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Congresswoman Barbara Lee speaks out against the war in Iraq at a labor rally at the San Francisco Federal Building Oct. 27 prior to the commencement of a peace march, in which thousands walked from Civic Center to Dolores Park. Photograph by Judith Scherr.
Congresswoman Barbara Lee speaks out against the war in Iraq at a labor rally at the San Francisco Federal Building Oct. 27 prior to the commencement of a peace march, in which thousands walked from Civic Center to Dolores Park. Photograph by Judith Scherr.
 

News

Judge Hits Berkeley Tree-Sitters With Injunction to Leave

By Richard Brenneman
Tuesday October 30, 2007

On Monday a Fremont judge granted an injunction that broadens his earlier order, which banished one named tree-sitter, to include all occupants of the trees, as well as to bar their supporters from the Memorial Stadium oak grove. 

The order signed Monday declares that, pending a trial of the university’s request for a permanent injunction, all tree-sitters “are hereby enjoined from lodging in, scaling, climbing, or sitting in or standing on or in, any of the trees.” 

“This doesn’t really change anything,” said Zachary Running Wolf, who kicked off the tree-sit last Dec. 2 when he ascended the branches of a redwood on Big Game Day. 

“We really think today’s ruling will make it all the more difficult to consider this a benign protest,” said Dan Mogulof, executive director of the university’s Office of Public Affairs. “We are hoping that the community and political leadership in Berkeley will help bring an end to this dangerous and illegal occupation.” 

Joined by a collection of other protesters, many of whom have been subjected to occasional trespassing and other arrests by campus police, Running Wolf has been fighting the planned elimination of the grove to make way for the Student Athlete High Performance Center. 

Running Wolf is a Native American activist and a once and future Berkeley mayoral candidate who is currently gathering signatures in an effort to force a recall of incumbent Mayor Tom Bates. 

A partly subterranean four-story complex that will house both a high-tech gym and athletic department offices, the center is the first in a planned series of developments at and near the stadium that are being contested in a second court case. 

The case brought back to Alameda County Superior Court Judge Richard Keller in Hayward is a follow-up to the judge’s earlier ruling Oct. 1, which restricted a broad injunction sought by the university against the one tree-sitter the school’s lawyer had named in their papers. 

Three days later, university lawyers Charles F. Robinson and Michael R. Goldstein filed a motion for reconsideration, which was the subject of Monday’s action. 

Running Wolf said that at any given time during the day, there are six protesters occupying the perches in the Coast Live Oaks and other trees in the grove. At night, the number rises to about 10, he said. 

“We’re gearing up for an assault by campus police,” he said. “We have heard rumors that they are exercising a training plan to go for an extraction any day now.  

“We are developing our plans to hold our ground,” he said. 

Mogulof said there are no plans for the military-type effort Running Wolf fears. 

He said the course of events depends in part on the outcome of the Hayward case now before Superior Court Judge Barbara J. Miller, who is being asked to rule on the legality of the process by which the university approved the gym and the other construction projects included in the Southeast Campus Integrated Projects. 

Miller, who must issue a ruling by mid-December, could either pave the way for construction or order a new environmental review process that would continue the status quo at the grove. 

Mogulof said he hopes that the current tree-sitters will follow the lead of David Galloway, the only sitting protester named in the order Keller approved earlier in the month. 

“He’s no longer there,” said the university official. 

But Running Wolf said the protest will continue.


City’s Creative Financing May Help Residents, Businesses Go Solar

By Judith Scherr
Tuesday October 30, 2007

The number of Berkeley homeowners and businesses with rooftop solar collectors could multiply in the next few years, if a complex financing proposal pans out. 

The concept of the city providing funds to loan to property owners was first proposed by Councilmember Dona Spring in 2002 “after rolling blackouts yanked up our energy bills,” Spring told the Daily Planet on Monday. However, city staff did not come up with an effective way to support financing at the time, Spring said. 

There are now about 383 sites in Berkeley with solar panels. The project is expected to add about 125 energy-efficient and/or solar sites with estimated construction costs at $4.4 million. 

On Nov. 6 the City Council will be asked to conceptually approve a Sustainable Energy Financing District put together by Cisco DeVries, chief of staff to Mayor Tom Bates, the city’s energy division and a number of financial consultants. The project would finance solar panels and solar hot water systems for both residential and small commercial properties. 

A finalized plan will be before the council next year. 

“We’re doing what Berkeley should do—innovate,” DeVries told the Planet Monday. 

In a phone interview, City Manager Phil Kamlarz told the Daily Planet the financing would work this way: An assessment district would be formed, comprised of property owners who want to be part of the program. The city would borrow the funds to pay for the program from banks or other sources. 

The interest rate charged to the city would be less than the interest rate at which many property owners would be able to borrow as individuals. 

The financing is intended to cost property owners the amount they would have been paying in higher electric bills—that is, the cost would be equal to their savings by going solar or becoming more energy efficient. The loans would be repaid through property taxes; the city would place liens on the properties in the program; the property owners would pay the cost of their solar system over 20 years, which is about the life of the equipment. If a property were sold, the added assessed property tax would remain with the property until the loan was paid off. 

While she is enthusiastic about the idea, Spring pointed out that the financing would work only if the city could truly borrow the funds at a lesser rate than an individual can. 

DeVries acknowledged the plan isn’t for everyone. “Some property owners, based on their means, can write a check,” DeVries said. Others may be able to obtain more favorable rates than the city can. 

The details of the program are still being hammered out, which likely accounts for some of the differences in the program as described by Kamlarz and by Alice La Pierre, building science specialist, with the city’s energy division. 

One of the questions still to answer is the relationship between the solar contractor and the property owner. 

La Pierre says that under the city financing program, the city would certify contractors with whom the property owners would contract directly. Under this scenario, costs could be regulated by the city.  

But Kamlarz says that if the city were to certify a contractor, Berkeley could be liable if the contractor did not perform as required. He prefers a plan where property owners choose their own contractors, without certification by the city. 

The city plans to fund the work to create the Sustainable Energy Financing District with about $160,000 from an Environmental Protection Agency grant proposal written by the city’s energy division. The grant has not yet been formally approved by the EPA. Details are being worked out between the agency and the city, DeVries said. In addition to the grant funds, some city staff time—city attorney and energy division time—would be devoted to putting together the program. 

Part of the work would include having the city of Berkeley create a booklet explaining to other cities how to go about replicating Berkeley’s model, DeVries said. 

The grant proposal emphasizes the pre-solar phase: Before a contractor could evaluate the size of the solar system that a property requires, energy-saving efficiencies would have to be achieved.  

The grant application says that “[t]he audit will meet and exceed the basic criteria required by the State of California prior to the use of state solar incentives. Unlike the state-required audit, this program will also require work be performed to meet a baseline energy efficiency standard.”  

Under this scenario property owners would be required to meet efficiency standards of homes sold in Berkeley, as prescribed by the Residential Energy Conservation Ordinance (RECO) and the Commercial Energy Conservation Ordinance (CECO).  

“In addition,” says the application, “we plan to require property owners install Energy Star appliances to replace appliances more than 15 years old.”  

DeVries underscores that the details of what would be required may change. 

For some people, such as La Pierre herself, reducing energy use is enough. La Pierre said her household pays an average of $20 per month for home energy costs, and they do not have solar panels. Their attic is insulated; their fireplace has been sealed off to prevent air leaks; they own energy-efficient appliances. LaPierre turns off power strips before leaving for the day.  

La Pierre points out that electricity is regulated by the state, but the price of natural gas is not. Since most people use gas for heating, it is important to thoroughly insulate, including walls and floor, La Pierre said. Double-paned windows also prevent heat from escaping.  

La Pierre cautioned that “not every home is suitable [for solar panels]. Some have too much shading.” And, she added, while tenants have little input into what their landlords do, they can make their apartments more energy efficient. 

The Sustainable Energy Financing District would not include city-owned property, DeVries said. That would require a different funding mechanism since the city does not pay property taxes and could not place a lien on itself.  

According to the grant proposal, the city would put together an advisory committee to guide the work. The committe would include Steve Chu, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Arthur Rosenfeld, member of the California Energy Commission, Daniel Kammen, a climate change policy expert and proponent of nuclear energy and Dian Grueneich, a member of the California Public Utilities Commission.  

The proposal further says that the city would contract with the Berkeley-based nonprofit Build It Green to hold workshops with contractors and solar installers “to develop and market the initiative.” Build It Green would also be asked “to produce a brochure and web page…issue press releases and promote the program.” 

The board members of Build It Green include Judi Ettlinger, director of marketing for Truitt and White, Stephanie Kiser, territory manager for Building Materials Distributor, Inc. and Gary Gerber, president of Sun Light & Power, a solar installation company in Berkeley. Gerber’s praise for the program is quoted by DeVries in an Oct. 23 press statement: “Nearly every day we meet potential customers who think they can’t afford a solar energy system. With Berkeley’s financing plan in place, just about any home or business owner who can afford to pay their utility bill every month should be able to go solar.”  


Confusion Continues to Plague Peralta District Measure A

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Tuesday October 30, 2007

The citizens’ oversight committee for the Peralta Community College District Measure A facilities bonds, which has not issued required minutes or a report on its activities for the year and a half since the bond measure was passed, descended into something close to disarray this month with confusion over its membership. 

Meanwhile, with or without citizen oversight, Peralta continues to move forward with projects funded by Measure A bonds, with the board approving requests for $2.7 million in 17 contracts and change orders at its Oct. 9 meeting and $2.1 million in three contracts at its Oct. 23 meeting. 

Peralta’s citizen oversight—or rather, the lack of it—contrasts sharply with that of nearby Chabot-Las Positas Community College District, which passed a similar facilities bond in 2004 and has a fully functioning committee that regularly meets and issues reports and minutes that are easily available on the district’s website (see sidebar). 

The seven-member Peralta Measure A Citizens’ Oversight Committee is specifically required in the ballot measure language by which the $390 million bond was passed by Alameda County voters in June 2006.  

Under that language, the committee was supposed to be formed within 60 days of the certification of the election results, with one member representing business interests, two members representing the community at large, one representing students, one representing an organization supporting the college district, one representing a senior citizens organization and one representing a taxpayers association. The committee’s organizational and community representations are specifically spelled out in the California Education Code section referenced in the bond measure. 

Under Ed. Code Section 15280, “all [oversight] committee proceedings shall be open to the public, and notice to the public shall be provided in the same manner as the proceedings of the governing board. The citizens’ oversight committee shall issue regular reports on the results of its activities. A report shall be issued at least once a year. Minutes of the proceedings of the citizens’ oversight committee and all documents received and reports issued shall be a matter of public record and be made available on an Internet website maintained by the governing board.” 

No public notices of committee meetings appear to have been ever given, no report has been issued, and no minutes or other documents from the oversight committee appear on the Peralta district website. 

Meanwhile, Peralta has not even fully formed the oversight committee. 

The district appeared to have filled all but one of the oversight committee positions last June, when Vice Chancellor Tom Smith announced that former California Assembly member Wilma Chan had accepted an appointment as one of the two community at-large positions. 

The remaining five committee members listed at that time were Bay Area World Trade Center President and CEO José Deans (business), Berkeley-Albany-Emeryville League of Women Voters Community College Chair Helene LeCar (community at-large), Laney College student Scott Folosade (students), Peralta Foundation President Bill Patterson (organization supporting the college district) and Polly Amrein (senior citizens). 

Chan’s appointment left only the taxpayers association representative position on the oversight committee vacant. In November of 2006, Peralta Chancellor Elihu Harris requested the appointment of San Francisco certified public accountant Hyacinth Ahuruonye to “serve as a citizen from a taxpayers association that supports a college or the district.”  

Ahuruonye once served as the campaign treasurer for former Oakland City Councilmember Moses Mayne. Neither district officials nor Ahuruonye himself ever identified the qualifying taxpayers association to which he belonged, and Peralta later dropped him from the committee after saying that he was not a taxpayer within the community college district. 

Chan was later removed from the committee, according to Trustee Board member Abel Guillen, after he informed district officials that the former assemblymember was ineligible for the oversight function because she has been working for the district under a short-term contract as a teacher. 

And the agenda for the Oct. 9 trustee board meeting of this year indicated that by this time, the committee had lost its business community representative, José Dueñas, and was now three short. Chancellor Elihu Harris said he was now looking for representatives from a local taxpayers association, the local business community and the community at large. 

At the Oct. 9 meeting, Harris said that the district “has been asked to call the local Chamber of Commerce so they can identify a taxpayers organization” to be represented. 

It is hard to understand why the district is having difficulty identifying such an organization. The long-standing Alameda County Taxpayers Association, with offices in downtown Oakland, has representatives on several local bond measure oversight committees, including the Alameda County Health Care Measure A Bond, the Alameda County Transportation Measure B Bond and the Chabot-Las Positas Measure B Bond. 

Arthur Geen, the association’s executive vice president, who serves on the Alameda County Measure A Oversight Committee, said that “nobody has contacted me” from Peralta concerning the Peralta bond committee. 

And there is other confusion concerning the Peralta committee. 

In answer to a query two weeks ago about the current oversight committee membership, Peralta officials sent a document entitled “Measure A—Citizen’s Bond Oversight Committee” that mentioned eight members: Amrein, Patterson, Scott, LeCar, two positions labeled “vacant” (taxpayers organization and business organization), and two Peralta employees, Vice Chancellors Tom Smith and Sadiq Ikharo. 

In a follow-up call to Jennifer Lenahan, a staff worker with the Peralta Finance and Administration Department who serves as the oversight committee secretary, confirmed that Smith and Ikharo are members of the committee, serving as the “co-chairs for the district.” 

Smith and Ikharo’s membership on the committee would appear to violate the same state law that precluded Chan’s membership. “No employee or official of the district,” says the law, “shall be appointed to the citizens’ oversight committee.” 

Two members of Peralta’s board of trustees said that the listing was in error and that Smith and Ikharo are, in fact, not committee members. After checking with Smith, Board President Bill Withrow said that “nobody from the staff is on the committee. Sadiq Ikharo is the point of contact for the bond projects. He is definitely not on the committee. Tom Smith functions as staff support. He is there to provide information on audits and other financial matters.” 

And trustee Abel Guillen, who works as an educational finance advisor for a company that helps California schools and college districts conduct bond measure campaigns, said that after talking with district officials, he learned that Smith and Ikharo only function as staff members on the committee. “The district is well aware that no one on staff or contracting with the district can serve on the independent citizens’ oversight committee.” 

But if that is true, the committee numbers don’t pan out. On Oct. 9, Chancellor Harris said that the seven-member committee was short three members. No new members were added to the committee list sent out two weeks ago that included Smith and Ikharo, and the at-large vacancy is no longer listed as it was on Oct. 9.  

Meanwhile, if Smith and Ikharo are not considered by the district to be committee members, the filled membership and vacancies in the current district committee list only add up to six, one short of the seven specifically required in the 2006 bond measure. 

Lenahan said by telephone last week that the oversight committee has had tours of several of the district’s campuses to review construction activities and is preparing to meet by the middle of November. 

 

 

 

Peralta Oversight Committee Contrasts With Chabot-Las Positas 

 

In March of 2004, two years before the passage of Peralta’s Measure A, voters in Alameda County and a small portion of Contra Costa County passed the $498 million Chabot-Las Positas Community College District capital improvement (construction) bond to “repair leaky roofs, worn wiring and plumbing; renovate aging, deteriorating classrooms and libraries; and repair, acquire, construct and equip college buildings, and computer labs at both Las Positas College in Livermore and Chabot College in Hayward.” 

The Chabot-Las Positas Measure B bonds were passed under the same authority as the Peralta Measure A bonds, California Proposition 39, which governs the project and oversight requirements for 55 percent-passage California education facilities bonds. 

Chabot-Las Positas operates a separate website for the bond at www.clpccd.org/bond that includes separate links for bond projects for Chabot, Las Positas and for the whole district, as well as links for the program management team, professional service providers and the citizens’ oversight committee. 

The oversight committee has eight members, including a representative of the Alameda County Taxpayers Association, and adopted bylaws that are posted on the website. It has met four times a year since September 2004 (14 meetings in all), with agendas and minutes posted, and has issued two annual reports, one in December 2005 and a second in December 2006.  

The Chabot-Las Positas bond measure pages can be accessed by a “bond program” link in a directory prominently displayed at the top of the district’s main web page.  

By contrast, there is nothing on the Peralta Community College District’s homepage that indicates a location of bond information. To find Measure A bond information on the Peralta page, a visitor must first go to the District Service Centers link on the homepage directory, then through a link to the district’s Department of General Services webpage, and from there to the Measure A page. The page contains no information on the Measure A citizens’ oversight committee but does contain links to spreadsheets of short-term construction projects for three of the four colleges, as well as reports on furniture and instructional equipment needs allocations. 

 

—J. Douglas Allen-Taylor


Downtown Advisory Panel Rules Out Point Towers

By Richard Brenneman
Tuesday October 30, 2007

Point towers are out for downtown Berkeley and 10-story apartment buildings are in—or eight floors for office and commercial buildings. That’s the solid consensus emerging from Monday morning’s meeting of DAPAC’s Land Use subcommittee—the six-member panel tasked with writing the new downtown plan’s central chapter. 

With chair Rob Wrenn’s gentle nudging, members reached a near-consensus on the 120-foot maximum height limit, though just how many such buildings would be allowed remained an issue to be resolved when the group meets again at 8 a.m. Wednesday. 

Beyond the limited number of 120-footers, the rest of the downtown core would be restricted to the present maximum of 100 feet, or eight floors for residential buildings and six for commercial structures. 

The main dissent came from Dorothy Walker, a retired UC Berkeley development executive, who has consistently pushed the tallest, densest city center profile. Other members who initially argued for taller buildings were able to accept the lower figure. 

The outcome of their deliberations will be presented to the larger Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee for adoption Nov. 7. 

Juliet Lamont and Jesse Arreguin were adamant that they’d not accept more than four 10-story buildings—in addition to the planned 220-foot high Berkeley Charles Hotel at Shattuck Avenue and Center Street. 

The possibility of raising an extension of the Shattuck Hotel to more than the 10-floor limit would be considered, but only if the new owners gave the city concessions in return. 

Wrenn chaired the city’s UC Hotel Task Force, which led to a recommendation that the city approve the hotel, to be named the Berkeley Charles, in exchange for concessions. 

Developer Ali Kashani contended that for buildings over five floors, projects only became economically viable at greater heights—with a 14-story minimum if projects were required to devote 20 percent of the lot to open space. 

Walker said she could only vote for the 10-story limit if she saw reliable numbers proving that developers were able to afford to build at that height, adding that she was waiting for data from experts. 

Otherwise she wanted a provision that calls for nine of the 160-foot point towers. 

But the other five members all said they were willing to accept the 120-foot limit, with a base height of 100 feet. 

Kerry O’Banion, the UC Berkeley planner who sits on the subcommittee in a non-voting role, said the university would be satisfied with those height restrictions. 

Lamont said that some environmental experts had questioned where buildings taller than that were even practical given the power needed to run elevators and pump water to upper floors. 

While Wrenn said he could accept up to eight buildings of 120 feet, including two higher hotels, Lamont was adamant, even when Wrenn asked, “What about seven?” 

Arreguin concurred. 

The subcommittee seemed willing to accept one possible compromise: a provision calling for a review of the plan, including a look at the public’s receptivity to additional tall buildings. 

The review would be triggered either by the construction of a specified number of the taller buildings or the end of a time period. Walker said five buildings or ten years would be fine with her. 

Members also agreed that heights would step down to five stories bordering residential neighborhoods, and remain at the present limits in the neighborhoods themselves.  

Two planning commissioners who sit on DAPAC but not the subcommittee have attended the land use meetings, Gene Poschman and James Samuels, who chairs the commission. 

Poschman argued that the existing downtown plan would accommodate all the growth required to receive funds through the Association of Bay Area Governments. 

The figures he presented challenged numbers from the planning staff, prompting a response from Matt Taecker, the planner hired with city and university funds to oversee the planning process. 

“I object to you casting uncertainty about these numbers,” Taecker said. 


Dow Comes to Berkeley, Sparking Student Protest

By Richard Brenneman
Tuesday October 30, 2007

Dow Chemical, the company whose very name sparked violent student protests during the Vietnam War era, is coming back to the UC Berkeley campus. 

This time, the controversial firm has teamed up with Haas School of Business and the College of Chemistry to launch a “Sustainable Products and Solutions” program which kicks off with a faculty meeting and lunch this morning (Tuesday). 

And just like in the 1960s protesters will be on hand. 

While the focus on those protests of yore was the company’s role as manufacturer of napalm for the fire bombs used to blast the terrain of Southeast Asia, this week’s protesters are looking at the company’s response to another disaster. 

Organized by the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, protesters are targeting the company’s activities in India. 

A Dec. 3, 1984, explosion at a pesticide plant owned by Union Carbide in Bhopal, India, killed as many as 8,000 people in one of the world’s worst industrial disasters. 

Another 100,000 people, many elderly and children, sustained permanent injuries. 

When Dow bought Union Carbide six years ago, the company refused to accept any liabilities stemming from the disaster. 

The Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC) at Berkeley adopted a 2004 resolution asking the company to accept responsibility and clean up the site, where soil and groundwater are still contaminated. 

In September, Dow sent Tony Kingsbury to the Haas Center for Responsible Business to launch the new program, where he will serve as executive director. 

The program will focus on research aimed at developing sustainable chemistry and products, and additional corporate funding is being sought. 

According to the school’s website, Kingsbury has worked for the company for 24 years, most recently at corporate headquarters in Michigan where he headed a task force on plastics sustainabilty and global industry affairs. 

The program’s dedication begins at 11 a.m. in the school’s Wells Fargo room. 

One of the organizers of today’s protest is Kamal Kapadia, a doctoral student who has also been active in the student movement criticizing the university’s $500 million research pact with BP. 

“There is considerable opposition developing among faculty,” she said. “And last semester the student Energy and Resources Collaborative returned a $1,000 grant from Dow.”


West Branch Library Re-Opens After Refurbishment

By Phila Rogers, Special to the Planet
Tuesday October 30, 2007

On a typical foggy Friday morning, just before 10 a.m., mothers and a few grandmothers wheel their toddlers to the front of the West Branch Library, waiting for the doors of the library to open admitting them to the toddler story hour. Once inside, strollers are deposited along the short hallway into the community meeting room. 

The Children’s Librarian, Nora Hale, is perched on a low seat ready to orchestrate the hour with stories, games, and songs that appeal to the short attention spans of an audience aged six months to 36 months. Other patrons descend on the computers or choose one of the daily newspapers from the racks.  

The West Branch Library, located a half block above San Pablo Avenue at 1125 University Ave., is Berkeley’s oldest branch library, the original building being built on that site in 1923. The library has been closed for refurbishing for the past couple months and will reopen this Friday with a celebration from 5-7 p.m. 

Warren Middleton, who first started working for the Berkeley Public Library’s West Branch 40 years ago, checks out a stack of books while fielding questions. When Middleton first worked at the library, it was in the original building before the extensive remodeling in 1974.  

“A friend of mine who was working there was going into the Army and asked me if I would like to apply for his job,” says Middleton. “He introduced me to the branch librarian and she hired me as a library page. A year later I transferred to central branch, where I stayed until I was drafted into the Army in 1968. Coming back to the library two years later, I worked at different branches until 1995 when I went back to West Branch. I’ve enjoyed working here, and I still do.” 

Middleton, now a supervising library assistant, hires the pages (now called library aides) in the same kinds of jobs he had when he started his long tenure at the Berkeley Public Library. “Over the years, I’ve served under seven library directors,” he notes. 

Marge Sussman, the branch manager at West Branch, arrived on her bike at 9 a.m. and works in her small office, attending to often pleasurable chores like reviewing and ordering books. Once the library opens, she’s apt to be at the Information Desk answering the phone and assisting patrons. 

Sussman’s association with the Berkeley Public Library began in 1989 as the children’s librarian at South Branch. Two years later she transferred to West Branch in the same position. “I did lots of pre-school programs like the Baby Bounce, Toddler Tales, and family story times along with visiting the local public schools to read stories in the younger grades and talk about books in the older grades,” she says. 

“But three years ago I became the permanent branch manager here at West Branch. Now my job is to consider the needs of all our patrons. I love getting to know the community in this way. I’ve seen lots of children grow up at West Branch, and a few have even brought their own children in to use the library,” says Sussman.  

The library staff at West Branch includes two full-time librarians (Sussman and Hale, the Children’s Librarian), Middleton and several part-time employees 

Each of Berkeley’s four branch libraries has its own distinct character representing, in part, the neighborhoods in which it is located. The adult literacy program, Berkeley Reads, is located at West Branch. During the day, participants in the program often come into the library, some to meet their volunteer tutors, others to use the special computers equipped with educational software that helps them with their reading and writing skills. 

The West Branch, in a neighborhood of shops, motels and restaurants on a heavily traveled street, feels like a refuge. Inside, it has a certain welcoming neighborhood coziness like a friendly pub— except with books instead of ale. 

Other patrons come from the Berkeley Adult School, which opened recently several blocks away on Virginia Street.  

Later in the day, teens come to visit their own alcove. Latino and Asian families have corners with round oak tables well-supplied with Asian and Spanish-language magazines and books. Children are served by a large area with pint-sized furnishings, a story-well surrounded by carpeted sitting stairs and shelves full of books for all ages.  

 

West Branch: In the Beginning 

When the Ocean View community in West Berkeley’s industrial district decided in 1895 that they wanted a branch library, a building at 845 University Ave. was rented for $15 a month. A table, a few kitchen chairs, a hat rack, and two maps on the wall made up the furnishings—plus a few books. The room was heated with a small, coal-burning iron stove. 

In 1923, an elegant new building, designed by William K. Bartges, was built on the present site at 1125 University Ave., just above San Pablo Avenue, then the only highway into town. Visitors were welcomed by an arch announcing “BERKELEY.” One hand, like an arrow, pointed west to the Manufacturing District, another toward the hills to the University of California. Another sign indicated the direction to the San Francisco ferry. Never a structure of beauty, the arch ended up as scrap metal during World War II. 

The new library, embellishing Berkeley’s gateway, was designed in the Classical Revival style with a Roman arch at the entrance. The small building was filled with light from windows on all sides and a large central skylight. 

In response to the need for more space, and in keeping with the then-current preference for the “modern” style, the building was extensively remodeled in 1974. It was given a concrete ramp, a side entrance and decorated with two murals. Several large redwood trees remain in the back, part of what once appeared to have been a garden. 

Once inside the present library, you can find the original entrance in the center of the building, now flanked by magazine racks. The arched window above the doorway still admits light from over the newer stucco wall fronting the street. 

Though the era of Carnegie-funded libraries had recently ended, the original West Branch Library was designed in the “Carnegie-style” where you mounted a staircase from the street, entered through elegant doors, to approach that altar to knowledge—the circulation desk. 

—Phila Rogers 

 

 

 

 


Letter Mistakenly Sent to County’s Party-Affiliated Voters

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Tuesday October 30, 2007

Alameda County election officials are saying that letters sent out to county voters this week indicating the recipients were not registered by party was done by mistake, and no changes have been actually made to registered voters’ party affiliation. 

“It was a human error,” Alameda County Registrar of Voters spokesperson Guy Ashley said by telephone. “The letter went out to many people who should not have gotten it. We’re sorry for the confusion this has caused.”  

Ashley said that the letter, which advises voters they must send in a form in order to qualify to get a ballot from either the American Independent or Democratic party for the February 2008 presidential primary, was intended to be sent to those voters who declined to state their party affiliation when they registered to vote. 

Instead, “somebody pushed the wrong button,” Ashley said, and the letters went out to a list of voters who had actually chosen a party affiliation. 

One of those voters was Berkeley City Councilmember Kris Worthington, who said he has been a registered Democrat since 1972. Worthington said he had received calls from several worried constituents who had also gotten the letters. 

The list was sent to a third-party vendor in Washington State who actually did the mailing. Ashley said the error only involved a list mistakenly sent out to the vendor. He said a follow-up letter would be sent to the same voters later this week advising of the error. 

Ashley said he had no information on the number of voters who received the erroneous letter. There were reports of letters received by both Democratic Party and Green Party voters. 

 

 


LeConte Neighbors Protest Proposed Project

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday October 30, 2007

A group of LeConte neighbors turned up at the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) meeting Thursday to protest a proposed three-story second unit at 2837 Fulton St. that, they said, was out of character with the neighborhood and would have visual and shadow impacts on the adjacent LeConte Elementary schoolyard. 

The board voted 8-1 to approve the proposed building, whose owners said they would be planting large trees to screen the building from the rest of the neighborhood. The proposed development would be located at the rear end of the lot along with an existing single-family dwelling unit. 

Some LeConte parents said that the proposed building would adversely affect the appeal and quality of education at the school, whose yard was the only park in the neighborhood. 

They contended that keeping density low adjacent to elementary schools was important to the success of a public school system. 

“A three-story accessory building does not exist in the neighborhood, and this would defy that historical trend and create a precedent to future builds,” said LeConte resident Mark Leverette. 

LeConte parent Susie Bluestone said that LeConte parents found it strange that the Berkeley Unified School District had not objected to the building’s height. 

“Would a three-story structure be something you would allow at Emerson or Thousand Oaks?” she asked. “LeConte wants the respect other schools get.” 

The LeConte Neighborhood Association voted against the proposed project- stating that it would tower over all the other houses in the neighborhood and add to inadequate off-street parking. 

“I met with Superintendent Michele Lawrence, and she didn’t express any concerns about impact on students,” said board member Terry Doran. “On the other hand, I am concerned that there might be complaints from the residents of the building about noise from the students.” 

“It’s just noise,” said Paul Toan, the owner. “It’s been great living next to the school and the playground and I don’t think we will have a problem.” 

Board member Jesse Arreguin voted against the project since Toan had not seriously considered a two-story alternative. 

“There are no other three-story second units in the neighborhood,” he said. “It is not keeping in character with the neighborhood ... While some changes were made to the design, they don’t really address the major issues.” 

Board member Bob Allen lauded the project. 

“If we are going to be increasing housing, it’s not going to be through high-rise buildings downtown or in the student dorms,” he said. “It’s going to be in the low-density, residential neighborhoods ... I have heard of the ominous shadows that this building will cast, but I don’t know why the neighbors are so gung ho about it. This is not the Arctic Circle, this is California. I can’t think of any house in my neighborhood that doesn’t throw a shadow.” 

Arreguin replied that he hoped housing would not be limited to low-density neighborhoods. 

“Family housing should be built downtown and in other parts of the city too,” he said. “And it’s true all buildings have shadow impacts, but it’s ZAB’s responsibility to determine whether this is the right design or if there is a design that minimizes the impact on neighbors.” 

Board member Jesse Anthony said that it was regrettable that children had been used to protest the proposed development. 

“It’s kind of an unfortunate house,” said Vice Chair Rick Judd. “Unfortunate because of the height, not the design. But unfortunately, it’s not enough to vote against the house.” 

ZAB chair steps down 

Board chair Christiana Tiedemann announced Thursday that she would be stepping down from ZAB after the meeting. 

Tiedemann—who was appointed by Mayor Tom Bates in January 2003—will be replaced by former San Francisco assistant director of planning George Williams at the next meeting on Nov. 8. 

Tiedemann, who represents the Coastal Commission for the California Attorney General’s office, said that she was leaving because of time commitment problems. 

“I have been doing it for the last four years and as it is I don’t have any free time,” she said. “I think there are plenty of talented people out there who can do this.” 

Vice chair Rick Judd will be acting chair at the next meeting when a election will be held to name the new chair and vice chair. Board members need five votes to win. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Signing of UC-BP Biofuel Pact Is Imminent, Say Lab, UCB

By Richard Brenneman
Tuesday October 30, 2007

The half-billion-dollar biofuel contract between a British oil company and UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL), and the University of Illinois should be signed “within the next couple of weeks.” 

The signing will come within weeks of another BP signing—this one of an agreement to pay the largest fine ever levied by federal regulators for price-fixing and criminal fraud. 

The $373 million includes $166 million in criminal fines and penalties stemming from a March 23, 2005, Texas refinery explosion that killed 15 workers and injured more than170 others. 

