to attack my integrity, please have the courtesy to explain to me specifically the instances in which you think that I lied. 

Next, scrawled across the doorway to my office, you wrote, “Recruiters are Traitors.” Please explain this one. How exactly am I a traitor? Was I a traitor when I joined the Marine Corps all those years ago? Is every Marine, therefore, a traitor? Was I a traitor during my two stints in Iraq? Was I a traitor when I was delivering humanitarian aid to the victims of the tsunami in Sumatra? Or do you only consider me a traitor while I am on this job? The fact is, recruitment is and always has been a part of maintaining any military organization. In fact, recruitment is a necessity of any large organization. Large corporations have employees that recruit full-time. Even you, I’m sure, must expend some effort to recruit for Code Pink. So what, exactly, is it that makes me a traitor?  

The fact is this: any independent nation must maintain a military (or be allied with those who do) to ensure the safety and security of its citizens. Regardless of what your opinions are of the current administration or the current conflict in Iraq, the U.S. military will be needed again in the future. If your counter-recruitment efforts are ultimately successful, who will defend us if we are directly attacked again as we were at Pearl Harbor? Who would respond if a future terrorist attack targets the Golden Gate Bridge, the BART system, or the UC Berkeley clock tower? And, to address the most hypocritical stance that your organization takes on its website, where would the peace keeping force come from that you advocate sending to Darfur? 

Finally, I believe that your efforts in protesting my office are misdirected. I agree that your stated goals of peace and social justice are worthy ones. War is a terrible thing that should only be undertaken in the most dire, extreme, and necessary of circumstances. However, war is made by politicians. The conflict in Iraq was ordered by the president and authorized by Congress. They are the ones who have the power to change the policy in Iraq, not members of the military. We execute policy to the best of our ability and to the best of our human capacity. Protesting in front of my office may be an easy way to get your organization in the headlines of local papers, but it doesn’t further any of your stated goals. 

To conclude, I don’t consider myself a “recruiter.” I am a Marine who happens to be on recruiting duty. As such, I conduct myself in accordance with our core values of honor, courage, and commitment. I will never sacrifice my honor by lying to anyone that walks into my office. I will never forsake the courage that it takes to restrain myself in the face of insulting and libelous labels like liar and traitor. And, most importantly, I will never waver from my commitment to helping individuals who desire to serve their country as officers in the Marine Corps. 

Captain Richard Lund is the United States Marine Corps’ officer selection officer for the northern Bay Area. 

On the evening of Sept. 19, I had a rare experience: I left a community meeting about a big new project feeling edified and even hopeful. Need I add that the event wasn’t run by the Berkeley Planning Department? Indeed, it wasn’t in Berkeley at all, but at the Albany Veterans Memorial Building. I was there because the project—the renovation and possible demolition and rebuilding of the Safeway at 1500 Solano—is a few blocks from my north Berkeley house. To judge from public comment, most of the hundred-plus people seated in the Memorial Building’s cavernous main hall were Albanians.  

The meeting’s engaging character, however, should not be attributed to the inherent affability of our neighbors to the north. Last year Albany was roiled by a nasty fight over a proposed mega-development at the waterfront. And in 2005 neighbors bristled at proposed changes in the Solano Safeway itself. 

No, the quality of last week’s discourse had other sources, all of which should interest Berkeleyans seeking more democratic public planning processes for our own city. (City of Berkeley planning staff, please take note.)  

A key factor was the developer’s apparent solicitude for the people whose lives would be most affected by the project. Early in the meeting, Safeway real estate manager for the East Bay, Todd Paradis (sounds like paradise), told the crowd that he had already conferred with neighbors whose property abuts the grocery store’s site, as well as with those who live across the street from the supermarket on Curtis and Neilson, which are both narrow and heavily trafficked. He then proceeded to respond to every one of the dozens of speakers who queued up to comment at the open mic. Some of Paradis’ replies were more satisfying than others, but all were rendered in a respectful tone that contributed greatly to the overall civility of the hour and half-long event. It also helped that there were no time limits on individual testimony, and that the event’s organizers—besides Paradis, the public relations consultancy of AJE Partners (the A stands for former Assemblyperson Dion Aroner)—allowed the meeting to go overtime so as to accommodate everyone who wished to speak.  

Lesson One: Treat the public with respect, and most of its members will respond in kind. 

Lesson Two: See that respect for the public extends to the content of the planning process as well as the tone and format.  

The flashpoint of controversy over Safeway’s 2005 proposal for the Solano store was the company’s proposal to put 40 condominiums on top of a new grocery building. Neighbors objected to condo-ization, noting that nearby streets are already thick with cars. At the start of last week’s meeting, Paradis defused the condo issue by stating that Safeway does not intend to put any housing on the site.  

So the question was—and is—what IS Safeway contemplating? On this matter, Paradis was ambiguous. Though he repeatedly assured us that no plans have been drawn up, he also indicated that some basic concepts are being considered. For example: bringing the store up to the lot line on Solano Avenue and moving all the parking—now situated in a 20,000-square-foot lot in front of the store’s Solano entrance—behind and underneath the building. Tied to that possibility was a second: creating a more “urban” ambiance by breaking up the Solano facade with smaller shops who rent their space (Paradis mentioned a café). He also spoke of upgrading the grocery’s offerings, especially its produce and organic sections, and adding a bakery. That would involve enlarging the store, which now has a problem with “run-outs,” due to lack of storage space. And Paradis said that Safeway wants to move the little pharmacy down the street, which it recently purchased, into the remodelled or rebuilt supermarket.  

All these disclosures drew lively responses from the audience—responses that contributed as much to the evening’s instructiveness as the disclosures themselves. Accustomed as I am to celebrating the specialness of Berkeley (and deploring its degradation at the hands of the current municipal regime), it did me good to witness Albanians’ deep affection for their town and their equally deep desire to protect its distinctive character. “We like Albany because of the small feel,” said Michelle, who lives on Cornell. The town is like “a village,” said Julie from Ordway. “We have a unique environment.” “The last thing I want to see,” said another woman, “is some big orange stucco building that looks like it should be in Pleasanton.”  

But when it came to specifying what they do want to see, Albanians were not of one mind. A few speakers liked the idea of putting the parking behind and beneath the store, moving the market up to the lot line on Solano and having small shops along the frontage. One such enthusiast, describing himself as a co-founder of Albany Strollers and Rollers, said that absent these changes, bicyclists and pedestrians would remain “second-class citizens” who had to dodge cars as entering and exiting the parking lot or looking for a free space. Others wanted to keep the parking in front. Several women, including myself, said that they liked parking in a highly visible location, especially at night, and that they wouldn’t use an underground lot. A neighbor of the north Shattuck Safeway wondered why Paradis didn’t report that the Berkeley store’s underground lot goes empty. An Albany resident took a refreshing approach: The up-front parking lot, she said, is precious “open space” that should be enhanced, not eliminated. 

Another issue that drew varied opinions was the store’s optimal size. Touting Albany’s walkability, Ordway’s Julie got a round of applause when she said that one very large building was a “drive-to idea.” But another Albanian, Carol, said the existing market is too small and runs out of things. Bettina from Curtis hoped the pharmacy will be folded into the new store. Nora, a young pharmacist who works at the Safeway pharmacy down the street, took the opposite view. Older customers who patronize the small, stand-alone shop because its entrance is right on a corner and its interior is easy to navigate with a cane or a walker. Move it into the supermarket, she said, and you will lose those customers.  

There’s an old saying: well begun is half done. The community planning process for the remaking the Safeway on Solano has had a promising start. Now, what? Paradis said that the company had created a website for the project, www.safewayonsolano.com and urged us to use it to contact him. As of Oct. 1, the store’s current floor plan was posted there, along with an e-mail address and a phone number to call for information, 849-4811. The “Community Outreach” window was blank.  

It would behoove the community to reach back and let Safeway know that we want our involvement in this project to continue in a meaningful way—and by “we,” I mean neighbors and patrons from Berkeley as well as Albany. Major changes to the store are going to affect the Solano Avenue and adjacent streets in both cities. The office of Berkeley’s District 5 councilmember, Laurie Capitelli, learned about the Sept. 19 meeting only a few days beforehand, and then, through a member of the Thousand Oaks Neighborhood Association Board. Safeway should give Capitelli’s office and his constituents timely notice of future activities.  

Throughout the Sept. 19 meeting, AJE’s Barbara Ellis appeared to be taking copious notes. How about posting her notes or some account of the proceedings, as well as additional comments from neighbors and Safeway’s responses to those comments? Also helpful would be a schedule of next steps in the planning process. Paradis mentioned a three- to five-year timeline that included 13 months worth of construction. Whatever the next step, it should deepen the dialogue between the company and the community, and within the community itself—a dialogue that includes decisionmaking. That’s a tall order; for the moment, I’m allowing myself to believe that Safeway is going to fill it.

The battle over Assemblymember Sandré Swanson’s AB45 Oakland school local control bill has gone inside, behind the locked doors of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office in the state capitol building in Sacramento, where all pretense at open government ends, and a polite, uniformed California Highway Patrol officer always guards the hallway entrance, keeping the public away. 

How the governor deliberates while he’s considering whether to veto or sign any particular bill—who he talks to, which issues or facts he is considering and which ones he is leaving out—are one of California’s great secrets. Except where it accrues to his political advantage Mr. Schwarzenegger—as did his predecessors—almost never answers press questions, either before or after, about his reasoning to allow or not allow bills to become state law, and in the cases of vetoes, rarely, if ever, do the accompanying messages give us any special insight into what actually drove him in one direction, or the other. 

So, since we are reduced to guessing, and one guess is as good as another, I’ll take a stab at it. 

I think that political principle and considerations of public policy will have almost nothing to do with whether or not Mr. Schwarzenegger signs Mr. Swanson’s Oakland local school control bill, the issue, instead, to be determined by which one of the actions—signature or veto—will either gain or cost Mr. Schwarzenegger votes if and when he decides to run for the United States Senate. 

Mr. Swanson’s bill is certainly not the swift return to local school control that Oakland deserves and most Oakland residents would like, but at least it takes such a return away from the whims and fancies of State Superintendent Jack O’Connell, who once, we remember, served as the banker’s clerk who most recently tried to foreclose on large sections of Oakland Unified’s mortgaged property in order to pay the bank back the loan ahead of schedule. That sad, tawdry endeavor failed only as the result of the loud banging and clanging of pots and pans throughout Oakland, scaring Mr. O’Connell away. 

Meanwhile, with Oakland Unified’s financial situation sinking progressively under Mr. O’Connell’s rapidly-increasing parade of appointed administrators (the district debt being considerably larger now than when the state first intervened), our Republican friends in Sacramento—like members of the old British parliament once did in regards to the American colonies and members of the later American Congress once did in regards to Africans held captive on Southern farms and plantations—have sought to justify the continued state occupation of the Oakland schools on the basis that they are all for the return of local control, only they want to make sure Oakland is “ready” for it. 

Notable was Assemblymember Bill Maze, Republican of Visalia, who Katy Murphy and Steve Geissinger of the Oakland Tribune tell us said, during the final floor debate on Mr. Swanson’s bill, that said AB45 is “premature at this point. The state is ‘part way there’ in its effort to restore fiscal health and fix other Oakland school district problems. We’re maybe 30 percent or 40 percent along the way. We’re not over that mark where we can say we have a great degree of confidence in where you’re taking this ship at this point.” 

To which remark the chained Africans, having recently revolted and overpowered the crew of the old slave ship Amistad, might have answered, “we’ll take our chances, thank you. Considering where the captain was taking us, any change in direction looks good.” 

There is no small irony, of course, in the people who attempt to manage local school districts throughout California being lectured by the people who sit in the state Legislature. If a school district fails to properly manage its budget, it is subject to be seized by the state and shaken like a terrier shakes a rat. If the state Legislature fails to properly manage its budget—well, actually, there doesn’t seem to be any consequences to the state Legislature, either individually or collectively, if the budget is botched and held up for a month or more, as it was this year, while school districts and community colleges and the infirm and aged wonder when and if their payments will be made. The legislators simply go back to their respective districts, to be elected and re-elected, year upon year. As William Golding once explained in the point he was making in “The Lord Of The Flies,” yes, the adults in the Navy come in to rescue the boys on the island from their descent into violence and barbarism, but then, who is there left to come to rescue the adults in the Navy? 

In democracies, such as we hold ourselves out to be, that source of succor is supposed to be the public, who can intervene with the power of the vote. Digging amongst all the arguments being made these days about why state control over Oakland Unified should remain for “a little while longer,” however, all mention of the Oakland public is pointedly absent except when, as in the above-mentioned Tribune article, we are lectured by AB45 opponents that Mr. Swanson’s bill was “engineered mostly to appease angry constituents of Swanson’s district.” As if a legislator following the will of his constituents is a bad thing, and that the Republican legislators who oppose AB45 are not doing it, largely, because Oakland is such an easy target, and holding Oakland’s feet to the fire plays well to their Republican constituents in their largely Republican districts. 

And that, as we said earlier, takes AB45 out of the area of principle—where it never actually resided, except rhetorically—and into the area of politics. 

And the political question is, will Mr. Schwarzenegger gain or lose more votes if he runs for the United States Senate by signing or vetoing AB45? 

Answering the gaining part is easy. Although signing AB45 would be a popular move for Mr. Schwarzenegger in Oakland, it is not his bill, he was never the moving force behind it, and though many Oakland voters would be grateful, it stretches the imagination to believe that any would use that as the basis to vote for the governor over, say, Barbara Boxer when she runs for re-election in 2010, or Diane Feinstein (or any other Democratic party nominee, should Ms. Feinstein decide not to run again) two years later. 

The entire Republican side of the equation is even easier; Mr. Schwarzenegger with neither win nor lose Republican votes, regardless of what he does on AB45. While opposition to the bill is popular among Republican legislators—scarcely a one of them voted for it, after all—it is hardly a big issue in Republican districts, and will likely be long obscured by other issues by the time the U.S. Senate race comes along. Even if Mr. Schwarzenegger signs the bill and Oakland’s education system were to completely collapse following the return of local control, the governor and his handlers would correctly point to the fact that AB45 does not automatically confer such local control, but gives the responsibility of deciding when Oakland is “ready” to the Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team (FCMAT). Mr. Schwarzenegger’s hands would be clean. 

The one area where signing or vetoing AB45 could have any effect on Mr. Schwarzenegger’s future California political prospects is in Oakland—if the governor vetoes the bill, the consequences from Oakland voters could be severe. 

At first, this might seem like an odd position to take, since Oakland is one of the most liberal-progressive cities in California, where Republicans traditionally get a lower percentage of the vote in statewide election. 

But the question if and when Mr. Schwarzenegger runs for another statewide office is: how pissed off will Oakland voters be about him, and how much will they go out of their way to promote the governor’s defeat? This “negative factor” is no small matter in political calculations. 

To date, no politician has suffered in Oakland because of their collusion in the state takeover of the Oakland Unified School District. State Senator Don Perata, former Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, former California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, Alameda County School Superintendent Sheila Jordan, and former Assemblymember Wilma Chan—each of whom had a hand, larger or smaller, in stirring the takeover pot—have all been on the ballot since that time, with no apparent Oakland consequences. 

But that may change. 

Oakland being Oakland, there was always a vocal minority who actively opposed the state takeover, fighting against it at every turn. But while it is doubtful that a majority of Oakland residents supported the state takeover when it originally occurred in 2003, most residents—particular parents of school-age children—probably saw it as impossible to quickly overturn, kept quiet, and tried to accommodate themselves to the new situation under state control. 

But that attitude took a noticeable change last year and this following the revelations that State Superintendent Jack O’Connell had long been secretly negotiating with east coast developers for the sale of OUSD’s administrative headquarters and five adjoining schools. Even former state administrator Randy Ward opposed that sale, a position that the East Bay Express’s Bob Gammon contends cost Ward his job. Mr. O’Connell’s proposed sale, in fact, invoked a rare political unity in Oakland, with all eight members of the Oakland City Council, all but one member of the OUSD school board, and the members of the Peralta Community College District all officially announcing their opposition. The deal collapsed of its own weight. 