The other fines stem from a February 2005 propane price-fixing conspiracy and damages caused by oil leaks from the Alaskan pipeline. 

The U.S. Department of Justice and BP announced the settlement Thursday, the same day a federal grand jury in Chicago indicted each of four BP employees on one count of conspiracy, 12 counts of market cornering and price manipulation and 16 counts of wire fraud. 

 

Final form  

LBNL spokesperson Ron Kolb and university spokesperson Robert Sanders confirmed that signing is imminent. 

“We’re hoping for the week of Nov. 5,” said Sanders. “It’s almost in the final form for review by BP and the (UC system) Office of the President.” 

The resulting Energy Biosciences Institute will research alternative fuels from crops, waste and coal, and pursue genetic modification of crops and microbes to create biologic refineries for transportation fuels. 

Research will also focus on reducing atmospheric carbon. 

Tad Patzek, an engineering professor who came to the university from the oil industry, said he wasn’t surprised the deal is near completion, but he worries about the consequences. 

“The university is getting itself into corporate relationships of the sort and extent of which it has never done before,” he said. 

“There will be a steep learning curve, and there will be some collateral damage,” said the Polish-born researcher. 

“The greatest impacts may be felt on the type of faculty the university hires, the types of subjects we teach, the graduate students we have and the kinds of research that will not be done,” he said. 

A small but active group of students and faculty have protested the BP research pact, but the concept received the formal endorsement of the majority of the university’s faculty senate and the blessing of its president, journalism professor William J. Drummond (who did not return calls). 

Protesters have raised concerns about the institute’s plans to engage in genetic modification of plants and microbes to produce transportation fuels, and about the potential threats of energy crops to farmlands in the Third World now used for food supplies. 

Another concern raised by Patzek and other scientists is the diversion of funding away from other possible energy sources, including solar. 

 

Second lab 

If the pact is signed as now scheduled, BP’s ties with the university will be solidified less than a month after the UC Office of the President and the Department of Energy signed a lease for another biofuel lab—this one funded by the Department of Energy. 

The director of the new Joint BioEnergy Institute lab in Emeryville—researcher Jay Keasling—initially served as a member of the executive committee of the BP project and was singled out along with EBI director-designate Chris Somerville by Chancellor Robert Birgeneau for his role in drafting the EBI proposal. 

Both scientists are founders and part owners of private labs researching biofuels. 

One university source said the school and the oil company had reached an agreement weeks ago, but that the contract was held up by government lawyers concerned about the implications of using public labs and scientists on a contract with a major private industrial firm.  

If the signing occurs as scheduled, the campus will have welcomed two controversial chemical giants within days of each other. A reception at the Haas School of Business today (Tuesday) will mark the formal welcoming of Dow Chemical to the Berkeley campus. 

Besides being a favorite target of pickets and marches protesting the company’s manufacture of napalm during the Vietnam War, Dow is being targeted today for its refusal to pay damages stemming from the Bhopal chemical disaster in India. 

 

Troubled past, fines 

British Petroleum, the former corporate name of BP, has an equally checkered past, including its central role in fomenting and financing the 1953 coup that ended Iraq’s only democratically elected government and its alleged backing of death squads in Latin America. 

The price-fixing charges stem from a series of ploys by officers of BP Products North America to corner the market on the main propane line supplying the nation’s Northeast and Midwest. 

According to the consent order signed by corporate officers, BP’s traders cornered the propane markets of two of the nation’s most populous regions in February 2004, selling the fuel at inflated prices. 

That effort, in turn, built on a bid to corner the market 10 months earlier.  

Though the firm managed to gain possession of all the available fuel the following year, its financial gains from the market cornering were thwarted by unseasonably warm weather and a pipeline break, ultimately costing the company $10 million. 

In admitting to the scheme, BP agreed to pay $100 million in criminal penalties, a $25 million fine to the U.S. Postal Inspection Consumer Fraud Fund, restitution to other companies of $53 million and civil penalties of $125 million to the Commodities Future Trading Commission. 

The criminal charges against the four BP traders were deferred as a result of the company’s agreement to pay the massive fines. 

The Alaskan pipeline leak cost the company $12 million in criminal fines and payments of $4 million each to the National Fish and Wildlife Federation and the State of Alaska in exchange for an agreement to forestall criminal prosecution.  

 

 


LPC to Vote on BHS Historic District Nomination

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday October 30, 2007

The Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) will vote on whether to nominate the Berkeley High School (BHS) Campus Historic District, at 1980 Allston Way, to the National Register of Historic places Thursday. 

Some Berkeley High buildings were designated as local landmarks in Dec. 1992. According to the City of Berkeley Landmark Application for Berkeley High School, the landmark designation protects the shop and science buildings along MLK Jr. Way, the Schwimley Little Theatre and the Berkeley High School Community Theatre. 

Six years later the buildings were included in the National Register of Historic Places, along with the other buildings that surround Civic Center Park. 

The other two important structures on the campus, Building C and the Old Gym, were placed on the landmarks commission’s list of potential historic buildings almost ten years ago. 

The Old Gym was recently landmarked locally, making all buildings on the BHS campus local or potential local landmarks. Nevertheless, the Berkeley Unified School District is going ahead with its plans to demolish the Old Gym and its warm water pool to build classrooms and sports facilities. 

Staff first received the nomination of the high school campus historic district on Sept. 23, followed by a revised nomination on Oct. 16. 

Since the City of Berkeley is a Certified Local Government, the city’s landmarks commission has been asked to prepare a report on whether the property meets the criteria for the National Register or not. 

Staff recommends against the nomination to the National Register of Historic Places. According to them, the property fails to meet the criteria for the National Register based on the information in the application. 

 

1050 Parker St. 

The commission will vote on whether to designate a building at 1050 Parker St. as a local landmark. 

A group of Berkeley residents was perplexed in August, when the building’s windows were dismantled prior to a demolition use permit having been issued by the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB). 

Demolition permits for any building over 40 years old in a commercial zone must first be reviewed by the landmarks commission to determine whether it has any historic significance. 

Neighborhood business owners and residents expressed concern when the tall metal-sash, multi-light windows went missing from the unoccupied one-story World War II-era building in July. 

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

Landmarks commissioner Carrie Olson told the Planet that the multi-light windows had been the character-defining features of the building. 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Police Blotter

By Rio Bauce
Tuesday October 30, 2007

Robbery 

On Sunday at 9:58 p.m., a young man evaded local authorities after he stole cash and a pack of cigarettes from Andronico’s at 1501 University Ave., said Lt. Wes Hester, spokesman for the Berkeley Police Department. 

 

Walgreens robbery 

An elderly Berkeley man stole a bunch of items from Walgreens on Stuart and Adeline at 3:39 p.m. on Sunday afternoon. When the automatic door didn’t open upon his exit, an employee detained him. At this point, he pulled out a knife and ran from the store. Local police stopped the man a mile away from the scene and arrested him. 

 

Road rage 

Shortly past 11:30 a.m. on Saturday morning, two men got into a fight near Grocery Outlet on the 2000 block of 4th Street. One male struck the other male and escaped. The suspect is not in custody. 

 

Witness / victim scare 

On Saturday, two African-American men approached a UC Berkeley student. One smacked him, and the other went through his pockets. The two men took a cell phone and a wallet containing cash and credit cards. The injured Cal student ran and passed by a witness who asked if they should call the police. After the young student said yes, and the witness began to call the police, one of the suspects noticed and chased the witness down to the bottom of the Downtown Berkeley BART station, where station agents called the police. The Cal student went to the hospital. No suspects have been taken into custody. 

 

Fight 

At 1:20 p.m. on Friday, two adults fought each other at the corner of University and 8th Street. No arrests were made.


Students Protest Islamo-Fascist Week on Campus

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday October 26, 2007

The UC Berkeley Muslim Students Association (MSA) responded to Islamo-Fascist Week on campus with Peace Not Prejudice Week, ending today. 

Funded by UC Berkeley alumnus and Republican activist David Horowitz and hosted by Berkeley College Republicans (BCR), Islamo-Fascist Week met with protests from more than 30 student groups on campus who joined together to form The Coalition for Peace Not Prejudice. 

“Islamo-Fascist Week represents ignorance and indirect oppression of American Muslims,” said sophomore Saman Khalid, a member of MSA, which was also part of the coalition. “It’s against Islam ... It’s offensive not just to Muslim students but to everybody. They are trying to inform moderate Muslims about radical Muslims. It’s ludicrous. I don’t think you need to inform Jews about Nazis or Blacks about Jim Crow.” 

Berkeley College Republicans, who had set up a table across from the group Peace Not Prejudice at Sproul Plaza this week, said their events were in defense of moderate Muslims against radicals. 

“It’s about making people aware of Islamic terrorism,” said Ross Lingenfelder, BCR president. “We are not talking about Catholic terrorism in Ireland or Hindu terrorism in Sri Lanka ... It’s awareness about a really dangerous form of Islam that’s out to destroy the United States.” 

Khalid told the Planet that BCR’s actions were threatening the safety of women wearing a hijab on campus. 

“There was a man here on campus not affiliated with BCR who was carrying a huge sign that said ‘Islam Abuses Women’ and that it ‘promoted polygamy and wifebeating’ ... If you are someone who has no idea about what Islam is then that message could give the wrong impression.” 

BCR brought in Nonie Darwish, founder of Arabs for Israel, for a talk which was covered by television crews from the Washington D.C. bureau of Al Jazeera Monday. 

“We are not talking about the average Muslim but about a radical strain,” said Lingenfelder, a UC Berkeley math major. 

“The only complaint we are getting is that others might try to interpret our message in a wrong way. My goal is to polarize the radical in Islam and the peace-loving American Islam ... [and] to expose how radical Muslims treat their women.” 

“They are saying support moderate Muslims and not radical Muslims but are not providing a definition for either,” said senior and MSA political action committee co-chair Hamzah Hararah. 

“For them Salman Rushdie might be a moderate, but for others he might not.” 

UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau stopped by the Pride Not Prejudice table Wednesday. 

“You are doing the right thing,” he told the students smiling. 

He later told the Planet that the university was obligated to let students express their views since Berkeley was the birthplace of free speech. 

“My pride lies with Peace Not Prejudice because they are conducting themselves in a dignified manner when they are being subjected to insult.”


Council Asks for Study On Hotel Funding

By Judith Scherr
Friday October 26, 2007

Despite concerns of some residents that the city could end up subsidizing a downtown hotel-condo project, the council on Tuesday voted 8-1 to accept the developer’s funds to hire a consultant to figure out funding. 

Councilmember Dona Spring voted against the proposal. 

The council also approved a 13 percent salary hike for firefighters and named the Planning Commission as the lead commission on Bus Rapid Transit. The city manager restored funding to the Quarter Meal program. 

 

Downtown hotel 

A downtown hotel at Shattuck Avenue and Center Street is in the planning stages, spearheaded by UC Berkeley, which owns the land where the 210-room facility would be built.  

The project, to be named the Berkeley Charles Hotel, is being developed by Boston-based Carpenter and Company and is planned to include a conference room, ballroom, retail space and 50 residential condominiums. 

A report authored by Acting Economic Development Division Director Michael Caplan urged the council to accept funding from the developer to pay a consultant to look at “possible mechanisms to provide tax abatement or other subsidies to render the project feasible.” Caplan’s report notes a $30 million funding gap. 

At the council meeting, however, Caplan underscored the limitations on the consultant’s work: “This does not commit the city to a project subsidy,” he said. 

The report says the funding gap can be partially resolved if the city waives some hotel occupancy tax revenues, funds that some councilmembers said should be used for other city projects. 

The council vote means accepting $50,000 from the developer to contract with Keyser Marston and Associates to address the funding gap and “find creative ways to close this gap” that includes “partnering with the city to rebate some portion of the Transient Occupancy Tax [hotel tax] generated by the hotel in its early years of operation.” 

Councilmember Linda Maio said she thought the project would generate funds for the city and agreed with most of the council that an expert should be hired to analyze the feasibility of the project. 

“We want to hire our own person to go through the numbers,” said Councilmember Linda Maio. “I’m concerned the numbers are so high.” 

A few members of the public and Councilmember Spring were less enthusiastic about the contract for the study, which they said would lead to city subsidies. 

“It’s nuts,” former Planning Commission Chair Zelda Bronstein told the council. While Bronstein said she supports the idea of building a hotel downtown, she cautioned, “The idea of the subsidy needs to be killed.” 

Spring was the lone council vote opposing acceptance of funds for the fiscal analysis. The proposed project may do more harm than good, she said. 

“We’re asked to violate the height ordinance,” Spring said. The hotel could be as high as 20 stories. “They want us to give away the sidewalk and the street and build luxury condos,” she said. 

The council turned down an addition to the resolution by Councilmember Kriss Worthington, who had wanted to include in the resolution an addition, asking the developer to include “community benefits” in the project, including offering “card check” (a way to unionize workers through cards they submit), green building and affordable housing. 

 

Firefighters’ contract 

Following an 8-0-1 council vote to approve a four-year contract, firefighters will get a 13 percent raise over four years, retroactive to June 2006. A 2008 ballot measure may be needed to help pay for the salary hike in 2009-2010. 

Spring abstained, calling for the council to delay consideration of the raise to allow “for more discussion on the impact on future budgets.”  

Councilmember Gordon Wozniak disagreed. “The city has been in negotiations for a year and a half,” he said, pointing out that the firefighters’ contract expired in June 2006. In other years the raises have been 5 to 6 percent, he said, adding that the approximate 3 percent salary hike per year mirrors the city’s revenue growth. 

The proposed contract places firefighters near the median salaries of firefighters in nearby districts, wrote City Manger Phil Kamlarz in a report to the council. 

Kamlarz also noted in the report that the anticipated revenue increases would be sufficient only through 2008. “However, the [fiscal year] 2009 adopted budget does not include funding for full staffing, which is currently being considered as part of a potential ballot measure for November 2008,” Kamlarz wrote. 

Spring argued that the public had not had time to read the report, delivered to the council and public just before the meeting. “We should be willing to let the public scrutinize this before we vote. Who do you think pays the bills around here?” she asked. 

 

Bus rapid transit (BRT) 

The City Council unanimously approved a resolution directing the Planning Commission in cooperation with the Transportation Commission to lead Berkeley’s process for public discussion and input on Bus Rapid Transit, an AC Transit proposal that would, if fully implemented, dedicate lanes for buses on Telegraph Avenue and other streets in Berkeley, Oakland and San Leandro. 

A staff report on the question indicates that the commission should be ready to present its “preferred alternative” for BRT implementation to the City Council by March 25. In addition to dedicated lanes, BRT can include technology to turn traffic lights green, ticket machines at bus stops, more frequent bus service and other features. 

The debate among public speakers at the meeting was over whether the Planning Commission or Transportation Commission should take the lead on the question. The argument for the Planning Commission was that it would look at broader ramifications of BRT—economic development and more—while the Transportation Commission would have looked more narrowly at questions such as side-street congestion that could result from BRT. 

The Transportation Commission has been favorable toward BRT. 

The resolution includes a proposal to AC Transit to conduct a feasibility study among the communities along the BRT route on the eco-pass concept, where bus passes are subsidized by the community or by businesses. 

 

Quarter Meal 

A vote of the council wasn’t necessary on Councilmember Worthington’s resolution to restore funding to Berkeley Food and Housing’s “quarter meal” program. The program was asking for $23,000 that had been cut from the city’s budget in June. City Manager Phil Kamlarz, however, said there was $2,000 per month until February in the city coffers to fund the program.  

At midyear, when the city takes a fresh look at its balance sheet, it might be able to give the program another half year of funding, he said. 

The Quarter Meal Program serves hot meals, five evenings per week at Trinity United Methodist Church on Bancroft Way.  

 

Editor’s note: Zelda Bronstein is currently volunteering as a proofreader for the Planet.


New Children’s Hospital Tax Measure Added to Ballot

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday October 26, 2007

After what Supervisor Keith Carson said was “reluctantly” carrying out their legally-mandated duty to place a $12 million Children’s Hospital special tax initiative on the February ballot, Alameda County supervisors voted to place a second compromise measure on the ballot as well. 

But supervisors also said that both ballot measures may be in trouble and may not get the political support of all of them in next year’s campaigning. 

The compromise measure, which County Administrator Susan Muranishi said would mitigate some but not all of the county’s concerns about the original Children’s Hospital’s initiative, was written by Children’s attorneys following what some participants have privately described as an intense Oct. 9 meeting between hospital and county officials, and what Muranishi said were “extensive” followup meetings and conference calls. 

Both measures passed at last Tuesday’s supervisors’ meeting on 4-0 votes, with Supervisor Alice Lai-Bitker absent. 

The two competing measures will now appear side-by-side on next year’s presidential ballot in Alameda County. To pass, each measure must receive a two-thirds vote. If both pass, the measure getting the most votes will go into force. 

Children’s Hospital Vice President Mary Dean told supervisors at last Tuesday’s meeting that Children’s was “in total support of the revised version of the measure.” 

Children’s Hospital officials were unavailable to comment for this story. 

Both measures would authorize a special property parcel tax ranging between $24 and $250 per year for the construction of a new Children’s Hospital. Seismic problems had forced Children’s, a private hospital, to either retrofit its old North Oakland hospital or build a new one either in Oakland, in another Alameda County city or outside the county. Earlier this month, Children’s announced plans to build a 250 patient room, $700 million facility, complete with a 12-story tower, between 52nd and 53rd streets near the hospital’s current location. 

But according to Muranishi, the revised measure would alleviate several of the county’s original concerns, including eliminating the county as the holder of the bond’s debt service, reimbursing the county’s costs in administering the tax and providing some assurance that tax proceeds do not supplant hospital funds that can then be freed up for purposes not spelled out in the tax measure. 

The conflict between county supervisors and Children’s Hospital officials, which had been simmering for several months, went public last July after all five supervisors expressed sometimes-bitter concerns that Children’s had placed their original measure on the ballot without prior consultation with county staff or officials. 

One of the county’s major concerns was that the Children’s measure, if passed, would add to the county’s debt load, making it difficult if not impossible for the county to initiate its own bond measure for needed seismic retrofits at county-operated Highland Hospital. 

“What caught me off guard is that this has been going on for a long while and we were not made aware of it,” Board of Supervisors President Scott Haggerty said at the time. “I don’t know how you can involve the county in incurring this level of debt without bringing us to the table. This is not about the fine work that Children’s Hospital is doing. Everybody on this board appreciates that and acknowledges that and supports that. Let’s not make this about the children. We get it. We spend millions on the needs of children in this county. It’s about process. It’s about not coming to us in advance. I don’t know how you operate like this.” 

A chastened Children’s Hospital President and CEO Frank Tiedemann said in response that he “apologize[d] if we have not communicated well. We do a good job running a hospital, but not so well in the political process. We know you have serious questions, and we will try to give them serious responses.” 

Children’s officials said last July that it was an oversight that county staff and officials had not been brought into the original planning for the tax initiative, but the hospital’s bond counsel later revealed to county officials that their exclusion from the planning process had been intentional. 

According to Supervisor Carson in announcing last Tuesday’s compromise, county officials “rolled up our sleeves to work on correcting the original measure in order to demonstrate our support for health care in this county, regardless of whether we are the deliverers of that health care.” 

Carson represents the district in which Children’s Hospital is located and has been taking the lead in negotiations between the county and hospital officials over the measure. 

While supervisors expressed reluctance at Tuesday’s meeting about voting to place the original measure on the ballot, Alameda County Counsel Richard Winnie told them that because the measure had received the necessary signatures, the supervisors were mandated to do so. 

But Carson said that the original measure “was proven to be flawed by the fact that Children’s Hospital’s own attorneys have come back and totally changed it,” and said that the original measure would have failed “without a doubt” because of announced opposition by the Alameda County Taxpayers Association and “all labor unions in the county.” 

Carson said he still had “deep concerns” about the compromise measure.  

And Haggerty said that both initiatives were “poorly written,” adding that “we tried to fix the problem initially before Children’s Hospital began collecting signatures on the original ballot measure,” but said that county officials were rebuffed by hospital officials. “I talked with one Children’s Hospital Board member about how poorly-written the first measure was, and this person looked me straight in the face and said, ‘you wouldn’t vote against children, would you?’” But Haggerty said that having two competing Children’s Hospital measures on the ballot will be confusing to voters, “and both of them will probably fail.” Haggerty said that “while I’m voting for it today, I’m not saying I will go out and ask voters to support it.”


Ward Street Community Says No to Antennas On UC Storage

By Judith Scherr
Friday October 26, 2007

Faced with some 60 neighbors opposing telecommunications antennas proposed for a building at Ward Street and Shattuck Avenue—and armed with signs calling for the recall of the mayor and stating “Don’t Sell Us Out”—the Berkeley City Council split Tuesday over whether to uphold the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) decision to deny permits for the antennas at 2721 Shattuck Ave. 

Nextel Communications and Verizon Communications have appealed the June zoning board decision, the second time ZAB has voted to deny Nextel and Verizon permits for the antennas atop the five-story UC Storage building. They have also filed lawsuits, saying the city’s denial violates the 1996 Telecommunications Act. 

The split vote on upholding the zoning board—with councilmembers Max Anderson, Dona Spring and Mayor Tom Bates in support of the ZAB decision, Councilmember Gordon Wozniak in opposition and Councilmembers Linda Maio, Darryl Moore, Laurie Capitelli, Betty Olds and Kriss Worthington abstaining—with no position having mustered the five required votes, buys the council 30 days to uphold or deny the telecommunications companies’ appeal.  

If no five-vote position for or against the appeal emerges at the council’s Nov. 6 meeting—and, if before the 30-day period is up, there is no special council meeting at which the ZAB denial is reversed—the zoning board decision will stand. 

The council addressed the lawsuit in closed sessions before and after the Oct. 23 meeting, but took no vote on whether to go forward with the suit, according to city spokesperson Mary Kay Clunies-Ross. The closed-door session was continued to Thursday at 5 p.m.  

“This is the first time the council has asked good questions,” the community group’s spokesperson Michael Barglow told the council, speaking for a second time at the end of the hearing. “The only reason we’re being taken seriously is because of the Verizon lawsuit,” he added. 

At the opening of the public hearing, Cory Alvin, speaking for Nextel, told the council that the company had reduced the number of antennas from 12 to six and noted that “a third-party review had determined that [the antennas] were necessary for coverage needs.” 

Alvin also underscored that the antennas were planned for a “commercial corridor,” as the city could deny them in a residential area. 

Community members, however, are quick to point out that UC Storage, owned by Piedmont resident Patrick Kennedy, abuts a residential neighborhood. Community speakers called on the city to locate the antennas away from the neighborhood, such as on the fire station on the west side of Shattuck Avenue at Derby Street. 

But Paul Albritton, attorney for Verizon, told the council: “There are no nearby sites for co-location.” He went on to ask the council to “look beyond the emotional appeals” of the community. 

Barglow, who lives near the proposed antenna site, spoke on behalf of the neighborhood. “Stand up and lead,” he told the council. 

Addressing the lawsuit, Barglow called on the city to spend the funds necessary to fight the telecommunications companies. He noted that while some city staff believe the lawsuit would cost about $250,000, the community thinks the cost would be less. 

Barglow added the campaign to recall Bates to the mix. The mayor, who was strongly supported by his neighbors in the last election, lives close to the proposed project. His house was picketed Monday night by about 25 of his neighbors.  

“Some of us are doing the hard work of recalling the mayor,” Barglow said. 

While city insiders asking for anonymity have said Bates supports settlement of the Nextel/Verizon lawsuit, the mayor voted in favor of denying the appeal. 

Another neighbor of the proposed antennas, Christopher Restivo, addressing the council, pointed out that the antennas proposed atop UC Storage were not likely to serve the South Berkeley neighborhood. “If folks in the hills are using cell phones, what antennas are they using?” he asked. 

While allegations of adverse health effects from radiation emitted by the antennas cannot be included in criteria for approval or disapproval of the antennas, according the Telecommunications Act, it was on the minds of both council and community. 

“Could you put aluminum foil to shield their houses?” asked Wozniak, the only councilmember to vote against the ZAB denial of the antennas.  

“Metal blinds would block [the radiation],” Anthony Tricoci, the city’s consultant on telecommunications responded. 

Anderson, a registered nurse, who represents the area and made the motion to uphold the zoning board decision, targeted the federal Telecommunications Act’s prohibitions against addressing the health questions. 

“This issue strikes at the heart of our role in the federal government,” he said. “We’re told we have no right to speak out about our health—we’re told to shut up and go away. Nextel and Verizon are not in this city to promote public health.” 

We cannot “leave the important aspects of our lives to those who do it for profit,” Anderson said.


Building Heights Edge Up at DAPAC Group

By Richard Brenneman
Friday October 26, 2007

The question of downtown Berkeley’s future skyline remained unresolved Thursday at the end of the second of three scheduled meetings of a citizen planning committee, the land-use subcommitee of the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee (DAPAC). 

With chair Rob Wrenn pushing for a unanimous vote, members of the panel are drafting language about the height and population of the future of the city center for presentation to DAPAC on Nov. 7. 

The controversial notion of 16-story point towers—roundly blasted at last week’s DAPAC public workshop—remained very much on the table at the end of Monday’s session. 

While majority sentiment at DAPAC meetings seemed to favor lower buildings, the heights discussed Thursday were edging up from the eight-floor counter-proposal Wrenn had offered only weeks earlier. 

Two subcommittee members—retired UC Berkeley development executive Dorothy Walker and professional transportation planner Victoria Eisen—backed the towers, with more support coming from Kerry O’Banion, the UC Berkeley planner who serves as the university’s ex officio member. O’Banion said he favored higher buildings, which would allow the university to keep all its planned development on property the tax-exempt institution already owns. 

It was the university’s expansion plans through the year 2020 that triggered the city lawsuit that resulted in an out-of-court settlement mandating a new downtown plan and the DAPAC process. 

Architect James Novosel and Wrenn opted for a 12-story maximum, with environmentalist Juliet Lamont favoring eight floors and affordable housing advocate Jesse Arreguin proposing a maximum of 10. 

Commercial buildings should be allowed to rise as high as apartments and condos, said committee members, with the exception of Arreguin, who said full height should be allowed only if the developer agreed to provide greater benefits for the community. 

Walker and Eisen said they favored taller buildings because they offered the only source of potential revenues for the public improvements in streets and open space called for in other chapters of the plan already adopted by DAPAC. 

Developer Ali Kashani and former city Land Use Planning Manager Mark Rhoades arrived together, with Kashani offering the subcommittee a set of spreadsheets arguing that only taller buildings would bring members of his trade to build in the city. 

Developers, he said, “look at a 15 to 20 percent” return on their investments—figures which, by his flow charts, could only be accomplished by structures of 14 stories and above. 

Planning Commission Chair James Samuels told the subcommittee that nothing should be taken off the table, adding that he thought there was substantial support on DAPAC for the proposed chapter by planning staffer Matt Taecker and its call for the point towers. 

Lamont challenged Ka-shani on his figures, saying that when she had worked in a bank, she learned to look with suspicion on figures prepared by advocates. 

And, besides, she asked, why should developers be entitled by a plan to profits greater than the average citizen is accustomed to receiving on investments in treasury bills or stocks? 

At one point when Kashani challenged her, Lamont shot back, “You don’t want to go toe to toe with me.” 

Walker and Eisen said the Kashani figures reinforced their convictions that tall buildings were needed to generate the fees needed for improvements. 

Planning Commissioner Gene Posch-man said that by simply continuing the existing 1990 downtown plan, the area could accommodate the 3,000 additional new housing units included in the version originally offered by Taecker. 

The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), a regional jurisdiction which administers an array of state funds to local jurisdiction, has decreed that the city must be willing to significantly increase the number of dwellings it is willing to build—though actual construction is left up to the realities of the market and government-funded construction programs. 

City officials, including Planning Director Dan Marks, have said downtown’s the only place the city might willingly accommodate a significant number of new dwelling units. 

The land-use subcommittee was a last-minute DAPAC creation, forced on a reluctant staff and Chair Will Travis. 

The move came after members rejected repeated iterations of proposed land-use elements that would liberally sprinkle the city center with the 16-story “point tower” apartment and condo buildings to accommodate the ABAG numbers. 

Subcommittee members have a lot to accomplish at Monday’s session, though they’ve left themselves an out with an option for a fourth meeting the following Thursday. 

Besides building heights, members must decide on where—and how many—taller buildings should be allowed and what shape they should adopt relative to lot size and the streetscape. 

 

Monday meeting 

Monday will be a long day for DAPAC subcommittee members. In addition to their own meeting that starts at 8 a.m., they also face a meeting for the full committee starting at 7 p.m. 

The Monday night meeting, held in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave., will feature a report on the public workshop, plus scheduled action on the Economic Development and Housing and Community Health/Services chapters. 

Those who arrive at 6:30 can see a presentation by landscape architect Walter Hood of the latest version of his plans for the proposed Center Street Plaza, which could be built if traffic were to be closed between Shattuck Avenue and Oxford Street.


University Seeks Community Input on People’s Park Report

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday October 26, 2007

The People’s Park Community Advisory Board is now accepting public comments on the draft report assessing the park’s needs and planning future changes. 

The board is scheduled to meet at the Trinity Methodist Church, 2362 Bancroft Way, on Nov. 5 from 7 to 9 p.m. to hear public comments on the report and state of the park. The board will make recommendations to the university on Dec. 3 about the study and future steps. 

San Francisco-based consultants MK-Think were paid $100,000 by UC Berkeley to conduct an assessment study to improve the park, which took place over the last nine months. 

The findings, according to MKThink, aim to address project goals of making the park safer and generating greater use by a broader range of community members. 

“They have done a good job but we still have a long way to go,” said Irene Hegarty, director of community relations for UC Berkeley. “The consultants have given us their best judgment, but if people think there are other things that should be taken into consideration we will listen to them.” 

The report focused on three ways to look at the site: an urban park, a student and community center and an arts park. 

At a community workshop held in July, park users, Telegraph Avenue merchants and residents and university officials shared ideas with MKThink about the issues of safety, homelessness and future programs and designs for the 2.8 acre site south of the UC Berkeley campus. 

Although student workshops were scheduled, Hegarty said lack of participation led to them being canceled. 

The 34-page report states that People’s Park is “often characterized as a battleground between park activists and the University of California,” which owns the property. Additionally, it states that many wanted the park to remain an open space and asked that the university recognize the struggles that took place to create it. Although homeless problems are discussed in the report, nothing conclusive is said about their future in the park. 

Board member George Beier said that he was hoping that the homeless issue would be discussed in detail at future meetings. 

“I really don’t believe you should push people out of a place until there is a place for them to go,” he said. “On the whole I think MKThink was sensitive to the needs of park users in the report ... I think the idea of tumbling into the park, of welcoming people, of using it as a place of reconciliation is great.” 

Beier added that he hadn’t seen a lot of space dedicated in the report about the history of the park. “I have said in the past that it would be great to have something small like a cafe to mark the history of the place and have a cup of coffee,” he said. “That’ll attract young people.” 

UC Berkeley student and board member Ionas Porges-Kiriakou said that he would like to see the word “green” before open space in the executive summary. 

“It’s too early to say if the $100,000 was well spent or not,” he said about the consultants’ fee. “If positive changes do happen to the park, then, yes, it was well spent.” 

Porges-Kiriakou also complained that students were under-represented in the report. 

“Successful outreach was not done,” he said. “I had to tell most of my friends about the meetings, and these are students who are aware of what’s going on in the community ... The report was MKThink’s analysis of public input rather than public input itself.” 

Board member Gianni Ranuzzi urged community members to read the report. 

“It’s a step to promote continued dialogue,” she said. “MKThink’s recommendations for improving restrooms, lighting and drainage seems doable.” 

Board members said that they were interested to see what plans the university had to move the report forward. 

The draft report can be viewed at www.communityrelations.berkeley.edu or at the People’s Park Office, next to the basketball court. Community members can comment on the draft report by e-mail at pplspark@berkeley.edu or send comments by mail to: People’s Park Community Advisory Board, 336 Sproul Hall #4208, Berkeley, CA 94720-4208.


Planners Mull Code, OK Condos

By Richard Brenneman
Friday October 26, 2007

Berkeley’s Planning Commissioners spent their meeting Wednesday talking about what they’d like to do. 

Commissioner Susan Wengraf asked commissioners and planning staff to consider the implications of letter from a contractor detailing his difficulties with the city’s zoning code. 

The issues around the Prince Street building permit application were complex, as Acting Land-Use Planning Manager Debra Sanderson explained in a memo to the commission. Part of the problem involved driveways that were wide enough for early 20th century cars but too narrow for their 21st century counterparts. 

Add the city’s parking requirements and the effort to turn a basically unusable garage into a mother-in-law apartment, and the homeowners found themselves caught in a complex of seemingly conflicting codes. 

While Sanderson said the would-be builder’s version of events differed from city’s staff’s perception of the events, she acknowledged that there are many areas where the city’s zoning code could be improved. 

“For two hours every Wednesday staff would go over items for discussion, though we’ve got it down to about an hour now,” she said. 

While many of the problems stemmed from interpretations of new ordinances, Sanderson said, others came from conflicts with existing laws. 

Commissioners decided in the end to ask the staff to bring one code problem before the commissioners to ponder at each meeting. 

Commissioners also agreed to delay consideration of proposals to create a city-specific density bonus statute at the request of the Wengraf and Zoning Adjustments Board member Rick Judd. 

The delay was sought so the chairs could review the comments on their proposal by city staff, then meet with them before the final document is presented to the commission. 

The commission scheduled a Nov. 14 hearing to consider proposed revisions to the city’s liquor license policies. 

One controversial policy would bar anyone from receiving a license in the city if they had even one past license violation on their record, and another would allow confiscation of licenses of older businesses which had been opened before the existing city liquor laws and which had been closed for at least nine days for any reason. 

The commission also voted unanimously in favor of an application to permit the conversion of six residential units into condominiums at 1821-1831 Highland Place. 

The units were previously tenant-in-common dwellings. 


Character and Cross Country

By Al Winslow
Friday October 26, 2007

Cross country running is a sport where everybody gets to play. 

All 46 students on this year’s Berkeley High School team—a collection of track runners, basketball players, chess players (who play better if they stay in shape), a baseball player and people who don’t like to run alone—all run in every race. 

Some finish near the front and some near the back. But nobody gets cut for being too slow. It’s a characteristic of the sport to get steadily faster. 

“I started out very slow,” said Brian Bort, now a coach. “My dad said I had to do a sport, and cross country was the only sport I couldn’t get kicked off of.” 

He had a back injury, he said, that hurt when he ran. Running made it go away after awhile. 

In his first race he ran five kilometers (about three miles) in 26.46 minutes. “I ran up to the coach and said, ‘Hey, Coach, 26.46, that’s pretty good.’ He just walked away.” 

In a race in college, he said, he ran a similar distance in 15.2 minutes, like running three five-minute miles in a row, part of it uphill. 

“I had coaches that wouldn’t let anybody go,” he said. 

Berkeley has a hilly, three-mile course in Tilden Park at the upper end of Euclid Avenue. Some courses are nastier, containing exposed tree roots, sand and streams that must be splashed through. 

Austin Snyder, a runner for three years, said 60 to 80 runners from several teams can start the race. “People elbow each other and people fall down,” he said. The idea is to keep your own team together as near to the front as possible. 

This is for mutual support and because of the team scoring system—five points for first down to one point for fifth. This works until the encounter with a horrible hill—half-a-mile long, rising at 45 degrees—where contenders and the also-rans divide. 

Brandon Reeves, a varsity basketball player with strong legs, said he can power himself up the hill but at a price. Over the top the “legs sort of go,” he said. 

Nate Haile, who came in first at a recent meet, also sprints up the hill, enough so that his thigh muscles hurt. But after a long descent he gets a second wind and is able to sprint again. 

Haile is from high-altitude Ethiopia, producer of the world’s best long-distance runners. For millennia, Ethiopians have lived on hills on the top of mountains from one to two miles above sea level. 

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 when 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.” 

 

 

Berkeley cross country runners at practice, Nate Haile on left. Photograph by Michael Howerton.


BUSD Nondiscrimination Policy to Include LGBT Students

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday October 26, 2007

The Berkeley Board of Education approved a policy to protect gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students and their families from discrimination and harassment in the Berkeley Unified School District for the first time Wednesday. 

The earlier Nondiscrimination/Harassment Policy included most subgroups but did not specifically reference gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students or their families, district officials told the Planet. 

The new expanded policy specifically addresses “gender differences, including transgender and gender non-conforming students and guards against bias and stereotyping of students based on gender.” 

Additionally, it “encourages curriculum, instruction and activities that are inclusive of all types of students and their families, and prohibits harassment in any form.” 

“We had an old, somewhat vague anti-harassment policy that did mention sexual orientation, that went back 15 years ago,” said School Board Vice President John Selawsky. “But there was no reference to anti-bullying programs or a curriculum development to include all types of students and families. The new policy itemizes some of these concerns. We are definitely not waiting for a crisis to develop this.” 

The earlier policy did not identify a district person or a complaint process to protect students against bullying, or even state that harassment would be subject to discipline. 

“I am not aware of any other school district that specifically encourages, as a preventive measure, activities and curriculum that teach kids to respect family diversity and gender identity,” said Judy Appel, executive director of Our Family Coalition, a Bay Area-based gay and lesbian family support group, and mother of two Oxford Elementary School students. 

“In California, there are laws that require schools to protect against discrimination and harassment based on sexual orientation and identity, but that doesn’t mean everybody is doing that in practice,” she said. 

Appel, who worked on a district-wide task force to draft the policy, said that the amendment would not force a biological girl who thinks of herself as a boy to use the girls’ bathroom. 

“Berkeley Unified is very welcoming to gays and lesbians, but I started hearing about anti-gay comments in the schools some time back,” she said. “None of the teachers were talking about family diversity. In general there wasn’t any uniform set of skills to combat stereotypes and teach diversity. A group of us decided to meet every month last year and one of the things that came up from parents was a policy that showed support ... We felt that kids weren’t seeing gay and lesbian families reflected in the classroom or learning to respect kids who would themselves realize they were lesbian or gay. The teachers had some fears and said that they would like to have some support from the district.” 

Nine-year-old Kobi, Appel’s son, told the Planet that he had never been teased at Oxford for having lesbian parents but had heard kids use the word “gay” as a slur. 

“My having two moms doesn’t affect me in any way,” he said. “It doesn’t make my family different from my friends’ families.” 

“They learn to respond quickly to different questions,” said Appel. “When people tell them ‘you must have a dad,’ they say ‘I don’t have a dad, I have a donor.’” 

Jen Rader, who, with her partner Barb Wenger, has two children (Ben, 6, and Elijah, 8) in Thousand Oaks Elementary School, said that the policy would create a safe and welcoming environment for all families. 

“Teachers will have the skills to answer questions not just about gay and lesbian families but multiracial, foster and adopted families,” she said. “If we make schools safe at the elementary level, then it will bear fruit in middle and high school.” 

Most gay and lesbian parents said harassment and bullying took place in the schools’ playground. 

“It’s possible that the new policy will stop that but it will require a lot of diligent policing,” said Ed Valenzuela, who adopted Malcolm X first-grader Kiki seven years ago with his partner Gary Walker. 

“Berkeley is very diverse, but two-dad families are definitely a minority here. There are a lot more lesbian mothers with children,” he said. “When things like Mother’s Day are celebrated at the school it would help if teachers are a little sensitive and turn it into a family event instead ... A couple of times Kiki has mentioned instances when a kid or two have come up to her and said ‘you have two dads, gross.” 

“That’s so gay” is another slur used in schools which gay and lesbian parents find offensive. 

District superintendent Michele Lawrence told the Planet that the district had no way of knowing the exact number of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students or families in the Berkeley public schools. 

“We don’t specifically ask questions about sexual orientation,” she said. “Our concern is to make certain that kids are sensitive to mixed students or families ... We want all children to feel safe on a school campus.”


Protesters Gear Up for Oct. 27 March to End the War

By Judith Scherr
Friday October 26, 2007

The oft-divided anti-war movement will be marching in San Francisco under a single banner Saturday: End the War Now. “No more surges, no more study groups: BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!”  

A pre-rally will begin at 11 a.m. at San Francisco’s Civic Center, after which protesters will march to Dolores Park. Before reaching the park, monitors will direct those who wish to participate in a symbolic “die in”—lying on the ground for a few minutes to symbolize those who died in Iraq—before continuing to the park. 

The sponsoring coalition includes the two large umbrella groups: ANSWER Coalition and United for Peace and Justice. There are some 150 other endorsers including the city of Berkeley, Alameda County Central Labor Council, Asian Pacific Islanders Resist! Watada Support Committee, Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists Social Justice Committee, Buddhist Peace Fellowship and the list goes on. 

Among the groups meeting to march are:  

• Bay Natives for Peace, who are gathering on the left side of the Civic Center stage and will lead the march. In an e-mail to the Planet the group said it’s asking all indigenous people to join them and wear “Homeland Security; fighting terrorism since 1492” shirts. 

• The Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club will take the 10:14 a.m. BART train from MacArthur BART to Civic Center, then march with the labor contingent.  

• Labor is meeting at the Federal Building, 450 Golden Gate Ave. at 10:30 a.m. and will hold its own pre-march rally there. Rep. Barbara Lee will be the featured speaker. After the march, the labor contingent will reassemble in Dolores Park. Councilmember Kriss Worthington will march in the labor contingent, representing the city of Berkeley. 

• Progressive Democrats of the East Bay is meeting at the plaza in front of the San Francisco Library, 100 Larkin St. They’ll be distributing postcards to send to Dave Obey, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, to hold him to his promise not to let funding for the war out of his committee. Northern California Progressive Democrats of America will have a table at Dolores Park. Telephone: 510-524-3791. 

• Code Pink is meeting at 10 a.m. at Civic Center, Larkin and Grove streets. Sing for Peace will march with them. 

Cindy Sheehan will be among the speakers at Dolores Park. Dennis Banks of the American Indian movement and Tim Paulson of the San Francisco Labor Council will also speak. Para La Gente, a rap group from Watsonville, will perform. 

Marches will take place in cities across the country, including New York, Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Orlando and Salt Lake City. 

There are more peace events Sunday: 

Women of Color  

Resource Center Brunch 

At 11 a.m., the Sisters of Fire Awards brunch will feature Angela Davis. Tickets are $45-75. The event is at the Scottish Rite Center, 1547 Lakeside Drive, Oakland. Call 510-444-2700 ext 304. 

Honorees will include Assemblymember Karen Bass, Los Angeles, the first African American and the first woman to serve as majority floor leader for the State Assembly, vocalist Linda Tillery, poet Isle Park, the Serv-ice Women Action Network, which helps women solve problems during and after military service, and California Latinas for Reproductive Justice. There will be a special tribute to 17-year Women of Color Resource Center Director Linda Burnham. 

 

Ecumenical Peace Institute Dinner 

At 6 p.m., also on Sunday, the Ecumenical Peace Institute annual dinner will feature Joseph Gerson, author of Empire and the Bomb, How the U.S. Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World.  

The event is at Redwood Gardens, 2951 Derby St. The donation is $15-$35 with no one turned away. Call 510-655-1162. 

 

Die-in 

And on Nov. 1, the first Thursday of the month, beginning at noon, activists “desperate about the continuing war in Iraq,” according to Ying Lee, a Berkeley Public Library trustee and former Berkeley councilmember, will observe the first year anniversary of the Thursday Die for Peace at the San Francisco Federal Building, 450 Golden Gate Ave.  

After a vigil and the reading of names of some of the Americans and Iraqis who have been killed in the war, some people will choose to commit civil disobedience. Lee is among dozens of people who have been arrested at the Federal Building a number of times over the past year. Other local residents who have been arrested over the year include Ruth Maguire, Sally Hindman, Stephanie Miyashiro and Grace Morizawa of Berkeley and Grace Shimizu of El Cerrito. 

While some of the arrestees may opt to pay the $125 fine after arrest, Lee said she and a few others plan to go to trial, likely some time in December. Lee told the Planet that it is critical for her to have a public trial “to express our horror about the war.”


UC Regents Set to Approve Berkeley Projects

By Richard Brenneman
Friday October 26, 2007

UC could make the first cash payment on a new downtown Berkeley art museum in January. 

The UC Board of Regents Committee on Grounds and Buildings is scheduled to approve a $3.5 million payment for partial plans of the new Berkeley Art Museum/ Pacific Film Archive during its Jan. 16 session at the Mission Bay Campus of UC San Francisco. 

The $110 million to $130 million in funding needed for the 138,500-square-foot being designed by Japanese architect Toyo Ito is set to come from private donors. 

Barclay Simpson, the 86-year-old Orinda resident and manufacturer who has given extensively to the project, heads the mu-seum’s board of trustees. If built, the new gym and office building that the university proposes to erect below the western wall of Memorial Stadium will also bear his name. 

Though the Barclay Simpson Student Athlete High Performance Center is tied up in a lawsuits filed by the city, neighbors and environmentalists, the university is moving forward with a search for a key project official to oversee the contract administration process. 

In a parallel move, the university has issued a call for companies interested in providing necessary site preparation and testing services, including the installation of a new support beam at the base of the stadium wall. 

The support beam was one of the bones of legal contention during the hearings on the litigation now awaiting a decision by Alameda County Superior Court Judge Barbara J. Miller. 

That action challenges the legality of the environmental documents for the gym and the other buildings included in the Southeast Campus Integrated Projects. 

 

Other campus projects 

The university is also moving forward with the planned demolition of Earl Warren Hall to make way for the 200,000-square-foot Li Ka-Shing Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences. 

A recently issued request for qualifications seeks a commissioning agent to supervise planning of the building’s heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems as well as other aspects of the project. Construction is scheduled to begin early next year, with completion 27 months later. 

Meanwhile, the university has also issued a call for bids for the demolition of the seismically unsound Campbell Hall, a building that houses offices of the College of Arts and Letters and astronomy and physics labs, and for construction of an 88,000-square-foot replacement. 

The new building would also feature a roof-level deck for student astronomers to study the stars, and a bridge linking the building to adjacent Le Conte Hall.  

The UC Board of Regents has scheduled actions on several Berkeley projects over the course of its next two meetings. 

For its meeting on Jan. 16, in addition to considering the new museum complex the board is slated to raise the amount of external funding the UC President’s office can contribute for the building of the Stanley Qualitative Biosciences and Bioengineering Facility from $15 million to $65 million. 

The nearly completed 285,000-square-foot building replaces the earlier 67,000-square foot Stanley Hall, which was demolished four years ago, located between Mining Circle and Gayley Road. 

The new facility, which will contain a significant part of the campus’s research on genetically modified organisms, opened on Sept. 29. 

While an earlier funding measure adopted by the regents in March 2002 specified that the regents would pledge the board’s credit to secure funding, that provision is stricken from the measure up for adoption in January. One of the reasons cited for the change in financing is that a $50 million pledge from a charitable trust is still outstanding, requiring the shift from donated funds to long-term financing. 

 

Lab projects 

Also in January, the Grounds and Buildings Committee will be asked to approve the environmental review documents and the design for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (LBNL) Advanced Light Source (ALS) User Support Building, a $32.8 million project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. 

The 31,389-square-foot building will support research with the ALS, a particle accelerator that produces ultraviolet light and x-ray beams. 

Approval will pave the way for clearing the site by demolishing the existing Building 10 at the lab. 

During their March 13 meeting, the same committee is being asked to amend the budget for the planned lab at LBNL that will house the offices and labs of the controversial biofuel program funded by BP plc, the company once known as British Petroleum. 

In addition to the BP-funded Energy Biosciences Institute, the structure will house other energy research programs, and plans show that part of the structure will be used for the lab’s nanotechnology research. 

While the regents had approved a $159.4 million budget earlier this year, the new action is needed to authorize a specific pledge to use the University Education Fund as the source of repayment of some of the $74.4 million in external funding needed for the project. 

The remainder of the external financing repayment is to come from lease revenues generated by BP’s use of the facility. Of the remainder of project costs, $70 million is to come from state bond funds and $15 million from gifts.  

Bioengineer Jay Keasling, a leading figure in the EBI project at the lab, is also running research programs out of the new Stanley Hall bioscience building and the lab’s newly leased space in Emeryville, where a second biofuel lab—the Joint BioEnergy Institute—will open next spring with federal funding. 

Funding changes to another LBNL project don’t require action by the regents, though the board will be formally notified of the move in January, 

The 22,500-square foot building will provide short-term housing for graduate students and visiting researchers working on projects at the lab. The Office of the President has already given approval not more than $9,993,000 of external financing for the project, with the remainder of $10,937,000 in costs covered by already available lab funds and a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. 

Construction is scheduled to begin next month and end by March 2009.


Fire News

By Richard Brenneman
Friday October 26, 2007

Deputy Fire Chief David P. Orth said a cigarette-sparked fire did about $20,000 in damage to an Alvarado Road home and its contents early Wednesday evening. 

Firefighters got a call at 6:14 p.m. from a boy next door to the home and rushed to 139 Alvarado, where they found flames inside a second-story home office. 

The blaze was under control within 20 minutes. 

Meanwhile, Berkeley firefighters have been busy battling bigger blazes in Southern California, said Orth. 

Two engines and eight firefighters were sent south as part of two Alameda County strike teams battling the raging wildland and forest fires that have devastated the Southland. 

Both companies were originally assigned to fight the Buckweed fire in Los Angeles County near Magic Mountain amusement park. 

One engine was later dispatched to the 9,000-acre Rice fire in San Diego County, and the second company was sent to combat the Grass Valley complex of fires near Lake Arrowhead in the mountains and near Big Bear Lake in the mountains above the Los Angeles basin. 

Flames had been whipped into firestorms by Santa Ana winds, which died down Wednesday. 

Orth said that he expects the two companies now in the south will be demobilized soon, though replacements may be needed depending on developments.


Opinion

Editorials

Editorial: So Just March, Already...

By Becky O’Malley
Friday October 26, 2007

The weather forecast says that Saturday will be another one of those gorgeous October days we’re blessed with in Northern California. It looks like it will be a very nice day for a walk—a long walk, a walk perhaps in San Francisco. Yes, if you haven’t figured it out already, this is a restrained pitch for the peace march in San Francisco. It’s being sponsored by—oh, who is it being sponsored by? And why does it matter anyhow? There will undoubtedly be people there with whom you disagree on some part of the message, or who will behave in a way you might not want to endorse. Go anyhow, carry your own sign with your own message, act the way you want everyone to act.  

You’ll see lots of old friends there, and make new ones. You’ll get some exercise. You’ll hear some music. You’ll see some handsome buildings, and some outrageous costumes. You can get there on BART, a trip in itself. 

And, someone pops up, will it stop the war? Well, no, probably not. Will it perhaps clean up the mess in Washington? Which mess? There’s always a mess in Washington.  

The latest candidate for attorney general of the United States of America doesn’t recognize torture when he sees it, and is a bit hazy on the concept of three branches of government. Blackwater and similar private security agencies continue to run amok not only in Iraq but around the world—it seems that the people in charge, whoever they are, didn’t learn about the nefarious “Hessian mercenaries” when they studied the Revolutionary War in their elementary school history classes. Congress continues to pass laws making the rich richer and the poor poorer, even failing in the last month to ensure that kids can go the doctor when they get sick.  

It is instructive but sobering to read in Arthur Schlesinger’s recently published journals for 1966 and 1967 about his own efforts and those of other Washington insiders, including Robert F. Kennedy, to persuade the Democratic establishment of the day to get out of Vietnam. Even those with the best intentions in that crowd, even RFK himself, didn’t really sense the strength of the groundswell of popular anti-war opinion which was building against the war.  

In the current congress, the Democrats cling to a tenuous voting majority, but they seem to be afraid to do anything much with it. Leaders express a desire to bring the troops home from Iraq, but can’t quite bring themselves to vote to cut off funds. “Wait until the election” seems to be the rallying cry, as it was in 1966-67.  

Schlesinger said then that “it is not hard to assert a congressional role,” but, given the structure of the American system, it is very hard to see how the Congress can restrain the presidential drive toward the enlargement of the war. Voting against military appropriations is both humanly and politically self-defeating.” 

Things haven’t changed much. The 1960s counterparts of today’s Democrats were looking for a hero to galvanize the masses against that era’s war. Schlesinger said of Bobby Kennedy that he had “a skepticism about a mass movement. Such a movement, [Kennedy] said, would have to tie itself to an issue or to a man. The issue of widening the war, he said, was too complicated and ambiguous. LBJ could always justify each specific step of intensification on the ground that it was necessary to say the lives of American troops and that it would shorten the war.” 

A lot of psychic energy is now being focused on who will be the Democratic nominee for president in 2008. The mass media love a horse race. Hillary Clinton, even though not a man, is being promoted in some quarters as the leader to whom a mass movement could be tied, despite her deplorable record (or lack of one) of leadership on key questions. Obama’s initial charisma seems to be wearing thin, for no good reason perhaps except that he’s lost the outsider’s glitz. A fresh face might pop up, or Al Gore might come from behind at the last minute, but don’t count on it. The Democrats could yet manage to lose this one.  

So, back to the main matter for the weekend...what good will it do to march in San Francisco on Saturday? Well, for one thing, for better or for worse, it is Nancy Pelosi’s home district, and she is still the speaker of the House, for all the good that does. She still shows a bit of backbone, but she needs all the propping up she can get from us.  

And then there’s the sacramental effect. The old Baltimore Catechism defined a sacrament as “the outward sign of an inward grace.” Every so often, it does us spiritual good to do what some traditions call “witnessing”—to show, well, not the flag perhaps, but to speak up for what we believe to be right, regardless of the effect.  

Mr. Eliot, the chronicler of life’s spiritual journeys, put it this way: 

“There is only the fight to recover what has been lost 

And found and lost again and again: and now under conditions 

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. 

For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” 

We must continue our struggle for a lasting peace based in a just society, even though we seem to find it and lose it again and again.  

And if that’s too metaphysical for you there’s always your mom’s unbeatable reason for doing the right thing: Because I say so, that’s why. 

A friend’s husband (he’s my friend too, but not in the same way) told me he went to the DAPAC workshop last week because the Planet editorial told him to go, and he always does what we tell him to do. His wife then suggested that I should tell him to do the dishes more often, but with awesome power like that I need to be careful how I use it, so I’ll stay clear of domestic matters. But as far as the march is concerned, don’t argue with me, just go. Logistical information about times, places, and groups you can hook up with can be found elsewhere in this issue.  

 


Public Comment

Letters to the Editor

Tuesday October 30, 2007

UC EXPENDITURES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Regarding the Oct. 23 article, “Alko Ready to Take On Staples, Owner Says”: 

While it is correct that the University of California, as part of efforts to reduce expenses (every purchasing dollar saved makes additional dollars available for teaching, research, and public service), has negotiated special purchasing contracts with vendors such as OfficeMax, it is also correct that UC Berkeley continues to support Berkeley businesses, including Alko Office Supply. 

A recently released study of the economic impact and social benefits of the UC Berkeley campus (www.berkeley.edu/econimpact) reports that in 2005-2006, UC Berkeley purchased more than $31 million in goods and services from Berkeley vendors, and UC Berkeley students, staff, and visitors spent more than $300 million in the city annually. 

Glenda Rubin 

Manager, Community Relations 

Office of the Chancellor 

 

• 

SMART GROWTH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In response to Will Travis’s Oct. 19 memo to DAPAC members: Smart growth might gain more acceptance if it were more of a rational theory and less of a textbook-based ideology. But then if its proponents addressed the real issues head on, they might have to acknowledge that smart growth is not an infallible solution. For example:  

Smart growth is generally associated with urban growth limits which restrict sprawl; in Portland these limits are state-mandated (in both Oregon and Washington). How likely is it that infill development will prevent suburban sprawl in the absence of any growth limits?  

Affordability varies tremendously across real estate markets (along with other factors such as demographics, climate, topography). In a market where close-in detached homes are virtually unaffordable to first time buyers, how likely is it that demand for suburban/exurban detached homes will lessen? And given the demographics of first time buyers, how likely is it that expensive condos will lessen the demand for detached homes?  

(And as for condo prices: The Chronicle’s Oct. 14 real estate section reports that the largest units in Oakland’s new “Broadway Grand” complex are priced at $901,900 for 2,108 square feet. That’s comparable to the median price per square foot in San Rafael.)  

Furthermore, many cities have unique circumstances that cannot be accounted for in a study, no matter how comprehensive. Berkeley is home to a major university, which generates tremendous traffic and ever-increasing demands on the city’s infrastructure. UC’s expansion plans, current and future, are unpredictable and largely beyond the city’s control. The city of Alameda has a different problem: it’s on an island with very limited access via aging bridges and tunnels—and the construction of a new bridge or “tube” is not at all likely. How much more density can either city accommodate?  

Why are smart growth proponents so consistently unwilling to acknowledge these circumstances and to work within their limitations?  

This discussion goes on and on and yet somehow never arrives at reality.  

Darcy Morrison  

Alameda 

 

• 

BULLIES ON THE  

BUSINESS PLAYGROUND 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

A couple months ago in the Planet there was a brief story regarding picketers at Metro Lighting on San Pablo. Apparently they were striking because they wanted to unionize and join the Industrial Workers of the World, an organization dedicated to ending “wage slavery.” My immediate thought was, “This must be a joke,” but then I remembered this was Berkeley, where there are people who actually take this sort of thing seriously. But really, the Wobblies?  

Further inquiry revealed it was not a joke to the owners of Metro Lighting, who are now being forced to spend a great deal of money on lawyers. Here is a locally owned business that makes quality products, pays its employees higher wages than most small businesses ($15-$19 an hour), as well as fully paid health insurance and two week vacations, which few small businesses can offer. If that’s wage slavery, sign me up!  

Apparently this is the new unionizing tactic: harass small businesses that don’t have the money to fight back, and ignore large businesses that are far more guilty of wage slavery and bad treatment of employees. It’s the same tactic being used here in Oakland by the UFCW against Farmer Joe’s. Why are unions picking on small businesses and ignoring non-union companies like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s? If the striking Metro Lighting employees and their supporters at the IWW are so worried about wage slavery, perhaps they should be picketing the local fast food restaurants or national retail chains. Oh, except those companies might be in a position to fight back. 

Owning a small business is rarely a path to riches—it’s mostly a path to stress, and the ability to, as the joke goes, choose WHICH 80 hours a week you work. If these idiots and their ideologue friends at the IWW succeed in driving Metro out of business, then who will gain? The owners will be out of a livelihood, and all the employees, including the strikers, will be out of a job. According to the IWW, working people should be entitled to the fruits of everything they produce. Fine. If the strikers would like to have all the money from everything they produce, let them give up working for others and go into business for themselves. Then they too will know the joys of wondering where the rent is coming from, being turned down for health insurance, having customers who don’t pay their bills on time, products that don’t sell, and all the other joys of self-employment. 

For those of us who are not anarchist ideologues, perhaps now would be an ideal time to show our support for a small local business that is being harassed by purchasing a nice light fixture.  

Jane Powell 

Oakland  

 

• 

BERKELEY HIGH SCHOOL ADVISORY PROPOSAL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Last week’s school board meeting was telling. Berkeley High principal Jim Slemp presented an advisory proposal that lacked a curriculum, a budget, any research supporting the proposal, and any mention of the one and a half hours of weekly academic instructional time that would be lost. And when asked about what he would do to find an extra 45 classrooms for advisory, Mr. Slemp could only hem and haw. (That makes me wonder about our recent $100 million school bond measure that was supposed to replace the 26 classrooms lost in the BHS Building B fire—that building was never rebuilt and a lawn has replaced it.) One school board member referred to the experience of a similar high school in Cambridge, MA that nearly lost its accreditation after implementing advisory. Another school board member asked why advisory teachers would only check student grades once a semester, if advisory was supposed to help them do better in school. Other school board members asked equally important questions for which there were no answers. Thank you for doing your job, Berkeley School Board. 

Peter Kuhn 

 

• 

WAR AND REPUBLICANS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

War and Republicans go together. The “war president,” Bush, in his rush to drag the United States into another war before his term ends, brings on the specter of World War III in a fit of insanity.  

Death and destruction seem to mean nothing to the president as he plays with unsubstantiated facts and figures. Every time W. tosses out more uncorroborated information about Iran, U.S. intelligence agencies are quick to step in and contradict it. 

Bush’s phony facts about Iran’s weapons of mass destruction are as non-existent as they were about Iraq’s WMD’s. 

Will Americans be duped again by Bush and his cabal and its propaganda? 

Ron Lowe  

Grass Valley 

 

• 

BERKELEY’S  

POPULATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I appreciate Robert Lauriston’s and Gale Garcia’s Oct. 26 replies to the Oct. 23 letter in which I challenged the claim that Berkeley’s population is declining. But their viewpoint still presents problems. Mr. Lauriston says Berkeley was larger 37 years ago, and that’s true. It’s also true, however, that (as in the rest of the country) average household sizes have declined considerably, so that any given population would need more housing units compared to four decades ago. I acknowledge Ms. Garcia’s correction about the availability of annual U.S. Census Bureau estimates, but would like to make three points:  

First, I don’t think the care and effort that goes into them across the country compares with that of the State Department of Finance, whose varied tools, from driving license information onwards, it would take too long to list. Second, we all know of the U.S. Census’s historic undercounts (especially of central city populations). The Bush administration is of course content with that, and has quashed attempts to give the Bureau the tools to reduce the problem.  

Second, these undercounts may well apply to estimates as well. We’ll have to wait till the 2010 census to find out, but it’s noteworthy that the Census Bureau’s 2006 estimates are lower than the state’s in Oakland by 14,300, San Francisco by 56,100, San Jose by 28,000, and Los Angeles by 131,000. Is it surprising that the U.S. estimate for Berkeley would be less than California’s? 

Third, the Census Bureau, just to confuse matters, also publishes (although not for everywhere every year) a sort of snapshot of changes, called the American Community Survey. It gives Berkeley’s 2006 population as 106,230—which does indicate growth since 2000! 

Finally, there is the curious and gratuitous matter that Gale Garcia raised—the fact that for many years (though not since 1995, when I retired) I was executive director of ABAG, the Association of Bay Area Governments. Apparently in some Karl Rovian kind of linkage, this is supposed to link me with rapacious developers: “ABAG’s power is about capital funding—largely for construction.” Anyone who thinks a program that reduces the public costs of worthy projects (UC’s headquarters, the BART extension to SFO, schools and health facilities throughout the state, non-profit housing efforts, and so on) makes ABAG into some kind of handmaiden of the construction industry is either disingenuous or naive. This is a program I’m extremely proud of, because, besides saving (like the insurance and risk management plan I also introduced), not only has it saved hundreds of millions of dollars, but it saved from extinction an all-too-modest regional planning program when Proposition 13 and huge federal cutbacks both landed on us at the same time. 

One last point. Ms. Garcia objects to the term NIMBY and says she’s “tired of the name-calling directed at those who try to preserve what is left of Berkeley’s charm, its revenue generating small businesses, and its wholly unique small-town—yet cosmopolitan—flavor.” I’ve lived in Berkeley for nearly 35 years, and it is preposterous to imply that those of us who think population growth in today’s metropolitan areas should, as much as reasonably possible, take place near major transportation facilities, have any less respect and love for what makes Berkeley unique than those who differ with us.  

Revan Tranter 

 

• 

FIRE DISASTER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

To all those citizens who fear socialism, a reminder—our federal disaster responses, which may be saving some of your homes as we speak, are socialistic. 

Gerta Farber 

 


Commentary: UC and BP: A Step in the Wrong Direction

By Ignacio Chapela
Tuesday October 30, 2007

When our students look back in time, it will be easy for them to recognize this as a key moment in history. The signing of the “bioenergy” agreement between British Petroleum and the University of California, Berkeley for a reported $500 million will be clearly visible then, in the future, as a very big step indeed, a decisive step in the wrong direction. 

At Berkeley, the bare promise of money has dulled the capacity for critical thinking and transformed our public institution into a secretive society manipulated by special interest grouplets. I shudder to think about the further consequences that the arrival of this money, and the BP associates carrying it, will have on our campus. Before today, the chancellor would already speak of “we” to refer only to those on campus who identify with his ideas, while the others, like me, are already defined as “them.”  