At the same time, public opinion in Oakland against the continued state takeover has appeared to enlarge and stiffen as the district has gone through three administrators in a matter of months—the last one on an interim basis, so we might soon see four—and various local media outlets have begun to publish what many local education activists have long known, that the district’s financial situation has worsened under state control, rather than gotten better, as was promised. 

State Superintendent O’Connell—the immediate holder of the dungeon keys—has been the first and steadiest recipient of the resultant Oakland anger. If he runs for California governor in the 2010 Democratic primary, it is difficult to see how he could campaign Oakland without facing demonstrations, and his chances of pulling more than a smattering of Oakland votes seems nil. 

One of the considerations facing Mr. Schwarzenegger in a veto of AB45, thus affirmatively keeping Mr. O’Connell in the position of imprisoning Oakland democratic rights at his whim and will, is whether or not it is worth the chance that in three years, Oakland residents and voters will forget. 

In June 1906, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company released a three-minute film called “A Trip to Berkeley, Cal.” The short was filmed aboard a moving streetcar on the #4 line of the Oakland Traction Consolidated Company, a precursor of the Key Route System. The #4 line ran between downtown Oakland and the intersection of Euclid and Hilgard Avenues, four blocks north of the UC campus. 

The film, which is available for viewing on the Library of Congress website, documents most of the #4 line’s final leg, as the streetcar rolls along Oxford Street, turns east onto Hearst Avenue, climbs up to North Gate, and turns north onto Euclid Avenue, coming to a stop in the middle of the 1800 block—the one we know as the Euclid or North Gate commercial district. 

Except that in 1906 there was no commercial district on Euclid Avenue, and one would not develop there until the 1920s and would not become fully built until the late ’30s. 

In 1906, there wasn’t a single building on the western side of Euclid Avenue’s 1800 block. The eastern side boasted three structures, with nary a store among them. The north fork of Strawberry Creek ran in its open channel on both sides of the street. The creek isn’t visible in “A Trip to Berkeley, Cal.,” but the buildings along Euclid Avenue are. 

Before the streetcar makes its turn at North Gate, one can see the house of Rev. George B. Smyth at 2509 Hearst Avenue. The Smyth house occupied the upper third of a triple corner lot. The lower two-thirds, abutting on Euclid Ave., were planted with an orchard. Next door to the orchard was the Northgate Hotel at 1809 Euclid—a large, three-story-plus-basement structure, adorned with two front balconies and three round turrets topped by witches’ caps. A tall water tower rose in the rear. Just up from the hotel, across the creek, stood two homes built in 1892. 

1805 Euclid was a very early Brown Shingle (1891 was the first year in which this type of building appeared in Berkeley, the most prominent surviving example being the Anna Head School), featuring a round turret and a gable whose concave walls curved in to accommodate a central window. Its neighbor at 1801 Euclid had a plain façade and wood siding. 

The Northgate Hotel, designed and built by A.W. Pattiani in 1902, was torn down in late 1936 and replaced by the current one-story Art Deco commercial building, still clad with the original ‘30s glossy black tiles and vertical chrome strips. The Smyth house, built in 1891, gave up its orchard for the Euclid Apartments, which opened in 1913. The Smyth house itself was turned into a fraternity, then into a rooming house, and ultimately was razed and replaced by a food court. 

Against all odds, the two 1892-vintage houses at 1801 and 1805 Euclid Ave. still stand, albeit not as houses and not on Euclid. Both houses first appeared in the Alameda County assessment records in 1893. The corner house at 1801 Euclid was owned by Frank M. Wilson, the Indiana-born banker who swooped upon Berkeley in 1891 and purchased the entire Daley’s Scenic Park tract for $4,000 in gold. Wilson would quickly establish himself as a Berkeley VIP and in 1894 would engage contractor George Frederick Estey to build him a brown-shingle house on the crest of Ridge Road. Intended as the barn for a projected mansion that was never built, it served as the Wilson family’s permanent residence until 1969 and was razed in the late 1970s to make way for the GTU Library designed by Louis Kahn. 

Before his house was built, Wilson lived in San Francisco, and in October 1893 he rented the house of realtor and Shattuck brother-in-law Ralza A. Morse on the northwest corner of Shattuck Ave. and Bancroft Way. By then, he had sold 1801 Euclid Ave. to realtor Oscar G. May, but it’s possible that Wilson occupied the Euclid house before doing so, since the assessment record in his name shows personal property in the house. 

The shingled house at 1805 Euclid Ave. was built for William W. Clark, a Maine-born real estate agent, and his brood of four twenty-something offspring, three of whom were enrolled at the San Francisco Business College. The designer of the Clark house is not known. It might have been Fred Estey, who would soon build several other brown-shingle residences in the neighborhood. 

Much has been written about the professors and artists who were among the early residents of Daley’s Scenic Park, but little is ever said about the middle- and working-class families who settled on the Northside while their children were attending the university, or about the real estate speculators who saw an opportunity near the campus. At the turn of the century, Berkeley was a magnet for realtors—or for people who became realtors after practicing entirely different professions in their previous locales. 

Oscar G. May, born in New York in 1839, was a Congregational minister in Illinois and Wisconsin prior to arriving in California. In Berkeley, May initially pooled his resources with realtor Warren Cheney, but by 1896 he was running O.G. May & Co. at 2123 Center Street, with his son-in-law, Walter J. Mortimer, as junior partner. After May’s retirement in 1904, Mortimer took over the office, where two of May’s sons, Frank and William, also worked. 

Frank Morris May (1868–1936) spent the 1890s and early 1900s alternating between teaching in Tulare and Contra Costa counties and carpentry in Berkeley. According to his daughter, Evelyn May Tippett, Frank worked with Fred Estey for a while. In 1896, Frank would build a Dutch Colonial farm house for Olivia G. Wright, a widowed mother of six, at the top of Virginia Street. The house still stands. 

While his brother William, also a carpenter (as was a third brother, Robert), was content to work as a salesman for their brother-in-law, Frank was described by Evelyn as “a self-starter.” In 1905, he opened his own realty office at 2149 Center Street. In addition to selling real estate—a 1905 ad in the San Francisco Call listed an 8-room house on a corner lot east of Fulton Street; a 9-room villa near Dwight Way Station; an alfalfa ranch in Merced County; and ten acres in San Ramon Valley—Frank advertised “Plans Drawn, Houses Built.” Most of the houses he built were lost in the 1923 Berkeley Fire. 

Both the Mays and the Clarks had decamped from Euclid Ave. by 1900 but continued to own their respective houses for a number of years. These houses were the only ones on the block until 1902, when William and Mary Henry built the Northgate Hotel. 

The Henrys are best known today as the parents of Mills College president Aurelia Henry Reinhardt. William W. Henry, a native of Bennington, VT, who came to California in 1858, was for many years a wholesale grocer in San Francisco and southern California. The ups and downs of his business might have taken their toll on the family’s well-being had not his indomitable wife (a hardy pioneer who had crossed the plains from Iowa at the age of 13, riding alongside the covered wagon on a small pony) kept the family going and paid for the children’s music and speech lessons by taking in boarders. 

The Henrys first appeared in Berkeley in 1896, when Aurelia was a student at Cal, and the following year built a house at 2401 Le Conte Avenue, across the street from Frank Wilson’s home. A stately, turreted affair clad in brown shingles, the Henry house was constructed by Fred Estey. It was large enough to accommodate the couple, their youngest four children, five boarders, and a cook. 

A mere five years after building their hilltop house, the Henrys moved one block downhill and became hoteliers in earnest. He was 63, she ten years younger, but they would run the Northgate for 24 years, until Mary’s death. It was listed in the 1904 directory as a private hotel, and later advertised as “A Select Family Hotel with Homelike Surroundings, 35 Minutes from San Francisco.” 

The clientele consisted of middle-class and professional families, some of whom stayed for decades. Victor J. Robertson, treasurer of the Commercial Publishing Co. and editor of the San Francisco Commercial News, boarded with the Henrys on Le Conte Ave., moved with them to the Northgate, and was still there in 1930, after both William and Mary had passed away. Robertson was a prominent civic activist and longtime president of the Conference Committee of the Improvement Clubs of Berkeley, as well as heading the North Berkeley Improvement Club. In 1907 he initiated a campaign to check graft in Alameda County government and another for a new city charter. The following year, he called on the city to stop the Spring Construction Co. from blasting in the North Berkeley quarry (converted in the ’30s into the municipal Rose Garden). He was an ardent supporter of damming the Hetch Hetchy, cleaning up the city, improving public transportation, and beautifying Shattuck Avenue. 

While Mary Henry managed the Northgate, her husband turned his attention to realty and insurance. Berkeley’s swelling population in the wake of the 1906 earthquake must have improved his business, for he erected a small office next to the hotel, at 1807 Euclid. This office was located directly over the creek, which would exact its revenge in February 1940, flooding and destroying Reid’s drugstore, built on the northwest corner of Euclid and Hearst. 

Around 1910, the Henrys formed the W.W. Henry Investment Company and began buying properties along the avenue, including 1801 and 1805 Euclid. They moved into 1805 Euclid but soon found a more lucrative way to utilize it. In 1914, the creek behind the two houses was culverted, and the houses were moved to the back and attached back-to-back to form a six-unit apartment building at 2508 Ridge Road. The Henrys called it the Bennington Apartments, after Mr. Henry’s home town. 

The conversion, which placed the turreted shingled house at the front, included a lower floor in stucco, with interesting architectural details such as arched doors and windows, sturdy round columns, and an ornamental baluster. The architect is not known, but similar columns can be seen on several houses designed by Walter H. Ratcliff, Jr. The Euclid frontage, which remained unbuilt until 1929, was planted in trees. 

Today, 2508 Ridge Road is divided into 15 apartments and faces the rear of Euclid Ave. shops. Although its splendor has faded, the building can lay claim to being the oldest known residential Brown Shingle in Berkeley. 

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

Photograph: Daniella Thompson  

The Bennington Apartments at 2508 Ridge Road combines two houses built on Euclid Ave. in 1892. They were constructed by William and Mary Henry, parents of Mills College president Aurelia Henry Reinhardt.  

Earthquake Tidbits 

There is no such thing as “earthquake weather.” Statistically, there is an equal distribution of earthquakes in cold weather, hot weather, rainy weather, etc. 

From 1975-1995 there were only four states that did not have any earthquakes. They were: Florida, Iowa, North Dakota, and Wisconsin. 

The San Andreas fault is not a single, continuous fault, but rather is actually a fault zone made up of many segments. Movement may occur along any of the many fault segments along the zone at any time. The San Andreas fault system is more that 1300 km (800 miles) long, and in some spots is as much as 16 km (10 miles) deep.  

Make your home secure and your family safe. 

Larry Guillot is owner of QuakePrepare, an earthquake consulting, securing, and gas shut-off valve installation service. 

Call him at 758-3299 or visit www.quakeprepare.com 

There’s a house in my neighborhood that’s back on the market again. You know the one. Been on and off the market for years and despite all reason, it’s listing for well over a million dollars. It has big problems: foundation, parking, odd use of space, geological issues and problematic drainage (let’s not even talk about the paint job), but there it is, asking more money than the last time and you know what? They’ll probably do all right. 

That’s the weird and funny thing about this market and our locale. It’s so coveted, that even allowing for the wild-boar variability of interest rates, slide zones, impending earthquake and habitual zoning battles, people want to be here so badly that they will purchase all sorts of trouble without much question or debate.  

In fact, you can go about trying to buy something for months without success even when doing battle over some pretty sorry looking digs. 

Remember those fabulous 70’s? Wide lapels, avocado green appliances and amazingly ugly wallpaper. Well, we had so many more houses on the market than potential buyers, that you could actually find a genuine Fixer Upper. I love the term and I love it with a true sense of nostalgia because this thing (the word and the object) seems to have become a lonely artifact of history.  

Oh, to be sure, we absolutely see places that need serious remodeling and some that ought simply to be bulldozed, but we rarely see houses, today, that can be bought for a significant reduction in price based on the volume of necessary repairs. 

I see this as a compression of the value in the market and here’s why. If you look at two houses in a similar neighborhood that have similar size, number of baths and other grossly defining features, the prices, at least in this market, may not be all that different, despite their conditions differing substantially. They’re compressed. 

This was what was different thirty years ago and is certainly different when you go back where your parents want you to buy in Sioux City (whiney voice: “Honey, for that kind of money, you could buy a house like your father’s boss has up by that golf course!”)  

When the market is less aggressive, the houses that need serious rethinking and repairing just get left on the pavement when the Flea-Market closes down. Not so here. The desire for ANY house in the Bay Area is so great that considerations that might have sent buyers walking away or, at least, bargaining the price down measurably in another time or place simply do not carry much weight in the here and now. 

This means that great houses and so-so houses are compressed into much closer cost proximity and sometimes into transposition. This is particularly true if you make some allowance for the variability of the market. A good example is what happens when we hit those few very hot weeks each year in which everyone in America has chosen to move to the East Bay from Podunk or Baltimore. At least once a year during this season, I’ll see two similar houses that for reasons I cannot fathom, sell for about the same price while being radically different in condition.  

Now, it’s certainly true that individual neighborhoods are strong controllers of cost but it still seems to me that the state of the property is one of the poorest predictors of cost that I see. This is pretty bad news for me since I’m in the condition business. 

Embarrasingly, what I have to say about a property may not be all that salient in the value of a house these days. Of course, I don’t trumpet this when I show up to inspect a property. I make damn sure to act as if my words are vital and that my absence is concomitant with capsize. Hey, I’m in business. 

I see this play out during inspections when, having identified an array of conditions, we will sit down with the realtor and discover that to ask for much price adjustment based on my findings is somewhere between slim pickin’s and negotiation suicide. Again, this is all market relative and was far less true when I started inspecting houses 19 years ago.  

Also, I’d like to be clear that this isn’t just a function of realtors trying to keep deals in play. I’ve seen enough deals fall apart to know that, despite their best efforts to get their clients to offer enough money, real estate agents can’t make their clients spend more than they want to and I’ve met buyers who’ve lost out on seven deals before they got into contract on the house where we meet. 

It’s too bad, really. I wish that I were working in a market where ramshackled shanties could be bought for a song and that remodeling brought handsome profits, but it’s too often not the case. This last part is kind of sad and it frustrates me to see one party market a house that’s been totally ignored for decades and make more than someone who’s brought a year of spit-polish and innovation into manifestation. 

So, in the end, this is kind of warning. Actually, it’s two. First, if you’re buying to fix up and remarket a house (a proud and worthy undertaking, by the way) be very, very shrewd and make those pennies squeak as they leave your hand. Be design-smart and cost conservative. 

And… If you’re a buyer, look at plenty of houses and be sure that you can live with the conditions your buying because they may not be a function of the price you’ve paid. 

I guess the good new is this. The reason all this is true is that we live in paradise. My wife and I work too much and don’t get out enough, but when we do, we realize that we live in an amazing place, rich in natural beauty, intellectual satisfaction, political righteousness and the best food on the planet. I guess we have to pay for these things and I guess we’re lucky that this lifestyle is available at any price, so I’m grateful. Cheers and Bon Appetite. 

Photograph: Matt Cantor. 

This house comes with a ‘bonus room.’

Judging from the small audience at the screening of In the Valley of Elah I attended, and its limited release—326 theaters—Paul Haggis’s masterpiece isn’t going to be around very long. Perhaps Americans are put off by the title—Elah is the valley where David fought Goliath—or maybe we’re not ready for such an unsparing look at the consequences of the Iraq war. But don’t worry, if you don’t get to see In the Valley of Elah before it closes, you’ll probably get another chance early in 2008, after the Academy Award nominations are announced. 

As he did for the Oscar-winning movie, Crash, Haggis wrote and directed In the Valley of Elah. It’s based upon the actual murder of a U.S. soldier, two days after he returned from Iraq. The movie works on three levels. As cinema, it’s as near perfect as any American film we’re likely to see this year. The plot is tight. The cinematography—by Roger Deakins—is flawless. And the acting is superb: Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron, and Susan Sarandon have all won Oscars; in January, they’ll undoubtedly again be nominated for an Academy Award for these performances, with Jones the favorite for best leading actor. 

The movie succeeds as a police-procedural whodunit. Jones’ character, Hank Deerfield, is a retired MP working as a truck driver in Tennessee. He learns his son, Mike, has returned from Iraq, but has gone AWOL from his base at Fort Rudd. The father drives to New Mexico to look into Mike’s disappearance. A few days later, the boy’s burned and dismembered body is discovered. Both the military and the local police dismiss the murder as a drug deal gone bad. Hank enlists the help of local police detective Emily Saunders—Charlize Theron in the best role of an already notable career. Through a combination of skillful interrogation and dogged persistence, the duo eventually uncovers the truth about who killed Mike. (Along the way, Susan Sarandon gives a brief, convincing portrayal of his mother.) 

However, In the Valley of Elah also works as a commentary on the war in Iraq. Not in the heavy-handed way that recent documentaries such as No End in Sight have done; there’s none of the self-righteous tone of “we’re right and they’re wrong.” Haggis’s movie painfully examines the impact of the war on all Americans. It reminded me of Coming Home, the 1978 winner of three Academy Awards, which looked at the psychological impact of the Vietnam War. (That movie was released three years after the war in Vietnam ended; In the Valley of Elah comes to us as the Iraq war continues.) 

Early in the movie, Tommy Lee Jones’ character, Hank, finds his son’s cell phone and remembers Mike used its camera to take pictures of Iraq. Hank hires a technician to reconstruct the videos in the phone’s damaged memory—the Iraq heat had fried the data. In parallel to the police investigation, the videos are reconstructed—a cinematic device first used in Antonioni’s classic Blow-Up. 

As the videos emerge, the audience gets a chilling sense of the chaos in Iraq, amplified by statements of members of Mike’s unit. In one harrowing exchange, a soldier says the best way to deal with Iraq is to “nuke it and turn it into ashes.” 

In the Valley of Elah is an unsparing examination of what the war is doing to America. At the beginning of the film, a woman tells Theron’s character, Emily, that her husband, who has just returned from Iraq, lost his temper and drowned their dog in the bathtub. The terrified wife complains she is afraid of her husband and doesn’t know what to do, as none of the authorities want to help. Emily explains she can’t do anything, because the woman’s husband hasn’t threatened her. Near the end of the movie, Emily is called to a murder scene: the soldier has drowned his wife in their bathtub. 

As Haggis’s epic garners the awards it deserves, the film will be the subject of multiple interpretations. Some will say it depicts the manner in which the reality of the Iraq conflict has gradually emerged: painful images reconstructed over time until the awful truth is revealed. Others will note that the war has made savagery routine, inured the American public to random death and destruction. Many will observe that the death of Mike Deerfield and the grief of his mother and father symbolizes America’s loss. All will agree that In the Valley of Elah is an earnest attempt to portray the war’s consequences. 

Afterward, I kept remembering the scene where the soldier’s wife is found drowned in the bathtub. America was warned about the psychological and moral consequences of invading Iraq. Nonetheless, we ignored wise counsel and proceeded with the war. Now the entire nation has to face the consequences—not just the soldiers and their families. For it’s our national soul that’s slowly drowning as this terrible war drags on. 

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

IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH 

Playing at the Albany Twin, AMC Bay Street (Emeryville) and the Grand Lake (Oakland).

A few weeks back I got a nice e-mail message from Fran Haselsteiner (and belated thanks to you), which read in part:  

“What I would like to know is: What happened to all the mourning doves? When I moved to Berkeley in the mid-’80s, they were everywhere. Now they seem to have been replaced by crows, which weren’t here in large numbers then. What gives?” 

Good question, or set of questions. I have to admit that I hadn’t been paying close attention to the mourning doves. We used to have them in the yard, and they nested, or attempted to nest, on the block; they weren’t very good at construction or maintenance. But lately? And how long has it been since the last sighting? 

The decline of the doves, if there is a decline, has been a lot more subtle than the rise of the crows. I have a 1971 checklist showing the American crow as an occasional visitor to the Berkeley Hills, defined so as to include the UC campus. Now they’re ubiquitous, hanging out in raucous flocks, gathering silently on wires like a road-show company of The Birds, playing crowball at the new Derby Street athletic field. (Crowball is a leisurely sport that involves a lot of standing around in the grass.) West Nile was supposed to have thinned their ranks, but it doesn’t look like that’s happened.  

The crows inspire a fair amount of alarm in some people, at the least a concern that they’re raiding the nests of other, more desirable species. And they may be for all I know. I don’t know if anyone has been studying them. There might be a causal relationship between crow abundance and dove scarcity. But you have to be careful about such assumptions; multiple variables may be in play.  

Consider the hawks, for example. This town is a more hospitable place for hawks than you might think, at least for Cooper’s hawks. Ralph Pericoli, who helps run the Cooper’s Hawk Intensive Nesting Survey for the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory, says 13 pairs of these mid-sized hawks nested or attempted to nest in Berkeley this year; the average is 11. That’s one of the highest densities recorded in any urban area. 

The hawks seem to have adapted behaviorally to the city setting. “They were once considered a secretive species of the deep forest,” says Pericoli. You couldn’t get anywhere near their wildland nests without setting off the parent hawks. But in Berkeley, they’re unfazed by pedestrians, barking dogs, or traffic noises. 

Pericoli speculates that the Cooper’s hawk density may be related to the life cycle of street trees; enough trees have become mature enough to look like good nest sites. Then, too, people aren’t shooting at them. Our urban chicken farmers are less prone than their rural counterparts to blast any passing hawk out of the sky. 

There’s also abundant hawk chow here. Although Coops, especially young ones, may take rodents (two juveniles that died this summer were found to have lethal doses of brodifacoum, a potent rat poison, in their livers), they’re primarily bird-eaters. A hunting hawk’s beat will include all the local birdfeeders.  

And their favorite prey? According to a 2003 survey of the contents of coughed-up pellets, that would be a near tie between the mourning dove (24.4 percent of 455 prey remains) and the American robin (23.4 per cent.) Rock pigeons, western scrub-jays, and house sparrows accounted for most of the rest of the prey samples. 

So are the hawks responsible for the decline of the doves? Again, I don’t know if there’s any data. So many other things can affect bird populations: changes in habitat (less open space for foraging?), changes in climate, diseases. And sometimes we just don’t have a clue.  

This is a roundabout way of admitting that I have no answers for Fran Haselsteiner. But her letter has gotten me ruminating about changes in Berkeley’s bird fauna over time, and reviewing some old references. And it looks like this may turn into a string of columns. 

Next time out: whatever happened to the yellow warblers? 

If anyone knows of a local nest, or singing males that appeared to be on territory, or any sightings outside the spring and fall migration periods, I’d like to hear about it.  

Photograph by Ron Sullivan. 

A pair of mourning doves: declining in Berkeley? 

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

FRIDAY, OCT. 5 

THEATER 

California Shakespeare Theater “King Lear” at the Bruns Ampitheater, 100 Gateway Blvd., Orinda, through Oct. 14. Tickets are $15-$60. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

Contra Costa Civic Theatre “Rumors” by Neil Simon, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., selected Sundays at 2 p.m. at 951 Pomona Ave. at Moeser, El Cerrito, through Oct. 14. Tickets are $11-$18. 655-8974. www.cct.org 

Impact Theatre “Sleepy” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave., through Oct. 13. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. 

Masquers Playhouse “4 Plays by Peter Levy” Fri. at 8 p.m., Sat. at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sun. at 2:30 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond. Q&A with the playwright at the Sat. eve. performance. Tickets are $10. 232-3888. www.masquers.org 

Ragged Wing Ensemble “Alice in Wonderland” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Envision Academy, 1515 Webster St., Oakland, through Oct. 13. Tickets are $15-$30. 800-838-3006. www.raggedwing.org 

Shotgun Players “Bulrusher” Thurs.-Sun. at 8 p.m. at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. through Oct. 28. Tickets are $17-$25. For reservations call 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

“Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” written and performed by Amy Wong, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12-$15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“The Quilts of Dorothy Vance” On display Fri. from 5 to 8 p.m., and Sat. from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. 

Tea Pot Show Works by members of the Potters’ Studio in celebration of their 35th Anniversary. Opening reception at 5:30 p.m. at 637 Cedar St. 528-3286. 

“A Class Act CCA-C” A group art show by students from California College of the Arts. Opening reception at 5:30 p.m. at Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th St. 465-8928. 

New Works by Peter Honig and Ce Ce Landoli Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Mercury 20 Gallery, 25 Grand Ave. at Broadway, Oakland. 701-4620. 

“Works by Keira Kotler and Jenn Shifflet” Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, 25 Grand Ave., upper level, Oakland. Exhibition runs through Nov. 17. www.chandracerrito.com 

“Water Street: Works by Jenny E. Balisle and Antonio Vigil” Reception at 4 p.m. at Pro Arts Gallery, 550 Second St., Oakland. 763-4361. 

“Circular Logic: Works by Mae Leung, Jo-ey Tang and Jesse Powell” Opening reception at 7 p.m. at Front Gallery, 35 Grand Ave., Oakland. http://frontgalleryoakland.com 

First Annual Oakland Arts Day Ceremony and Reception at 5 p.m. at Oakland City Hall, 1 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza at 14th St, & Broadway. RSVP to 238-7561. 

FILM 

Berkeley Video & Film Fest Independent cinema from around the world continuous sreenings Fri.-Sun. at California Theater, 2113 Kittredge St. 464-5983. http://berkeleyvideofilmfest.org 

“Irma Vep” with filmmaker Oliver Assayas and film historian Jean-Michel Frodon in conversation at 6:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Sunset Cinema: “Piece by Piece” on San Francisco’s graffiti art movement at 6:30 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, Oak at 10th St., Oakland. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

Midnight Movies “Office Space” Fri. and Sat. at midnight at Piedmont Cinema, 4186 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Cost is $8. 464-5980. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Wendy Tokunaga introduces her novel “Midori by Moonlight” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Marina Lewycka reads from her new novel “Strawberry Fields” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Oakland Opera Theater “Turn of the Screw” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Oakland Metro Operahouse, 630 3rd. St., through Oct. 14. Tickets are $25. 763-1146.  

The Korean Traditional Dance Company at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. No ticket required. 642-5674. 

Ric Alexander, jazz fusion, at 5 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, Oak at 10th St., Oakland. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

Tin/Bag plus Chris Brown, Phillip Greenlief & Donald Robinson at 8 p.m. at Free-Jazz Fridays at the Jazz House, 1510 8th St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$15. 415-846-9432. 

Yore Folk Dance Ensemble “Semah” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. tickets are $15-$25. 925-798-1300. 

Joffrey Ballet at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $34-$90. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Dwele and Melissa Young at 8:30 p.m. at Kimball’s Carnival, 522 2nd St., Jack London Square. Tickets are $30. 444-6979. www.kimballscarnival.com 

Michael Smolens & KRIYA at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $15. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Robinson, Brown & Greenlief in Trio at 8 p.m. at Free-Jazz Fridays at the Jazz House, 1510 8th St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$15. 415-846-9432. 

Youssoupha Sideibe and Shimshai, West African kora, at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12-$15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Tamra Engle, rock, folk, at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Australian Bebop Ragas at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

The Brothers Goldman at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Jeff Rolka and Robert Heiskell at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Berkeley Django Reinhardt Hot Jazz Festival at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $12. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Modern Life is War, Trap Them, Trash Talk at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

The Dave Stein Hub-Bub at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

William Beatty, piano, at 6:30 p.m. at The Mount Everest Restaurant, 2011 Shattuck Ave. at University. 

Ben Adams Quintet at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Rahsaan Patterson at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $24-$28. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, OCT. 6 

CHILDREN  

Michael Katz, storyteller, at 10:30 a.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 3rd floor, Community Meeting Room, 2090 Kittredge St. 

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with Jerry Kennedy, aka J-Soul at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5 for adults, $4 for children. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Active Arts Theatre for Young Audiences “James and the Giant Peach” Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m., Mon. at 11:30 a.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $14-$18. 925-798-1300. 

“Short Attention Span Circus” Acrobatics and juggling by Jean Paul Valjean Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave. 452-2259. 

Annie Barrows reads from “Ivy and Bean Break the Fossil Record” at 4 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“The Quilts of Dorothy Vance” On display from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. 

“One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now” Sign-language interpreted tour at 1:30 p.m.at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. 

“Cross Currents: Artists of Alameda” Opening reception at 1 p.m. at Alameda Museum gallery, 2324 Alameda Ave. 865-0541. 

21st Annual Emeryville Art Exhibition A showcase for more than 90 artists who live or work in Emeryville opens at EmeryStation East, 2nd Floor, 5885 Hollis St., Emeryville, and runs to Oct. 28. 652-6122. www.emeryarts.com  

“Counter Intuitive: Photographs by Susan Tuttle” Opening reception at 3 p.m. at Montclair Gallery, 1986 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. 339-4286. 

FILM 

Berkeley Video & Film Fest Independent cinema from around the world, Sat. and Sun. from 1 to 9:45 p.m. at California Theater, 2113 Kittredge St. 464-5983. http://berkeleyvideofilmfest.org 

“The Big Game” A documentary about Berkeley’s urban tree-sit at 6:55 p.m. at the Landmark California Theater, 2133 Kittredge St. 464-5983. 

“demonlover” with filmmaker Oliver Assayas and film historian Jean-Michel Frodon in conversation at 6:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

The Third Baby Beat Poetry Festival featuring Judy Wells, Neeli Cherkovski, H.D. Moe & Blake More from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at The Humanist Fellowship Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Free. 528-8713. 

Bay Area Poets Coalition Annual Contest and Poetry Reading from 3 to 5 p.m. at Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison St. Park on the street, not in Lodge parking lot. 527-9905.  

Oliver Chin reads from his latest work “Julie Black Belt, The Kungfu Chronicles” at 3 p.m. at Eastwind Books of Berkeley 2066 University Ave. 548-2350. 

Poetry Flash with Tung-Hui Hu and Mari l’Esperance at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Erica Weber, soprano, performs the works of Mozart, Brahms, Schubert at 8 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana St. Tickets are $8-$12. 549-3864. www. 

trinitychamberconcerts.com 

Women’s Antique Vocal Ensemble “Transitions: Spanish Influence in the New World” at 8 p.m. at St. Albert Priory Chapel, 6172 Chabot Rd., Oakland. Tickets are $10-$15. www.wavewomen.org  

“Melody of China” Premiering compositions by Gang Situ and Yuanlin Chen at 7:30 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. Tickets are $10-$18. 415-681-8599. www.melodyofchina.org 

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, all Vivaldi program, at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $30-$72. 415-392-4400. www.philharmonia.org 

Gamelan Sekar Jaya Music and dance of Bali, at 8 p.m. at Oakland Asian Cultural Center, 11th St. between Franklin and Webster in the Pacific Renaissance Plaza in Oakland’s Chinatown. Tickets are $6-$12. 237-6849. www.gsj.org 

Joffrey Ballet at 2 and 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $34-$90. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Jessica Williams, jazz pianist, at 8 p.m. at Piedmont Piano Company, 4382 Piedmont Ave. corner Pleasant Valley, Oakland. Donation $20. For reservations call 415-543-9988. 

Beep with Michael Coleman jazz, at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $5. 843-2473.  

Tanaora at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ.  

Melodians, reggae, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15-$18. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Sotaque Baiano, Brazilian, at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $10. 548-1159. www.shattuckdownlow.com 

Jessica Rice and Stevie Barsotti at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Veretski Pass at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Faye Carol at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Royal Hawaiian Serenaders at 9 p.m. at Temple Bar Tiki Bar & Grill, 984 University Ave. 548-9888. 

Vanessa Lowe and Elliot Randall at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $10. 558-0881. 

Sugar Shack at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Tried and True, Troublemaker, Call to Arms, at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, OCT. 7 

CHILDREN 

Asheba at Ashkenaz at 3 p.m. Cost is $4-$6. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Rosemary Wells reads from her new books including “Mother Gooses’s Little Treasures” at 4 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

“The Panchatantra: Animal Lessons from India” at 12:30 and 3:30 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave. 452-2259. 

EXHIBITIONS 

Berkeley Treasures: Three Generations of Printmakers Works by Emmanuel Montoya, Miriam Stahl and Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Opening reception at 2 p.m. at Berkeley art Center, 1275 Walnut St. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

“One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now” Guided tour at 2 p.m.at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. 