Any disagreement continues to be suppressed, dismissed as simply part of the colorful character of our campus, and the signing of the contract will directly fund the mechanisms necessary to entrench this suppression. Nevertheless, biofuels are now known to have been the wrong answer to the global warming puzzle, and the approach to biofuels into which Berkeley will be locked by signing a contract with BP is also already known to bring with it serious problems for human and environmental health. This reality is clear for anyone with eyes to see, most certainly for those unfortunate enough to live under the immediate consequences of its pursuit in places like Argentina and Indonesia. Time, wind and water will bring those consequences back home to us. With information available today, the only reason one could have to go into the biofuel program of BP and its Berkeley associates is to make personal progress, financially for sure and maybe scholarly, from the very flare of public support created by one’s own propagandizing. 

Other core values have been sacrificed already in the process of bringing BP to our campus and the ink in the contract with BP will seal their fate. Our chancellor and all the promoters of this agreement have systematically avoided reckoning with the destructive force brought about by this contract against academic freedom and also against an unencumbered public voice for the university. By hijacking the Academic Senate through brute force and parliamentary sleight of hand last spring, BP boosters have minted a new definition of academic freedom as the freedom not to be questioned on their financial associations, no matter how damaging for the university or the public. In other times this Orwellian definition would have been rejected as a grab for unaccountable profiteering, and so it shall be recognized in the future.  

But today any question relating to conflict of interest is swept under the cover of this new definition, making it possible for BP associates to carry out research, provide guidance in public policy, teach and train from the halls of our university while standing to gain most of their personal wealth from the consequences of their very research, teaching, and public opinion. The promotion of diversity and true academic freedom and the avoidance of conflict of interest are the most delicate values of our profession because once we lose them it becomes practically impossible even to see that we have: as we open our doors to BP employees and their associates, as we use the money that they bring to recruit professors and students who will by definition agree with the New Order for the university, a flood of acquiescence will drown out any memory of what a truly open and diverse campus could have achieved. In this process, society as a whole may gain a few upward ticks in the stock markets but it certainly loses irretrievably the values sown into the university as seeds for the future over many generations. 

This tragic moment for the public university and for biology represents, paradoxically, the natural but unfortunate culmination of Dan Koshland’s dream, a dream that became by deed of Koshland’s fortune Berkeley’s and the nation’s. Koshland can be credited more than any single individual for his obstinate dedication to transform the discipline of biology into what he defined as Big Science, just as it had been done by others for the field of physics that he so admired. In this effort, he conceived of his home, Berkeley, as the ideal place to bring that dream to reality. While this goal may have looked as desirable back in the ’80s, by the dawn of the 21st century it is clear that it represents the sacrifice of a whole discipline, biology, in the hands of a small, monopolistic political group which has successfully captured the name of science for their own visions, including the vision of Big Money. Whether Professor Koshland was able to see the tragedy in the natural consequences of his dream will remain an interesting question for his biographers. But now without Koshland his dream forges ahead by bringing the biggest players and profiteers in the geopolitical arena to dictate what we, and by consequence, society, should do with the Big Science that we have wrought. 

Koshland was wrong, however, in modelling biology after physics, and the jury is in on that judgement. While physics was able to speed from nuclear particle theory to nuclear war in the briefest three decades, biology continues to resist, half a century and many billions of dollars later, the proposals of physicists and chemical engineers. The New Biology going into the BP era at Berkeley may have new names and new faces, but it has not been able to change the fundamentals of living systems, most poignantly those in the open, public space: the loss of biological and cultural diversity, the spread of epidemics and invasive species, the emergence of new diseases for humans and their companion domesticates, all these problems continue not only unabated, but racing at increased pace.  

The interventions by our BP-Berkeleyans have already shown what a staggering power they can have in furthering, not solving, all these problems. Physics as an abstraction provides necessary but not sufficient understanding to deal in real life with living individuals, species or ecosystems, and those living systems will continue to resist from their complex biological reality. Part of that biology-in-resistance shows up at Berkeley every year in the form of faculty, students and many others who want to sustain the idea that we can do much better than proposing to steer the world through engineers and lawyers. A lobby of BP boosters, half-a-billion-dollars louder, will most likely overlook to our peril the power of resistance of those living systems which they wish would fade away. But the public would do well to remember, on the day that the contract is signed in their name, that it is from that very suppressed biology that they can expect any real answers to the questions conveniently shelved away for the BP press conference. 

 

Ignacio Chaplea is a professor of ecosystems sciences at UC Berkeley. 


Commentary: Support Free Speech and Open Debate in KPFA Election

By Carol Spooner
Tuesday October 30, 2007

We fought a long hard fight to win democratic elections for KPFA’s Local Station Board (LSB). One of the most important reasons for that was so that listeners could be informed by the candidates of the issues and problems and their proposed solutions. Imagine, if back in 1999 we had had the ability to communicate with all the members and to elect—and recall—the board of directors (through our elected delegates on the LSB). 

In 1999 Pacifica silenced its critics, fired them, took them off the air, arrested them, put armed guards in KPFA, boarded up the station and piped in music from Houston. 

Today, supposedly, the candidates have the right to lay it out as they see it, and the voters have the ability to contact the candidates (those who give contact information) and ask questions and make up their minds who to vote for. This isn’t perfect, but it is a hell of a lot more than we had back in 1999 when we had to ask the California attorney general for permission to sue to remove the Pacifica board of directors. 

I say supposedly because Pacifica’s current interim executive director, Dan Siegel, is now trying to silence a group of candidates for the KPFA LSB and to prejudice the election against them for their revelation of certain issues of real interest to the KPFA membership. Based on complaints from KPFA’s interim management and members of the “Concerned Listeners” slate of candidates for the KPFA LSB, all of the KPFA listener candidates’ statements have been removed from the “official” Pacifica elections web page at www.pacificaelections.org. (I have just learned that they will soon be reposted but with non-alpha characters inserted in the names of persons mentioned in the statements. That will certainly make them far less helpful to voters in deciding how to vote.) In addition, the interim executive director has posted an “Open Letter to the Pacifica Community” on the KPFA Elections web page at in which he characterizes as “abusive” and “hateful speech” the statements of “a group of candidates running for the KPFA local board” whose statements, Siegel says, “contain little more than personal attacks on their opponents and station staff.” He has also conflated the KPFA “Peoples Radio” candidates statements with a racially inflammatory statement made by a WBAI candidate, and has smeared the KPFA candidates with the same stinky fish-wrap.  

First, Pacifica management is prohibited by law and the Pacifica bylaws from making prejudicial statements about the candidates. They are not permitted to use Pacifica resources (including web pages) to the advantage or disadvantage of any candidate or group of candidates. 

Secondly, the “Peoples’ Radio” slate candidates’ statements cannot by any standard be characterized as “hate speech” or “abusive” or “personal attacks.” They are not attacks on anyone’s character. They are factual assertions and strong arguments concerning the positions and actions of other candidates and the station manager and program director concerning station policies and the LSB. Vigorous debate about these issues is the proper purpose of the elections forum, so that the membership can make informed decisions when they vote. 

It is true that in September 2005 Brian Edwards-Tiekert (a staff LSB member currently running for reelection) sent an email to a group of people to schedule a meeting to discuss, among other things, “dismantling the LSB.” Among those people was Sherry Gendleman (a listener LSB member currently running for re-election on the “Concerned Listeners” slate), Lemlem Rijio (who was then KPFA’s development director and is now KPFA’s interim station manager), Sasha Lilley (who was then a producer for “Against The Grain” and is now KPFA’s interim program director), and Bonnie Simmons (who is a staff LSB member, the current LSB chair, and an endorser of the “Concerned Listeners” slate of candidates). 

This is a matter that should be of concern to the voters. “Dismantling” the LSB is not the way to get good governance for KPFA and Pacifica. I am glad that the “Peoples Radio” slate chose to publish it in their joint candidates’ statements. That e-mail was widely circulated among those close to the station when it first came out, and the fact that it is now a campaign issue should be a surprise to nobody. 

It is an outrage that the interim executive director is issuing prejudicial statements and taking candidates’ statements off the web page.  

So, while I believe more strongly than ever that it is essential that the “I-Team” candidates be elected to serve as a core of civility and sanity on the LSB and a “buffer zone” between the opposing factions, I also believe it is important to repudiate the executive director for his outrageous acts, and “Concerned Listeners” slate for demanding this censorship of other candidates’ statements. That can be done by ranking “Peoples’ Radio” slate members after the “I-Team” candidates. This will also preserve some balance on the LSB, as the “Concerned Listeners” hold a majority of the seats that were filled last year and are not up for re-election this year. I would certainly prefer that candidates be elected who support free speech and open debate, rather than those who are seeking to silence and censor it. 

Here is my recommended order of ranking: 

No. 1-No. 4 — the “I-Team” listed in alphabetical order—you choose your order of preference: Steve Conley, Chandra Hauptman, Tracy Rosenberg and Joe Wanzala. 

No. 5-No. 11 — the “Peoples Radio” slate listed in alphabetical order—you choose your order of preference: Bob English, Dave Heller, Atilla Nagy, Richard Phelps, Mara Rivera, Gerald Sanders and Stan Woods. 

No matter how you vote, please do be sure to vote so the election makes its 10 percent quorum. The ballots must be received (not postmarked) by Nov. 15. 

For more info on the candidates and their slates see their web pages: 

• The I-Team: http://radiopoetics.org. 

• Peoples’ Radio: http://peoplesradio.net/election2007.htm. 

• KPFA Voices For Justice: http://voicesforjusticeradio.googlepages.com. 

• Concerned Listeners For KPFA: http://concernedlisteners.org. 

 

Santa Rosa resident Carol Spooner was a KPFA Local Board Member from 2000 to 2005 and a Pacifica National Board member from 2002 to 2005.


Commentary: KPFA ‘Concerned Listeners’

By Sherry Gendelman
Tuesday October 30, 2007

Concerned Listeners very much appreciates the Berkeley Daily Planet’s coverage of the current KPFA LSB elections.  

Concerned Listeners is a broad coalition of people active in labor, community organizing, and the arts. We formed because we did not want KPFA’s board dominated by sectarian groups trying to impose a rigid ideological orthodoxy on a station that has always thrived because of its diversity. Our candidates include myself, Sherry Gendelman, a long-time stawart and activist who led one of the listener lawsuits that saved KPFA and Pacifica from a hostile board in 1999-2001. We also include new faces like Dianne Enriquez, an activist with Young Workers United, and a former member of KPFA’s First Voice Apprenticeship Program. We have people active in unions and academia, like Warren Mar of the CCSF Community and Labor Studies Program. And we also have people with a history in the arts—for years, John Van Eyck sat on board of the National Endowment for the Arts as a trade union representative. Matthew Hallinan is a seasoned political organizer, and co-founded of the Wellstone Club. Susan McDonough works for the Alameda County Central Labor council, and has a strong nonprofit fundraising background. Antonio Medrano is a consummate community activist, co-chairing Concilio Latino of Contra Costa County, among his work with many, many other organizations. And Paul Robins, a software manager from the Peninsula, is tech-savvy with a solid background in labor organizing and Buddhist peace work. See www.concernedlisteners.org. 

We’re running to strengthen KPFA. We believe in a KPFA that is both radical, and diverse, embracing its original mission of using the airwaves for dialogue between contrasting points of view. We want to bring the station closer to the communities it serves, by doing hands-on outreach and organizing ourselves—not by yelling about how the station’s not doing enough.  

In this regard we welcome the statement by Dan Siegel, civil rights attorney, long-time political activist, and interim executive director of the Pacifica Foundation. It is Dan Siegel’s opinion that “Pacifica’s local station board elections have taken a particularly nasty turn. A group of candidates running for the KPFA local board have issued statements that contain little more than personal attacks on their opponents and station staff. A candidate at WBAI engages in blatant race-baiting. As a community and a progressive organization we must ask ourselves whether this type of rhetoric is acceptable. “Siegel went on to say that the debate within Pacifica is often so toxic that it inhibits the ability of Pacifica to respond to the issues our time, and the in-fighting, he said, “saps the morale of our hard-working and underpaid staff, and discourages people of good will from participating in our organization.” 

We, Concerned Listeners, urge Pacifica’s members to decide if this is the nature of the dialogue they want those of us who are active to engage in. To quote Mr. Siegel yet again, Pacifica needs “leaders who will work to improve our programming, broaden our listener base, and attract needed financial support.” We, Concerned Listeners, urge all KPFA members to vote for those candidates who want KPFA to flourish. To vote for candidates who have expressed ideas about how this radio station should be run to the advantage of the mission of Pacifica. We believe that would mean votes for the Concerned Listeners slate of candidates. We want to do some of the things the board is supposed to do but hasn’t—fundraise for KPFA, organize town halls for KPFA, hire visionary permanent management. But we can’t accomplish those things if we can’t transcend the board’s petty infighting.  

 

Sherry Gendelman is a Concerned Listeners candidate for KPFA’s Local Station Board.  

 


Commentary: The KPFA Flap

By Matthew Hallinan
Tuesday October 30, 2007

When I was considering running for the KPFA Local Station Board, a number of old-time activist friends told me I was crazy. There is a sectarian fringe, they said, that has placed all their hopes for getting access to an audience by gaining control over KPFA. At the same time, they explained, there was a staff that had grown comfortable with the way things are, and that would resist any effort to change things. Anybody who would put him or herself in the middle of that minefield was just plain nuts.  

What to do? KPFA and the other Pacifica stations are a few of the last mass media outlets that belong to progressives. It’s just not possible for those of us who witnessed the mass hysteria whipped up by the media during the drive to war with Iraq to simply stand back and let KPFA slide into oblivion because we don’t want to deal with the nasty characters who are trying to take it over. All of us on the left have had to deal with nasty characters—and most had a lot more power than these folks! 

When I agreed to run on the Concerned Listeners slate, I made a pact with the other members of that slate not to run a negative campaign. Somebody had to break the cycle of mudslinging that turns off listeners and that keeps good people from getting involved with the station. We were going to be different. We were going to talk about our positive vision for bringing peace to KPFA and for mobilizing support for strengthening its signal, improving its programming, and reaching out to a broader progressive audience.  

Seemed like a good idea. We all signed the KPFA Fair Campaign Provisions, the fifth plank of which states that no candidate may use Pacifica or KPFA resources to publicly attack another candidate, station staff, management, or the Foundation. Seemed like a good way to ensure that people would talk about their visions for the station, rather than simply what they don’t like about their opponents.  

However, at the candidate’s forum broadcast by KPFA, one of the People’s Radio candidates made a series of unsubstantiated charges against some of the management, staff and board. The point of his attacks was to insinuate that the members of the Concerned Listeners slate were somehow linked to the events and people he criticized. We ignored it.  

Then, when the election pamphlets were sent out to all the voters, we were amazed to see that the seven members of the People’s Radio slate had combined their statements into a lengthy, paranoid tract. They attempted to “expose” an effort by management, backed by a “minority” of staff, and supported by our slate to “dismantle” the Local Station Board in order to seize power at the station. Management’s goal, they said, was to take us back to the “bad old days” before the listener’s revolution of 1999. The members of our slate howled foul. We were playing by the rules and got blind-sided. And when we complained of the unfairness of this, that their slate broke the rules we had all signed on to, and defamed us in the one mailing the station would make—Carol Spooner and Marc Sapir come forth to protest that our complaints are just another example of management suppressing free speech.  

I know it’s a waste of time and energy to get down in the mud with a bunch of attack dogs, but it just goes against my Irish temperament to give these folks a pass on this.  

The issues are exactly the opposite of what the People’s Radio folks claim. There is no danger of management turning the clock back to 1999. The power of the Local Station Board is now written into the by-laws of the Foundation. This charge is their equivalent of Bush’s WMDs.  

It is we, the Concerned Listeners slate that wants to bring democracy to the board and to the station. It is the People’s Radio folks and their allies who are fighting tooth and nail to keep a broad, representative local Station Board from being elected. Look at who is running on our slate and who our endorsers are! The People’s Radio folks are not interested in bringing new people on to the Board—people who haven’t participated before in KPFA and that represent progressive currents that may have different outlooks on many issues than they do.  

These folks don’t want to broaden the base of democratic participation in KPFA—they want to control the station. They think they are the “true” representative’s of the Left, and they think they should be in a position to define KPFA’s mission. But do they ever talk about this? Do they ever say what their vision is? No they don’t. They talk in vague generalities about ‘mission’ and program, and substitute paranoid and baseless attacks on others to avoid spelling out what they really want for the station.  

They are not battling an effort by management to take over KPFA. Management at the station hardly exists: the paralysis created by these people has kept a permanent station and program manager from being hired! They have demonized the management and the paid staff, and have tried to present Concerned Listener’s efforts to get the entire KPFA community working together as a subterfuge for a management take-over. These folks are true believer bullies who do not want to see KPFA become an authentically democratic station that can serve as home to this incredible, broad and diverse progressive community we have in Northern California.  

That’s what’s at stake in the LSB elections at KPFA. 

 

Matthew Hallinan is a Concerned Listeners candidate for KPFA’s Local Station Board.  

 

 


Commentary: Density: Cause or Effect

By Darren Conly
Tuesday October 30, 2007

In his well-researched Oct. 23 commentary on the cons of increasing the density of downtown and Berkeley as a whole, Neil Mayer provided me with two major negative points concerning increased density: 1) That it produces gritty, undesirable urban conditions, or 2) that increased density leads to gentrification and the ousting of working families. 

In support of his first conclusion he cites examples of denser California cities of over 100,000 people (i.e. cities that can be compared to Berkeley) such as Santa Ana, Inglewood, East Los Angeles, El Monte and Norwalk and lumps them as cities with “urban ills of every type, where low income people...crowd multiple families into a single home in order to afford the rent.” Mayer is right on in pointing out that a large number of dense cities (in addition to the ones concerned here) do have such social ills. 

However, an essential distinction that Mayer has appeared to have overlooked is between density measured as the sheer number of people per square mile and density measured as the number of people per household. For example, San Francisco, which by most measures is not seen as a “slum” (though it certainly does have its share of slums) is, according to Dataplace.org, the second densest major city in California at 16,634 people per square mile and has an average of 2.5 people per household. El Monte, which Mayer implies as fitting into the “slum” category (I have never been to El Monte myself, so I do not know how much of a slum it is) has a population density of 12,169 people per square mile 4.2 people per household. What this means is that while the presumably “beautiful” San Francisco has a higher people-per-square-mile population density, its residents are less likely to be living with as many people than in the “grittier” El Monte. 

How does this distinction apply to the impact of increased density in our city of Berkeley? Well, one key factor in how density affects the quality of a city is not the level of density itself, but rather how that density is achieved. By pushing for a denser Berkeley, one supports having more housing units per unit of land, not more people per household. If one promotes a denser arrangement of housing units in Berkeley, the resulting increase in pure population density would come about in a more positive fashion. Specifically, we could have more people per square mile in Berkeley without degrading the quality of life by cramming more people into each household. 

In answer to his second (and on a superficial level contradictory) point that increased density promotes gentrification and the ousting of working families I respond by saying that yes, San Francisco and Berkeley are suffering from a housing crunch forcing many working families out, but attributing such consequences to increased density does not logically make sense. Larger economic forces such as high-paying high-end jobs and a beautiful climate are driving up the cost of housing in all Bay Area communities, regardless of their density. San Francisco’s housing market, for example, would still be on fire even if Rincon Hill weren’t being built. In essence, density is often a consequence of gentrification, not a cause. I will agree that increased density may not help keep housing prices down, but my point is that it will not spur housing prices to go up. 

I agree with Mayer that density should not go unchecked and that 20-story luxury condos are not a good idea for Berkeley. I merely have sought to point out that attributing certain urban problems such as high living costs, crime, poverty and blight to density is not necessarily an apt analysis. 

 

Darren Conly is a Berkeley resident.


Commentary: A Moderate Position on Density

By Charles Siegel
Tuesday October 30, 2007

The debate about development in Berkeley has been polarized for decades, but a moderate position is emerging in the current debate over downtown height limits. The moderates support smart growth but oppose high-rises. I myself am a long-time advocate of smart growth. I have supported all the pedestrian-oriented infill projects built in downtown and on transit-corridors during the past 20 years, including the Gaia Building. But I am completely opposed to building 16-story or 12-story towers downtown, because I want to preserve downtown’s human scale. During the current debate over downtown density, both extremes—anti-development advocates and pro-high-rise advocates—have made misleading claims. 

First, anti-development advocates have claimed that Berkeley is already very dense, denser than overwhelming majority of American cities. But it is parochial to compare Berkeley only with contemporary American cities. Berkeley is much less dense than most cities in the world. Traditional European cities are made up of row houses and apartment buildings of three to six stories, and they are about five times as dense as Berkeley. Asian cities are filled with high-rises and are much denser than European cities. Europeans who come to Berkeley sometimes say that they expected it to be a city, and they are surprised that it is a suburb. 

Berkeley is also less dense than American cities were 100 years ago. During the 20th century, densities declined dramatically as American cities were rebuilt around the automobile. During the 21st century, our cities will have to be rebuilt at higher densities again to deal with global warming. Even in America, current low densities are a historical anomaly. 

Second, anti-development advocates have claimed that higher densities will not help solve our environmental problems, since building high densities in Berkeley will not prevent people from moving to sprawl on the suburban fringes. 

In reality, international comparisons by Kenworthy and Newman and comparisons within the Bay Area by Holtzclaw show that automobile use is inversely proportional to density. Americans who live in urban downtowns drive only about one-quarter as much as the average American. Because automobile use is the prime source of greenhouse gas emissions in California, building housing downtown is one of the most effective things we can do to counter global warming. 

Third, anti-development advocates claim that working families want houses and will not live in apartments in downtown, which will just be filled with students. 

But what would those students do if they could not find apartments? They would find houses to share, and they could easily spend more on those houses than working families, because they are willing to cram more people into one house. The result is that fewer working families would be able to afford housing in west Berkeley, north Oakland, or El Cerrito, and they would be forced to move to remote suburbs. 

Even if apartments downtown are occupied exclusively by students and by empty nesters, that will open up more houses for families in nearby neighborhoods and cities. 

High-rise advocates have made two claims that can be dismissed quickly. First, high-rise advocates claim that it will not be economically feasible for developers to build in Berkeley downtown Berkeley unless they can go to fourteen stories or more. This is obviously untrue, since the Gaia Building, Library Gardens, and other downtown developments have been built with much lower height limits. 

Second, high-rise advocates claim that higher densities will give us the revenue to build amenities such as parks downtown. This reminds me of the famous statement that a Vietnam War general made: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” If we have to destroy downtown’s character to build an extra park there, then I would rather do without the park. 

Third, and more seriously, high-rise advocates claim that, the more density we build downtown, the more we will do to fight global warming. This argument is made by planners, who tend to think in terms of abstractions. They calculate the precise greenhouse gas reductions under different scenarios, but they do not care as much about how it will feel to live in or shop in downtown under these different scenarios. 

Since Berkeley is a small city, the number of people who move downtown will have a small impact on global warming under any scenario. The most important impact we can have is to provide a model that other cities will imitate. I would like to see people come to downtown Berkeley from other parts of the region and nation, and to think that it is such an attractive downtown that they would like to see the same type of development in their own cities. Millions of American tourists go to Europe each years to experience traditional urban neighborhoods with buildings up to six-stories tall, and I think they would also be willing to build this sort of neighborhood in their own cities. Traditional European cities are dense and walkable, but they have a very comfortable and appealing human scale. 

I don’t know of any tourists who go to experience neighborhoods with buildings sixteen stories tall, and I think most Americans would not want that sort of neighborhood in their own city. If Americans believe that smart growth requires buildings that are massive and impersonal, then there will be a backlash against smart growth. 

There are high-rise neighborhoods available for the limited number of people who want them—for example, in San Francisco. 

I think the most important thing that Berkeley can do to promote smart growth and fight global warming is to provide a counter-example to San Francisco: we should create a downtown that shows other cities that it is possible to build smart growth on a human scale.  

 

Charles Siegel is a Berkeley resident. 


Commentary: Underneath the Shady Tree (Again)

By Winston Burton
Tuesday October 30, 2007

I was sitting outside at a restaurant, on Center Street in downtown Berkeley, when my friend Martin the mailman approached.  

“Hey Winston, what’s going on with downtown Berkeley and all that stuff you were dreaming about two years ago? Pretending you were sitting under a shady tree in front of a grand hotel, looking at a new museum, kids playing in a plaza, a creek on this very block, and a Jimi Hendrix statue down the street. Looks the same to me!”  

“Martin, Martin, Martin my friend, as I said before, sometimes you have to eat dessert first!” I told him. “If you mean DAPAC and the planning for downtown, we’re gradually moving forward to the end. But sometimes only visions can be enjoyed in the now, and reality can take a long time. If we had a dictatorship we could make decisions instantaneously, lop off the heads of those who object and move rapidly. But this is Berkeley! And we are striving for consensus, which takes more time, but ultimately in the end it’s worth it! Every body needs to take a deep breath and be patient.”  

“Well, what’s taking so long?” Martin said impatiently. I tried to explain.  

“People are concerned with the height of buildings, blocked views, sunlight and shaded neighborhoods, while others are focused on who or how many people should be in the buildings, open space—which every one wants, and how to pay for it! Then there’s build green, build smart and build in sustainability. Some people are passionate about preserving the charm and history of downtown, while others are convinced there’s very little history, nothing that’s charming so let’s plan for the future. Toss in the university’s role, NIMBYism, Bus Rapid Transit, classism, racism and best practices in Vancouver, San Luis Obispo and Paris. In addition to relevant topics about downtown businesses, density and capacity, over the past two years we’ve had presentations about everything else under the sun except a partridge in a pear tree or should we say oak tree! Trust me, I’ve listened and learned from them all, and I think we’ve got a lot accomplished! I’ve attended at least two three-hour meetings a month, for the last two years and have missed a lot of family time and Monday night football. Don’t you get it?” I said, my voice rising. “This is Berkeley! I could discover the solution to world hunger and Henny Penny would say I’m only contributing to overpopulation and global warming. You can’t please everybody!” 

Martin looked at me and said, “You sound kind of angry—are you burnt out?” 

“Not at all, I guess I’m a freak,” I told him. “I’ve always tried to be on time to hear the public comment part in the beginning of each meeting, which I still believe is one of the most important parts of the process. I will not be intimidated, and I’m determined to do my civic duty impartially. I actually enjoyed most of the meetings and I think that the other committee members were the brightest and nicest people I’ve ever worked with. I applaud them all for being willing to give up their evenings and family time to discuss and work on things that may never come to fruition in our lifetimes!”  

“So what’s next?” Martin asked. I told him, “Well, as the prisoner told the guard when he was being released from San Quentin, ‘My time is up, when’s yours?’ ” 

 

Winston Burton is member of the Downtown Area Planning Advisory Committee (DAPAC).


Letters to the Editor

Friday October 26, 2007

CORRECTION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In Richard Brenneman’s Oct. 23 article entitled “Density Bonuses, Liquor Licenses on Planning Agenda,” it suggested that the joint density bonus subcommittee was only comprised of members of the Planning Commission and the Zoning Adjustments Board. 

However, the City Council also appointed members of the Housing Advisory Commission (HAC) to the subcommittee and they participated as full voting members in the subcommittee’s discussions.  

I am sure that it was a honest mistake, however I would appreciate it if that point could be corrected to reflect the HAC’s participation in the process.  

Jesse Arreguin  

 

• 

UNNEIGHBORLY BEHAVIOR 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I was at the West Berkeley Community meeting on Oct. 16 and was amazed at the rude behavior. People shouted insults from the audience. One fellow took hold of the microphone and wouldn’t give it up. He continued his rant until the time ran out and others who were waiting didn’t get a chance to speak. This is Berkeley democracy? 

I have had some problems with the way the West Berkeley Business Alliance has handled their proposal, but also with the spin that WEBAIC and some community members have given it. It is time to get over any mistakes that were made and also to get over hurt feelings about being disrespected, not informed, ignored etc. Let us get on with discussions about what needs to be done and who is willing to lend what kind of support. We are neighbors, not enemies. 

Bob Kubik 

 

• 

CITY ATTORNEY 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

The commentary masquerading as a news article reporting the retirement of City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque deserves a response. We have just witnessed the nation’s understandable loss of confidence in Attorney General Gonzales. His diminished standing resulted from the accurate perception that he lacked the necessary integrity commensurate with that position. While many of us believed the legal advice he provided was incorrect at best, what was particularly troubling was his lack of independence—the concern that he tailored his legal advice to meet the demands of theadministration, regardless of whether prevailing law and the Constitution supported that position. We now know that Attorney General Ashcroft maintained his integrity while rejecting the demand of Gonzales, Cheney and Addington to approve certain surveillance programs. 

The city attorney’s responsibility is multifaceted and exceptionally difficult. She must provide legal advice to city officials and the City Council on a wide range of issues, including personnel and employment law matters, zoning, police conduct, compliance with federal and state mandates, etc. She also must defend the city in wide-ranging litigation and initiate litigation as well. 

In asking her to carry out these responsibilities, we must not expect perfection. Nor must we expect that the city attorney’s reading of the legal landscape always will conform to ours or to those held by our elected officials or city administrators. If we demand such conformity, we are, in effect, demanding the same politically-based fealty which the Bush administration demanded and received from Attorney General Gonzales.  

If what we demand instead is integrity, advice based on a fair attempt to interpret and apply the law, and a vigorous effort to defend suits brought by and against the city, we must conclude that the city has been very well-served by Ms. Albuquerque’s tenure. Although I have locked horns with the city attorney’s office and challenged its interpretation and application of the law, I never had cause to question the city attorney’s fidelity to the people of Berkeley or her devotion to fairly interpreting and applying the law to further the city’s interests, without sacrificing her integrity or independence.  

It may be that few tears were shed about her departure; unfortunately this may reflect a desire to retain a city attorney in the Gonzales mode, i.e., an attorney who will obligingly follow the ideologically-based dictates of those in political power when the advice is sought. Let us hope, instead, that the new city attorney aspires to exhibit the independence and integrity of our retiring senior legal officer.  

Thom Seaton  

 

• 

GOOD RIDDANCE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

And good riddance to you, Manuela. You built a career by telling the city manager and City Council what they wanted to hear, which is not the same as providing good legal counsel. Take your golden parachute and just go. 

The city no doubt will go through the motions of a major search for your replacement, but in it’s wisdom probably will end up replacing you from within. This would be a serious mistake. Like the other law enforcement agency that has been in the news recently (Hi, Alberto), this one needs to be rebuilt from the top down. 

Evelyn Giardina 

Walnut Creek 

 

• 

BERKELEY’S RULING CLIQUES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Sorry, I cannot remain silent in the face of Becky O’Malley’s Stalinist-type revisionism (see her Oct. 23 editorial). I must point out that when I had my iron-clad case before the courts, I received absolutely no support or assistance from anyone of Becky O’Malley’s ilk, with one single and brave exception: Dona Spring. My case was based on an incontrovertible truth of the Brown Act, which specialists like Terry Francke now in retrospect freely admit. If I had received public support, it might well have made all the difference. As it was, I walked into a hostile court room as a sole pro per litigant up against two huge monoliths: the City of Berkeley and the University of California. Naturally, I got the short end of the stick, but along with me, the entire citizenry of Berkeley got the short end of the stick, and it is at least as much the fault of Becky O’Malley and all of her ilk as Chancellor Birgeneau or Mayor Bates. I guess I just wasn’t an influential enough member of the cliques that rule Berkeley to warrant the support of anyone. But now I must point out that those cliques are equally culpable to the villains they constantly try to create in the fiction of their editorials and commentaries. 

Now we must rely on the existing lawsuit, which also lost in the trial court and is now on appeal. However, the issues in that lawsuit are in fact much more “iffy” than the iron-clad issue in my lawsuit. But just like the very ones they constantly accuse, those of Becky O’Malley’s ilk do not look at the merits of an issue, but only at the status of the lawyer bringing the lawsuit. They do not really believe in the democracy of ordinary people any more than the high-flyers like Chancellor Birgeneau and Mayor Bates. Theirs is a bourgeois interest in promoting themselves up to the level of other members of the petite and not so petite bourgeoisie. 

Peter J. Mutnick 

 

• 

DOWNTOWN DENSITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I feel I have to respond to Becky O’Malley’s Oct. 23 editorial about the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee. For what it’s worth, I strongly support the proposals to allow much greater density in downtown Berkeley. O’Malley would apparently assume that I must be either a shill for the university, or a smug denizen of the hills who would never consider living in one of the downtown condominium buildings myself. I do, as it happens, live in the hills; I also work at the university, which (for what it’s worth) strikes me as far and away the best and most interesting thing about Berkeley. A downtown plan that permits higher densities would in fact help the university build the laboratories and museum buildings we need to retain our competitive edge as one of the world’s leading centers for higher education. But that is not the main reason I support such a plan. My concerns are rather to make our city a more urban and livable place, and to support a more environmentally and socially responsible pattern of development for our region. 

When contributors to the Daily Planet carry on about the threat that density poses to the cherished character of our town, I must confess I have no idea what they are talking about. Downtown Berkeley is at present a pretty desolate and unattractive place, one that many citizens avoid if at all possible. This is a real pity, because—unlike Westwood and Santa Cruz—our downtown has the potential to be a vibrant, small-scale urban center, with a dense network of public transportation options at the foot of a great international university. The obvious problem with downtown Berkeley right now is that it is not dense enough; we need more people on the streets at all times of the day and the evening, supporting shops and cafes and restaurants and theaters, and contributing to a flourishing urban culture. I believe a denser downtown Berkeley would become a much more attractive place for everyone who lives in and visits our city. I might even be willing to sell my house and the hills, give up my car, and move into one of the new condominiums. It would be terrific to be able to walk to work and to BART—but only if there is enough density in the downtown area to support a wider array of urban amenities than the area is able to offer at present. 

R. Jay Wallace 

 

• 

DENSITY AND DEVELOPMENT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

If there ever was a good illustration of Mark Twain’s statement that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics, it is Neil Mayer’s piece supposedly giving us the “facts” about Berkeley’s population density. 

First, it does not appear to me that he has his statistics right. Mayer claims that Berkeley ranks 172nd out of 25,150 “places” in the entire country, meaning that “we are denser than 99.3 percent of all other places in the United States.” I don’t know where he gets his figure for the number of “places” in the United States, but the source he cites, DataPlace, lists Berkeley as 172nd out of 848 cities in population density, putting us in the 80th percentile, not the 99th. DataPlace also shows that Berkeley is less dense than, for example, Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and San Francisco, Santa Monica and Hawaiian Gardens, California, to name only a few. 

Moreover, population density is a rather meaningless figure when it is computed simply by dividing the number of residents of a particular city by the number of square miles within that city’s borders. City boundaries are arbitrary, as we all know. For example, if Tilden Park were included in the City of Berkeley, the City would have 13.7 square miles, not “just under 10.5” and our population density would be 7,751 per square mile, not 10,158. That would make us 324th out 848 cities in population density, putting us barely in the 60th percentile. Everybody I know who lives in Berkeley uses Tilden Park extensively and counts it as part of the Berkeley experience. Why shouldn’t its acreage count in our density figures, just as Central Park counts for New York City and Golden Gate Park counts for San Francisco? 

Anyone who has spent 40 years living in Berkeley (as I have) and a fair amount of time visiting cities and towns around the country, can probably speak more wisely about comparative densities than Mayer’s statistics do. In my opinion, Berkeley can house a great many more people than it currently does, and we are all better off if population growth happens in cities like Berkeley rather than in further suburban sprawl. 

Fred Feller 

 

• 

DOWNTOWN DEVELOPMENT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As a modest contribution to the downtown development discussion, I would like to say that living in a fourth-floor apartment downtown has been wonderful. While I see that some people will not live without a motor vehicle, I do not need one at all, as I use BART, AC Transit, my feet, and a bicycle. It is reasonable to think that people who elect to live downtown will be less inclined to use cars than if they chose to live in lower density areas. 

It is also wonderful to be able to walk to everything downtown has to offer, and I would think that downtown could offer even more if more people lived there. I certainly wouldn’t want a downtown that shuts down after office hours, or where parking structures dominate the scenery, both situations that happen when people spread out to lower density neighborhoods. 

Guy Tiphane 

 

• 

DOWNTOWN SUBSIDY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It has recently come to my attention that Mayor Bates and/or the Berkeley City Council are “floating the idea of a $15 to $30 million subsidy” using city funds for the development by Carpenter and Company of a hotel complex in the middle of our downtown! Can this really be true! Not knowing all the facts, I hesitate to question their action. However… 

I was personally in a meeting when Carpenter and Company presented their idea in October, 2006 about how they were looking forward to doing this project and were very proud of a similar project in Boston. The same month I learned from the then-director of the Berkeley Art Museum that BAM “paid a significant fee share for the firm SMWM, who were retained by the Carpenter Company to develop a master plan for the block.” At no time whatsoever was there any indication that the firm SMWM was going to be doing this project for anything other than profit. 

This project has always been presented to those interested in the downtown as a business investment not in need of a subsidy! 

How can it be that our City Council is considering giving a subsidy to a for-profit organization that has already expressed the opinion that it is doing this project because they think it will be a fantastic financial success. If it is not a financially viable project for SMWM then they should not be in the business of such a development. 

If SMWM and Carpenter and Company are to reap a financial profit then SMWM and Carpenter and Company should make the financial investment to reap such a profit. Too much has been said for organizations that take from the public without remuneration and use it to benefit the already financially endowed commercial enterprise. 

I hope that in no way have Mayor Bates and/or the City Council undermined the hard and determined work of those citizens on the DAPAC who have sought to include this project in their recommendations. Please note, if it was not for the interference of the university in the business of running our city then such an effort would never have to have been made in the first place. 

Wendy P. Markel 

 

• 

RENT BOARD DUTIES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I wrote a commentary piece for the Oct. 5 issue of the Daily Planet in which I asserted that the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board has virtually nothing to do. Their three mandated tasks are gone or damn near gone. The Annual General Adjustment is now automatic, the Board itself has promulgated such regulations that there are now virtually no Individual Rental Adjustments and Costa Hawkins, the state law that imposed vacancy decontrol upon Berkeley, makes registration unnecessary. And yet the Rent Board has 18 employees and spends $3.5 million a year.  

As sensitive as Berkeley’s progressive community is to criticism, I expected a wave of rebuttals. And yet, the Daily Planet has published five editions since printing my commentary and no one has come forth to refute my position. If I am wrong, I would love to hear the opposing viewpoint. I challenge to Rent Board or any of its supporters to justify the size and cost of its bureaucracy. I am making some serious charges. Defend yourselves! If no one will prove me wrong, I can only assume that the Rent Board indeed spends millions to do virtually nothing.  

Albert Sukoff 

 

• 

REPUBLICAN RESIGNATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Last year I resigned from the Republican Party. It no longer represents me, nor does it represent America. It represents a relative handful of conscienceless, greedy people who are willing to destroy our country to feather their nests. I pray that enough people wake up and repudiate (a great word: reject with shame) the Republican party while “America” is still restorable. 

K.C. Rourke 

 

• 

RISKY BUSINESS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The Planet’s characterization of the biotech industry’s latest risky adventure as “tweaking genes in the drive to turn plants into fuel for planes trains and automobiles” suggests that this project is not only innocent enough, but maybe green as well. The biotech industry has gone to great lengths to repackage their dangerous work as to appear to be legitimate. The work that will be done here is a part of the larger effort to promote ethanol/GMO technology and has the same disastrous environmental and biological consequences as planting GMO crops for food.  

The corn favored by the industry for ethanol is GMO corn. Much of the land used to grow food for people would now be used to grow GMO plants for “planes, trains and automobiles.” This means less food for people and higher prices. To insure that all people can eat, we should be working to establish local control of lands to grow, harvest and distribute food, not federal control. This is vitally important if we are to regain our health and freedom. Eating naturally produced foods that are locally produced are important in maintaining healthy people and healthy communities. 

Let’s also remember the problems of cross-pollination by growing GMO are also the same, whereas non-GMO crops are easily contaminated when the wind blows. Recent studies in Colorado have shown that consuming GMO plants weakens natural immune function. 

In short, the biotech industry’s experiment with ethanol and other plant derived fuels, now being conducted, in part, right here in Berkeley is risky business with unintended consequences. A closer look at the big money and the players involved tells the rest of this sad story. 

Michael Bauce 

• 

PRO AND ANTI 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Dear Debbie Dresser of Hayward: You sound like a good person, and I believe you are not “pro war.” I would consider myself “anti-war,” but if another country’s government bombed my home and killed my loved ones, I know I could become warlike, maybe even strap on a suicide bomb. That is what our country has done to innocent Iraqis over and over and over. Do you ever imagine what they feel like? They are human beings just like us. Please don’t say that Saddam Hussein attacked the World Trade Center. That has been disproved. I believe you and I are not pro war, but there are people who are. Like Dick Cheney and George Bush and Blackwater and the other rich military contractors who are making a killing off this war. They can’t seem to get enough. They want to attack Iran with nuclear bombs now. Do you believe we should not have any say in what wars are just? Leave it up to those is power and blindly follow? Do you believe stealing their oil is a good motive for war? Some of us question these things. Maybe you should watch the video “Iraq for Sale.” I think you are being used. Do you not think Melanie Morgan is raking in big bucks to carry water for our corrupt administration? Have you heard the expression, “follow the money”? There is not big money in being antiwar. Think about it. 

Vivian Warkentin 

 

• 

PATRIOTIC COPS? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I came to the Wednesday Oct. 17 demonstration at the Marine recruiting station in Berkeley just as the anti-war protesters being herded to the east side of Shattuck yet I realized instantly how tactical a move that was for BPD who were in charge of keeping “the peace.” Each side, Code Pink and other anti-war groups on the east side and Melanie Morgan’s pro-war groups on the west side of Shattuck, was shouting, chanting, and singing in competition and, at times, in response to each other. It was raucous and angry. I decided to stay among the pro-war side to film some of their singing. When a young solder came to the mic and accused the anti-war side of “not knowing what they’re talking about,” I asked if he thought General Abizaid and General Sanchez, both former commanders in Iraq, knew what they were talking about. I was immediately pushed and shoved toward the other side of the street. I was incensed by their violence and asked a Berkeley police officer to cite them for assault. He laughed at me and after cooling off (on the east side of the street) I realized that BPD had their hands full with keeping overall crowd safety. So I watched as the pro-war people sent roaring Harleys crawling past the anti-war side racing their engines as loudly as possible, and as a pro-war “patriot” raced across the street and cut the cable of Code Pink’s bull horn. None of these acts of provocative violence were sufficient to merit BPD’s response. It was as I’d surmised. When I asked an officer if he couldn’t enforce the noise statute against the motorcycle drivers I was told “I’ve got bigger problems.” Nevertheless when an anti-war protester torched a small American flag a booted BPD cop was on him in less than five seconds. The burning flag was not near anyone close enough to endanger them immediately. I want to know why the BPD so blatantly chose to ignore the various violations of the law by the pro-war side and were so quick to abandon their “bigger problems” to act against an anti-war protester. 

Joseph Liesner 

Oakland 

 

• 

BERKELEY’S POPULATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Regarding recent letters from Gale Garcia and Revan Tranter: We won’t really know until the 2010 census whether Berkeley’s population has declined or increased from the 102,743 found by the 2000 census. The California Department of Finance’s most recent estimate is 106,347. However, that claim seems dubious given that in 2000, thanks to the dot-com boom, the rental vacancy rate was an unusually low 3 percent. The vacancy rate has since, thanks to the dot-com bust, roughly doubled, so the U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent estimate that the population has dropped slightly to 101,555 seems more plausible. 

However, even if the CDF estimate is closer to the truth, that is still a substantial drop from the peak population of 116,716 recorded by the 1970 census. In other words, in those days our town housed 10,000 to 15,000 more people with fewer buildings than we have today. 

Robert Lauriston 

 

• 

ABAG’S CONFLICT OF INTEREST 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I was surprised at Revan Tranter’s claim (Oct. 23) that the US Census Bureau doesn’t make annual estimates. They can be found on the Census Bureau website here: www.census.gov/popest/cities/SUB-EST2006-4.html, showing the population of Berkeley at 103,068 in 2000 and at 101,555 in 2006.  

The American Community Survey (mentioned in another article in the same issue) states that while it produces various estimates, “it is the Census Bureau’s Population Estimates Program that produces and disseminates the official estimates of the population. . .” 

Still, I’d like to thank Mr. Tranter, who was executive director of the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) from 1973-1995, for responding to my letter, and for his interesting and educational article of 2001: “ABAG: A Concise History” which I first read years ago. 

In this history, Mr. Tranter details the hard times experienced by ABAG during the 1970s and early ’80s, when a third of their staff were laid off and the remaining staff took a cut in pay. Following are three quotes from the article. 

“What probably helped restore a measure of financial security [to ABAG], and even persuade most of the few remaining non-members to join, was the decision to make up for the reduction in planning capacity by becoming more of a service agency.” 

“In 1983, ABAG launched its first financial services program: credit pooling. . . . and with roughly a hundred jurisdictions (let alone many more if the program could be marketed outside the Bay Area) there would always be at least a few cities or counties contemplating capital funding. . . “ 

“Today borrowers include not only cities and counties, but special districts, hospitals, universities, schools, nonprofit housing and health care organizations, housing partnerships, and private businesses. More than $1 billion dollars has been provided in tax-exempt financing. Visit the University of California’s handsome systemwide headquarters in downtown Oakland and you are looking at a building financed by ABAG. Seven different programs are offered on a statewide basis, and the savings to members have been immense.” 

ABAG’s power is about capital funding—largely for construction. It is not surprising that ABAG promotes a belief in relentless population growth, no matter what is actually occurring. If construction came to a halt in California, ABAG might, once again, experience hard times. 

Finally, I think that many Berkeleyans are tired of the term NIMBY, and tired of the name-calling directed at those who try to preserve what is left of Berkeley’s charm, its revenue generating small businesses, and its wholly unique small-town—yet cosmopolitan—flavor. 

Gale Garcia 

 

• 

CHEVRON 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Chevron, with headquarters in San Ramon, is one of the largest corporations in California and has a presence throughout the Bay Area. 

Chevron’s human rights human rights violations (or complicity in violations) span three continents: 

• Chevron, one of the largest foreign investors in Burma is allowed to operate in Burma by a loophole in existing U.S. sanctions against the country, and has provided significant revenues to Burma’s military regime. Chevron continues to do business in Burma despite the current upsurge in repression there. 

• Chevron is being sued in Ecuadorian courts for intentionally dumping 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon rainforest during the 28 years (1964 to 1992) it operated an oil concession there. 

• Chevron also faces a trial in U.S federal court in San Francisco on charges it paid Nigerian military and police personnel to fire weapons at villagers staging a protest at a Chevron oil platform in 1998, killing two. Nigerian villagers also charge the company with being complicit in an attack on two villages that left four others dead. Chevron has no defined human rights policy despite shareholder pressure. Amazing as it would seem, Chevron is a sponsor of a Business for Social Responsibility Conference being held in San Francisco today. 

Given all this information (which can be found at www.chevrontoxico.com and www.amazonwatch.org), I believe people in Berkeley would want to explore ways to address concerns about Chevron’s business practices including learning what, if any, is the nature of the City of Berkeley business with Chevron. 

Judy Shattuck 

 

• 

BUS RAPID TRANSIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Like so many disputes in Berkeley, the arguments over Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) make me want to hit the mute button. 

The AC Transit proposal would not convert Berkeley into a mini-Curitiba as some proponents imply. 

What it would be is a significant improvement over the existing Rapid Bus and its predecessor services. It would attract some people who would otherwise drive. As is always the case in transit, much depends on how land is developed adjacent to the stops. 

BRT would not compete with BART. Anyone who pretends that it would is either woefully ignorant or deliberately deceiving. BART and BRT are intended for different markets. BRT would have many more stops than BART. Few of them would even be within walking distance of BART stations. BRT would also run more frequently. 

Some opponents argue that the money could be better spent on different projects. This is a bogus argument. AC Transit needs state or federal money to implement the project. They either get it or they don’t. If they do get outside funding, it will be for the BRT project. They will not be able to divert it to another project. If their BRT project materializes, it will bring benefits to Berkeley at no additional local cost. 

There are also fears that automobile traffic would spill over on to neighborhood streets. The allegation that such spillover with BRT would be worse than without it lacks analytical or logical support. 

The BRT program lays a good foundation for future, higher capacity and less petroleum-dependent alternatives like trolley buses and/or Light Rail. That is the right direction for Berkeley to go if we believe that human activity is responsible for global warming. 

Some would rather see BRT replace the notoriously unpredictable Route 51 service along University Avenue. In AC Transit’s long range plan, that would be the next step after the current proposal is implemented. 

We should all encourage Council to do what they can to realize the AC Transit BRT project. 

Bob Piper 

Former Berkeley Director of  

Transportation 

 

• 

BHS ADVISORY PROPOSAL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I don’t know whether I should have laughed or cried while reading “School Council Releases Draft Proposal” in the Oct. 23 issue. To replace academic instructional time with a lamebrain advisory whose goal is to “help students create a vision of their future” is downright criminal. Students are failing because they are not being taught basic academic skills. It’s obvious what kind of future awaits those who can’t write a simple sentence or make change for a $20 bill. It’s bleak. And the conjoined twin of advisories, block scheduling, has already been tried at Berkeley High. It was abandoned as a complete failure seven years ago. Surely the Berkeley School Board won’t approve removing an hour and a half a week of instructional time and replacing it with an advisory program that has a sketchy at best curriculum, especially when similar high schools are abandoning the advisory/block scheduling program as another failed education trend. 

Maureen Burke 

 

• 

SOUTH BERKELEY ANTENNAS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The residents of South Berkeley won an important victory at Tuesday night’s City Council public hearing. They pursuaded the council to abstain on Verizon’s application to install 11 cell phone antennas atop UC Storage at 2721 Shattuck Ave. The night before the hearing a demonstration at Mayor Tom Bates’ house was also very successful. With 12 hours of notice beforehand, 30 people showed up with signs reading “Stand Up And Lead” and “Don’t Sell Us Out.” 

At the public hearing itself, more than 60 residents turned out to convince the City Council of our intent to continue fighting for greater local control over the siting of cell antennas. The council listened, stood up and led. They did not run away from the Verizon lawsuit. Of special note, Mayor Bates joined Max Anderson and Dona Spring in supporting the Zoning Adjustments Board denial of Verizon’s application. (The rest of the council abstained.) This action sets the stage for a final action to keep the ZAB’s decision intact at the next City Council meeting on Nov. 6. Keep that date in mind for a final resolution at the City Council level. We hope to have a good turnout for that meeting as well. Thank you to the community for all your support. 

Michael Barglow 

Berkeley Neighborhood  

Antenna-Free Union 

 

• 

CROSSROADS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It is a mistake for the Crossroads Co-op to try to evict Carol Denney, who was an original member of the co-op and has lived there for the last 17 years. When we started the Village Co-op (original name) at 1970 San Pablo Ave. in Berkeley, the vision was simple. We thought it should be a place where the existing tenants could have a home free of racism, sexism or homophobia, where we would be free of landlord exploitation and slum conditions. The board of directors became the ruling body and took over the landlord’s position. They were never supposed to be an elite body looking down on its members. One unit, one vote, was how the project was set up, and each member voted as they pleased. Your unit was your home and no one had any right to force you to make changes you did not approve of; your home is your castle.  

Another thing that was discussed was that no member should ever be evicted for any reason. How could a person be evicted from their home? Limited equity was also to be part of the contract with each unit to guarantee that each person’s rights were realized. There was also supposed to be professional mediation to resolve conflicts.  

Payments were supposed to only be increased because of housing or mortgage conditions, and then only by the board and only by vote of a committee, which means that everything was supposed to be done in a democratic manner.  

We knew that we were not building a utopia, that there would certainly be conflicts and that we would have to deal with them humanly to make life tolerable for our families and friends. It was also apparent that we would have to police ourselves and that we did not live in a perfect world.  

The present atmosphere in the building is one that contradicts the very principles that the co-op was founded on. The Board has decided that innuendo and personal vendettas should replace mediation and common sense. The very idea that the board should push to evict a long time resident without mediation is an injustice in itself. If this continues and the present eviction of Carol Denney goes forward, I will appear on her behalf in Superior Court. Professional mediation should begin posthaste so that no further harm comes to the reputations of Carol Denney or the Crossroads Village Co-op.  

Gary Isom Spencer 

Founder, Crossroads Co-Op  

 

• 

TIME TO RE-INSTITUTE  

THE DRAFT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

No, I’m not recommending sending more of our young people to Iraq to be cannon fodder. I’m talking about sending them to places where we can begin to repair the image of the United States, and do work that will actually benefit the countries we visit, the environment, and (indirectly) ourselves. Some could be administered by the Peace Corps. Others could help restore habitat, train park rangers, and help people learn how to survive without killing endangered species. I’m sure that there are many charitable organizations already doing such work, which could come up with other good ideas. If we had a Department of Peace, it could oversee this work, and do a lot more good than our Department of “Defense.” Of course, it would require thinking about other countries in a new way, not just in terms of whether they are part of an “Axis of Evil.” To avoid contributing to global warming, perhaps they could travel by bicycle or sailboat. . . . I think that such work would do far more good than the Olympics, which harms the environment by causing huge amounts of airplane travel and by promoting environmentally destructive sports like mountain biking. 

Mike Vandeman 

San Ramon 

 

• 

THE WAR PRESIDENT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The “war president “ is up to his old tricks. Bush is deceiving America again; the president wants a missile defense system in Europe to counter the emerging threat of attack by Iran. What we have here is another contrived lie and scaremongering out of the White House. If it wasn’t so crazy, it would be laughable.  

Iran has no missiles, Iran has no nuclear weapons, and Iran is a threat to no one, Europe, America or Israel.  

Will Americans fall victim to Bush’s duplicity and fearmongering and get sucked into another Middle East war? 

Hey, wake up, you’ve had seven years to figure out George W. Bush. This madman could start a global war; he’s got nothing to lose. 

Ron Lowe  

Grass Valley 

 


Commentary: West Berkeley BID is Not Mom and Apple Pie

By Dan Knapp
Friday October 26, 2007

In his Oct. 19 letter to the editor, Steven Donaldson didn’t mention that he is one of the West Berkeley property owners trying to set up a new tax to fund privatizing city services. He posed instead as just another interested neighborhood guy, who no doubt attended the “Town Hall Meeting” partly to register his support for the tax and partly to observe the antics of dozens of “folks” whose earnest and articulate arguments he professes never to understand. Indeed, in 12 paragraphs of Steven’s prose, he never engages his opponents’ arguments at all. It’s as if we had nothing to say. But of course we did. 

His metaphor of landowners digging into their own wallets to pay for all this “improvement” has a homey feel, but it’s wrong. The fact is that the people who will pay the tax he wants funneled to his Business Improvement District (BID) will largely be the tenant businesses who occupy the land and who work hard for the money they make. The primary mechanism that will ensure the profit transfer is the all-too-common triple net lease, which when signed requires the commercial tenant to pay the landlord’s property taxes. Even without a triple-net, the increased cost will surely find itself into the monthly rent figure that these tenants pay. 

Much is made by Mr. Donaldson and his WBBA allies of the theme “there’s only one Berkeley beat officer for all of West Berkeley after midnight.” In my nearly three decades of operating a business in West Berkeley I have had many occasions in the early morning hours to be rousted out of bed by our burglar alarm service. Berkeley police always get to the site before me. In fact, the beat officer has a key to our business, so she or he is usually already inside, and hardly ever alone. And on occasions when there has been a real burglar onsite, there have always been at least three or four other officers present to help apprehend the suspect. These Berkeley police officers are fine people; polite, competent, well-equipped. I’ve had the privilege of meeting a bunch of them, albeit at unusual hours. So maybe one beat officer for West Berkeley is sufficient, no?  

Mr. Donaldson thinks taxing Berkeley small businesses to fund a privatized security system run by landowners is just ducky, but I think it sounds like a Middle Eastern militia or worse. At the town hall meeting, when I got my chance to speak to the neighbors, I said I would be willing as a small business owner to pay additional taxes to fund additional city services if they are needed, but not to fund a duplicative service controlled by a BID. Sounds too much like Blackwater! 

The fact is that in our area of West Berkeley, south of Ashby Avenue, the businesses take care of their own streets and sidewalks. With few exceptions, we mostly paint out graffitti as it happens. We even repair our own potholes, thanks to a new bagged asphalt patch product that is simple, cheap, and effective. We don’t want to look like a slum, so we pick up trash. We’re recyclers, so most of what we pick up goes for beneficial reuse, but we’d prefer for people to use proper containers and not the streets for their discards. Trash is inefficient and irresponsible. We weedwhip our weeds and replace them when possible with tough ornamentals. We employ a cottage industry of private security services to give us clues as to when police services are to be called and when not.  

Mr. Donaldson’s assurances that the BID will not be used to lobby for landowner interests fall flat in the face of the rules giving the biggest property owners control of the tax money. How are such promises to be monitored, enforced, adjudicated? The City Council is too busy to do it. Besides, what a wonderful invitation to downstream conflict as people debate whether an infraction has occurred!  

Indeed, the WBBA is and has been part of what seems a triumvirate consisting of certain city Economic Development staff and City Councilmembers who are working to destroy the West Berkeley Plan and replace it with a wrecking ball for the local artisanal and industrial economy. Manufacturers and materials recovery enterprises are joining the ranks of the artisans who are pushing back.  

 

Dan Knapp is a co-founder of Urban Ore, Inc. in West Berkeley.


Commentary: An Open Letter to Captain Richard Lund

By Zanne Joi
Friday October 26, 2007

Dear Captain Lund, 

We thank you for your Oct. 2 letter to Code Pink published in the Daily Planet. Your letter and our weekly protests at your Marine Corps Recruitment Center are emblematic of the difficult times we live in. Declaring our intentions over matters of public concern invokes the democratic spirit of debate. Perhaps together, Capt. Lund, we can represent to Berkeley and to the world that is watching, what it means to engage in America’s democratic process meaningfully, vigorously and, most importantly, peacefully.  

Capt. Lund, we would like to honor the concerns that you set forth in your letter. These are: 1) you were insulted; 2) you felt that our statements about military recruitment were unfair; and 3) you believe that our efforts at ending this war by targeting your Marine Corps Recruitment Office were misdirected. We are happy to respond to all of your concerns. 

For the past five years, Code Pink chapters across the nation have been at the forefront of the peace movement. From meeting with our local politicians, to attending hearings in Congress, to picketing war profiteers, Code Pink has consistently demonstrated that we understand that war mongering is not an isolated activity, played out by a few warm bodies. You, Capt. Lund, are one of the most powerful components of the war machine. Without recruiters, the war has no players. Please be clear, Capt. Lund, that this is not an attack on you as a person. Instead, this is a multi-pronged, well-orchestrated, nation-wide attack on the War Machine and everything that feeds it, by the women of Code Pink.  

We have had the honor of protesting the war in Iraq with thousands of Iraq war veterans. What they have shared with us is that they were not told the truth by the recruiters, they did not understand the full and deadly consequences of signing on the dotted line, and that they did not get what they were promised in terms of medical care and benefits upon discharge. It is important to note that the American public was intentionally lied to by our own government in order to get into this war. We will not continue to be deceived, but will work until those political leaders tell the American people the truth. The truth is that soldiers who are returning from Iraq are committing suicide at an alarming rate and becoming deathly ill with cancers. We are women for peace, and our obligation is to the people, not to the military chain of command. 

Capt. Lund, you object to our use of the word “traitor” in connection to the word “recruiters.” The definition of “traitor” is one “who betrays another’s trust or is false to an obligation or duty.” The connection between the two terms goes to the very heart of what we are protesting: misinforming individuals and/or encouraging recruitment of uninformed individuals. This allegation is supported by the stories of returning veterans, and lying has been extensively documented to be a regrettably common practice among recruiters. We are here to question such recruitment tactics.  

You concede to telling potential recruits that becoming a Marine is “not an easy path.” Without specifics, this is a dangerous euphemism. Do you tell them this war is recognized as illegal by international law, the UN, and our own U.S. Constitution? Do you tell the kids that come into your office that eighty percent of Americans, including Republican and Democratic members of Congress, and even high ranking members of the military have denounced this war as unjust and something we need to extricate ourselves from immediately? Do you tell them that if they do survive their tour of duty, they will very likely return with undiagnosed illnesses due to contamination from depleted uranium? Do you tell them that they may be injured with irreparable brain injury and loss of limbs or even genitals? Do you tell them they are likely to return broken by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and will be statistically more likely to beat and/or kill their wives than men in the civilian population? Do you tell them that 100,000 plus military personnel have reported that they lack adequate medical coverage? Do you tell the young women that the Department of Defense reports sixty percent of women in the military and National Guard are sexually assaulted or harassed by their peers or superiors? We understand that you couldn’t possibly tell them that because—who would go? Would you have gone?  

Finally, you state that “any independent nation must maintain a military to ensure the safety and security of its citizens.” You go on to ask Code Pink the following questions: “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 systems, or the UC Berkeley clock tower?” We too wonder who will protect us from attacks on U.S. soil, or in times of natural disaster since you state that everyone you recruit “will almost certainly go to Iraq.” We wonder if the wildfires now raging in southern California could have been contained if 8,182 California National Guard and their equipment were not in Iraq. When Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans, there was no one to protect Americans here at home. Our military is not here.  

You contend that by protesting in front your Marine Officer Recruiting Center, Code Pink is misdirected. You ask us to direct our efforts towards politicians, the president, and Congress, saying: “They are the ones who have the power to change the policy in Iraq, not members of the military.” We must disagree with you on this matter, Capt. Lund, because you forgot one very important group that has incredible power: the people. The politicians, President, and Congress work for us—no matter what their actions show. The first step in taking back this country is ending the war. Berkeley voters passed several political initiatives since Sept. 11, 2001 to publicly state, from the outset, that we oppose this war. Your Recruitment Office flies in the face of these resolutions. We are here to ensure that the people’s mandate against the war is meaningful.  

We understand that you have taken an oath to follow orders sent down to you through the chain of command. We understand this requires that you set aside your personal beliefs. We, however, did not sign on the dotted line and we will not “do as we’re told.” To shut up and go elsewhere with our protest would effectively make us traitors to our cause. We will never sacrifice our steadfast commitment to peace. We will not forsake the courage it takes to restrain ourselves as we bear witness to a continuous parade of flag-shrouded coffins. We reject the violence and intimidation that is hurled in the direction of the peace movement. While we do not have the might of guns, generals, and sinister legislation, we have the truth. Eventually and inevitably, truth will win out. 

 

Peacefully Yours, 

Zanne Joi on behalf of Code Pink 

 

P.S. We want to set the record straight by pointing out that the anti-war statements left outside of your office were made with sidewalk chalk and duct tape, none of which is permanent. We are very respectful of the environment, and did not deface your Center. 

 


Commentary; A Public Comment Process Without Central Control

By Robert Vogel and Simona Carini
Friday October 26, 2007

Most of the world today has access to competing sources of news, each claiming to present a balanced version of truth. While the professional media reports from multiple primary sources and permits a variety of opinion in letters to the editor, no single source is truly capable of “balance” in reporting the news. At some point, an editor ultimately controls what gets published; at that point “balance” is compromised and the editor’s bias inevitably influences public opinion and policy. 

Balance can only flow from the free expression of competing views. We founded KitchenDemocracy.org 18 months ago to promote that expression. We envision a competitive marketplace of ideas informed by traditional news sources yet free from central control; a place where every idea from every citizen has an equal opportunity for presentation and consideration. No one person sets the agenda on Kitchen Democracy—all editorial control is exerted democratically by our users. At the end of this “public comment process,” the most persuasive ideas influence public opinion and policy. 

This vision is not new. The traditional town hall meeting has played that role for centuries. What’s new is the number of people who, thanks to the Internet, can now participate. The town hall meeting is no longer limited to those who can afford to attend (or send their representative to) late night meetings. Anyone with access to a connected computer, including those at the public library, can contribute to our marketplace of ideas on their own schedule. 

Unfortunately, the Internet—like the town hall meeting—can become a hostile cacophony of spontaneous utterance. Our challenge has been to craft a framework which encourages thoughtful, civil expression in the absence of central control. Over the past 18 months we have evolved the Kitchen Democracy framework so that now in our established communities: 

• Any user can propose any issue for public comment on KitchenDemocracy.org. 