Michael-Che Swisher “Animals of Tilden” Artist talk at 2 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

21st Annual Emeryville Art Exhibition featuring more than 90 artists who live or work in Emeryville. Reception at 6 p.m. at EmeryStation East, 2nd Floor, 5885 Hollis Street, Emeryville. 652-6122. www.emeryarts.com  

FILM 

Berkeley Video & Film Fest Independent cinema from around the world, from 1 to 10 p.m. at California Theater, 2113 Kittredge St. 464-5983. http://berkeleyvideofilmfest.org 

“Cold Water” with filmmaker Oliver Assayas and film historian Jean-Michel Frodon in conversation at 3 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“A Celebration of Odd and Hilarious Found Videos” at 5 p.m. at Parkway Theater, 1834 Park Blvd., Oakland. Tickets: $8. 814-2400. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Prometheus Symphony Orchestra at 3 p.m. at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Montecito and Grand Ave., Oakland. 415-864-2151. 

Paul Hanson, bassoon, Steve Erquiaga, guitar, perform music of Brazil, Eastern Europe and more at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center 1275 Walnut St. Cost is $8-$10. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, all Vivaldi program, at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $30-$72. 415-392-4400. www.philharmonia.org 

Oakland Opera Theater “Turn of the Screw” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Oakland Metro Operahouse, 630 3rd St., through Oct. 14. Tickets are $25. 763-1146.  

Slammin’ the Infinite & Citta Di Vitti featuring Steve Swell & Sabir Mateen at 8 p.m. at 1510 8th Street Performance Space, Oakland. Cost is $10-$15. 415-846-9432. rob@thejazzhouse.com 

Esteban Bello, Meli Rivera, Ray Cepeda and other, noon to sundown on Edith St. just off Cedar. Look for balloons. Benefits “The Children of Chaguitillo Nicaragua” Cost is $12. 472-3170. 

Benny Watson Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Americana Unplugged: The BAckyard Party Boys at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

William Beatty and The Unconditionals at 6:30 p.m. at The Mt. Everest Restaurant 2011 Shattuck Ave. at University. 665-6035. 

Duamuxa and Rafael Manriquez recounting a musical history of the Chilean presence in California, at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12. 849-2568.  

John Handy at 4:30 at the Jazzschool. Cost is $20. 845-5373.  

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

MONDAY, OCT. 8 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Express with May Garron and Terry McCarty at 7 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Four Seasons Concerts presents Joyce Yang at 7:30 p.m. at Regents Theatre, Valley Center for Performing Arts at Holy Names University. Tickets are $30-$40. 601-7919. www.fourseasonsconcerts.com 

Ed Neff and Friends at 7 p.m. at Le Bateau Ivre, 2629 Telegraph Ave. 849-1100. www.lebateauivre.net 

Ric & Yolanda, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Viva Brasil at 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

TUESDAY, OCT. 9 

THEATER 

SporK Festival, a bi-racial, bi-cultural celebration of short palys featuring Leila Buck at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$25. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash with Lucille Lang Day, Ed Miller and Antohony Russell White at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley City College auditorium, 2050 Center St. 525-5476. 

Peter Turchi talks about “maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

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

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

Vagabond Opera at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Scraptet, jazz, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Jazzschool 10th Anniversary Concert at 7:30 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $125. 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, OCT. 10 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Ancient Roots/Urban Journeys: Expressions for Dias de los Muertos” opens at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts., Oakland. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Ann Patchett reads from her new novel “Run” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Deep Sports with authors Michael Lewis and Dave Zirin at 7:30 p.m. at King Middle School, 1781 Rose St. Benedit for KPFA. Tickets are $10-$13 at Cody’s. 559-9500. 

Anne Willan presents “Country Cooking of France” at noon at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik and Three Blind Mice, at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Young Musician’s Program perfroms at noon at Oakland City Center, 12th and Broadway. www.oaklandcitycenter.com 

Bach Festival with Angela Hewitt, piano, Wednesday, October 10 at 8:00 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $42. 642-9988. www.calperformances.net; 

Michael Barsimanto Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Balkan Folkdance at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lessons at 7 p.m. Cost is $7. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

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

Buxter Hoot’n at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

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

John Scofield Trio featuring The ScoHorns at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun.. Cost is $16-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, OCT. 11 

EXHIBITIONS 

“One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now” Guided tour at 12:15 and 5:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808 

“A Class Act CCA-C” A group art show by students from California College of the Arts. Reception at 5:30 p.m. at Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th St. 465-8928. 

THEATER 

“Whatever She Wants” a romantic comedy stage play by Je-Caryous Johnson, Thurs. and Fri. at 8 p.m., Sat. at 3 and 8 p.m. at the Paramount Theater, 2025 Broadway, Oakland. Tickets are $34.50-$49.50. 465-6400. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Hidden History of the East Bay: Photographs Tell Towns’ Stories” at 1 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts., Oakland. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

Omali Yeshitela, Black Power Movement veteran and Uhuru Movement leader reads from his latest work, “One Africa! One Nation!” at 7 p.m. at Barnes & Noble, 98 Broadway, Jack London Square, Oakland. 272-0120. 

“Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in 18th Century Italy” with author Martha Feldman in conversation with Mary Ann Smart at 5:30 at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. 

“History, Culture and the Art of Puppetry in Japan” with Peter Grilli at 7 p.m. in Wheeler Auditorium, UC Campus. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Gabrielle Calvocoressi and Ken Weisner, poets and contibutors to “The Music Lover’s Poetry Anthology” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Edward J. Larson describes “Magnificanet Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Oakland Opera Theater “ Turn of the Screw” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Oakland Metro Operahouse, 630 3rd St., through Oct. 14. Tickets are $25. 763-1146.  

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

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

Five Dollar Suit, bluegrass, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Mark Growden, Professor Gall, Knees & Elbows at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Todd Shipley at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

TURN OF THE SCREW 

Benjamin Britten’s revisioning of Henry James’ ghost story is relocated in a Louisiana plantation by the ever adventurous Oakland Opera. 630 Third, St., Oakland. October 5-7, 11-14, Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m.; Sundays at 2 p.m. 510-763-1146 or www.oaklandopera.org. 

SLEEPY AT LAVAL’S 

Steven Yocky’s play Sleepy runs two more weekends at LaVal’s, 1834 Euclid Ave. Sleepy is a revival of the omni-bus play: different characters in different scenes, or vignettes, that somehow fit together. A credible job of fun. Through Oct. 13, Thurs.-Sat. 8 p.m. Tickets $10-$14. 464-4468. 

WILLIAMS PLAYS AT  

PIEDMONT PIANO 

Jazz pianist Jessica Williams, a resident of the Bay Area until recently, returns to Piedmont Piano for two shows—tonight (Friday) at 8 p.m. in the San Francisco store on Second Street, Saturday (also 8 p.m.) at the Oakland store. Over the years, Williams has evolved a unique style, in part an interpretation of Monk, which is very much her own.

I’m fascinated by why some succeed, and why some struggle with life,” said Alameda County Deputy Public Defender and Berkeley resident Mark McGoldrick, “why similarly situated people do differently, even from the same family. Why do some make it and some have a harder time? It’s one of the mysteries of life. Why does one kid from East Oakland make it to Julliard and others never get out of the ‘hood? How do you describe it? Is it luck? The will to live? It’s unquantifiable.” 

McGoldrick was reflecting on the bigger questions behind his own new solo show, Countercoup, directed by David Ford, now playing at The Marsh in San Francisco through Oct. 20. 

Countercoup is “semiautobiographical,” the story of a young man from a white middle-class family in rehabilitation from an accident that paralyzed him, the friendship he makes with a man from the ghetto, paralyzed from a gunshot wound, and what happens to them both on re-entry into the real world, how their “lives end up in different places.” 

McGoldrick says the model for the principal character of his tale is himself as a teenager and young man, an at-risk youth from “a loving family” in Arizona leading a “don’t-tell-me-what-to-do lifestyle—typical: alcohol, drugs, being a jerk—and progressively getting into more trouble,” including breaking his hands twice in fistfights, getting suspended from school, until finally breaking his neck in a car accident during Christmas 1982 at age 17. 

Now the former angry young man finds himself defending other angry young men in court. “It’s interesting how the roles are reversed, now that I’m the seasoned graybeard, trying to counsel those bent on self-destruction. Generations keep coming up, and continue to do strange stuff.” 

After his accident and hospitalization, McGoldrick went through rehabilitation, “like a bootcamp,” eventually getting discharged to his waiting parents’ care. “It was frustrating. I couldn’t do anything. But at least my family was around to abuse!”  

McGoldrick enrolled in the local community college, then later at the state university. “Before, I wasn’t sure about going. College wasn’t interesting. But once I’d broken my neck, and couldn’t do the things I wanted to do, it seemed obvious college was a first step. I’d go for the thinking jobs.” He graduated from Harvard Law School, then clerked for a Federal judge in San Diego, before taking the job he still holds after 13 years with the Alameda County Public Defender’s Office and moving to Berkeley. “I like the climate, where it is on the bay,” said McGoldrick, “the ambiance, the mix of people.” 

His work as a deputy public defender brings him into immediate contact with those who “live in a different America than I live in. The clients I meet coming through the criminal justice system; that’s our point of contact, where the most resources ever invested in them are used to punish them. I start with that as the defendant’s reality.” 

“Some are the working poor,” he continued, “None have enough to pay for a private attorney. They have no health insurance; they go to the emergency room for health care. Some wait to get their dental work done in prison. Their probation reports, a kind of bio of five or 10 pages, often read like a Stephen King story. I look at their background, read through—and ask, what did we think was going to happen to this kid? Anything other than what did? It reads like a recipe for making a criminal defendant.” 

“What do we do? Catch them, put our hands on hips and say, ‘For shame!’? There’re no chances for shame—say, for a prostitute on San Pablo Avenue—and as if it’s not it’s own hell.” 

He reflected further on his job and on the system he works in: “It’s emotionally hard work, and often comes from the soul when terrible, terrible things go awry in the industry of pain I work in. But I like what I do. I believe in it. I’m proud of my office. There’s a world of choices of what I could be doing, could get paid for somewhere else. I have an immense amount of pride to be working as a public defender rather than a private attorney. I feel that’s on a public service model.” 

Countercoup is partly a straight-ahead cautionary story, which ends in an epiphany the character has when it’s almost too late about how he’s been messing up, and half buddy story, McGoldrick said.  

“He and his new friend meet in the hospital and go through the same process together, but end up in different places. The new friend is a blue collar guy who never thought about going to college; it wasn’t in the cards,” he said. “The buddy gets out, moves into substandard subsidized housing, with miscreant attendants who sometimes show up, sometimes leave him to sleep in his wheelchair all night. One life goes into a bad place, the other is lifted up. And the character based on me sees himself abandoning his buddy, where the audience might not. I like telling stories, not creating messages in that way. I prefer it if people afterwards, over a drink or dinner, have different opinions. That’s fine with me. It’s more the way I think life is.” 

McGoldrick’s reticence about message-mongering is reflected in how he gets his points across on stage: “The buddy gets upset when he sees my character, ensconced in privilege, tear off the head of a nurse’s aide. So social ideas are shown through dramatic interchange. There’s a lot of dark stuff, but it’s also funny. It’s graphic; people wince, then laugh, feel comic relief, in the spirit of the public defender’s sense of humor.” 

COUNTERCOUP 

8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday through Oct. 20 at The Marsh, 1062 Valencia St.,  

San Francisco. Tickets: (800) 838-3006. Information: (415) 826-5750 or  

www.themarsh.org.

The Berkeley Film and Video Festivals marks its 16th year this weekend with another vast and varied program of independent productions. If there’s a theme to the annual festival, the theme is that there is no theme; it simply showcases independent film in all its unruly diversity, from the brilliant to the silly, from mainstream to left field, from documentaries and drama to comedy and cutting-edge avant garde. 

The festival, put on annually by the East Bay Media Center, runs today (Friday) through Sunday at Landmark’s California Theater in downtown Berkeley.  

Festival Director Mel Vapour takes pride in one participant’s description of the festival as a bastion of artistic integrity among film festivals, and one that remains blissfully celebrity-free. This year’s program is no exception, providing a feast of cinematic pleasures untouched by commercial considerations.  

One of the most extraordinary films on this year’s program is George Aguilar’s Diary of Niclas Gheiler. Aguilar has created what he terms a “documentary mashup,” consisting of old family photographs and found footage combined with words from his grandfather’s diary. The result is a stirring poetic reverie on his grandfather’s life in Germany from World War I, when he served alongside a young Adolf Hitler, and the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in the run-up to World War II. It’s a 32-minute tour de force that approaches history from a deeply personal perspective. 

The Big Game, by L A Wood, presents a sympathetic view of the Memorial Stadium oak grove tree-sit. Regardless of where you come down on the myriad issues surrounding the UC Berkeley’s plan to build an athletic performance facility along the stadium’s western wall, this entertaining 30-minute film is sure to provide grist for your political mill. Though university officials declined Wood’s invitation to comment on camera, he does little to fill that gap in the narrative, at no point providing the viewer with an account of the university’s reasoning behind its plans or its responses to the protest. The result is a film which may be endearing to the like-minded, but which will only fuel the ire of those on the other side of the debate, encouraging rather than tempering the tendencies of each side to paint the other in broad strokes. Familiar faces abound; in fact, the film is a veritable who’s who of Daily Planet opinion page contributors.  

Henry Ferrini and Ken Riaf’s Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place provides a compassionate portrait of the larger-than-life poet—his work, his humanity and his influence—using archival footage and audio along with testimonials from friends and colleagues. The central narrative concerns Olson’s quest to preserve the unique qualities of his hometown, a quest one fellow poet likens to a Superbowl match-up between the Minnesota Vikings and the Miami Dolphins, in which the Dolphins abandoned their game plan in favor of tactical improvisation that reached the level of poetry. It’s an analogy many tree-sitters would be loathe to accept, but in the context of Olson’s all-encompassing, all-embracing, big-picture view of life and community, such supposed polarities as football vs. poetry are exposed as meaningless. 

Other films from this weekend’s program: 

• Orit Schwartz’s The Frank Anderson, a sharp comedic short (featuring several familiar faces from larger-budget Hollywood productions), tells the story of an insurance agent who pays a price when he denies coverage for a man’s breast reduction surgery while enthusiastically offering to pay for enhancement surgery for a woman he hopes to bed.  

• Flaming Chicken, Gerald Varney’s 20-minute impressionistic musing on San Francisco, is comprised largely of hitherto unseen footage Varney shot while working as a Bay Area journalist in the ‘60s and ‘70s.  

• Silhouettes, a seven-minute short by Acalanes High School (Lafayette) students Patrick Ouziel and Kevin Walker, details the plight of a teen whose shadow, which takes the form of a rabbit, leads to bullying from his peers. 

• Chronicles of Impeccable Sportsmanship, Erika Tasini’s excellent silent short that depicts curious dynamics among a rooftop-dwelling family. 

• The Homecoming, a solemn and mysterious 10-minute film, consists of evocative scenes that almost play like trailers from longer films.  

• Tile M for Murder, an absurd, almost cartoonish comedy, features a hostile couple squaring off over a game of Scrabble on a sweltering summer day. “It’s a hot day and I hate my wife,” says the husband, and off we go on a bile-fueled ride in which the words spelled out on the board dictate the course of events. 

• Mark Hammond’s feature film Johnny Was boasts an excellent performance by Vinnie Jones as a former Irish Republican Army fighter hiding out in London. The film also features the screen debuts of boxer Lennox Lewis and former Who frontman Roger Daltrey. 

But this sampling just scratches the surface. There are simply too many films on the program to do justice to them in the space allotted here. Suffice it to say, this is a film lover’s film festival, one that eschews the predictable fare that so often passes for independent film these days in an effort to present an engaging and wide-ranging program of cinema artistry. 

Photograph: A scene from George Aguilar’s poetic “documentary mashup,” Diary of Niclas Gheiler, a found-footage reverie on the life of the director’s German grandfather in the years between the world wars.

In June 1906, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company released a three-minute film called “A Trip to Berkeley, Cal.” The short was filmed aboard a moving streetcar on the #4 line of the Oakland Traction Consolidated Company, a precursor of the Key Route System. The #4 line ran between downtown Oakland and the intersection of Euclid and Hilgard Avenues, four blocks north of the UC campus. 