• Other users confidentially suggest improvements to issue proposers, making the formulation of issues a community process. 

• Users democratically select which issues open for public comment. Only issues which are rated sufficiently “Actionable,” “Balanced,” “Clear” and “Important” actually open. 

• Each user can add their statement, anonymously or signed, to the public comment process. In either case, the user must confidentially provide us their email and home address to help us verify that each user submits at most one statement per issue. This policy encourages shy residents to contribute, while restraining others from dominating the process. 

• Statements are monitored for personal attacks and inappropriate material. This is the only compromise we have made to the idea of “central control,” and it has been quite successful: Less than 0.1 percent of users receive invitations to rephrase offending statements, and most of them do. 

• Responses to statements made on Kitchen Democracy are not encouraged. Instead, statements are grouped together by ‘position’: All the yeas are presented together, and all the nays are presented together. This keeps the process focused on the issue, rather than flame-wars between participants. 

To date more than 3,500 East Bay residents in four communities have contributed insightful civil statements which regularly influence public policy. Though this represents substantial progress, we still have work to do. There are concerns that our public comment process may be interpreted as a scientific sampling of public opinion, or worse, as a referendum which binds elected officials to follow trends in Kitchen Democracy statements. Though the website clearly states that the process is neither, and though official decisions do not always follow Kitchen Democracy trends, we may have inadvertently contributed to those concerns by labeling each user’s statement a ‘Vote’. 

In response to those concerns, we changed the language on the website. Starting with issues suggested this month, the word “vote” no longer describes a user’s contribution; instead we call it a “statement.” The vote process is now called a “public comment process.” We hope these changes will help clarify that like a town hall meeting, ours is a process designed to facilitate the formulation of public policy—not to conduct public opinion research or a binding referendum. 

As Kitchen Democracy evolves, so we hope will our users’ relationship to our public comment process. Because there is no central edit or, the responsibility to identify pressing issues and frame them in an unbiased fashion rests with our users. With every freedom comes a responsibility; in this case, the freedom from central editorial control imposes a responsibility to propose, select and/or state your position on the issues of the day. 

Please take a few minutes to exercise your power and help set public policy on KitchenDemocracy.org. If you don’t, someone else will.


Commentary: BioEnergy Institute and BP Grant Are Already Archaic

By James Singmaster
Friday October 26, 2007

Regrettably, UC Berkeley, which just had a big opening show Oct. 22 for its Joint BioEnergy Institute, will soon see the bioenergy concept drop dead after so much hoopla from the University and BP on bioenergy having great “possibilities to save the world.” The hydrogen fuel future may be fast approaching as German scientists at the Max Planck Institute announced a few weeks ago their finding a catalyst that uses sunlight energy to convert water into hydrogen. Hydrogen for fuel and windmills for electric power have no pollution or residual junk problems and should be setup as fast as possible to give us clean energy, and most of the bioenergy concept will soon be laughed about for its shortsightedness. 

Unfortunately, we have the legacy from fossil fuel burning and nuclear power of environmental overloads of carbon dioxide and heat energy that will not go away without some program to reduce their levels on the globe. Some might claim especially on seeing the October National Geographic article on “Carbon’s New Math” that somehow due to a misleading chart there, we will see the level of that gas in the atmosphere drop with clean energy. But that defies the basic laws of conservation of mass and energy, meaning that the overloads will remain to continue global warming that is melting ice faster than predicted and is making nastier weather every month now. 

As I have indicated in several previous Planet letters describing one way to get control of global warming, we have to have a program to actually remove some of the overloads. 

One step to at least recycle some of the extra heat energy causing higher wind speeds is to establish windmill farms in place of fossil fuel power plants. The much more efficient windmills set up last year in the Rio Vista area get very little mention for some reason in our Governor’s green hoopla. The much bigger step to reduce levels of GHGs especially carbon dioxide is the pyrolysis of our massive amounts of organic wastes that cost megabucks in dump maintaining fees while giving off that gas plus methane and energy as the wastes biodegrade. Our organic wastes are a massive biofuels crop wasted, which could be converted by pyrolysis into some energy and charcoal to remove some of the carbon nature trapped in plants, but instead we allow those wastes to re-emit that gas in dumps and especially in the major composting operations being done now by dumps and especially in the major composting operations being done now by many waste handling companies. Using wastes in pyrolysis requires no usurping of land and water from food crops, several of which have seen big price jumps affecting consumers according to several recent news articles. In addition to the charcoal, pyrolysis releases a distillate of water and organic compounds that could be refined to supply the needs for drug and plastic products free from the usual oil starting basis. 

What the Institute could turn to is making the pyrolysis process as efficient as possible, and, for speeding the removal of carbon dioxide, it could look into some tree crops to be harvested in a regular manner to be pyrolyzed. Tree crops with alfalfa growing under them could provide food still especially for various animals, and we may need a considerable amount of tree planting for wind breaks to prevent soil erosion, an oncoming global warming problem, that the UN-Scientific Expert Group report from Sigma Xi warned about last May. With pyrolysis, everything but the beauty of trees gets utilized to reduce global warming especially if hydrogen can fire the process. Remember trees are recyclers, not permanent sinks, of carbon dioxide as they shed leaves, flowers, etc. to decay, so getting any real action on controlling global warming requires taking advantage of nature’s trapping of carbon dioxide while stopping her from using her biodegrading system to reemit the gas.  

 

Fremont resident James Singmaster is a retired environmental toxicologist.


Columns

Column: The Public Eye: Breaking the Public Trust (Three Cheers for Dona Spring)

By Zelda Bronstein
Tuesday October 30, 2007

It was after 11 p.m. last Tuesday, and the council chamber was nearly empty, when Dave Blake stepped up to the lectern and used his two minutes of public comment to warn the council that its secretive ways were undermining Berkeley’s ability to generate revenue at the ballot box. Describing himself “as a citizen who’s been involved in raising money for the city”—Blake has campaigned for measures to fund the city’s library, parks and warm water pool—the former Zoning Adjustments Board member obliquely referred to the failure of the four city tax measures in November 2004: “A lot of people think that the reason we’re no longer successful in passing items in this city,” he said, “is that we’re not generating the feeling of trust between the council and the people in the city … I don’t think we’re going to be passing any two-thirds measures in the near future, unless we start to be open and clear about big decisions like this one.”  

The decision at hand was whether the city should accept $50,000 from the developer of the proposed downtown UC hotel/conference center, with its 19-story tower of luxury condominiums, to pay a “consultant team” to do what the staff report called “feasibility analysis and review of possible mechanisms to provide tax abatement or other subsidies to render the project feasible.”  

The project is currently unfeasible, the report explained, because it is now estimated to cost $30 million more than the revenues it’s expected to yield. The developer, Massachusetts-based Carpenter and Company, says it may be able to reduce the overrun by “nearly half” through “creative measures, including value engineering.” To close the remaining $15 million gap, the developer and the city are contemplating a “public-private partnership” that involves rebating “some portion of the Transient Occupancy Tax generated by the hotel in the early years of its operation.”  

This was a big decision, all right, and not just because of the size of the proposed bailout. Berkeley has never subsidized a project of this sort—a private, for-profit hotel/conference center-cum-luxury housing. Indeed, it was the novelty of such a subsidy that led City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque, at the Agenda Committee’s Oct. 15 meeting, to defy Mayor Bates. Ever averse to public scrutiny of his backroom deals, the mayor wanted the item to go on the consent calendar, where it could be approved without any discussion. In a welcome show of independence, Albuquerque insisted that the matter had to go on the council’s October 23 action calendar. At the start of the Oct. 23 meeting, Councilmember Wozniak tried to move it back onto consent. Before the city attorney could weigh in, Councilmember Spring intervened, saying she wanted it to stay on action, and there it remained. 

It was about three and half hours later that Blake objected to having an item of such magnitude squirreled away “in an obscure part of the agenda” and then taken up late at night. He asked the council to send the proposal to the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee and to the Planning Commision for review and recommendations. Other citizens, including myself, expressed even stronger objections, recommending that the mere idea of a massive tax rebate for a hotel/conference center topped by (mostly) luxury condominiums should be rejected outright.  

In the spring of 2004, when I was chairing the Planning Commission, I helped convene and then served on the UC Hotel/Conference Center Citizens Advisory Group. The group’s extensive recommendations said nothing about tax rebates (or, for that matter, luxury condos). Indeed, the project was sold to the community as a major revenue generator. With a city budget balanced with deep cuts in staff and services, $160 million in unfunded municipal liabilities and three revenue measures under consideration by the council for the November 2008 ballot, the thought of rebating $15 million worth of taxes to a private developer of luxury condos atop a hotel/conference center intended primarily for UC clientele is unconscionable. 

But the fix was in—indeed, it’s been in for a while: According to the staff report, the consultant team has already been chosen, from interviews conducted last summer. In other words, months before the item appeared on a council agenda, city officials were moving it forward as if it were a done deal. Shades of the Ashby BART “transit village” fiasco! 

The back story helps explain why last Tuesday the council majority insisted that the developer’s gratuity had to be accepted that very night. Throwing Blake a sop, Councilmember Maio averred that the council would “share” the consultant’s “results” with DAPAC. But Blake had asked that DAPAC (and the Planning Commission) review the hiring of the consultants, not their findings. 

Mayor Bates didn’t bother with sops. “I think it was really an error,” he said, “to put in [the staff report] the $30 million hole.” (Replied the report’s author, Office of Economic Development Acting Director Michael Caplan, “That was the developer’s latest estimate.”)  

But it was Kriss Worthington, of all people, who offered the most fulsome defense of the developer and the proposal. Carpenter & Co., he said, had made all sorts of promises to the community, agreeing, for example, to build affordable housing into the project. Nobody thought to remind the councilmember, now completing his eleventh year in office, that Berkeley law requires any project of 5 units or more to include at least 20 percent affordable housing.  

Worthington’s sometime ally, Dona Spring, challenged his tribute to the developer’s generosity on other grounds. She pointed out that, far from bending over backwards to accommodate the city, Carpenter & Co. was already asking to violate Berkeley’s 7-story downtown height limit and to be granted rights to the sidewalk and part of the street adjacent to the project site as well. The consultant’s findings, she predicted, would be used to justify massive tax rebates to the developer. To Spring, that prospect was unacceptable. When the council approved the staff recommendation on an 8-1 vote, she was the lone dissenter. 

So much for restoring the public trust. Worse yet, this was the second time that night that the council majority denied their constituents an opportunity to scrutinize a very big-ticket item: They’d already disposed of the first item on their consent calendar, the new contract with the Berkeley Fire Fighters Association, in a peremptory manner.  

That the firefighters’ contract appeared on the consent calendar in the first place was deplorable. The four-year memorandum of understanding with the BFFA will have a greater impact on Berkeley’s future, fiscal and otherwise, than any other action the council will take in the next four years. With that impact in mind, Spring moved it onto the action calendar.When the item came up, she asked that it be held over until the next council meeting on Nov. 6, so that the public could study the information that the city manager had distributed at the start of the meeting. That information, which ostensibly supported the 13 percent salary raise and the various increases in benefits in the MOU, had not been provided to the public when the contract first appeared on the council agenda, on Oct. 9. It was made available on Oct. 23 only because Spring had requested it. 

Once again, her appeal “to show the taxpayers a little respect” was rebuffed by her eight colleagues, all of whom insisted that the council had to act right away, and that “dragging it out” for two more weeks, after 17 months of negotiations, was unthinkable. Yet on Oct. 9, nobody on the council uttered the slightest protest when, in response to a mysterious request from the firefighters’ union, the city manager pulled the MOU from the council agenda and held it over until Oct. 23. 

Seeking to defuse the issue, the mayor asserted that the item had “been out for at least a month.” Spring immediately disputed his claim. “The info,” she said, “has only been available since tonight. I have not had a chance to read it. The people who came to the meeting—” Bates cut her off mid-sentence with a curt rejoinder: “Then you should abstain.” Boos and hisses filled the then-packed chamber. Banging his gavel, Bates snapped, “This is not a kangaroo court. If you’re going to act like that, we’re going to ask you to move—right now—full stop!” Someone called the question, and the council voted 8-0-1 (Spring did abstain) to approve the contract. 

I wish that the mayor had cleared the room, and that the council had continued to meet and to take action in a venue from which the public had been expelled. That scenario would have made starkly palpable what’s going down in Berkeley City Hall. 

 


Column: The Public Eye: Depressed America

By Bob Burnett
Tuesday October 30, 2007

These are hard times in America. There’s broad agreement our nation has lost its way and the U.S. is no longer “the shining light on the hill.” We don’t trust our leaders or believe national politicians care about the common good. Americans are uncertain and depressed. 

Depression has become a persistent feature of our national character. One in four Americans suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder. It’s usually clinical depression characterized by persistent sadness and a loss of interest in favorite activities. Depression’s symptoms include anxiety, change in eating habits, over- or under-eating, insomnia, fatigue, irritability, helplessness, pessimism, difficulty making decisions, morbid thoughts, loss of interest in pleasurable activities, and persistent physical complaints that do not respond to treatment. Depression is now the leading cause of disability in North America. 

The depression epidemic explains why Americans have been so passive in the face of the continuing outrages of the Bush Administration: It’s the reason why our fellow citizens didn’t protest the stolen election of 2000; or the invasion of Iraq; or Bush’s subversion of the constitution—to name only three misdeeds. 

In his Oct. 14 op-ed, “The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us,” New York Times columnist Frank Rich discussed our national passivity. Rich attributed it to the duplicity of the Bush administration: “It was always the White House’s plan to coax us into a blissful ignorance about the war … [They] invited our passive complicity by requiring no shared sacrifice. A country that knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch was all too easily persuaded there could be a free war.” 

Perhaps Frank Rich is right and Americans were lulled into lethargy by a sinister plan hatched by George Bush and Dick Cheney. It’s plausible their well-oiled propaganda machine convinced us “war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.” Perhaps. But I find it hard to accept Rich’s explanation because I don’t believe the Bush-Cheney gang is that smart or their propaganda that compelling.  

It’s also tempting to explain national apathy as a consequence of the declining intelligence of the American people. Observing the amount of media attention lavished on flea wits such as Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears, it’s easy to conclude that between watching hours of television and sucking up mega-doses of corn syrup, our fellow citizens have deep-fried their brains. This explanation suggests the Bush administration has gotten away with their shenanigans because the majority of the American public either doesn’t understand what the White House is doing or doesn’t care—we’ve become self-centered dolts. Nonetheless, while there’s certainly compelling evidence we’ve become a nation of sheep, I continue to believe the majority of our people are smart enough to see the big picture: We get it, we just don’t do anything about it. 

That leaves depression as the logical explanation for our passivity: We’ve been immobilized by our depression. The question is what caused this. It wasn’t all that long ago—the ’60s—when Americans were hopeful; when we believed: “Tomorrow will be a better day. We can build a peaceful world.” 

Then came an enervating message that bred helplessness and despair. Since the Reagan era, conservatives have broadcast a grim homily: “You’re on your own. No matter how dire your circumstances, no matter how unfairly life treats you, don’t count on government to help you.” This conservative ideology reached its nadir after 9/11 when President Bush told traumatized Americans there was nothing they could do to ease their fear and anxiety except to go shopping. As the plight of the average citizen worsened, so did the national mood: In the ’60s most of us believed the future would be better for our children, now we don’t.  

Over this same period we became a nation of depressives. It’s not only that one in four of us has a diagnosed mental disorder, but also that millions of Americans self-medicate: we take prescription drugs for depression—antidepressants are now the most frequently prescribed drugs—or use daily palliatives such as alcohol or marijuana. There are millions more who suffer from the symptoms of depression—chronic anxiety or fatigue, eating disorders, or irritability—and never seek help, who stagger through each day in a funk. And there are millions of Americans who feel chronic helplessness in the face of an Administration that doesn’t listen to the cries of the average person and seems determined to implement their evil agenda regardless of the consequences. 

These are hard times. There’s a rogue president in the White House and the good ship USA is heading into increasingly treacherous waters. There’s good reason to be discouraged but not to be defeated. After all, U.S. history teaches us that Americans have lived through hard times before: the Civil War, Great Depression, and World War II—to mention only three perilous periods.  

We can take solace in the knowledge that during historic hard times, Americans have always come together and worked for the common good. That’s what we need to do now. The next president must preach a message of hope and invite us to make a shared sacrifice for the good of the country. And to help cure our national depression. 

 

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


Wild Neighbors: Birds in Berkeley: The Owls in the Oak

By Joe Eaton
Tuesday October 30, 2007

Eighty-one years ago Joseph Grinnell, director of UC’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, sat in his corner office at the edge of Faculty Glade watching a crew of arborists at work on a venerable coast live oak. Or, as he put it in his essay “Tree Surgery and the Birds,” “ ‘tree surgeons’ … under directions of a ‘landscape architect.’ ” His contempt is evident. Over the years, Grinnell had observed 46 species of birds in that oak. And he noted the removal of bits of the tree that had attracted particular species of birds: the decaying stub where the downy woodpecker drummed, the white-breasted nuthatch’s favorite foraging ground, the flycatcher’s perch. 

“My corner tree used to have knotholes,” he wrote. “One such cavity, years ago, furnished the home site for a Screech Owl, and from it each summer issued a brood of young owls … Nowadays, it seems, the tenets of tree surgery require that no such cavities be permitted to remain in any well-cared-for tree. Each and every former and even potential knothole has been gouged out and sealed up, so that only a forbidding wall of cement meets the eye and beak of any prospecting bird.” 

To Grinnell, the loss of the campus screech-owls was just part of the “local disappearance of our native bird-life.” And he was in a position to know. Hired to run the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) by the remarkable naturalist-philanthropist Annie Alexander (see Barbara Stein’s biography On Her Own Terms: Annie Montague Alexander and the Rise of Science in the American West for more on that working relationship), Grinnell was the architect of Berkeley’s preeminence in mammalogy and ornithology.  

He had been born in Indian Territory where his physician father practiced, and grew up among Red Cloud’s Oglala Sioux. His road to Berkeley led through Pasadena and Alaska. Three years after taking over the museum, he organized an epic Sierran transect that provides a baseline for contemporary studies of faunal response to climate change. During that project, Grinnell once set out from Yosemite Valley and hiked more than 40 miles over the crest to Mono Lake in a single day, shotgun and notebook in hand. 

Grinnell also pioneered some of the fundamental concepts of ecology: ecological niches, competitive exclusion. He recognized that animals shaped their environments as well as being shaped by them, and that variation was the raw material of evolution. 

The year after the attack of the “tree surgeons,” Grinnell and Margaret Wythe published their Directory to the Bird-life of the San Francisco Bay Region, under the auspices of the Cooper Ornithological Club. (His choice of a female collaborator is interesting. Grinnell respected his patron Alexander, but didn’t allow women on MVZ field trips.)  

Grinnell and Wythe documented 159 nesting species in the Bay Area but were pessimistic about their future, expecting that diversity to decline. “Species of birds are disappearing, some never to return,” they wrote; “some species are just about holding their own … On the whole, it looks as though the total number of species in the Bay region at the present time were undergoing decided reduction, due in major part to the elimination of habitats of wide diversity or of productive kinds.” 

Fortunately, their crystal ball was a bit cloudy. William Bousman recently compared the Directory with data from the subsequent 80 years of breeding bird surveys and atlas projects, and found nesting records for 215 species. Many of those were one-off attempts by vagrants; however, 19 species not present in 1927 appear to be here to stay. Some newcomers were commercially exploited species rebounding after the ravages of the plume trade. Others found new man-made habitats like salt ponds and reservoirs, or responded to the regrowth of redwood forests and the planting of urban trees. Range expansions include northern birds moving south, southern birds moving north, eastern birds moving west. 

And what goes for the overall Bay Area goes for Berkeley. Crows and ravens have taken advantage of the garbage we generate. Cooper’s hawks have moved into Berkeley’s street trees. Chestnut-backed chickadees, unknown in the East Bay in Grinnell’s time, feel at home among planted evergreens. Other birds have benefitted from an expanded urban oak population. John Westlake, a long-time Berkeley birder, has a theory that the maturing of all the oaks planted in the early 70s has a lot to do with the current abundance of oak-associated birds like the Nuttall’s woodpecker and oak titmouse.  

“The unhappy future projected by Grinnell and Wythe has not come to pass,” writes Bousman, “at least not yet.” True, there have been tradeoffs.  

If Charles Keeler revisited his old Berkeley haunts, he would miss the yellow warblers and western meadowlarks, as Grinnell would miss the screech-owls. But who could complain about the chickadees? 

 

Photograph by Ron Sullivan. 

Knothole with a view: western screech-owl in Briones Regional Park.


Column: Dispatches From the Edge: Lies, Damned Lies and Iraq

By Conn Hallinan
Friday October 26, 2007

The great 19th century Tory prime minister Benjamin Disraeli once remarked there were three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. It is a dictum the Bush administration has taken to heart when it comes to totaling up the carnage in Iraq: If you don’t like the numbers, just change them; and when in doubt, look ‘em in the eye and lie. 

For instance, according to the Department of Defense (DOD), the United States does not track civilian casualties. As former commander General Tommy Franks put it, “We don’t do body counts.”  

But testimony in the recent trial of U.S. Army snipers from the First Battalion of the 501 Infantry regiment indicated the generals indeed do body counts. In a July hearing at Fort Liberty, Iraq, Sgt. Anthony G. Murphy said he and other snipers felt “an underlying tone” of disapproval from their commanders when they didn’t rack up big body counts. 

“It just kind of felt like, ‘What are you guys doing wrong out there?’” he testified. When the snipers started setting traps to lure in unsuspecting Iraqis, the kill ratios went up and the commanders, he said, were pleased. 

The choreography the Bush administration does around casualties is aimed at creating a dance of lies and disinformation to cover up one of the worst humanitarian crises to strike the Middle East since the Mongols sacked Baghdad. 

That is not an overstatement. 

A recent poll by the British agency ORB found that the war may have killed more than one million people, a toll that surpasses the 800,000 killed in the Rwandan genocide. 

Trying to figure out the butcher bill is an uphill task. 

For instance, according to the London-based organization Iraq Body Count, by March of this year, civilian deaths stood at 65,160. Iraq Body Count also noted that 2007 has seen “the worst violence against civilians in Iraq since the invasion.” The conservative Brookings Institute’s Iraq Index posts slightly higher figures, and the United Nations higher still.  

The Iraq Interior Ministry is highly critical of the UN’s conclusion that 34,000 Iraqis died in 2006, calling it “inaccurate” and “unbalanced” but refusing to release its own figures. The administration has only come up with one sum: In December 2005 President George W. Bush commented to the press that the number of Iraqis killed was “30,000, more or less.” 

The first serious statistical investigation of the war’s impact was a survey by Johns Hopkins University published in the British medical magazine, the Lancet. According to the study, from the March 2003 invasion through September 2006, the number of deaths due to the war was between 426,369 and 793,663, with 601,027 as the median figure. Over half of those were women and children. Like the ORB study, Johns Hopkins used the “excess mortality” methodology, which measures not only deaths from war, but violent crime and disease. It found that 91.8 percent of the excess mortality was due to violence, 31 percent of that inflicted by coalition forces. 

President Bush immediately dismissed the study’s methodology as “pretty well discredited,” and the media either ignored it or accepted the White House’s characterization. 

In fact, biostatisticians and mortality experts are virtually unanimous that the John Hopkins study is accurate. Liala Guterman, a senior reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education, says she contacted 10 experts in the field about the Lancet article, and “not one of them took issue with the study’s methods or conclusions.” Indeed, she said, the experts found the conclusions “cautious.” 

According to John Zogby of Zogby International, one of the world’s most respected polling services, “The sampling [in the Lancet survey] is solid, the methodology is a good as it gets.” Ronald Waldman, a Columbia University epidemiologist, said the method was “tried and true,” and British Defense Ministry science advisor, Sir Roy Anderson, said the survey was “close to the best practice.” 

Indeed, the Bush administration used exactly the same methodology to determine the number of deaths in Darfur, figures that were used to convince the U.S. Congress to label the current crisis in the Sudan “genocide.” 

The administration’s sleight of hand on deaths and casualties even extends to its own forces. There are, for instance, no hard figures on the number of private U.S. and British contractors wounded or killed, even though private contractors outnumber the number of coalition troops in Iraq. 

And when casualty statistics come out in ways the DOD doesn’t like, the department just changes how they are counted.  

On Jan. 29, 2007, the Pentagon listed 47,657 “non-mortal” casualties in Iraq. One day later this number had fallen to 31,493 by the simple device of dropping any casualty that did not require “medical air transport.” The DOD also doesn’t include vehicle accidents, or soldiers who are taken ill, including those with mental problems.  

No one has systematically collected information on the number of Iraqis wounded by the war, although a ratio of two to one wounded to killed—between one and two million—is considered a good rule-of-thumb figure. 

Besides the deaths and injuries, the war had unleashed, according to the Financial Times, “The worst refugee crisis in the Middle East since the mass exodus of Palestinians that was part of the violent birth of the state of Israel in 1948.” 

According to the Global Policy Forum, 2.2 million Iraqis have fled their country, mostly to Jordan and Syria, and another 2 million have been turned into internal refugees. If one adds to that the ORB figures for deaths, it means at least 20 percent of Iraqi’s pre-war population of 26 million has been killed, wounded, exiled or displaced. 

The White House has simply ignored the refugee crisis. 

In 2006, the U.S. budgeted $3 million for refugees, although according to Amman-based researcher Noah Merrill, none of the relief organizations, including the UN, has seen any of that money. And if they had, Merrill points out, it would come to a grand total of $3.50 per person. “Jordan is an expensive country,” he says, “and $3.50 will not help anyone—not even for a day.” 

Half of Iraq’s population are children, nearly 20 percent of them under the age of five. Some 25 percent are malnourished, and 10 percent suffer from acute malnutrition. According to a study by Adil Shamoo of the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine, 70 percent of Iraqi’s children suffer from traumatic stress syndrome. 

Food rationing, a system on which five million Iraqis rely to stay alive, is breaking down, and according to Patrick Cockburn of the Independent, two million can no longer be fed because of security concerns. Unemployment is at 68 percent. Once the most industrial country in the Arab world, Iraq is devolving into an oil-rich, agrarian backwater. Some 75 percent of the country’s doctors and pharmacists have fled, bringing its medical system—at one time the best in the Arab world—to the point of collapse. 

And finally, like a biblical plague, cholera is working itself down the country’s river system, from the Kurdish north to Basra in the south. Between 7,000 and 10,000 Iraqis have already been sickened. 

In 1258 the Mongol generals Hulagu and Guo Kan besieged and took the city of Baghdad. They murdered its inhabitants, burned its libraries, and ravished its lands. The Bush Administration has done the same but hidden it behind a smoke screen of lies and voodoo statistics. 

For the average Iraqi, there is little difference between the Mongols and the United States. Both have laid waste to their country.


Column: Undercurrents: The Oakland Development Debate Gets Ugly

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday October 26, 2007

Back South, where I once lived, I used to know an older man who I’d greet every time I saw him with the question, “How’s the world treating you?”  

“The world treating me pretty good,” he’d always answer. “It’s some of them rotten peoples in it, I’m having most of my trouble with.” 

It’s an old joke, of course, but in many ways it describes the attitude of some Oakland commentators and policymakers, who seem to approach the city like the old European explorers approached the American shores, dreaming over all the wondrous things they might do with this wondrous new land, if they could only clear out some of the heathen savages wandering around. 

And so we have whoever has set up the OaklandSucks blog at http://oaklandsucks.blogspot.com (they fail to provide a profile to identify themselves further), who writes in a “Oh How We Hate Urban Economics” posting earlier this week: “Guess what? The residents of West Oakland would rather live in a hyper-crime ghetto than in a nice area, at least that’s what everyone found out at a West Oakland Project Area Committee meeting. And honestly, we don’t blame them. Why should they be forced to change their lifestyle of drug dealing, aggravated assault, and general theft to accommodate outsiders that want something better? Well, they shouldn’t! In fact, the residents of West Oakland believe that their current existence is the way things have always been (failing to realize of course that West Oakland was once 83 percent white-folk). Therefore, if everything has always been this horrible, new development to try and improve West Oakland is only going to change things, and probably for the worse.” 

Ha. And ha. 

There is much that is patently incorrect in this bit of anti-Black bigotry, the major one being that it is the poster herself (himself) who appears to make the nexus between drug dealing, aggravated assault, and general theft and a community that is no longer 83 percent white. Long-time Oakland residents themselves remember that two generations back, West Oakland was the anchor of the city’s African-American middle class, the place where “the nicest people lived,” my grandmother used to tell her children, with 7th Street the center of a nationally-renowned African-American social scene that drew visitors from around the area to see the likes of Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles, and such. When West Oakland residents say they wish to fight gentrification in order to protect and restore their community, my guess is that it is to this golden period they look. Their concern is that if West Oakland is restored to its old grandeur as a series of gated communities where current residents can no longer afford to live, viewing it from a distant height only as they pass along 880 on their way to Vallejo or Antioch, then what is the benefit to most of the current residents? 

The thinking that is present in the OaklandSucks post is what fueled a good bit of the development binge during the Jerry Brown years, from the Estuary loft district to the Forest City Uptown project to Oak To Ninth, with the unsubtle goal of developing housing designed specifically to attract people who do not live in Oakland and currently do not consider giving us the time of day. The smelly underside of that policy was a studied neglect of improvement in many of the lower income neighborhoods where the darker people live for the benefit of the people currently living there, along with concurrent efforts to make the city unpopular for les undesirables, slowly and methodically pushing them out. If such twin policies were to succeed, a generation from now Oakland would be a largely whitebread, middle class city, with merely a smattering of color here and there to give it flavor. 

There are many such communities ringing the Bay Area, of course, to which so many of my white neighbors fled in the ’50s and ’60s when the greater Oakland neighborhoods began opening up, first to African-Americans, then to Latinos, then to the world. Tired of the long commute, however, the children and grandchildren of those old neighbors now seek to return to the city their families long ago abandoned. 

There are some people of dark color—perhaps unknowing of its ultimate consequences, perhaps not, who knows what lurks within the hearts of men?—who are loud advocates of these policies of resettlement. 

One of them is former AC Transit Director Clinton Killian, who full disclosure obliges me to reveal once represented, in his capacity as an attorney, the opposite side in a legal matter to which I was a party. That was long ago, and the matter is no longer pending. 

In a series of “Killian Analysis” columns in the local Globe newspaper, Mr. Killian has taken on the development policies of Mayor Ron Dellums. Those policies, based in the mayor’s Model City agenda, are quite the opposite of the Jerry Brown Resettlement Doctrine, seeking instead to make the city safer and more economically vibrant for those who currently live here, encouraging all of us to stay. 

For reasons of his own, Mr. Killian chooses to attack Mr. Dellums’ Budget Chief, Dan Lindheim, rather than Mr. Dellums himself, although on the surface, at least, the proposals Mr. Killian is objecting to appear to be coming from the mayor rather than his subordinate. 

In an Oct. 17 column entitled “Dr. No” (that being the title he gives Mr. Lindheim because he believes Mr. Lindheim is blocking development projects), Mr. Killian writes “Mayor Ron Dellums has consistently stressed his priority to expand and diversify the initial economic revitalization. However, it does not appear that all his staff is fully supportive of his stated goal to rebuild Oakland. His economic development director Dan Lindheim has taken actions that are in clear contradiction of the mayor’s stated policies and the desire of the overwhelming majority of Oakland citizens. … [Lindheim] has become a project killer of the types that the mayor supports and would benefit Oakland.” 

The three projects Mr. Killian accuses Mr. Lindheim of specifically blocking are the Mandela-Gateway Project at the old Pacific Pipe site on West Grand and Mandela in West Oakland, the Embarcadero Cove project in the Coliseum development area, and The Transit Gateway project near the Fruitvale Bart station west of International. In each instance, Mr. Killian says that in opposition to both the staff reports and community support, Mr. Lindheim has prevented the development of three projects that would bring needed jobs, housing, and commercial development to West Oakland, Deep East Oakland, and the Fruitvale. 

Mr. Killian says that Mr. Lindheim’s views have been improperly influenced by Oakland industrial property owner Robert Schwartz, who he says “has a strong economic and personal connection” with Mr. Lindheim, being “the business partner of Mr. Lindheim’s uncle and cousin.” 

“For years,” Mr. Killian writes, Mr. Schwartz “has railed against transforming Oakland’s industrial land. Under Jerry Brown, his views were roundly discredited. Now under Dellums, he has his friend Dr. NO’s [Mr. Lindheim’s] ear. As a result, [Mr. Schwartz] chaired the mayor’s land use taskforce and has strongly pushed the city to a no industrial transformation policy. This opposition is extremely curious and appears to be motivated by blind self-interest and not in the best interest of Oakland citizens.” 

Oakland became known in some circles as “money town” during the Brown-and-State-Senator-Don-Perata years, with ongoing accusations and federal investigations that developers gave bribes to local officials and state officials with local ties in order to grease the way for particular developments. We should always take seriously, therefore, any charges that personal gain by city officials rather than community gain may be the real reason behind the approval or disapproval of any particular development. 

However, in his column, Mr. Killian fails to show how Mr. Schwartz would personally gain directly from either the retention of the existing industrial lands in Oakland or the denial of the three projects in question (obviously, anyone with industrial development interests might ultimately benefit from retaining Oakland’s industrial land, but that hardly qualifies as improper advocacy). 

Further, in talking about the Mandela-Gateway Project, Mr. Killian fails to mention that the first city official to oppose the project was not Mr. Lindheim, or Mr. Dellums, but was the longtime Councilmember representing that district, Nancy Nadel. 

In December of last year, before Mr. Dellums took office as mayor, Ms. Nadel told a gathering of a “gentrification bus tour” of West Oakland sponsored by Just Cause Oakland that the proposed Mandela-Gateway posed “a problem of incompatible mixed use. Mandela Parkway is being transformed in a way that is driving out long-term residents. Most of the existing residents don’t have the capital to buy the live-work spaces that are being proposed, or to set up small businesses in the spaces that are being offered.” Mr. Lindheim was one of the listeners at that gathering. 

In a later newspaper interview, Ms. Nadel said that industrial zoned land constitutes only 3 percent of Oakland, and that the remaining industrial-zoned acres ought to be treasured and preserved so that industries can be attracted to provide jobs for current Oakland residents. 

Meanwhile, that same fall, members of the mayor’s housing task force voted 19-0 (seven members abstaining) to recommend that the mayor’s office “develop and review an industrial land conversion policy to prioritize industrial retention and prioritize rezoned industrial to residential land for affordable housing.” 

The Mandela-Gateway developers, in fact, had asked for a change in the zoning of the old Pacific Pipe property from industrial to mixed-use in order to accommodate their project. Last March, the Zoning Update Committee of the Oakland Planning Commission was scheduled to consider that request, but delayed it at the request of the Dellums Administration until an overall look at the General Plan, the zoning ordinances, and the city’s industrial needs can be undertaken. Mr. Dellums has said that he wants a zoning policy that reflects the overall needs of the city rather than a chameleon policy—my words, not the mayor’s—that changes colors and hues depending on the needs of a current developer. 

There’s a need to have this discussion on the goals of Oakland development policy—whether it should transform Oakland by clearing out “undesirable” residents and communities, or whether it should serve as a rising lake to lift the boats of everyone currently living in the city. Let’s all of us reveal our agendas, personal and political, so we know where each other stands, and the conversation can move forward without all this rancor and personal attack and slurs against entire communities. 

 


Open Home in Focus: Elegant and Cozy North Berkeley House on View

By Steven Finacom
Friday October 26, 2007

Around a North Berkeley bend, quickly by-passed by those busily headed someplace else, there’s a gem of a creek side house. The architecture and setting embody much of what gives residential Berkeley a special sense of place. 

1214 The Alameda is a three bedroom, two-story home currently on the market for $799,000. Terry Pedersen of Marvin Gardens Real Estate is the listing agent, and information on the house is available at www.1214TheAlameda.com  

An Open House will be held 2-4:30 p.m., this coming Sunday, Oct. 28. 

The real estate listing describes this as a “Hansel and Gretel” house. It also has an English Cottage feel, with more than a touch of Berkeley Craftsman on the interior. 

The street side (east) elevation of the house is dominated by a large, two-story, gable and a dormer projecting from the steep roof. A quirky garage is off to the left; more about that later.  

Walk the narrow porch lengthwise to the front door, which turns left through a vestibule into the living room. Three casement windows look out on the porch and a bay window faces south. A working fireplace of clinker brick is centered on the west wall. Box beam ceilings, redwood paneling, and diamond-paned windows establish an Arts and Crafts character.  

The living room is in the southeast corner. Southwest, entered from the living room on either side of the fireplace, is a tile-floored sun-porch. Northwest, diagonal from the living room, is a formal dining room also with a bay window, but here modified into a west-facing window seat.  

The kitchen is at the northeast corner of the house, reached from the dining room. Like the living room it looks out to the east through diamond casement windows. Turn the corner into a small pantry/laundry/half-bath area. 

A stairway ascends to the second floor from the far northwest corner of the dining room. Although this is curiously far from the front door it gives the upstairs a welcome, private, feel. Square wooden balusters, rising from stair tread to ceiling, screen the stairwell from the dining room.  

Upstairs a short central hall runs at right angles to the stair. Straight ahead, the master bedroom is underneath the south gable of the house. Like the living room below it has a fireplace and French doors open to a balcony, perched above the front porch.  

Right, off the hall, there’s a second bedroom above the dining room, facing west. A pair of interior French doors connects it on the south to a sleeping porch which has another door to the master bedroom, linking the three rooms in an “L” shaped circuit.  

The bathroom tucks into the eastern gable, off the hall. Open the low door to the right of the shower to a closet neatly outfitted with its own built-in chest of drawers. Bathroom and bedrooms have sloping ceilings in parts and angled corners where the dormer and gable roofs meet. The feeling is more cozy than claustrophobic, but watch your head as you walk about. 

Listed at a little less than 1,500 square feet this is not an especially large house and it could easily become crowded with several residents or a McMansion load of possessions. But it also feels instinctively comfortable and has a lot of versatility if you think of it as two-bedroom, with two generous “plus” rooms. The current owner, the realtor reports, raised two children here and has owned the house for about 17 years. 

Scattered through the house are several handcrafted Sue Johnson lamps. Some built-in fixtures—including a butterfly-decorated wall sconce in the upstairs hall, and a ceiling fixture with a dragonfly motif over the dining table—were designed for the house and stay with it, according to the realtor.  

The diamond-paned windows—true divided lites, with sturdy mullions—set much of the character of the house inside and out. The living room and dining room bays have a larger, undivided “picture window” in the middle to frame the view, flanked by the smaller-paned windows. 

Hardwood floors are found in most rooms, cork floors (perhaps from a mid-century remodel?) in the second bedroom and sleeping porch upstairs.  

The unpainted woodwork is nut brown or tan, lighter in color than you might expect for an old Craftsman house. The realtor says the present owner was told by earlier residents that it was once darker, but the original finish was removed and the walls—and, my guess is, the box beams downstairs—lightened with a wash.  

The exterior of the house is now painted a light cream yellow with white trim. The first story is shingled, while the gable ends above have a sort of English-Tudor false work timber pattern. Deep eaves give the house a sheltered feel. From the window box outside the second story bathroom window an immensely long tubular succulent trails like some topiary Rapunzel’s hair, all the way to the ground. 

The only early photographs that can be readily found—black and white, from 1951, and 1971—show a dark exterior, probably unpainted wood.  

Behind and below the house an open stretch of Codornices Creek—burbling, not roaring, this time of year—loops through the property. A small wooden footbridge crosses to a surprisingly spacious rear yard. Two light-standards with large glass shades stand on each side of the creek. They look rather like salvaged early Berkeley street lamps to me.  

Much of the garden is under the canopy of an immense, thick-trunked, California live oak. Most is informally landscaped, with a light covering of ground covers and shrubs. Large, tropic-looking crinums with white flowers punctuate the landscape as do an interesting variety of unusual shrubs and perennials. 

“That site is California pastoral!” says Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association’s Lesley Emmington. Rustic house, huge oak, embracing creek, and artfully informal plantings front and back come together for a quintessentially Berkeley “living with nature” feel. 

Adjacent to the house a one-car garage, tilting a bit, perches on wooden supports above the steeply sloping creek bank. Notice how it’s “inside out”, with visible exterior framing and interior board siding.  

It angles towards a similar freestanding garage that juts out from the property just south of the creek. Garages show up on the 1929 Sanborn map, and in the 1951 photograph, although whether the present day ones are modified originals or later “rebuilds” is not entirely apparent at first look. 

Who designed and created this house and placed it so? 

It seems to have been built in the early 1910s. The Ormsby Donogh file at Berkeley Architectural Heritage notes for 1913 that the house was owned by, or perhaps had a mortgage through, the Berkeley Bank of Savings, and was valued at $1,900. The 1951 real estate listing says it was then-38 years old (which equates to around 1913) and it was certainly there by 1929 when the Sanborn map for that year shows the house footprint and detached garage. 

When former BAHA President JoAnn Price interviewed one Frederick Peake nearly 40 years ago, he told her—according to an entry in Dave Bohn’s 1971 book, From East of This Golden Shores—“he had built the entire block. I asked if Maybeck had been involved and he replied ‘Oh no’.”  

“However, he said he had employed a draughtsman for the house who had been an employee of Maybeck. He also said he and Maybeck had been charter members of the Hillside Club, which was a social club for residents of Northeast Berkeley.” 

A 1951 real estate listing notation preserved at BAHA says the house had “Maybeck design” and “Style: Maybeck,” according to BAHA Executive Director Anthony Bruce. Not firm evidence that Maybeck was the architect, especially given Peake’s contrary statement.  

And maybe it’s not even a relevant question. The Maybeck influence was strong in this neighborhood without Berkeley’s best-remembered architect being professionally involved in every project. 

The Maybeck family lived just a block to the south of this lot in what’s now a much altered house, and a City Landmark, on the southwest corner of Berryman and Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. It was there in the 1890s that Bernard Maybeck, a drawing instructor at the University, invited some of his UC engineering students for extracurricular talks about architecture. 

“I think that neighborhood has more unknown influences by him than he’s been given credit for,” says Emmington of BAHA. “There’s a lot between 1892 (when the Maybeck’s moved here) and when they went uptown, that they were doing in that neighborhood.”  

“An important part of his legacy is his effect as a catalyst who changed the world round him, not only through his own buildings, but through his persuasiveness in converting others to pursue his visions,” a BAHA brochure from 1986 notes. “He encouraged friends to design their own homes and worked with them on drawing the plans…Maybeck’s ideas are a source of communal inspiration…”  

And “architecture” was not back then the codified, licensed, practice it is now. Many people in Berkeley who had no formal training came up with their own ideas for houses and capably had them built without ever employing a “design professional.” Skilled contractors and builders also executed what, today, are often misinterpreted as architect-designed homes. 

In sum, there’s no good reason to feel that a house like 1214 The Alameda had to have had plans done by a formal architect or had to have been directly associated with someone like Maybeck in order to end up the way it did. 

The house is on the southern fringe of the Northbrae subdivision, one of Berkeley’s early 20th century “streetcar suburbs.” Stately landmark stone gateway pillars are just half a block north of the house.  

To the south, southwest, and east, the neighborhoods are somewhat older and eclectic with Victorians, cottages, Colonial Revival houses, modest bungalows, and architecturally unclassifiable homes. Walk through some of the surrounding blocks if you can and enjoy them house by house. For a long time this area was near the northern fringes of urban settlement in the inner East Bay. The natural topography and creek-carved landscape are evident in the dips and rises of the district.  

Nearby community fixtures include Martin Luther King, Jr. Junior High a few blocks to the southwest and the elegant North Berkeley Library one block north at an extensive angled intersection where The Alameda meets Hopkins. A tiny street island south of the Library grew into a landscaped pedestrian park after neighbors gathered there for post 9-11 memorials. 

The Monterey Market district, beloved by North Berkeley shoppers, is a left turn and several blocks down Hopkins to the west, and the “Gourmet Ghetto” and North Shattuck shopping district are uphill to the east, along with Live Oak Park through which Codornices Creek also flows. The Solano Avenue shopping district is a bit further to the north along The Alameda, and Downtown Berkeley and the UC campus are a long walk or short drive southeast.  

One change between Maybeckian days and the present. The Alameda and Martin Luther King, Jr. Way (once Grove Street) have turned into a busy commute route and cross-town thoroughfare. The block where 1214 The Alameda is located curves northwest to south, as The Alameda narrows from a broad boulevard to a narrow two-lane street headed towards Downtown Berkeley.  

The house sits back and downhill a bit from the street and inside it seems fairly quiet, while the bulk of the building may shield much of the rear garden from street noise. Still, traffic is a factor to consider.  

Those hunting for a home in a setting like this should also make sure to become familiar with Berkeley’s ordinances detailing the rights and obligations of those whose property includes a creek, along with city regulations concerning heritage oak trees on private property. 

 

 


Garden Variety: NWF’s Connie Award Goes to Local Wildlands/Garden Patron Kathy Kramer

By Ron Sullivan
Friday October 26, 2007

One of our own is on her way to Washington DC to receive a long-deserved award. Kathy Kramer, who founded and runs the annual Bringing Back the Natives garden tour, will be honored on Nov. 1—appropriately enough, All Saints’ Day—along with Bill McKibben (The End of Nature), Al Gore, Rev. Richard Cizik (who has stirred up a hornets’ nest with the Evangelical Climate Initiative’s “Call to Action” statement, insisting on Christians’ responsibility toward stewardship of the earth), Steve Curwood (host of NPR’s Living on Earth show) and others including more dubious company like Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.  

OK, the Guv gets it for continuing to resist offshore oil drilling. For that he deserves a cookie.  

The “Connie Award” is given by the National Wildlife Federation, which has worked with Kramer over the past three years to facilitate the free and fascinating local springtime tours.  

The tours’ premise is that gardens on the tour should have at least 30 percent California native plants; usually they have more, and some, like Scott and Jenny Fleming’s treasure of a native garden in the Berkeley hills, are entirely natives.  

Others, like Idell Weydemeyer’s delightful patch of El Sobrante, combine human-food production with wildlife habitat: the perfect blend of responsible land use and sensual fun. There’s every shade of nativity in between, and I’ve sung the tour’s praises here before. I’m right, too. Don’t miss the next one: Sunday, May 4, 2008.  

Kramer also got The Watershed Project off the ground, back when it was the Aquatic Outreach Institute. It’s been featuring educator-training programs for over a decade: Kids in Creeks, Kids in Marshes, Kids in Gardens, Watching Our Watersheds; wildlife and composting workshops, lots more.  

TWP has helped local creek-lovers found seven grassroots watershed/friends-of-creeks organizations, and continues to help sustain them. It has a fiscal sponsorship program and does fundraising assistance—the sort of thing that hands-on nature fiends like me need and typically don’t do well ourselves—and individual consultation for people who want to start such groups and keep them going.  

The Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour arose from the same set of concerns as Kramer’s watershed work: “My interest in native plants stems from the fact that they don’t need the pesticides that non-natives do, they don’t require much water, they are the best for attracting wildlife, and they are part of California’s natural landscape.” 

When she wanted natives for her own garden, “It was harder to find out what native plants would do well in your area than it should have been. It should be easier for people to learn how to select and care for native plants.” 

The free, self-guided annual tour includes teaching sessions by garden owners and experts; plant, book, and poster sales and plant give-aways in individuals’ gardens and in plant nurseries; children’s activities, and most importantly, chances to see native gardens flourishing in the various climates of Alameda and Contra Costa counties.  

Past Connie award recipients include Jimmy Carter and Lady Bird Johnson, two people who made graduating from top-tier American politics look like a great vocation. Kramer’s in good company, and the National Wildlife Federation dignifies itself by giving her recognition. 

 

www.thewatershedproject.org 

www.bringingbackthenatives.net 

 

 

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Daily Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Daily Planet.


Quake Tip of the Week

By Larry Guillot
Friday October 26, 2007

More Earthquake Tidbits 

 

Each year the southern California area has about 10,000 earthquakes. Most of them are so small that they are not felt. Only several hundred are greater than magnitude 3.0, and only about 15-20 are greater than magnitude 4.0. If there is a large earthquake, however, the aftershock sequence will produce many more earthquakes of all magnitudes for many months 

Alaska is the most earthquake-prone state and experiences a magnitude-seven earthquake almost every year, and a magnitude eight or greater on average every 14 years. 

Make your home secure and your family safe. 

 

 

Guillot is owner of QuakePrepare, an earthquake consulting, securing, and gas shut-off valve installation service. Call him at 510-758-3299 or visit www.quakeprepare.com 


About the House: Insurance: Knob and Tube Wiring

By Matt Cantor
Friday October 26, 2007

The other day a recent inspection client of mine called up and asked if I could help answer a few questions. She proceeded to ask if her new house had copper piping. 

I clicked, dragged and said, in sequence, “You have mainly copper piping with some galvanized steel, you have knob and tube wiring and fuses at a subpanel but breakers at the main, your roof is roughly 3 years old and your foundation is bolted and braced.”  

She laughed, asking how I knew what the rest of her questions had been. I told her that she was pursuing the answers to a series of questions that her insurance provider had asked her to declare. I could hear the smile over the phone. We talked a bit more and said our so-longs. 

Although these queries are all fairly silly and not very useful in determining the safety of the home (mostly because of the lack of specificity), insurance companies continue to ask these same questions. I tried to sit down with a S.F. based insurance provider many years ago and help them to develop a better form but it was, sadly, beyond them. Something about falling on dead ears comes to mind. 

Though there was much in my client’s list of questions worthy of further discussion, I’d like to explore just one today, that being the merits or failings of knob and tube wiring. 

Knob and tube was the first wiring type installed in our homes. The term comes from the insulators used to keep the wiring out of contact with the flammable wooden framing it bobs and weaves though on its way though walls, floors and ceilings. Knobs are two-part insulators that nail onto wooden framing, snugly sandwiching the insulated wire between two neatly cast porcelain cylinders as the nail gets its final smack. 

Tubes are also porcelain and are long hollow pipes with a flared end that can be slid partly through a hole drilled in a joist or stud. A wire can be run through the inside of the tube and be thus kept away from rough and flammable edges. These also sometimes get used when wires cross over one another. 

Knob and tube wiring is inferior to modern wiring in a few respects but these deficiencies are often not significant, especially in the face of the poor wiring sometimes done using modern methods. 

Knob and tube wiring is almost never grounded. That means that the devices in your home that need grounding, such as your fridge, computer or microwave oven are left without a requisite safety feature; so for these, please add a new grounded outlet. However, if you were to spread all your plug-in devices out on the lawn (yardsale!), you’d find that a very small number of them had three-prong (grounding) plugs and therefore do not require grounding.  

This means that, whatever upgrade you may require, it is not axiomatic that those old, two-prong, knob and tube fed outlets, need to be replaced. They need only be augmented with a few modern circuits bearing three-prong grounded outlets. 

This works out nicely since almost all houses with knob and tube wiring (which haven’t been the subject of upgrade) are lacking in an adequate distribution of outlets and possibly lighting. Therefore, the need for more outlets and the need for some to be grounded can be fulfilled in one fell swoop. 

Some of the other disadvantages of knob and tube wiring include its unsuitability to 240 volt devices such as electric stoves, oven or dryers. This can be done, but is rarely done properly as knob and tube was being phased out before most of these devices had arrived on the scene. Also knob and tube is generally coupled with fuses (our next article will go there) and so there is no way to make one of these big devices fully disconnect, when a fuse blows, as can be done with breakers. 

Knob and tube systems were also designed for far fewer electrical devices than most people have today. In 1925 there were no computers, microwave ovens or TVs and refrigerators were few and far between. The systems are generally too small for today’s watt-hungry world. 

Early knob and tube systems are also sometimes wired with the fusing on the neutral wire, allowing a blown fuse to leave current running and to shock the explorer who attempts to fix the seemingly dead device. 

All this said, I like knob and tube and have rarely found original, unaltered, wiring to be less than impressive in the neatness and care of its layout and assembly. One of the best things about this wiring is that it is soldered at the connections. The Western Union splice, developed during the era of telegraph wiring, is far superior to today’s methods of connecting wires because they virtually never pull apart. A sticky, thick, cloth-covered tape was well applied to the wire splices and is rarely faulty after as much as 85 years.  

One of the great things about these soldered connections is that they are much less prone to overheat because the connections have very low resistance. I have often opened a “modern” junction box to see wires, bound in a plastic “wire-nut” spring apart due to having been joined with almost no diligence or care. It’s actually much easier to perform this sort of screw-up today than it would have been in 1925 when knob and tube wiring was king (and quality control was rote). 

This bit about soldering means that fires are less likely to occur and circuits are less likely to behave badly. 

So with all these plusses and minuses, what should a person do if they’ve just moved into a 1925 house with two, two-prong outlets per room and no grounding outlets for the fridge or computer. My advice is to have the wiring checked, upgrade the panels that feed the knob and tube wiring and add some new circuits. That’s all. Now see, that didn’t hurt a bit! 


Arts & Events

Arts Calendar

Tuesday October 30, 2007

TUESDAY, OCT. 30 

THEATER 

“Quilombo” Performance and fundraiser for Kim McMillon’s play on the Diaspora at 6 p.m. at Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, 1616 Franklin St., Oakland. 836-4649.  

FILM 

“Alternative Requirements” Works by Bay Area students at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Tell on on Tuesdays Storytelling at 7:30 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center. Cost is $8-$12 sliding scale. www.juiamorgan.org 

“Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol Between Jews and Christians” with author David Biale at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585.  

“Journey in Ancient Arabia” with photographer Mamade Kadreebux at 7:30 p.m. in the Home Room, International House, UC Campus. Cost is $5. http://ihouse.berkeley.edu 

Freight and Salvage Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $4.50-$5.50. 548-1761.  

Don Lattin describes “Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Singers’ Open Mic with Kelly Park at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ.  

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

The Bluesbox Bayou Band at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054.  

Eddie Palmieri Salsa Orchestra at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $22-$26. 238-9200.  

WEDNESDAY, OCT. 31 

FILM 

“The Last Man on Earth” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Amiri Baraka, founder of the Black Arts Movement, and winner of the American Book Award reads at 6:30 p.m. at 315 Wheeler Hall, the Maude Fife Room, UC Campus. http://holloway.english.berkeley.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Frederica von Stade in a benefit for the Sophia House, at noon at Oakland City Center, 12th and Broadway. www.oaklandcitycenter.com, www.sophiaproject.org 

Music for the Spirit Halloween Concert with Ron McKean on harpsichord at 12:15 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church of Oakland, 2619 Broadway. 444-3555. 

Erin Inglish & Joe Ridout at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

UC Jazz Ensembles at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $6. 841-JAZZ.  

Zabava!, Disciples of Markos, Yalazia at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Costumes welcome. Cost is $10-$12. 525-5054.  

Orquestra Borinquen at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

The Soul Burners at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Eddie Palmieri Salsa Orchestra at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $22-$26. 238-9200.  

THURSDAY, NOV. 1 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Goya: The Disasters of War” An exhibition of prints by the Spanish artist opens at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way, and runs through March 2. Cost is $3-$8. 642-0808. 

Photographs of Hill Tribe Women in Northern Thailand by Adrienne Miller opens at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6241. 

“One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now” Guided tour at 12:15 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft. 642-0808. 

FILM 

“Un Poquito de Tanta Verdad” about the people of Oaxaca, Mexico at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $15-$20. 849-2568.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Lunch Poems with Amiri Baraka at 12:10 p.m. at the Morrison Library, inside the Doe Library, UC Campus. 642-0137 

Susan Dinkelspiel Cerny on “Observations: The San Francisco Bay Area and its Built Environment” at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Reception to follow. Tickets are $15. Sponsored by Berkeley Architectural Heritage Assoc. 841-2242.  

Joshua Clover, D.A. Powell and Juliana Spahr read in celebration of the publication of “American Poets of the 21st Century: The New Poetics” at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

Alan Williamson explores both Buddhism and Christianity in poems at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720 ext 17.  

Lucy Jane Bledsoe reads from her new novel “Biting the Apple” at 7:30 p.m. at Laurel Bookstore, 4100 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland. 531-2073. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Mud, The New Up, Phonofly, female-fronted rock, at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $8. 525-5054.  

Iva Bittova, fiddler and vocalist, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $20.50-$21.50. 548-1761.  

Roberta Picket Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Whiskey Brothers, old-time and bluegrass at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Superthief at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Kinsella, Thurs.-Sat. at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Eddie Palmieri Salsa Orchestra at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $22-$26. 238-9200.  

FRIDAY, NOV. 2 

THEATER 

Actor’s Ensemble of Berkeley”Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave., through Nov. 17. Tickets are $10-$12. 841-5580.  

Altarena Playhouse “Morning’s at Seven” A family comedy by Paul Osborn Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Altarena Playhouse, 1409 High St., Alameda, through Nov. 11. Tickets are $17-$20. 523-1553. www.altarena.org 

Aurora Theatre Company “Sex” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St., through Dec. 9. Tickets are $28-$50. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

Berkeley Playhouse “Seussical, the Musical” Thurs.-Sat. at 7:30 p.m., Sat. at 2 p.m., Sun. at 3 pm. at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., through Dec. 2. Tickets are $18-$23. 665-5565. www.berkeleyplayhouse.org 

Central Works “Every Inch a King” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., through Nov. 18. Tickets are $9-$25. 558-1381.centralworks.org 

International Theater Ensemble A Propos of the Wet Snow” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Metal Shop Theatre, Willard Middle School, 2425 Stuart St. Tickets are $20-$30. 415-440-6163.  

Masquers Playhouse “Little Mary Sunshine” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., selected Sun. at 2:30 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond. Tickets are $18. 232-4031. www.masquers.org 

Women’s Will “Antigone” Fri.-Sun. at 8 p.m. at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St. between Telegraph and Shattuck, Oakland, through Nov. 11. Tickets are $15-$25 sliding scale. 420-0813. www.womenswill.org 

Youth Musical Theater Company “Man of La Mancha” Fri. at 8 p.m., Sat. at 3 and 8 p.m. at Longfellow Auditorium, 1500 Derby St. Tickets are $8-$15. 595-5514. info@ymtcberkeley.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Fiber Devotion” Joell Jones, soft sculpture, and Jeanne Jabbour, stitched drawings, on All Souls’ Day in honor of Día de los Muertos from 6 to 10 p.m. at 447 Twenty-fifth St., Oakland. www.oakopolis.org 

“The Edge of Reality” Abstract paintings by Juanita Hagberg. Opening reception at 7 p.m. at The Gallery, Lavezzo Designs, 5751 Horton St., Emeryville. Exhibition runs to Nov. 30. 643-0553. 

“Four Masters of Origami” Works by Robert Lang, Bernie Peyton, Linda Mihara, and Peter Engel. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at K Gallery, 2513 Blanding Ave., Alameda. 865-5062. 

“Push Rewind: Maafa 2007” Closing reception at 6 p.m. at Inquiry Gallery, 2865 Broadway, Unit 2, Oakland. 641-715-3900, ext. 36800. 

The Puerto Rican Diaspora Documentary Project Works by Frank Espada. Opening reception at 5 p.m. at Joyce Gordon Photography Gallery, 406 14th St., lower level, Oakland. 465-8928. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Ancient Roots/Urban Journeys Gallery talk with Aida Gomes on Dias de los Muertos at 5 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, Oak at 10th St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. Free for teachers. 238-2022.  

Sam Keen describes “Sightings: Extraordinary Encounters with Ordinary Birds” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Babtunde Lea’s “Summoning of the Ghost” Tribute to Miles, Cannon and Trane at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ.  

“Side by Side” Performances by Anne Bluethenthal & Dancers, Dandelion Dancetheater, Deep Water Dance Theater, Facing East Dance & Music, and others, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $12-$15. 925-798-1300.  

La Familia Son at 5 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, Oak at 10th St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2022.  

Illustrio, trio of clarinet, viola, and piano, at 7:30 p.m. at Arlington Community Church, 52 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Donation of $15 requested. 

Keni el Lebrijano, guitarist at 7:30 p.m. at 6 Degrees on Solano, 1403 Solano Ave. Albany. Free, but reservations recommended. 528-1237. 

Stompy Jones, East Coast swing, lindy-hop, at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $13. 525-5054.  

Lucy Kaplansky at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $26.50-$27.50. 548-1761.  

Stella Royale and Padraic Finbar Hagerty-Hammond at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Morning Line at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082.  

Inspector Double Negative, Missing Link, The Harvey Cartel at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

Kinsella, Fri. and Sat. at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Femi at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $7-$15. 548-1159.  

Eddie Palmieri Salsa Orchestra at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $22-$26. 238-9200.  

SATURDAY, NOV. 3 

CHILDREN  

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with Betsy Rose, songs to celebrate the fall season, at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5 for adults, $4 for children. 849-2568. 

Duo Amaranto, folk music in Spanish and English, at 11 a.m. at Studio Grow, 1235 Tenth St. Cost is $7. 526-9888. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“The Works of a Year in Mexico” Paintings by Juana Alicia. Opening reception at 5 p.m. at Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th St., Oakland. 465-8928.  

“Disappearing Honey Bees” a Day of the Dead Altar by Margo Rivera-Weiss. Reception with the artist at 1 p.m. at the San Pablo Gallery, 13831 San Pablo Ave., Maple Hall, Civic Center, San Pablo.  

THEATER 

“A Shirtwaist Tale” on American labor history, at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at JCC of the East Bay, 1414 Walnut St. Tickets are $15-$20. 848-0237, ext. 3.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Cheers to Muses Reading, contemporary works by Asian American women, at 3 p.m. at Eastwind Books of Berkeley, 2066 University Ave. 548-2350. 

Poetry Flash with Kirmen Uribe, Elizabeth Maclin, and John Felstiner at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 559-9500. 

Jamie Myrick portrays Zora Neale Hurston, author of “Their Eyes Were Watching God” from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the West Berkeley Senior Center. 981-6275. 

Bay Area Poets Coalition open reading and contest from 3 to 5 p.m. at Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison St. Park on the street. 527-9905.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“Russian Romance” with Maria Mikheyenko, soprano, Dmitri Anissimov, tenor, Alexander Katsman, piano, at 8 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana St. at Durant and Bancroft. Tickets are $8-$12. 549-3864.  

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra “Royal Dance” with Marion Verbruggen, recorder, at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $30-$72. 415-392-4400.  

Volti “Adventures in Life, Love, and Longing” at 8 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way.Tickets are $8-$20. 415-771-3352.  

Young People’s Symphony Orchestra Fall Concert at 8 p.m. at Valley Center for the Performing Arts at Holy Names University, 3500 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. Tickets are$12-$15. 849-9776. www.ypsomusic.net 

Sister Comrade An evening of words and music celebrating the lives of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2501 Harrison St., Oakland. Tickets are $25-$28. 528-3043. www.sistercomrade.com 

Works in the Works, a low-tech performance series for artists to show newl works Sat. and Sun. at 7:30 p.m. at Eighth Street Studio, 2525 Eighth St. Tickets are $10. 527-5115. 

World Flute Fest from 1 to 5 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Donations accepted. 542-7517.  

Irvin Mayfield and The New Orleans Jazz Orchestra at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $22-$42. 642-9988.  

“Nosotras” with Lichi Fuentes, Rosa Los Santos, Fernanda Bustamante, Gabriela Shiroma, and others, at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $13-15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Mr. Lonesome & the Bluebelles at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ.  

Caribbean Allstars, Renee Asteria at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $11-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Galaxy Band at 6:30 p.m. at Allegro Ballroom, 5855 Christie Ave., Emeryville. Cost is $5-$15. 655-2888.  

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

Amy X Neuberg & her Cello ChiXtet at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Margie Baker & Friends at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $112-$15. 845-5373.  

Zoe Ellis with Maya Kronfeld at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

George Cotsirilos Jazz Group at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $3. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

John Howland Trio, Joel Streeter, Junior League at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082.  

Royal Hawaiian Serenaders at 9 p.m. at Temple Bar Tiki Bar & Grill, 984 University Ave. 548-9888. 