The film, which is available for viewing on the Library of Congress website, documents most of the #4 line’s final leg, as the streetcar rolls along Oxford Street, turns east onto Hearst Avenue, climbs up to North Gate, and turns north onto Euclid Avenue, coming to a stop in the middle of the 1800 block—the one we know as the Euclid or North Gate commercial district. 

Except that in 1906 there was no commercial district on Euclid Avenue, and one would not develop there until the 1920s and would not become fully built until the late ’30s. 

In 1906, there wasn’t a single building on the western side of Euclid Avenue’s 1800 block. The eastern side boasted three structures, with nary a store among them. The north fork of Strawberry Creek ran in its open channel on both sides of the street. The creek isn’t visible in “A Trip to Berkeley, Cal.,” but the buildings along Euclid Avenue are. 

Before the streetcar makes its turn at North Gate, one can see the house of Rev. George B. Smyth at 2509 Hearst Avenue. The Smyth house occupied the upper third of a triple corner lot. The lower two-thirds, abutting on Euclid Ave., were planted with an orchard. Next door to the orchard was the Northgate Hotel at 1809 Euclid—a large, three-story-plus-basement structure, adorned with two front balconies and three round turrets topped by witches’ caps. A tall water tower rose in the rear. Just up from the hotel, across the creek, stood two homes built in 1892. 

1805 Euclid was a very early Brown Shingle (1891 was the first year in which this type of building appeared in Berkeley, the most prominent surviving example being the Anna Head School), featuring a round turret and a gable whose concave walls curved in to accommodate a central window. Its neighbor at 1801 Euclid had a plain façade and wood siding. 

The Northgate Hotel, designed and built by A.W. Pattiani in 1902, was torn down in late 1936 and replaced by the current one-story Art Deco commercial building, still clad with the original ‘30s glossy black tiles and vertical chrome strips. The Smyth house, built in 1891, gave up its orchard for the Euclid Apartments, which opened in 1913. The Smyth house itself was turned into a fraternity, then into a rooming house, and ultimately was razed and replaced by a food court. 

Against all odds, the two 1892-vintage houses at 1801 and 1805 Euclid Ave. still stand, albeit not as houses and not on Euclid. Both houses first appeared in the Alameda County assessment records in 1893. The corner house at 1801 Euclid was owned by Frank M. Wilson, the Indiana-born banker who swooped upon Berkeley in 1891 and purchased the entire Daley’s Scenic Park tract for $4,000 in gold. Wilson would quickly establish himself as a Berkeley VIP and in 1894 would engage contractor George Frederick Estey to build him a brown-shingle house on the crest of Ridge Road. Intended as the barn for a projected mansion that was never built, it served as the Wilson family’s permanent residence until 1969 and was razed in the late 1970s to make way for the GTU Library designed by Louis Kahn. 

Before his house was built, Wilson lived in San Francisco, and in October 1893 he rented the house of realtor and Shattuck brother-in-law Ralza A. Morse on the northwest corner of Shattuck Ave. and Bancroft Way. By then, he had sold 1801 Euclid Ave. to realtor Oscar G. May, but it’s possible that Wilson occupied the Euclid house before doing so, since the assessment record in his name shows personal property in the house. 

The shingled house at 1805 Euclid Ave. was built for William W. Clark, a Maine-born real estate agent, and his brood of four twenty-something offspring, three of whom were enrolled at the San Francisco Business College. The designer of the Clark house is not known. It might have been Fred Estey, who would soon build several other brown-shingle residences in the neighborhood. 

Much has been written about the professors and artists who were among the early residents of Daley’s Scenic Park, but little is ever said about the middle- and working-class families who settled on the Northside while their children were attending the university, or about the real estate speculators who saw an opportunity near the campus. At the turn of the century, Berkeley was a magnet for realtors—or for people who became realtors after practicing entirely different professions in their previous locales. 

Oscar G. May, born in New York in 1839, was a Congregational minister in Illinois and Wisconsin prior to arriving in California. In Berkeley, May initially pooled his resources with realtor Warren Cheney, but by 1896 he was running O.G. May & Co. at 2123 Center Street, with his son-in-law, Walter J. Mortimer, as junior partner. After May’s retirement in 1904, Mortimer took over the office, where two of May’s sons, Frank and William, also worked. 

Frank Morris May (1868–1936) spent the 1890s and early 1900s alternating between teaching in Tulare and Contra Costa counties and carpentry in Berkeley. According to his daughter, Evelyn May Tippett, Frank worked with Fred Estey for a while. In 1896, Frank would build a Dutch Colonial farm house for Olivia G. Wright, a widowed mother of six, at the top of Virginia Street. The house still stands. 

While his brother William, also a carpenter (as was a third brother, Robert), was content to work as a salesman for their brother-in-law, Frank was described by Evelyn as “a self-starter.” In 1905, he opened his own realty office at 2149 Center Street. In addition to selling real estate—a 1905 ad in the San Francisco Call listed an 8-room house on a corner lot east of Fulton Street; a 9-room villa near Dwight Way Station; an alfalfa ranch in Merced County; and ten acres in San Ramon Valley—Frank advertised “Plans Drawn, Houses Built.” Most of the houses he built were lost in the 1923 Berkeley Fire. 

Both the Mays and the Clarks had decamped from Euclid Ave. by 1900 but continued to own their respective houses for a number of years. These houses were the only ones on the block until 1902, when William and Mary Henry built the Northgate Hotel. 

The Henrys are best known today as the parents of Mills College president Aurelia Henry Reinhardt. William W. Henry, a native of Bennington, VT, who came to California in 1858, was for many years a wholesale grocer in San Francisco and southern California. The ups and downs of his business might have taken their toll on the family’s well-being had not his indomitable wife (a hardy pioneer who had crossed the plains from Iowa at the age of 13, riding alongside the covered wagon on a small pony) kept the family going and paid for the children’s music and speech lessons by taking in boarders. 

The Henrys first appeared in Berkeley in 1896, when Aurelia was a student at Cal, and the following year built a house at 2401 Le Conte Avenue, across the street from Frank Wilson’s home. A stately, turreted affair clad in brown shingles, the Henry house was constructed by Fred Estey. It was large enough to accommodate the couple, their youngest four children, five boarders, and a cook. 

A mere five years after building their hilltop house, the Henrys moved one block downhill and became hoteliers in earnest. He was 63, she ten years younger, but they would run the Northgate for 24 years, until Mary’s death. It was listed in the 1904 directory as a private hotel, and later advertised as “A Select Family Hotel with Homelike Surroundings, 35 Minutes from San Francisco.” 

The clientele consisted of middle-class and professional families, some of whom stayed for decades. Victor J. Robertson, treasurer of the Commercial Publishing Co. and editor of the San Francisco Commercial News, boarded with the Henrys on Le Conte Ave., moved with them to the Northgate, and was still there in 1930, after both William and Mary had passed away. Robertson was a prominent civic activist and longtime president of the Conference Committee of the Improvement Clubs of Berkeley, as well as heading the North Berkeley Improvement Club. In 1907 he initiated a campaign to check graft in Alameda County government and another for a new city charter. The following year, he called on the city to stop the Spring Construction Co. from blasting in the North Berkeley quarry (converted in the ’30s into the municipal Rose Garden). He was an ardent supporter of damming the Hetch Hetchy, cleaning up the city, improving public transportation, and beautifying Shattuck Avenue. 

While Mary Henry managed the Northgate, her husband turned his attention to realty and insurance. Berkeley’s swelling population in the wake of the 1906 earthquake must have improved his business, for he erected a small office next to the hotel, at 1807 Euclid. This office was located directly over the creek, which would exact its revenge in February 1940, flooding and destroying Reid’s drugstore, built on the northwest corner of Euclid and Hearst. 

Around 1910, the Henrys formed the W.W. Henry Investment Company and began buying properties along the avenue, including 1801 and 1805 Euclid. They moved into 1805 Euclid but soon found a more lucrative way to utilize it. In 1914, the creek behind the two houses was culverted, and the houses were moved to the back and attached back-to-back to form a six-unit apartment building at 2508 Ridge Road. The Henrys called it the Bennington Apartments, after Mr. Henry’s home town. 

The conversion, which placed the turreted shingled house at the front, included a lower floor in stucco, with interesting architectural details such as arched doors and windows, sturdy round columns, and an ornamental baluster. The architect is not known, but similar columns can be seen on several houses designed by Walter H. Ratcliff, Jr. The Euclid frontage, which remained unbuilt until 1929, was planted in trees. 

Today, 2508 Ridge Road is divided into 15 apartments and faces the rear of Euclid Ave. shops. Although its splendor has faded, the building can lay claim to being the oldest known residential Brown Shingle in Berkeley. 

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

Photograph: Daniella Thompson  

The Bennington Apartments at 2508 Ridge Road combines two houses built on Euclid Ave. in 1892. They were constructed by William and Mary Henry, parents of Mills College president Aurelia Henry Reinhardt.  

Earthquake Tidbits 

There is no such thing as “earthquake weather.” Statistically, there is an equal distribution of earthquakes in cold weather, hot weather, rainy weather, etc. 

From 1975-1995 there were only four states that did not have any earthquakes. They were: Florida, Iowa, North Dakota, and Wisconsin. 

The San Andreas fault is not a single, continuous fault, but rather is actually a fault zone made up of many segments. Movement may occur along any of the many fault segments along the zone at any time. The San Andreas fault system is more that 1300 km (800 miles) long, and in some spots is as much as 16 km (10 miles) deep.  

Make your home secure and your family safe. 

Larry Guillot is owner of QuakePrepare, an earthquake consulting, securing, and gas shut-off valve installation service. 

Call him at 758-3299 or visit www.quakeprepare.com 

There’s a house in my neighborhood that’s back on the market again. You know the one. Been on and off the market for years and despite all reason, it’s listing for well over a million dollars. It has big problems: foundation, parking, odd use of space, geological issues and problematic drainage (let’s not even talk about the paint job), but there it is, asking more money than the last time and you know what? They’ll probably do all right. 

That’s the weird and funny thing about this market and our locale. It’s so coveted, that even allowing for the wild-boar variability of interest rates, slide zones, impending earthquake and habitual zoning battles, people want to be here so badly that they will purchase all sorts of trouble without much question or debate.  

In fact, you can go about trying to buy something for months without success even when doing battle over some pretty sorry looking digs. 

Remember those fabulous 70’s? Wide lapels, avocado green appliances and amazingly ugly wallpaper. Well, we had so many more houses on the market than potential buyers, that you could actually find a genuine Fixer Upper. I love the term and I love it with a true sense of nostalgia because this thing (the word and the object) seems to have become a lonely artifact of history.  

Oh, to be sure, we absolutely see places that need serious remodeling and some that ought simply to be bulldozed, but we rarely see houses, today, that can be bought for a significant reduction in price based on the volume of necessary repairs. 

I see this as a compression of the value in the market and here’s why. If you look at two houses in a similar neighborhood that have similar size, number of baths and other grossly defining features, the prices, at least in this market, may not be all that different, despite their conditions differing substantially. They’re compressed. 

This was what was different thirty years ago and is certainly different when you go back where your parents want you to buy in Sioux City (whiney voice: “Honey, for that kind of money, you could buy a house like your father’s boss has up by that golf course!”)  

When the market is less aggressive, the houses that need serious rethinking and repairing just get left on the pavement when the Flea-Market closes down. Not so here. The desire for ANY house in the Bay Area is so great that considerations that might have sent buyers walking away or, at least, bargaining the price down measurably in another time or place simply do not carry much weight in the here and now. 

This means that great houses and so-so houses are compressed into much closer cost proximity and sometimes into transposition. This is particularly true if you make some allowance for the variability of the market. A good example is what happens when we hit those few very hot weeks each year in which everyone in America has chosen to move to the East Bay from Podunk or Baltimore. At least once a year during this season, I’ll see two similar houses that for reasons I cannot fathom, sell for about the same price while being radically different in condition.  

Now, it’s certainly true that individual neighborhoods are strong controllers of cost but it still seems to me that the state of the property is one of the poorest predictors of cost that I see. This is pretty bad news for me since I’m in the condition business. 

Embarrasingly, what I have to say about a property may not be all that salient in the value of a house these days. Of course, I don’t trumpet this when I show up to inspect a property. I make damn sure to act as if my words are vital and that my absence is concomitant with capsize. Hey, I’m in business. 

I see this play out during inspections when, having identified an array of conditions, we will sit down with the realtor and discover that to ask for much price adjustment based on my findings is somewhere between slim pickin’s and negotiation suicide. Again, this is all market relative and was far less true when I started inspecting houses 19 years ago.  

Also, I’d like to be clear that this isn’t just a function of realtors trying to keep deals in play. I’ve seen enough deals fall apart to know that, despite their best efforts to get their clients to offer enough money, real estate agents can’t make their clients spend more than they want to and I’ve met buyers who’ve lost out on seven deals before they got into contract on the house where we meet. 

It’s too bad, really. I wish that I were working in a market where ramshackled shanties could be bought for a song and that remodeling brought handsome profits, but it’s too often not the case. This last part is kind of sad and it frustrates me to see one party market a house that’s been totally ignored for decades and make more than someone who’s brought a year of spit-polish and innovation into manifestation. 

So, in the end, this is kind of warning. Actually, it’s two. First, if you’re buying to fix up and remarket a house (a proud and worthy undertaking, by the way) be very, very shrewd and make those pennies squeak as they leave your hand. Be design-smart and cost conservative. 

And… If you’re a buyer, look at plenty of houses and be sure that you can live with the conditions your buying because they may not be a function of the price you’ve paid. 

I guess the good new is this. The reason all this is true is that we live in paradise. My wife and I work too much and don’t get out enough, but when we do, we realize that we live in an amazing place, rich in natural beauty, intellectual satisfaction, political righteousness and the best food on the planet. I guess we have to pay for these things and I guess we’re lucky that this lifestyle is available at any price, so I’m grateful. Cheers and Bon Appetite. 

Photograph: Matt Cantor. 

This house comes with a ‘bonus room.’

FRIDAY, OCT. 5 

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing on Fridays until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Celeste MacLeod on “Immigration in Australia, Past and Present” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. 526-2925.  

Birding with the Golden Gate Audubon Society at Jewel Lake in Tilden Regional Park Meet at 8:30 a.m. at the parking lot at north end of Central Park Dr. for a mile-long stroll through this lush riparian area. 848-9156. philajane6@yahoo.com 

“Grace Paley: 1922-2007, A Celebration” at 7 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Donations requested. 

“Confronting Empire” with Congresswomn Cynthia McKinney at 6 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowhip of Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar St. Suggested donation $10-$30. 

“Ghosts of Abu Ghraib” A documentary by Rory Kennedy at 7 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. For mature audiences only. Presented by the Bay Area Religious Campaign Against Torture and the Fr. Bill O’Donnell Social Justice Committee. 499-0537. 

“The Thursday Club” A documentary about the Oakland police in the 1960s, followed by discussion with the filmmaker, George Csicsery, at 8 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

“The Future of Food” A documentary on unlabeled, patented, genetically engineered foods at 7 p.m. at Center for UrbanPEACE, 2584 Martin Luther King Jr. Way. Q and A follows. Free. 866-732-2320. 

3rd Annual Berkeley Juggling & Unicycling Festival Fri. from 5 to 7 p.m., Sat. 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., Sun. 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at King Middle School, 1781 Rose Ave. For details see www.berkeleyjuggling.org/festival 

“Catching the Wave: Connecting East Asia Through Soft Power” Conference on ways in which culture, product branding, export projection of national cultures, athletic events, and global NGOs serve to create a more unified (or divided) Asia. Fri. and Sat. in the Toll Room, Alumni House, UC Campus. For details see http://ieas.berkeley.edu/events/2007.10.05.html 

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 

SATURDAY, OCT. 6 

Berkeley Indigenous Peoples’ Day Powwow and Indian Market, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Grand Entry at noon, at Civic Center Park, on MLK Way between Center St. and Allston Way. 595-5520. 

Berkeley Historical Society Tour of the Maybeck Estates in Kensington from 10 a.m. to noon. Cost is $8-$10. To register and for meeting place call 848-0181. 

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. at the African American Museum and Library at 659 14th St. 238-3234.  

Mini-Farmers in Tilden A farm exploration program, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. for ages 4-6 years, accompanied by an adult. We will explore the Little Farm, care for animals, do crafts and farm chores. Wear boots and dress to get dirty! Fee is $6-$8. Registration required. 1-888-EBPARKS 

Swim a Mile for Women with Cancer Fundraiser for the Women’s Cancer Resource Center Sat. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Mills College Pool, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland. For information call 601-4040, ext. 180. wcrc.org 

Political Affairs Readers Group meets to discuss “High-Tech Capitalism and the Class Struggle” by John Bachtell at 10 a.m. at the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library for Social research, 6501 Telegraph Ave. Sponsored by the CPUSA. 595-7417. 

Annual Bonsai Show and Sale Sat. from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sun. from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Lakeside Garden Center, 666 Bellevue, Oakland near Fairyland. lsolivenster@gmail.com 

Stagebridge Theatre Company’s Open House from 3 to 5 p.m. at Arts First Oakland, 2501 Harrison St., at 27th St., Oakland. 444.4577.  

Introduction to Stamp Collecting with the East Bay Collectors Club at 1:30 p.m. in the 3rd flr Community meeting Room, Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6143. 

Free Digital Fingerprinting for Children and activities for children Sat. from noon to 6 p.m., Sun. from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Hilltop Buick, 3230 Auto Plaza, Richmond. Records are given to parents.1-319-268-4044. 

Albany Tennis Tournament from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Memorial Park to raise money for the new Albany High School Men’s Tennis Team. All ages and levels are welcome to play in a doubles round robin format. Cost is $10-$25, sliding scale. BBQ lunch included. Advance sign up strongly suggested. 527-5775. bbguletz@sbcglobal.net 

Make a Miniature Japanese Kite at 2 p.m. in the Edith Stone Room, Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

“Destination Studies Class: Hawaii” from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at Berkeley City College, 2050 Center St. Cost is $10. 981-2931. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755. 

SUNDAY, OCT. 7 

Beach Impeach Join 1,500 others to spell out IMPEACH on the lawn of Cesar Chavez Park, Berkeley Marina. Arrive by 11 a.m. To sign up see www.beachimpeach.org 

Autumn Meditation Walk Guided exercises including walking meditation and quiet sitting at 9:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Solo Sierrans Hike in Tilden Meet at 3:30 p.m. at Lone Oak big parking lot for an hour & a half hike through the woods and up the hills, before we dine on Solane Ave. Rain cancels. 234-8949. 

“The Big Game” A documentary about Berkeley’s urban tree-sit at 6:55 p.m. at the Landmark California Theater, 2133 Kittredge St. 464-5983. 

ACLU B.A.R.K.+ Chapter Annual Meeting “Govenment Surveillance 2007: Where Has Privacy Gone?” with Nicole A. Ozer, Gayle McLaughlin and Barbara Zerbe MacNab from 3 to 5 p.m. at the Doubletree Hotel, Berkeley Marina. 558-0377. 

Haiti Report Back with the East Bay Sanctuary Haiti Support Committee at 2 p.m. at Epworth United Methodist Church, 1953 Hopkins St.  

CodePINK Newcomer Orientation & Activist Training at 10 a.m. at 1248 Solano Ave., Albany . RSVP to 524-2776. 

Friends of People’s Park meeting at 4 p.m. in the park at the stage. Topics include Park updates and work objectives. All are welcome.  

“Lose 5,000 Pounds” Cool the Earth Workshop from 2 to 6 p.m. at Fellowship Hall, 1924 Cedar St. at Bonita. Cost is $25. www.bfuu.org 

EcoHouse Tour of the Ecology Center’s environmentally friendly demonstration home and garden, at 10 a.m. at 1305 Hopkins St., enter via garden entrance on Peralta. Cost is $10, sliding scale, no one turned away. RSVP to 548-2220, ext. 242. ecologycenter.org 

“Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War” with Iain Boal, at 10 a.m. at Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. 595-7417. www.tifcss.org 

Rockridge Kitchen Tour of nine remodeled kitchens from Arts & Crafts to Contemporary, from 12:30 to 5:30 p.m. Register at 5951 College Ave at Harwood. Tickets are $30-$40. www.rockridge.org 

“Driving Public Policy to Improve End-of-Life Care” with former US Assistant Attorney General Robert Raben, at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge. 981-6100. www.compassionandchoicesnca.org 

Booksigning: “Yoga as Medicine” with Timothy McCall, M.D. at 1 p.m. at Elephant Pharm Berkeley, 1607 Shattuck Ave. 549-9200. 

Free Hands-on Bicycle Repair Class Learn how to do a safety inspection. Bring your bicycle and tools. At 10 a.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712.  

“Poetry and the Spiritual Journey” with Barbara Hamilton-Holway at 10 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302, ext. 306. 

Tibetan Buddhism with Rosalyn White on “From the Roof of the World: Saving Tibet’s Culture” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812.  

Sew Your Own Open Studio Come learn to use our industrial and domestic machines, or work on your own projects, from 5 to 9 p.m. at 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. Cost is $3 per hour. 644-2577.  

MONDAY, OCT. 8 

Berkeley Green Monday meets to discuss “ Think Global - Act Local. Go Green at Work, at Home and at the Beach!” with Babak Jacinto Tondre of EcoHouse & Graywater Systems, Ecology Center; Pamela Evans of Green Business Program, Alameda County; Patty Donald of Marina Experience Programs, City of Berkeley, at 7:30 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Free. 848-4681. 

“Faith, Politics and Passion” with John L. Bell from the Iona community in Scotland at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. 848-3696. 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St.548-0425. 

Free Boatbuilding Classes for Youth Mon.-Wed. from 3 to 7 p.m. at Berkeley Boathouse, 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. Classes cover woodworking, boatbuilding, and boat repair. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

TUESDAY, OCT. 9 

Tuesdays for the Birds Tranquil bird walks in local parklands, led by Bethany Facendini, from 7 to 9:30 a.m. Today we will visit Eastshore State Park and the Albany Bulb. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233. 

Birding Class on Owls Learn about their habits and habitats, then look for them on Sat. field trips. Classes are Oct. 9, 16, and 23 at 7 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, Oak at 10th St., Oakland. Field trips are Oct. 20 and 27. Offered in conjunction with the Audubon Society. Fee is $50. To register call 843-2222.  

“Tracking the Nation’s Groundwater Reserves” with William M. Alley of the U.S. Geological Survey at 5:30 p.m. in Room 112, Wurster Hall, UC Campus. 642-2666. 

“The Hidden Humor in Holy Scripture” with John L. Bell from the Iona community in Scotland at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. 848-3696. 

Berkeley School Volunteers Orientation from 4 to 5 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. Come learn about volunteer opportunities. 644-8833. 

End the Occupation Vigil every Tues. at noon at Oakland Federal Bldg., 1301 Clay St. www.epicalc.org 

Street Level Cycles Community Bike Program Come use our tools as well as receive help with performing repairs free of charge. Youth classes available. Tues., Thurs., and Sat. from 2 to 6 p.m. at at 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

Family Storytime at 7 p.m. at Kensington Library. 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043.  

Community Sing-a-Long every Tues, at 2 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. 524-9122.  

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, OCT. 10 

Walking Tour of Historic Oakland Churches and Temples Meet at 10 a.m. at the front of the First Presbyterian Church at 2619 Broadway. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning Colloquium with Stephen R.J. Sheppard on “Global Warming in Everyday Places: Localizing, Spatializing, and Visualizing Climate Change” at 1 p.m. at Wurster Hall, Room 315A, UC Campus. All welcome. laep.ced.berkeley.edu/events/colloquium 

Pools for Berkeley meets to discuss the possibilities of an aquatic center at West Campus at 7 p.m. at City of Berkeley Corporation Yard, Public Meeting Room, 1326 Allston Way. All welcome. Childcare for ages 5 and up. www.poolsforberkeley.org 

“Matewan” A film about labor and race in a West Virginia mining town at 8 p.m. at Long Haul Infoshop, 3124 Shatttuck Ave. www.thelonghaul.org 

An Introduction to Marxism, a free class for beginners and students at every level from 6:30 to 9 p.m. at Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. 595-7417. www.tifcss.org 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. 548-9840. 

THURSDAY, OCT. 11 

“Hidden History of the East Bay: Photographs Tell Towns’ Stories” at 1 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts., Oakland. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

Tilden Mini-Rangers Hiking, conservation and nature-based activities for ages 8-12. Dress to ramble and get dirty. From 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 1-888-327-2757. 

35th Anniversary Celebration of Harbor House with Dr. Tony Campolo from 6 to 9 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church of Oakland, 2619 Broadway at 27th St., Oakland. Tickets are $30-$40, available from Harbor House, 1811, 11th Avenue, Oakland. 534-0165. 

University of California Press Book Sale from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 2120 Berkeley Way, one block north of University, between Shattuck and Oxford. www.ucpress.edu 

Jack London Aquatic Center Community Challenge and fundraiser to inspire diverse communiteis to participate in water sports, at 5 p.m. at Jack London Aquatic Center. For information call 208-6067. 

Food + Farming Film “Our Daily Bread” and “We Feed the World” with San Francisco area breadbakers Steve Sullivan, founder Acme Breads, and Julie Cummins, CUESA, at 6:40 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. at Arch.  

Benefit for Sickle Cell Disease and Thalassemia Programs at Children’s Hospital & Research Center with an Evening Under the Stars at Chabot Space & Science Center. Tickets are $40-$90. 428-3452. www.childrenshospitaloakland.org 

“How to Have a Healthy Childbirth” at 5:30 p.m. at Pharmaca, 1744 Solano Ave. 527-8929. 

World of Plants Tours Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $5. 643-2755.  

CITY MEETINGS 

City Council meets Tues., Oct. 9, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers. 981-6900. www. 

ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Commission on Disability meets Wed., Oct. 10, at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-6346. TDD: 981-6345.  

Homeless Commission meets Wed., Oct. 10, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5426.  

Planning Commission meets Wed., Oct. 10, Oct. 24 at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7484.  

Waterfront Commission meets Wed., Oct. 10, at 7 p.m., at 201 University Ave. 981-6740.  

Downtown Area Plan Advisory Commission meets Thurs. Oct. 11, at 7 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7487. 

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., Oct. 11, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. 981-7410.  

TUESDAY, OCT. 2 

EXHIBITIONS 

Berkeley Public Library Staff Art Show on display to Oct. 28 at the Central Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6100. www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org 

FILM 

“Miss Navajo” reception at 6 p.m., film at 6:30 p.m. followed by discussion, at Oakland Museum of California, Oak at 10th St., Oakland. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

Vintage Films: “Lawrence of Arabia” at noon and 6:30 p.m. at Piedmont Cinema, 4186 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. 464-5980. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti reads at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

“The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America” with author Peter Dale Scott at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Brass Menazheri/The Greg & Aya Band at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Balkan dance lesson at 7:30 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

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

Tessa Loehwing, jazz, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

Tessa Loehwing at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198. San Francisco, SoVoSo at 8 p.m. and Paula West, Steve Heckman Quartet at 10 p.m. in at benefit for the Alzheimers Association at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $25-$35. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

WEDNESDAY, OCT. 3 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Hand of the Artist” Paintings, photography, sculptural basketry and jewelry. Reception at 6 p.m. at Royal Ground Gallery, 2058 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. 841-0441. 

FILM 

Vintage Films: “The Last Picture Show” at 1 and 7 p.m. at Piedmont Cinema, 4186 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. 464-5980. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Reese Erlich describes “The Iran Agenda: The Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik and Three Blind Mice, at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Enchante String Quartet at noon at Oakland City Center, 12th and Broadway. www.oaklandcitycenter.com 

Dan Stanton Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $9. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Whiskey Brothers, old-time and bluegrass at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

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

The Websters & Scott Nygaard at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Mikie Lee and Amber at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

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

THURSDAY, OCT. 4 

THEATER 

“Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” written and performed by Amy Wong, Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $7-$15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

Brick & Mortar: Bay Area Sculptural Abstracts Works by Stephen Day, David O. Johnson, Christopher Loomis, and Florian Roeper. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Pro Arts Gallery, 550 Second St. Oakland. 763-4361.  

FILM 

Into the Labyrinth: The Films of Jan Svankmajer at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Free screening. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“Boarding Gate” with Oliver Assayas and Jean-Michel Frodon in conversation at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Vintage Films: “Star Trek IV: THe Voyage Home” at 1 and 7 p.m. at Piedmont Cinema, 4186 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. 464-5980. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Lunch Poems with John Matthais at 12:10 p.m. at the Morrison Library, inside the Doe Library, UC Campus. 642-0137. 

5 Cave Canem Poets from the African American community at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720. 

Artist Talk with Rosalind Nashashibi at 6 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum Galleries, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-8734. 

Ann Aurelia Lopez discusses her book “The Farmworkers’ Journey” at 7 p.m. at Revolution Books, 2425-C Channing Way. 848-1196.  

Jeffrey Toobin introduces “The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court” at 7:30 p.m. in Chevron Auditorium, International House, 2299 Piedmont Ave. Tickets are $5 available from Cody’s. 559-9500. 

Gary Braasch describes “Earth Under Fire: How Global Warming is Changing the World” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Bayonics, Culver City Dub Collective at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Joffrey Ballet at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $34-$90. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Global Conversations: Kala Ramnath & George Brooks at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Wendy Dewitt, blues, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Denisa Fraga & Kristan Lynch at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $9. 841-JAZZ. 

Pirate Radio, Scotland Barr and the Slow Drags at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082 w 

Rahsaan Patterson at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $24-$28. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

FRIDAY, OCT. 5 

THEATER 

California Shakespeare Theater “King Lear” at the Bruns Ampitheater, 100 Gateway Blvd., Orinda, through Oct. 14. Tickets are $15-$60. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

Contra Costa Civic Theatre “Rumors” by Neil Simon, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., selected Sundays at 2 p.m. at 951 Pomona Ave. at Moeser, El Cerrito, through Oct. 14. Tickets are $11-$18. 655-8974. www.cct.org 

Impact Theatre “Sleepy” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave., through Oct. 13. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. 

Masquers Playhouse “4 Plays by Peter Levy” Fri. at 8 p.m., Sat. at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sun. at 2:30 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond. Q&A with the playwright at the Sat. eve. performance. Tickets are $10. 232-3888. www.masquers.org 

Ragged Wing Ensemble “Alice in Wonderland” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Envision Academy, 1515 Webster St., Oakland, through Oct. 13. Tickets are $15-$30. 800-838-3006. www.raggedwing.org 

Shotgun Players “Bulrusher” Thurs.-Sun. at 8 p.m. at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. through Oct. 28. Tickets are $17-$25. For reservations call 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

“Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” written and performed by Amy Wong, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12-$15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“The Quilts of Dorothy Vance” On display Fri. from 5 to 8 p.m., and Sat. from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. 

Tea Pot Show Works by members of the Potters’ Studio in celebration of their 35th Anniversary. Opening reception at 5:30 p.m. at 637 Cedar St. 528-3286. 

“A Class Act CCA-C” A group art show by students from California College of the Arts. Opening reception at 5:30 p.m. at Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th St. 465-8928. 

“Works by Keira Kotler and Jenn Shifflet” Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, 25 Grand Ave., upper level, Oakland. Exhibition runs through Nov. 17. www.chandracerrito.com 

New Works by Peter Honig and Ce Ce Landoli Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Mercury 20 Gallery, 25 Grand Ave. at Broadway, Oakland. 701-4620. 

First Annual Oakland Arts Day Ceremony and Reception at 5 p.m. at Oakland City Hall, 1 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza at 14th St, & Broadway. RSVP to 238-7561. 

FILM 

Berkeley Video & Film Fest Independent cinema from around the world continuous sreenings Fri.-Sun. at California Theater, 2113 Kittredge St. 464-5983. http://berkeleyvideofilmfest.org 

“Irma Vep” with filmmaker Oliver Assayas and film historian Jean-Michel Frodon in conversation at 6:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Sunset Cinema: “Piece by Piece” on San Francisco’s graffiti art movement at 6:30 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, Oak at 10th St., Oakland. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

Midnight Movies “Office Space” Fri. and Sat. at midnight at Piedmont Cinema, 4186 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Cost is $8. 464-5980. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Wendy Tokunaga introduces her novel “Midori by Moonlight” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Oakland Opera Theater “Turn of the Screw” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Oakland Metro Operahouse, 630 3rd. St., through Oct. 14. Tickets are $25. 763-1146.  

The Korean Traditional Dance Company at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. No ticket required. 642-5674. 

Ric Alexander, jazz fusion, at 5 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, Oak at 10th St., Oakland. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

Tin/Bag plus Chris Brown, Phillip Greenlief & Donald Robinson at 8 p.m. at Free-Jazz Fridays at the Jazz House, 1510 8th St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$15. 415-846-9432. 

Yore Folk Dance Ensemble “Semah” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. tickets are $15-$25. 925-798-1300. 

Joffrey Ballet at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $34-$90. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Dwele and Melissa Young at 8:30 p.m. at Kimball’s Carnival, 522 2nd St., Jack London Square. Tickets are $30. 444-6979. www.kimballscarnival.com 

Michael Smolens & KRIYA at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $15. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Robinson, Brown & Greenlief in Trio at 8 p.m. at Free-Jazz Fridays at the Jazz House, 1510 8th St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$15. 415-846-9432. 

Youssoupha Sideibe and Shimshai, West African kora, at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12-$15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Tamra Engle, rock, folk, at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Australian Bebop Ragas at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

The Brothers Goldman at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Jeff Rolka and Robert Heiskell at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Berkeley Django Reinhardt Hot Jazz Festival at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $12. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Modern Life is War, Trap Them, Trash Talk at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

The Dave Stein Hub-Bub at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Ben Adams Quintet at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Rahsaan Patterson at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $24-$28. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, OCT. 6 

CHILDREN  

Michael Katz, storyteller, at 10:30 a.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 3rd floor, Community Meeting Room, 2090 Kittredge St. 

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with Jerry Kennedy, aka J-Soul at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5 for adults, $4 for children. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Active Arts Theatre for Young Audiences “James and the Giant Peach” Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m., Mon. at 11:30 a.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $14-$18. 925-798-1300. 

“Short Attention Span Circus” Acrobatics and juggling by Jean Paul Valjean Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave. 452-2259. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“The Quilts of Dorothy Vance” On display from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. 

“One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now” Sign-language interpreted tour at 1:30 p.m.at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. 

“Cross Currents: Artists of Alameda” Opening reception at 1 p.m. at Alameda Museum gallery, 2324 Alameda Ave. 865-0541. 

21st Annual Emeryville Art Exhibition A showcase for more than 90 artists who live or work in Emeryville opens at EmeryStation East, 2nd Floor, 5885 Hollis St., Emeryville, and runs to Oct. 28. 652-6122. www.emeryarts.com  

“Counter Intuitive: Photographs by Susan Tuttle” Opening reception at 3 p.m. at Montclair Gallery, 1986 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. 339-4286. 

FILM 

Berkeley Video & Film Fest Independent cinema from around the world, Sat. and Sun. from 1 to 9:45 p.m. at California Theater, 2113 Kittredge St. 464-5983. http://berkeleyvideofilmfest.org 

“The Big Game” A documentary about Berkeley’s urban tree-sit at 6:55 p.m. at the Landmark California Theater, 2133 Kittredge St. 464-5983. 

“demonlover” with filmmaker Oliver Assayas and film historian Jean-Michel Frodon in conversation at 6:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

The Third Baby Beat Poetry Festival featuring Judy Wells, Neeli Cherkovski, H.D. Moe & Blake More from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at The Humanist Fellowship Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Free. 528-8713. 

Bay Area Poets Coalition Annual Contest and Poetry Reading from 3 to 5 p.m. at Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison St. Park on the street, not in Lodge parking lot. 527-9905.  

Oliver Chin reads from his latest work “Julie Black Belt, The Kungfu Chronicles” at 3 p.m. at Eastwind Books of Berkeley 2066 University Ave. 548-2350. 

Poetry Flash with Tung-Hui Hu and Mari l’Esperance at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Erica Weber, soprano, performs the works of Mozart, Brahms, Schubert at 8 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana St. Tickets are $8-$12. 549-3864. www. 

trinitychamberconcerts.com 

Women’s Antique Vocal Ensemble “Transitions: Spanish Influence in the New World” at 8 p.m. at St. Albert Priory Chapel, 6172 Chabot Rd., Oak land. Tickets are $10-$15. www.wavewomen.org  

“Melody of China” Premiering compositions by Gang Situ and Yuanlin Chen at 7:30 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. Tickets are $10-$18. 415-681-8599. www.melodyofchina.org 

Gamelan Sekar Jaya Music and dance of Bali, at 8 p.m. at Oakland Asian Cultural Center, 11th St. between Franklin and Webster in the Pacific Renaissance Plaza in Oakland's Chinatown. Tickets are $6-$12. 237-6849. www.gsj.org 

Joffrey Ballet at 2 and 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $34-$90. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Beep with Michael Coleman jazz, at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $5. 843-2473.  

Tanaora at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ.  

Melodians, reggae, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15-$18. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Sotaque Baiano, Brazilian, at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $10. 548-1159. www.shattuckdownlow.com 

Jessica Rice and Stevie Barsotti at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Veretski Pass at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Faye Carol at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Royal Hawaiian Serenaders at 9 p.m. at Temple Bar Tiki Bar & Grill, 984 University Ave. 548-9888. 

Sugar Shack at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Tried and True, Troublemaker, Call to Arms, at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, OCT. 7 

CHILDREN 

Asheba at Ashkenaz at 3 p.m. Cost is $4-$6. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Rosemary Wells reads from her new books including “Mother Gooses’s Little Treasures” at 4 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

“The Panchatantra: Animal Lessons from India” at 12:30 and 3:30 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave. 452-2259. 

EXHIBITIONS 

Berkeley Treasures: Three Generations of Printmakers Works by Emmanuel Montoya, Miriam Stahl and Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Opening reception at 2 p.m. at Berkeley art Center, 1275 Walnut St. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

“One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now” Guided tour at 2 p.m.at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. 

Michael-Che Swisher “Animals of Tilden” Artist talk at 2 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

21st Annual Emeryville Art Exhibition featuring more than 90 artists who live or work in Emeryville. Reception at 6 p.m. at EmeryStation East, 2nd Floor, 5885 Hollis Street, Emeryville. 652-6122. www.emeryarts.com  

FILM 

Berkeley Video & Film Fest Independent cinema from around the world, from 1 to 10 p.m. at California Theater, 2113 Kittredge St. 464-5983. http://berkeleyvideofilmfest.org 

“Cold Water” with filmmaker Oliver Assayas and film historian Jean-Michel Frodon in conversation at 3 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“A Celebration of Odd and Hilarious Found Videos” at 5 p.m. at Parkway Theater, 1834 Park Blvd., Oakland. Tickets: $8. 814-2400. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Prometheus Symphony Orchestra at 3 p.m. at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Montecito and Grand Ave., Oakland. 415-864-2151. 

Paul Hanson, bassoon, Steve Erquiaga, guitar, perform music of Brazil, Eastern Europe and more at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center 1275 Walnut St. Cost is $8-$10. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

Oakland Opera Theater “Turn of the Screw” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Oakland Metro Operahouse, 630 3rd St., through Oct. 14. Tickets are $25. 763-1146.  

Slammin’ the Infinite & Citta Di Vitti featuring Steve Swell & Sabir Mateen at 8 p.m. at 1510 8th Street Performance Space, Oakland. Cost is $10-$15. 415-846-9432.rob@thejazzhouse.com 

Esteban Bello, Meli Rivera, Ray Cepeda and other, noon to sundown on Edith St. just off Cedar. Look for balloons. Benefits “The Children of Chaguitillo Nicaragua” Cost is $12. 472-3170. 

Benny Watson Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Americana Unplugged: The BAckyard Party Boys at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

William Beatty and The Unconditionals at 6:30 p.m. at The Mt. Everest Restaurant 2011 Shattuck Ave. at University. 665-6035. 

Duamuxa and Rafael Manriquez recounting a musical history of the Chilean presence in California, at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

John Handy at 4:30 at the Jazzschool. Cost is $20. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

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

MONDAY, OCT. 8 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Express with May Garron and Terry McCarty at 7 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Four Seasons Concerts presents Joyce Yang at 7:30 p.m. at Regents Theatre, Valley Center for Performing Arts at Holy Names University. Tickets are $30-$40. 601-7919. www.fourseasonsconcerts.com 

Ric & Yolanda, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Viva Brasil at 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

The Oakland Opera Theater will present Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw this weekend as the inaugural opera in their new theater space at 630 Third St. Because of the company’s commitment to producing opera that is meaningful to the community, director Tom Dean, in concert with production manager Mia Steadman, has reworked the setting of this ghost story set in Victorian England by placing the opera’s action on a remote plantation in Louisiana. 

Britten and his librettist Myfanwy Piper made substantial changes to the original Henry James’ novella, which is atmospheric, eerie, and full of unresolved innuendo. It’s uncertain in James whether or not the narrator/governess is truly seeing ghosts or if those ghosts are determined to take over the lives of the children as she imagines. In the opera the ghosts exist as real characters, the governess may be a hysteric but what she sees and imagines are true.  

Further, the ghosts are surely evil: their intent is to corrupt the children’s innocence. Peter Quint, the dead valet, sings “I seek a friend—/Obedient to follow where I lead, / Slick as a juggler’s mate to catch my thought, / Proud, curious, agile, he shall feed / My mounting power.” The former governess/ghost is just as unsavory, and the two sing a repeating refrain from Yeats’ Second Coming: “The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” 

As if to emphasize this theme of innocence under threat, Piper has the children sing nursery rhymes, which bear a suggestion of violence or sexuality. The text of the focal song of Miles’ struggle with sexual abjection is taken from schoolboys’ rhyming grammatical rules of Latin, which according to librettist Piper were from a Latin primer that belonged to her aunt: “Malo … I would rather be/ Malo … in an apple tree / Malo … than a naughty boy / Malo … in adversity.” The children’s songs like much of the opera’s music contrasts the charming and ethereal against the dark and obsessive. 

In return, the ghosts Quint and Miss Jessel speak to the children in mythic and fairy tale metaphors: “The little mermaid weeping on the sill / Gerda and Psyche seeking their loves again.” Their melodies rising in lingering runs and ornamentation. 

Britten’s opera is tightly structured in a prologue and 16 scenes that are separated by a theme and 15 short musical variations that sketch out the meaning of the scenes through a musical motif that uses the 12 notes of the chromatic scale ascending and descending. The celestina describes the motif linked to Peter Quint, which falls on the listener’s ear like fairy dust. 

Oakland Opera’s choice to relocate this Victorian haunting was made not only with the desire to Americanize the opera but also because of Louisiana’s rich European history as well as the Southern plantation’s suggestive setting—both spooky and beautiful. Within the company’s new space, which has twice the square footage of the Oakland Metro, the company’s artistic team have built both plantation house and a swamp to replace the lake where the governess and Flora first see the apparition of Miss Jessel. 

Only one major change in the libretto has been made to accommodate the setting: the housekeeper Mrs. Grose, the source of the opera’s kindness and stability, has been transformed to Mama Grose, an African American slave. The ghosts are represented by the aerial team The Starlings Trapese Duo.  

Britten’s score calls for a 13-piece chamber orchestra of winds and strings, with harp, piano and celestina, and a full range of percussion instruments, from glockenspiel to timpani. Unable to find an orchestral reduction, musical director Deirdre McClure opted for the full orchestration, which was now possible given the larger space of the company’s new theater. The orchestration is very compact in the original, with the burden of dynamics placed in the percussion, and strings and woodwinds creating the haunting melodic atmosphere of the ghost story. 

One of the major stumbling blocks to mounting the opera was finding children who could sing the roles of Flora and Miles. After two months of auditions, the role was double cast for two pairs of children: Brooks Fisher and Madelaine Matej, and Nick Kempen and Kelty Morash. All four children have sung the roles before; Nick and Kelty appearing in the 2007 Adler Fellows production at the Lincoln Theater in Napa. 

Soprano Anja Strauss sings the governess and was chosen for her crystal clear and vibrant sound. Lori Willis sings Mama Grose. “Her rich silvery sound blends beautifully with Anja’s,” said Mia Steadman, who added that “this is the best cast we have ever had.”  

Miss Jessel is sung by Marta Johansen, whose lyric soprano “sounds like water” in the role’s lower passages. Tenor Gerald Seminatore, whose engagements have included performances with the Glimmerglass and Santa Fe Opera, sings the complexly evocative role of Peter Quint, which was debuted by Peter Pears in the original 1954 production staged at La Fenice in Venice.  

Photograph by Ralph Granich. 

Kelty Morash in The Turn of the Screw.

The crown, as conceived of in Shakespeare,” Orson Welles said, “bears a very special kind of magic ... [Shakespeare] spent years getting himself a coat of arms. He wrote mostly about kings. We can’t have a great Shakespearean theatre in America anymore, because it’s impossible for today’s American actors to comprehend what Shakespeare meant by ‘king.’ They think a king is just a gentleman who finds himself wearing a crown and sitting on a throne.” 

As far as this goes—and Welles touches on one of the crucial ideas, one in crisis, of Shakespeare’s time—it reflects on how the CalShakes production of King Lear, onstage now in Orinda, has made a virtue out of that incomprehension by adapting the tale (which The Bard himself pieced together from legendary sources) to the America of the 1920s, flush with success (and lucre) from the “adventure” of the First World War—with Lear as a Captain of Industry (or Robber Baron) surrounded by military men and advisors in silk hats and cutaways, on a set of girdered colonnades and oil drums, haunted by the down-and-out. There’s a whiff of the Teapot Dome Scandal hovering in the background, and Lear (in a finely nuanced performance by Jeffrey DeMunn, oft-seen in character on the big screen, TV and the New York stage) expresses himself with the impatience, even impetuosity, of the self-made man, rather than with the regal gesture of those to the manner born. 

There’s great clarity to this production, as directed by Lisa Peterson (with the dramaturgical assistance of Shakespearean scholar Philippa Kelly), a clarity of line running through the complex actions, of gesture in the interaction of characters, and of speech, so crucial, in a performing arts milieu that is often content with “Festivalese” rushes of uninflected verse and hackneyed or tossed off expressions and “body language.” 

There’s been some criticism that an otherwise admirable show has sacrificed the true poetry and drama of the play. What is true is that the CalShakes production isn’t operatic and concentrates on meaning, on the coherence of the wild pitch and yaw of the poetry and the range of characters and situations comprising one vast (and easily overwrought) drama, which it manages to scan briskly, with driving rhythms, never leaving a moment free of absorbing interest. Nearly three hours pass without the weariness of the wait for great moments. And when those great moments come, they’re integrated into the whole, not played up like a wind-lashed, illuminated banner, flapping in the dark and stormy night—but in a very human space that can hold in tableau these diverse and difficult personalities in a world breaking up on the rocks of personal extravagance. 

It’s a little unfair to single out a few in the uniformly hard-working cast of more than 20, but besides DeMunn’s excellent Lear, mention should go to the hot and cool team of daughters who put Lear out on the heath, Delia MacDougall and Julie Eccles; to James Carpenter’s upright—and terribly wrong—Gloucester; Erik Lochtefield as Gloucester’s foppish son feigning mad indigence (one of Lochtefield’s best performances yet); and Anthony Fusco as a Fool half second banana, half racetrack tout. 

The rest of those in name roles—Sarah Nealis, Andy Murray, Andrew Hurteau, L. Peter Callendar—give much to the delineation of their characters, and add to the impressive ensemble’s unity, as Liam Vincent, as Oswald, the least of the named roles, does by showing the smarmy snobbishness that masks cowardice. 

Only Edmund, Gloucester’s bastard son, played (and played very well) by Ravi Kapoor as Al Pacino-doing-Scarface, doesn’t strike the right note. One of Shakespeare’s “incomprehensibly” evil villains, who addresses the audience a fair bit, Edmund in this interpretation falls down (as the title role in the CalShakes’ Richard III did, earlier this summer) seemingly to a cultural phenomenon. After several generations spent trying to make such caricaturish roles “believable,” once directors and actors caught on that Shakespeare was playing with types (right out of the allegorical medieval theater which preceded him by only a generation or two), they took up the concept. But they ran with it a little too far, playing everything over the top, too cartoonish, losing, amid the sound and fury, The Bard’s Manneristic purpose for placing an allegorical type next to—or within the same role as—a flesh and blood character. 

Alexander V. Nichols’ lights, Paul James Prendergast’s sound and original music and Meg Neville’s costumes all add to the overall effect—as Rachel Hauck’s remarkable set especially does. This is one of the rare productions of Lear which catches the whole sweep of this prodigious drama.

A few weeks back I got a nice e-mail message from Fran Haselsteiner (and belated thanks to you), which read in part:  

“What I would like to know is: What happened to all the mourning doves? When I moved to Berkeley in the mid-’80s, they were everywhere. Now they seem to have been replaced by crows, which weren’t here in large numbers then. What gives?” 

Good question, or set of questions. I have to admit that I hadn’t been paying close attention to the mourning doves. We used to have them in the yard, and they nested, or attempted to nest, on the block; they weren’t very good at construction or maintenance. But lately? And how long has it been since the last sighting? 

The decline of the doves, if there is a decline, has been a lot more subtle than the rise of the crows. I have a 1971 checklist showing the American crow as an occasional visitor to the Berkeley Hills, defined so as to include the UC campus. Now they’re ubiquitous, hanging out in raucous flocks, gathering silently on wires like a road-show company of The Birds, playing crowball at the new Derby Street athletic field. (Crowball is a leisurely sport that involves a lot of standing around in the grass.) West Nile was supposed to have thinned their ranks, but it doesn’t look like that’s happened.  

The crows inspire a fair amount of alarm in some people, at the least a concern that they’re raiding the nests of other, more desirable species. And they may be for all I know. I don’t know if anyone has been studying them. There might be a causal relationship between crow abundance and dove scarcity. But you have to be careful about such assumptions; multiple variables may be in play.  

Consider the hawks, for example. This town is a more hospitable place for hawks than you might think, at least for Cooper’s hawks. Ralph Pericoli, who helps run the Cooper’s Hawk Intensive Nesting Survey for the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory, says 13 pairs of these mid-sized hawks nested or attempted to nest in Berkeley this year; the average is 11. That’s one of the highest densities recorded in any urban area. 

The hawks seem to have adapted behaviorally to the city setting. “They were once considered a secretive species of the deep forest,” says Pericoli. You couldn’t get anywhere near their wildland nests without setting off the parent hawks. But in Berkeley, they’re unfazed by pedestrians, barking dogs, or traffic noises. 

Pericoli speculates that the Cooper’s hawk density may be related to the life cycle of street trees; enough trees have become mature enough to look like good nest sites. Then, too, people aren’t shooting at them. Our urban chicken farmers are less prone than their rural counterparts to blast any passing hawk out of the sky. 

There’s also abundant hawk chow here. Although Coops, especially young ones, may take rodents (two juveniles that died this summer were found to have lethal doses of brodifacoum, a potent rat poison, in their livers), they’re primarily bird-eaters. A hunting hawk’s beat will include all the local birdfeeders.  

And their favorite prey? According to a 2003 survey of the contents of coughed-up pellets, that would be a near tie between the mourning dove (24.4 percent of 455 prey remains) and the American robin (23.4 per cent.) Rock pigeons, western scrub-jays, and house sparrows accounted for most of the rest of the prey samples. 

So are the hawks responsible for the decline of the doves? Again, I don’t know if there’s any data. So many other things can affect bird populations: changes in habitat (less open space for foraging?), changes in climate, diseases. And sometimes we just don’t have a clue.  

This is a roundabout way of admitting that I have no answers for Fran Haselsteiner. But her letter has gotten me ruminating about changes in Berkeley’s bird fauna over time, and reviewing some old references. And it looks like this may turn into a string of columns. 

Next time out: whatever happened to the yellow warblers? 

If anyone knows of a local nest, or singing males that appeared to be on territory, or any sightings outside the spring and fall migration periods, I’d like to hear about it.  

Photograph by Ron Sullivan. 

A pair of mourning doves: declining in Berkeley? 

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

TUESDAY, OCT. 2 

Tuesdays for the Birds Tranquil bird walks in local parklands, led by Bethany Facendini, from 7 to 9:30 a.m. Today we will visit Tilden. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233. 

“What Islam, Whose Islam? The Struggle for Women’s Rights within a Religious Framework & the Experience of Sisters in Islam” with Zainah Anwar, Executive Director, Sisters in Islam, Malaysia, at 4 p.m. in the Home Room, International House, 2299 Piedmont Ave. Co-sponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Center for South Asian Studies. 

“Reese Erlich Day” Benefit Dinner at 7:30 p.m. at Saigon Restaurant, 326 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza. Cost is $50 per person or $80 per couple and includes one copy of the book “The Iran Agenda” and a CD of the new “Making Contact” radio documentary. RSVP to 251-1332, ext. 105. 

“Reincarnation and Buddhism” A series of three talks with Reverend Harry Bridge, Lodi Buddhist Temple, on Oct. 2, 16, and 30 at 7 p.m. at the Jodo Shinshu Center, 2140 Durant Ave. at Fulton St. Cost is $20 for the series. 809-1460. 

Berkeley High School Governance Council meets to discuss proposed changes to the bylaws and the advisory plan, at 4:15 p.m. in the Community Theater Lobby. 644-4803. 

End the Occupation Vigil every Tues. at noon at Oakland Federal Bldg., 1301 Clay St. www.epicalc.org 

Family Storytime at 7 p.m. at Kensington Library. 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043.  

Community Sing-a-Long every Tues, at 2 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. 524-9122.  

Street Level Cycles Community Bike Program Come use our tools as well as receive help with performing repairs free of charge. Youth classes available. Tues., Thurs., and Sat. from 2 to 6 p.m. at at 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

Tuesday Documentaries at 7 p.m. at the Gaia Arts Center, 2120 Allston Way. Donation of $5 benefits the Berkeley Food and Housing Project. 665-0305. 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, OCT. 3 

Walking Tour of Oakland City Center Meet at 10 a.m. in front Oakland City Hall at Frank Ogawa Plaza. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. 

El Sabor de Fruitvale with a farmers’ market, bilingual storytelling with puppets, face painting, free books for children and information on community services from 3 to 7 p.m. at Fruitvale Village Plaza, 3411 East 12th St., Oakland. 535-6900. www.unitycouncil.org  

“The Revolt Against Consumerism” Author and journalist Tim Holt will speak on the Hillside Movement at 6 p.m. at the North Berkeley Branch Library, 1170 The Alameda at Hopkins. 981-6250. 

“The Darwin Awards” a film comedy, at 7:30 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Cost is $5. 843-8724. 

Friends of Albany Library Membership Meeting with a celebration of the publication of “Images of America: Albany” by Karen Sorensen at 7:30 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720. 

Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning Colloquium with Clare Cooper-Marcus on “Healing Gardens and Restorative Landscapes: The Links to Physical Health and Psychological Wholeness” at 1 p.m. at Wurster Hall, Room 315A, UC Campus. All welcome. laep.ced. 

berkeley.edu/events/colloquium 

“Responsibilities of Global Citizenship” Dinner and reception for I-House director Martin Brennan, at 5:30 p.m. at Chevron Auditorium, International House, Piedmont Ave. Cost is $15. 642-4128. 

Stagebridge Theater at the monthly birthday party at 1:15 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. 981-5190. 

Writer Coach Connection Volunteers needed to help Berkeley students improve their writing and critical thinking skills from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. To register call 524-2319. www.writercoachconnection.org  

Red Cross Blood Services Volunteer Orientation from 10 a.m. to noon at 6230 Claremont Ave., Oakland. Registration required. 594-5165. 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome. 548-9840. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at 6:30 p.m. at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center.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, OCT. 4 

BOSS Graduation Formerly homeless graduates celebrate new homes, jobs and lives at 6 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Includes entertainment and dinner. 649-1930. 

El Cerrito Conversation on Climate Action, a part of the National Conversation on Climate Action, at 6 p.m. at Cerrito Theater’s It Club Too, 10070 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. www.climateconversation.org 

Stop the Proposed BP-UC Berkeley Deal! Gather at the Kroeber Fountain with signs at 11:30 a.m. for a noon rally at a biofuel conference at the Bancroft Hotel, 2680 Bancroft. stopbp-berkeley.org 

Berkeley School Volunteers Orientation from 10 to 11 a.m. at 1835 Allston Way. Come learn about volunteer opportunities. 644-8833. 

“Natural Medicine and Hormone Testing” at 6 p.m. at Pharmaca, 1744 Solano Ave. 527-8929. 

World of Plants Tours Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $5. 643-2755.  

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Club meets at 6:45 p.m. at Spud’s Pizza, 3290 Adeline at Alcatraz. namaste@ 

avatar.freetoasthost.info  

FRIDAY, OCT. 5 

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing on Fridays until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Celeste MacLeod on “Immigration in Australia, Past and Present” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. 526-2925.  

Birding with the Golden Gate Audubon Society at Jewel Lake in Tilden Regional Park Meet at 8:30 a.m. at the parking lot at north end of Central Park Dr. for a mile-long stroll through this lush riparian area. 848-9156. philajane6@yahoo.com 

“Ghosts of Abu Ghraib” A documentary by Rory Kennedy at 7 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. For mature audiences only. Presented by the Bay Area Religious Campaign Against Torture and the Fr. Bill O’Donnell Social Justice Committee. 499-0537. 

“The Thursday Club” A documentary about the Oakland police in the 1960s, followed by discussion with the filmmaker, George Csicsery, at 8 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

3rd Annual Berkeley Juggling & Unicycling Festival Fri. from 5 to 7 p.m., Sat. 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., Sun. 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at King Middle School, 1781 Rose Ave. For details see www.berkeleyjuggling.org/festival 

“Catching the Wave: Connecting East Asia Through Soft Power” Conference on ways in which culture, product branding, export projection of national cultures, athletic events, and global NGOs serve to create a more unified (or divided) Asia. Fri. and Sat. in the Toll Room, Alumni House, UC Campus. For details see http://ieas.berkeley.edu/events/2007.10.05.html 

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 

SATURDAY, OCT. 6 

Berkeley Indigenous Peoples’ Day Powwow and Indian Market, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Grand Entry at noon, at Civic Center Park, on MLK Way between Center St. and Allston Way. 595-5520. 

Berkeley Historical Society Tour of the Maybeck Estates in Kensington from 10 a.m. to noon. Cost is $8-$10. To register and for meeting place call 848-0181. 

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. at the African American Museum and Library at 659 14th St. 238-3234.  

Mini-Farmers in Tilden A farm exploration program, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. for ages 4-6 years, accompanied by an adult. We will explore the Little Farm, care for animals, do crafts and farm chores. Wear boots and dress to get dirty! Fee is $6-$8. Registration required. 1-888-EBPARKS 

Swim a Mile for Women with Cancer Fundraiser for the Women’s Cancer Resource Center Sat. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Mills College Pool, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland. For information call 601-4040, ext. 180. wcrc.org 

Political Affairs Readers Group meets to discuss “High-Tech Capitalism and the Class Struggle” by John Bachtell at 10 a.m. at the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library for Social research, 6501 Telegraph Ave. Sponsored by the CPUSA. 595-7417. 

Annual Bonsai Show and Sale Sat. from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sun. from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Lakeside Garden Center, 666 Bellevue, Oakland near Fairyland. lsolivenster@gmail.com 

Stagebridge Theatre Company’s Open House from 3 to 5 p.m. at Arts First Oakland, 2501 Harrison St., at 27th St., Oakland 444.4577. www.stagebridge.org 

Introduction to Stamp Collecting with the East Bay Collectors Club at 1:30 p.m. in the 3rd flr Community meeting Room, Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6143. 

Free Digital Fingerprinting for Children and activities for children Sat. from noon to 6 p.m., Sun. from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Hilltop Buick, 3230 Auto Plaza, Richmond. Records are given to parents.1-319-268-4044. 

Albany Tennis Tournament from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Memorial Park to raise money for the new Albany High School Men’s Tennis Team. All ages and levels are welcome to play in a doubles round robin format. Cost is $10-$25, sliding scale. BBQ lunch included. Advance sign up strongly suggested. 527-5775. bbguletz@sbcglobal.net 

Make a Miniature Japanese Kite at 2 p.m. in the Edith Stone Room, Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

“Destination Studies Class: Hawaii” from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at Berkeley City College, 2050 Center St. Cost is $10. 981-2931. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

SUNDAY, OCT. 7 

Beach Impeach Join 1,500 others to spell out IMPEACH on the lawn of Cesar Chavez Park, Berkeley Marina. Arrive by 11 a.m. To sign up see www.beachimpeach.org 

Autumn Meditation Walk Guided exercises including walking meditation and quiet sitting at 9:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

“The Big Game” A documentary about Berkeley’s urban tree-sit at 6:55 p.m. at the Landmark California Theater, 2133 Kittredge St. 464-5983. 

ACLU B.A.R.K.+ Chapter Annual Meeting “Govenment Surveillance 2007: Where Has Privacy Gone?” with Nicole A. Ozer, Gayle McLAughlin and BArbara Zerbe MacNab from 3 to 5 p.m. at the Doubletree Hotel, Berkeley Marina. 558-0377. 

CodePINK Newcomer Orientation & Activist Training at 10 a.m. at 1248 Solano Ave., Albany . RSVP to 524-2776. 

Friends of People’s Park meeting at 4 p.m. in the park at the stage. Topics include Park updates and work objectives. All are welcome.  

“Lose 5,000 Pounds” Cool the Earth Workshop from 2 to 6 p.m. at Fellowship Hall, 1924 Cedar St. at Bonita. Cost is $25. www.bfuu.org 

EcoHouse Tour of the Ecology Center’s environmentally friendly demonstration home and garden, at 10 a.m. at 1305 Hopkins St., enter via garden entrance on Peralta. Cost is $10, sliding scale, no one turned away. RSVP to 548-2220, ext. 242. ecologycenter.org 

Rockridge Kitchen Tour of nine remodeled kitchens from Arts & Crafts to Contemporary, from 12:30 to 5:30 p.m. Register at 5951 College Ave at Harwood. Tickets are $30-$40. www.rockridge.org 

“Driving Public Policy to Improve End-of-Life Care” with former US Assistant Attorney General Robert Raben, at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge. 981-6100. www.compassionandchoicesnca.org 

Booksigning: “Yoga as Medicine” with Timothy McCall, M.D. at 1 p.m. at Elephant Pharm Berkeley, 1607 Shattuck Ave. 549-9200. 

Old Time Radio East Bay Fans and collectors meet to listen to classic radio shows at 5 p.m. at a private home in Richmond. Email for details DavidinBerkeley@yahoo.com 

Free Hands-on Bicycle Repair Class Learn how to do a safety inspection. Bring your bicycle and tools. At 10 a.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712.  

“Poetry and the Spiritual Journey” with Barbara Hamilton-Holway at 10 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302, ext. 306. 

Tibetan Buddhism with Rosalyn White on “From the Roof of the World: Saving Tibet’s Culture” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812.  

MONDAY, OCT. 8 

Berkeley Green Monday meets to discuss “ Think Global - Act Local. Go Green at Work, at Home and at the Beach!” with Babak Jacinto Tondre of EcoHouse & Graywater Systems, Ecology Center; Pamela Evans of Green Business Program, Alameda County; Patty Donald of Marina Experience Programs, City of Berkeley, at 7:30 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Free. 848-4681. 

“Faith, Politics and Passion” with John L. Bell from the Iona community in Scotland at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. 848-3696. 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

Free Boatbuilding Classes for Youth Mon.-Wed. from 3 to 7 p.m. at Berkeley Boathouse, 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. Classes cover woodworking, boatbuilding, and boat repair. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

CITY MEETINGS 

Commission on Labor Special Meeting to discuss the Public Commons for Everyone Inititive Wed. Oct. 3 at 6 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7550.  

Commission on the Status of Women meets Wed., Oct. 3, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190.  

Landmarks Preservation Commission meets Thurs., Oct. 4, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7419.  

Public Works Commission meets Thurs., Oct. 4, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-6406.

A Sept. 25 story about an Oakland police shooting (“Protesters Call for Prosecution of Oakland Police Sergeant”) quoted an Oakland police spokesperson as saying that a loaded revolver was found on “Gonzales,” which is the name of the police officer, not of the shooting victim, whose name was King.