SUNDAY, NOV. 4 

EXHIBITIONS 

“The Five Magpies” Works by Priscilla Birge, Barbara Hazard, Joanna Katz, Diane Rusnak and Sarah Whitecotton. Opening reception at 2 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. Exhibition runs to Dec. 2. www.giorgigallery.com 

Thangka Painting Demonstration with Rinzing Gyaltsen Yongewa at 1:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft. Part of the exhibition Pparting the Curtain: Asian Art Revealed.” 642-0808. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz introduces her new book “The Color of Jews: Racial Politics & Radical Diasporism” at 4 p.m. at Cafe Leila, 1724 San Pablo Ave., corner Francisco. Donation $10. bayareawomeninblack@yahoo.com 

Daniel Lyons, who started the blog “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs” reads from his new book “Option$” at 4 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

San Francisco Chamber Orchestra Fall Family Concert at noon at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. www.juliamorgan.org 

Shoko Hikage and Yoko Hirano-Itatani, koto, at 7 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Tickets are $10-$15. 845-1350. 

Young People’s Chamber Orchestra Autumn Harvest Concert at 4 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $1-$5. 595-4688. www.ypco.org  

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra “Royal Dance” with Marion Verbruggen, recorder, at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $30-$72. 415-392-4400. www.philharmonia.org 

Oakland Civic Orchestra at 4 p.m. at Lake Merritt United Methodist Church, 1330 Lakeshore Avenue, Oakland. 238-7275. 

Per Tengstrand and Shan-Shan Sun, pianists, at 4 p.m. at Scottish Rite Theater, 1547 Lakeside Drive, Oakland. Tickets are $30-$40. 601-7919.  

Oakland Lyric Opera “An Afternoon of Russian Romance” at 2 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $18-$20. 836-6772.  

Dmitri Hvorostovsky, baritone, at 3 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $34-$90. 642-9988.  

Live Oak Concert with William Beatty, piano, at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Cost is $10. 644-6893.  

“Desert Roots” World Beat Music with Dror Sinai, Rachel Valfer & Eliyahu Sills at 7:30 p.m. at Kehilla Community Synagogue, 1300 Grand Ave., Piedmont. Tickets are $15-$20. 547-2424, ext. 211. 

Emeryville Taiko 10th Anniversary Concert at 7:30 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $25. 925-798-1300. 

Bruce Barthol at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Beep! The Michael Coleman Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ.  

Trance Zen Dance at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com


The Shtetl Before the Holocaust

By Peter Selz, Special to the Planet
Tuesday October 30, 2007

We know so much about the deportation and death of Polish Jews in the Holocaust, but so little about life in the shtetl before the genocide. The exhibition of his paintings, currently on view at the Magnes Museum displays 65 pictures by an artist who has documented the joys and sorrows of daily life in the shtetl.  

Mayer Kirschenblatt has drawn on an amazing memory to tell the story. Mayer left the small town of Opatow (pronounced Apt in Yiddish) in 1934, when he was 17 and emigrated to Canada in search of a better life. In Toronto he became a house painter and eventually opened a small paint and wallpaper business.  

At age 59 he fell ill, retired and began telling his stories to his daughter, Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblet, an anthropologist and professor of Jewish Studies at NYU. She had seen some still-lifes her father had painted on a vacation in Florida, detected some talent and encouraged him to paint. On his 50th wedding anniversary in 1990 he began to paint a historic narrative, documenting all aspects of life in his hometown as he remembered it.  

Four hundred paintings and the story of the place has been published as They Call Me Mayer July by the University of California Press and serves as the catalogue of the show of 65 paintings at the Magnes. 

We see births and deaths, weddings and bar mitzvahs, holiday celebrations and burials, children playing and going to school, men praying in their prayer shawls. We see the butcher, the chimney sweep, the blacksmith, the water carrier, the bagel seller, musicians and the fellow called “The Human Fly,” who liked to climb the wall of buildings. We wonder how he was able to remember it all and how he was able to paint so convincingly.  

His style, related to folk art, used to be called “primitive” by art historians and critics. It is simply work by a self-taught painter, now often referred to as “outsider art.”  

When Mayer came to the opening of his show in Berkeley, I had occasion to ask him about his sources. He spoke with admiration of Chagall, and, indeed, there is a resemblance to pictures Chagall produced during his return to Russia in World War I. Chagall, however, was trained as a painter in St. Petersburg, absorbed the lessons of Cubism in Paris, and purposely worked in a more naive style back in Russia.  

Mayer certainly lacks the sense of color and composition we find in an artist like Chagall. Mayer also knew the photographs of the ghettoes by the Russian photographer Roman Vishniac, and he was also familiar with the renowned Yiddish writers Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Loeb Peretz, who wrote with such humor and understanding about life and culture in the Jewish shtetl, where the Jews often outnumbered the gentiles, who always saw them as “The Other” while the Jews looked at the Poles as the outsiders. 

As one would expect, not all the paintings are of equal interest or aesthetic quality. Some, in fact, are rather awkward, which is part of their appeal. I was particularly delighted with “Purim Play: The Krakow Wedding” (circa 1994). Purim celebrates the delivery of the Jews from Persian massacre. It is a holiday which often includes theatricals about Mordecai and Esther. In Mayer’s paintings we see itinerant actors with Napoleonic hats and a small band of musicians at work. And there are the kids—including Mayer himself looking into the window of the more prosperous folks who could afford to hire the actors and music players. “Exit Hamburg, 1934” (1997) shows a large picture of Hitler and a Nazi woman examining the papers of a traveler at the Humburg (sic) American Ship Lines. This is how the artist remembered his exit from Europe. This was 1934 and he remembers that “we did not personally experience anti-Semitism.” They left before it was too late. 

Forty-seven members of his family who had remained in Poland were killed by the Nazis.  

Mayer, his mother and his siblings went on their “cold and stormy crossing,” and they must have been among all the people sitting in straight chairs on the bow of the ocean liner in “Ice Fields: Arriving in Canadian Waters.” We see members of the crew, pushing chunks of ice off the prow. The Mayers took the train from Halifax to Toronto, where many years later Mayer related the reveries of his childhood world in word and picture. 

 

Image:  

Mayer Kirschenblatt’s Purim Play: The Kraków Wedding (circa 1994, acrylic on canvas).  

 

 

THEY CALLED ME MAYER JULY: PAINTED MEMORIES OF A JEWISH CHILDHOOD IN POLAND BEFORE THE HOLOCAUST 

Through Jan. 13 at the Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St., Berkeley. 549-6950. www.magnes.org.


The Theater: Virago Theatre Stages ‘Mankind’s Last Hope’ In Alameda

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Tuesday October 30, 2007

Mankind’s Last Hope, Virago Theatre’s burlesque futuristic sitcom, through this weekend at Alameda’s Rhythmix Cultural Center near the Park Street Bridge, is the perfect antidote to the overcommercialization of Halloween.  

It has crazy costumes and makeup, exuberant alien bosses and eccentric, downtrodden human “craft workers,” with live and taped spoof commercials (some featuring Alameda businesses) and a general air of putting on issues serious and trivial. 

Directed by Robert Lundy-Paine, this original staged teleplay, written by Dan Brodnitz and Jeff Green, includes credits framing each of the three episodes and a loopy theme song about how The Horde invades earth in 2040, most humans dying, the rest enslaved to whittle or fashion inspirational greeting cards for Earth Industries in a New Galactic Economic Order.  

It makes Star Trek seem like the future on Prozak. But there is a human underground, somewhere, a resistance to the overly friendly, menacing but too jocular, insect-like task masters of The Horde, more grotesquely human than their sadsack slave charges, who whittle away with switchblades or spellcheck, always afraid of being eaten. 

With the enormous alien femininity of Jiggy (Angela Dant), Horde supervisor of a human work crew, and her turgid affair with the even more enormous (but never seen, though heard) “cool” Xanthor, splendidly deadpan Chloe Bronzan is introduced as “hairless monkey Bright Eyes,” nude and bound in straps, to be introduced into the crew, perhaps as breeding material.  

But she comes out of solitary in The Box as take-charge Alex, cool herself in camouflage and suspiciously speaking Horde like a nonhuman. Soon, with the eating of crewleader Burt (Tony Jonick), she’s given the job of managing her hokey human confreres: buff but puerile Hank (Kenneth Sears), grim Spencer (James Colgan) with eyepatch and blade, and ditzy (but lovable) screw-up Wally (Alex Goldenberg), who’s been given a tail, then a third nipple, secreting poisonous milk, with which he hopes to poison Xanthor, in a misguided blow for human freedom. 

But the proceedings are jovial as well as edgy, with a doo-wop number when Hank bemoans the demise of his balloon animal pet, beloved Snakey; a weird puppet show, to cheer the sentimental humans up and improve morale; and a very funny tango between Horde master Bongar (Linda-Ruth Cardozo) and unctuous human slave Wortle (Molly M. Holcomb) while scheming against his/her own kind. Hannah Gustaffson plays a young Hordette with humor and quizzical charm, presiding over The Box. 

This kind of put-on demands good acting to rise above the kitsch it spoofs, and the ensemble proves up to it with Lundy-Paine’s direction. The comic timing is fine, and neither Sci-Fi freaks nor those indifferent to the planet’s imaginary fate(s) will be bored or displeased. 

 

 

MANKIND’S LAST HOPE 

Presented by Virago Theatre at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and 2 p.m. Sundays through Nov. 4 at the Rhythmix Cultural Center, 2513 Blanding Ave., Alameda.  

$12-$17. www.viragotheatre.org.


Spooky, Unusual Events in Celebration of Halloween

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Tuesday October 30, 2007

All Hallows, All Saints, All Souls, Samhain, Todos Santos, Dia de los Muertes ... by any other name, to us, Halloween and the cluster of celebrations around the old Celtic lunar new year after harvest, adopted by the Christian Church as holidays.  

Until recently, Halloween in particular has been mostly a North American affair, at least in modern times—a children’s holiday, and a night for imaginations (and behavior) to run riot ... carnavalesque, for northern cultures which lack that tradition. 

Lately, there’s been both controversy and mayhem, both reactions missing or exaggerating the purpose of the holiday, captured by Berkeley Renaissance poet Robin Blaser: “so eerie: ‘must get rid of Halloween—/it’s pagan,’ say these clowns of/tailor-made, cardboard transcendence,/ignorant of All hallows coming up,/deaf to this laughter with the ultimate ...” 

But in between the tailor-made consumer extravaganza of Halloween superstores and the suppressed blow-out of the Castro, the Bay Area offers a few appropriate ways to celebrate, whether en famille or as adults—or adults only. 

Though much of the action passed with last weekend, Halloween, All Saints and the next few days will see a few unique events.  

• On Halloween itself, 7 p.m. in San Francisco’s Union Square, Larry Reed’s Shadowlight Productions will present, for free, Greek shadowmaster Leonidas Kassipides, himself the grandson of a shadow puppeteer. He will be performing The Metamorphosis of Karaghiozis, with live clarinet, strings and dumbek, the comic adventures of a popular hero of the period Greece was dominated by the Ottoman empire. 

• Closer to home, Ashkenaz complements the theme with a Balkan Halloween, featuring Greek folk music and Rebetika by the Disciples of Markos and Yalozis, at 8 p.m. ($10 with costume, $12 without). 

• The silver screen, which spread spookiness, as well as gross horror, around the globe, will feature “a deadpan feast of the undead” at the Pacific Film Archive, with The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price, at 7:30 p.m., and Murnau’s great silent masterpiece of darkness and light, Faust, with musical accompaniment by brilliant Dutch jazz and comedy orchestra the Willem Breuker Kollektif at the Palace of Fine Arts for the SF Jazz Festival at 8 p.m. ($10-20). 

• Truly carnavalesque will be “Frightmare on 8th Street,” Cherie Carson’s aerial dance performance, when “creatures of the night crawl, fly, float, hover.” The show is at Studio 12, 2525 Eighth St., 7 p.m. on Halloween and Nov. 2-3 ($5-13, call 587-0770 or see www.movingout.org). 

• Creaturely, but in reverse: a Pet Masquerade Party (and contest), 9 a.m.-5 p.m. on Tuesday and Wednesday at 151 Vermont, Ste. 9, in San Francisco (415) 241-9176.  

• Helen Adams’ All Souls Eve will feature a celebration of the late, fey Scottish poet, who was closely associated with Berkeley and San Francisco Renaissance poets Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan, with performances of her eerie, funny modern ballads and her (and her sister Pat’s) ballad opera, “San Francisco’s Burning” (1960). Composer Warren Jepson and many others, including poets Michael McClure and Diane DiPrima, will appear for the publication of A Helen Adam Reader, 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Unitarian Center, Franklin at Geary in San Francisco ($5; info on the Poetry Center’s website, www.sfsu.edu/poetry). 

• On stage Thursday and Friday, The Hypnodrome in San Francisco will feature plays drawn from the original repertoire of Parisian Belle Epoche Grand Guignol ($20; $69 for the Shock Box, (800) 838-3006). In Alameda, Virago Theatre Company stages Mankind’s last Hope and popular Teatro Zinzanni goes ZinZombie on Halloween with a masquerade ball in their tent on San Francisco’s Embarcadero. 

• Berkeley’s Starlight Circle Players hold their second annual Samhain Allhallows Concert fundraiser, with a plethora of bands (including The Questionably Sane), with masquerade, tarot, art and “taverna treats by the pyrate chefs of Drunken Dragon Inn,” Saturday at 2 p.m. at the Fellowship of Unitarians, at Cedar and Bonita ($15-35, volunteers free, www.starlightcircleplayers@yahoo.com).  

• Though the Dia de los Muertes festival was last weekend in Fruitvale, Oakland’s Chapel of the Chimes has a community altar by artist Patti Goldstein through Nov. 6; families are invited to place offerings. 4499 Piedmont Ave., 9-5 p.m.  

• For a quieter alternative, African-American poet and playwright Amiri Baraka will read at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday in Wheeler Hall, on the UC campus, and perform next week with the Chicago Arts Ensemble’s Roscoe Mitchell at San Francisco’s Victoria Theatre (see the Poetry Center Website, above).  

A Halloween connection? Baraka, writing as LeRoy Jones, in his famous “In Memory of Radio,” eulogizing Orson Welles’ broadcast character: “Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston?/Only Jack Kerouac, that I know of, and me ... ‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.’/O, yes he does/O, yes he does/An evil word it is,/This Love.” 

 


Books: A Guide to the Bay Area’s Buildings and Architecture

By Steven Finacom, Special to the Daily Planet
Tuesday October 30, 2007

A long-awaited, much-needed, and up-to-date guide to the great and representative buildings and architectural history of the Bay Area debuts this month.  

An Architectural Guidebook to San Francisco and the Bay Area is authored by Susan Dinkelspiel Cerny, in conjunction with a dozen contributing authors and photographers.  

Cerny speaks in Berkeley this Thursday evening as part of a Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA) lecture series.  

Her talk is entitled “Observations: The San Francisco Bay Area and Its Built Environment,” drawing on the stories told in the book and the experience of researching and writing it. Books will be available for sale, with a discount for BAHA members. The book, published by Gibbs-Smith, retails for $29.95. 

Locals will recognize Cerny’s name from her two editions of Berkeley Landmarks, the scores of articles she has authored about Berkeley buildings and history, and her decades of selfless service to the cause of historic preservation. She’s a Bay Area native, with deep family roots in the region. 

The architecture of the Bay Area ranges from 18th-century Spanish missions to modern airport terminals. Imported and homegrown architectural styles, natural disasters, human interventions from railroads to war to the silicon chip, and a unique regional geography and climate have combined to create a wonderful and complex mix of buildings, spaces, and places. 

The guide is organized geographically by county, with individual cities, districts, and structures profiled. The writers went into the field with notebook and camera as well as consulting an array of historical documents, surveys, and local experts.  

Each building is identified by year of construction and designer (where known), followed by a few sentences of history, context, and notable design features. Black and white photographs of many of the structures are included. 

Neighborhood patterns are profiled, and the entries provide useful hints for spotting structures that enrich the context, such as San Francisco buildings that may not be architecturally preeminent but survived the 1906 earthquake and fire and illustrate earlier patterns of design or development. 

If you have an omnivorous historical appetite, the brevity of the entries can sometimes be frustrating, but one appreciates the challenges of putting together a book like this. Essential basics can be included, but there’s not room for exhaustive histories or extremely detailed design descriptions.  

Architecturally, the most prominent local communities such as San Francisco and Berkeley have been well covered by previous guides (including two written by Cerny) and published architectural histories. However, many smaller or less visible Bay Area towns, cities, and neighborhoods have been overlooked. 

This book, with more than 500 pages of text and over 2,000 individual entries, rectifies the imbalance and provides a regional perspective, addressing not just the older city centers but the suburbs, and profiling their major edifices and representative structures from cattle ranching days to Gold Rush to dot-com boom. 

In the Bay Area, understanding a mid-century Eichler subdivision or a South Bay R & D office park is as important to an appreciation of regional history and development patterns as admiring the Palace of Fine Arts or a pristine row of Victorian beauties. This guide thoroughly surveys the spectrum of local history and architecture. 

Refreshingly, it avoids a failing of some other architectural guidebooks. That’s the tendency of authors, often architects or critics, to turn a guide into a showcase of their personal preferences. 

For example, some San Francisco guidebooks written in the streamlined ‘30s fairly dripped with scorn at those horrible, out-of-date, Victorian houses, while others from the 1960s tout the virtues of particular Modern era buildings that, from 21st-century hindsight, are pretty mundane.  

In contrast, Cerny and her co-authors appear to have come to this project not as cheerleaders for design from any particular era, but from backgrounds as community and architectural historians with a thoughtful appreciation of past and present. 

They brought a catholic sensibility to their writing and selection of projects, respectfully showing the whole panorama of Bay Area architectural history and urban development. 

Quite a number of recent/contemporary buildings are indeed appropriately included, but they are thoughtfully treated without genuflection at the ephemeral altars of the “starchitect.”  

For example, the brief write-up on the new De Young Museum building gives a fair and matter-of-fact overview of both its virtues and shortcomings. 

An Architectural Guidebook to San Francisco and the Bay Area is easy to use, the maps relate well to the descriptions, and the index is clear and (from my brief perusal) seems accurate.  

There’s also a chronological, illustrated, guide to regional architectural styles and trends.  

If you’re at all interested in the architecture and history of the Bay Area, this will be an indispensable reference to own. I may, in fact, get two copies; one for home, and one that stays in the car, so that on trips through the Bay Area, quick answers to “what building is that?” can finally be found. 

 

 

AN ARCHITECTURAL  

GUIDEBOOK TO SAN FRANCISCO AND THE BAY AREA 

By Susan Dinkelspiel Cerny 

Gibbs-Smith, $29.95. 

 

Susan Cerny speaks at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the historic Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Refreshments and book-signing follow across the street at Berkeley Architectural Heritage’s colonial revival mansion, the McCreary-Greer House. 

Tickets are $15. Call BAHA at 841-2242, or check the www.berkeleyheritage.com website for more details. 

Cerny’s lecture will be followed at 2 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, Nov. 11, by the third and final talk in a BAHA series featuring local authors and historical topics. 

Mark A. Wilson, author of the newly published Julia Morgan, Architect of Beauty (Gibbs-Smith, 2007) speaks on “Julia Morgan: her Unique Place in American Architecture” at the Seldon Williams House (Julia Morgan, architect, 1928), in Berkeley's Claremont Court neighborhood. 

A reception and book-signing will follow. The talk provides an opportunity to visit one of Julia Morgan's most beautiful private homes. The cost is $25 per person. Reservations for the Wilson event may be made by sending a check, payable to BAHA, and a return envelope to: BAHA, P.O. Box 1137, Berkeley, CA 94701.


Kingdom of Shadows: The Origins of the Horror Film

By Justin DeFreitas
Tuesday October 30, 2007

As long as we've had motion pictures, we've used them to scare ourselves. The medium is perfectly suited for it. Even the earliest filmmakers saw the potential, employing double exposures, trick shots, spooky sets and dramatic lighting to illuminate the darker side of the imagination, to bring to life the ethereal netherworlds and distorted figures of the collective unconscious. 

A string of new DVD releases presents some of the greatest examples of early horror, films from the 1920s, when the genre reached its first full blossoming in both the United States and in Europe.  

In the 1920s Universal was at the bottom of the heap of Hollywood studios, an also-ran amid the likes of MGM, Paramount and United Artists. Whereas MGM may have turned out a film per week, including many big-budget blockbusters per year, Universal produced a steady diet of low-budget programmers.  

Universal chief Carl Laemmle, in an effort to stake his claim to some of the prestige and influence of his rivals, outlined a plan to produce a few big-budget films per year, spectacles with melodramatic plots, vast sets, and casts of thousands, or at least hundreds. He called them "Super Jewels." One of the first was Erich von Stroheim's Foolish Wives, a film that Laemmle relentlessly promoted as the first million-dollar film, even going so far as to mount a large ticking display outside the studio that tallied the rising cost of the production minute by minute.  

The most spectacular of Laemmle's Super Jewels, however, were the Lon Chaney vehicles. Image Entertainment has just released the first, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), in a definitive new DVD edition, following their previous excellent edition of the second, The Phantom of the Opera (1925). 

Chaney, known as "the man of a thousand faces," is the key factor in these films, transforming himself into the most hideous of creatures in each, yet maintaining the humanity of the character, and thus the sympathy of the audience, in the creation of what would be the prototype for the long line of horror film monsters to follow.  

The Hunchback disc includes a new score, commentary track, photo galleries (some in 3-D—glasses provided), and behind-the-scenes footage of Chaney, sans makeup, on the set.  

Chaney also figures prominently in another new DVD release, Kino's American Silent Horror box set. The set serves as a companion to the company's previous collection, German Horror Classics, which featured such seminal horror film masterpieces as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and Nosferatu (1922), a film Kino will soon re-release in a definitive two-disc edition.  

The American horror set features four more classics of the genre: Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), The Penalty (1920), The Cat and the Canary (1927), and The Man Who Laughs (1928).  

The Penalty shows Chaney in yet another painful contortion, this time as a double amputee. Chaney's self-designed costume involved him strapping his legs back and walking on his knees throughout the film as a brutal gangster out for revenge on the quack who wrongly deformed him as a child. It is not one of Chaney's better-known films, yet it is certainly one of his finest performances, for unlike the previous films mentioned here, he is not forced to compete with the grandiosity of the production itself. Extra features include excerpts from other Chaney films and a video tour of the actor's famed makeup kit.  

Dr. Jeckyll stars the great John Barrymore in what many consider the first great American horror film. It is one of most frequently adapted stories, especially in the early years of cinema. In fact, the disc includes an excerpt from a rival version made the same year, as well as an essay on the novel's various incarnations. The original score for the film was composed and performed by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, a superb quintet that appeared at this year's San Francisco Silent Film Festival.  

The American horror film really took off once Hollywood began recruiting talent from Europe, most notably from Germany. The German Expressionists had been exploring and exploiting the full visual potential of film for years, using unusual camera angles, fantastic sets and the elaborate interplay of light and shadow to create dramatic effects that gave rise to the modern horror film. Paul Leni, director of the classic German film Waxworks (1924), was hired by Laemmle and made his American debut with The Cat and the Canary, a comedy-horror film that essentially defined the haunted house thriller. The tale had already been a huge success on Broadway, but Leni brought a distinctly Germanic touch to the film version; his use of camera movement, evocative set design and other expressionistic techniques helped bring a new level of artistry to American film.  

He followed up a couple of years later with perhaps the highlight of the Kino collection, The Man Who Laughs, starring another German émigré, Conrad Veidt. The story, based on a novel by Victor Hugo, concerns the son of a politician who is kidnapped by a rival and has his face carved into a hideous smile by a gypsy surgeon. Eventually he finds refuge in a traveling freak show before finding himself drawn back into a world of political intrigue. The film was hugely influential in the horror genre, and even beyond it, the hero providing the inspiration for the character of the Joker in the Batman comic books.  

The set also includes a 1998 documentary on the origins and development of the horror film. Kingdom of Shadows, narrated by Rod Steiger, traces the themes and techniques of the genre from the earliest days of cinema through the beginning of the sound era, using excerpts from dozens of classic films.  

Another Kino release, though not quite a horror film, adds another dimension to the genre. A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929), a British production, is more of a suspense film perhaps, or a psychological thriller with noirish overtones. Directed by Anthony Asquith, the film rivals Hitchcock for its use of suspense and the subjective camera in the delineation of a mind on the verge of collapse. The film is full of virtuoso techniques, from its flashback structure and shadowy photography to a heart-pounding scene set in a movie theater, where the mounting tension is created by dramatic close-ups and rapid-fire editing as a man's jealousy and rage build inside him until, finally, Asquith releases the tension with a satiric jab at the new phenomenon sweeping motion pictures: the talkies. And later, during the film's climax, there's a striking and innovative use of color to depict a moment of sudden violence. 

Also included on the set is Silent Britain, a new documentary celebrating the rediscovery of long-neglected silent film classics from the UK. 

 

 

 

Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) 

Image Entertainment. www.image-entertainment.com. 

$24.99 

 

American Silent Horror (1920-1928) 

Kino. www.kino.com. 

$49.95 

 

A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929) 

Kino. www.kino.com. 

$29.95 


Wild Neighbors: Birds in Berkeley: The Owls in the Oak

By Joe Eaton
Tuesday October 30, 2007

Eighty-one years ago Joseph Grinnell, director of UC’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, sat in his corner office at the edge of Faculty Glade watching a crew of arborists at work on a venerable coast live oak. Or, as he put it in his essay “Tree Surgery and the Birds,” “ ‘tree surgeons’ … under directions of a ‘landscape architect.’ ” His contempt is evident. Over the years, Grinnell had observed 46 species of birds in that oak. And he noted the removal of bits of the tree that had attracted particular species of birds: the decaying stub where the downy woodpecker drummed, the white-breasted nuthatch’s favorite foraging ground, the flycatcher’s perch. 

“My corner tree used to have knotholes,” he wrote. “One such cavity, years ago, furnished the home site for a Screech Owl, and from it each summer issued a brood of young owls … Nowadays, it seems, the tenets of tree surgery require that no such cavities be permitted to remain in any well-cared-for tree. Each and every former and even potential knothole has been gouged out and sealed up, so that only a forbidding wall of cement meets the eye and beak of any prospecting bird.” 

To Grinnell, the loss of the campus screech-owls was just part of the “local disappearance of our native bird-life.” And he was in a position to know. Hired to run the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) by the remarkable naturalist-philanthropist Annie Alexander (see Barbara Stein’s biography On Her Own Terms: Annie Montague Alexander and the Rise of Science in the American West for more on that working relationship), Grinnell was the architect of Berkeley’s preeminence in mammalogy and ornithology.  

He had been born in Indian Territory where his physician father practiced, and grew up among Red Cloud’s Oglala Sioux. His road to Berkeley led through Pasadena and Alaska. Three years after taking over the museum, he organized an epic Sierran transect that provides a baseline for contemporary studies of faunal response to climate change. During that project, Grinnell once set out from Yosemite Valley and hiked more than 40 miles over the crest to Mono Lake in a single day, shotgun and notebook in hand. 

Grinnell also pioneered some of the fundamental concepts of ecology: ecological niches, competitive exclusion. He recognized that animals shaped their environments as well as being shaped by them, and that variation was the raw material of evolution. 

The year after the attack of the “tree surgeons,” Grinnell and Margaret Wythe published their Directory to the Bird-life of the San Francisco Bay Region, under the auspices of the Cooper Ornithological Club. (His choice of a female collaborator is interesting. Grinnell respected his patron Alexander, but didn’t allow women on MVZ field trips.)  

Grinnell and Wythe documented 159 nesting species in the Bay Area but were pessimistic about their future, expecting that diversity to decline. “Species of birds are disappearing, some never to return,” they wrote; “some species are just about holding their own … On the whole, it looks as though the total number of species in the Bay region at the present time were undergoing decided reduction, due in major part to the elimination of habitats of wide diversity or of productive kinds.” 

Fortunately, their crystal ball was a bit cloudy. William Bousman recently compared the Directory with data from the subsequent 80 years of breeding bird surveys and atlas projects, and found nesting records for 215 species. Many of those were one-off attempts by vagrants; however, 19 species not present in 1927 appear to be here to stay. Some newcomers were commercially exploited species rebounding after the ravages of the plume trade. Others found new man-made habitats like salt ponds and reservoirs, or responded to the regrowth of redwood forests and the planting of urban trees. Range expansions include northern birds moving south, southern birds moving north, eastern birds moving west. 

And what goes for the overall Bay Area goes for Berkeley. Crows and ravens have taken advantage of the garbage we generate. Cooper’s hawks have moved into Berkeley’s street trees. Chestnut-backed chickadees, unknown in the East Bay in Grinnell’s time, feel at home among planted evergreens. Other birds have benefitted from an expanded urban oak population. John Westlake, a long-time Berkeley birder, has a theory that the maturing of all the oaks planted in the early 70s has a lot to do with the current abundance of oak-associated birds like the Nuttall’s woodpecker and oak titmouse.  

“The unhappy future projected by Grinnell and Wythe has not come to pass,” writes Bousman, “at least not yet.” True, there have been tradeoffs.  

If Charles Keeler revisited his old Berkeley haunts, he would miss the yellow warblers and western meadowlarks, as Grinnell would miss the screech-owls. But who could complain about the chickadees? 

 

Photograph by Ron Sullivan. 

Knothole with a view: western screech-owl in Briones Regional Park.


Berkeley This Week

Tuesday October 30, 2007

TUESDAY, OCT. 30 

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 Sobrante Ridge, Coach Drive. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233. 

Fall Fruit ‘n’ Fright at the Tuesday Berkeley Farmers’ Market with pears, pomegranates and persimmons, a Pumpkin Carving Contest, Day of the Dead festivities, and Fall Fruit Pies by Mission Pies from 3 to 7 p.m. on Derby St. at MLK, Jr. Way. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter.org 

“Volunteer at Any Age” A Peace Corps Information Session at 6 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 1-800-424-8580. www.peacecorps.gov 

“Quilombo” Performance and fundraiser for Kim McMillon’s play on the Diaspora at 6 p.m. at Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, 1616 Franklin St., Oakland. 836-4649. 

“Reincarnation and Buddhism” with Reverend Harry Bridge, Lodi Buddhist Temple from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at the Jodo Shinshu Center, 2140 Durant Ave. at Fulton St. Donation $20. 809-1460. 

End the Occupation Vigil every Tues. at noon at Oakland Federal Bldg., 1301 Clay St. www.epicalc.org 

Community Sing-a-Long every Tues, at 2 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. 524-9122.  

Family Storytime at 7 p.m. at Kensington Library. 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043.  

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704. www.ecologycenter.org 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. 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. 31 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland uptown to the Lake to discover Art Deco landmarks. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of the Paramount Theater at 2025 Broadway. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. 

Ancestor Night “Quilombo Communities of Rio de Janeiro” with Robert King at 6 p.m. at Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, 1616 Franklin St., Oakland. 836-4649. 

Halloween Storytime and Costume Party for ages 3 to 8 at 3:30 p.m. at Claremont Branch, Berkeley Public Library, 2940 Benvenue Ave. 981-6280.  

Halloween at Habitot A not-too-spooky event for infants, toddlers and pre-schoolers, from 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 2065 Kittredge St. Cost is $6-$7. 647-1111. 

Howl-o-ween Celebration with tricks and treats, for dogs and humans from 5 to 6 p.m. at Ohlone Dog Park, Grant St. and Hearst Ave. Dress up your pup and bring them out to the ball! Treats for dogs and humans, costume pageant at 5:45 p.m. Sponsored by the Ohlone Dog Park Association. 845-4213. ohlonedogpark.org 

Studio One Art Center Annual Pumpkin Potluck with sharing of squash recipes and treat bags for youth, from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. at 1428 Alice St., off 14th St. Costumes welcome. 597-5027. 

Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning Colloquium with Caroline Chen on Dancing in the Streets of Contemporary Beijing: improvised USes of Space” at 1 p.m. at Wurster Hall, Room 315A, UC Campus. All welcome. laep.ced. 

berkeley.edu/events/colloquium 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. Heavy rain cancels. 548-9840. 

CodePink Halloween Protest at the Marine Recruiting Station, 64 Shattuck Square. Come in costume. 524-2776. 

THURSDAY, NOV. 1 

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  

“Observations: The San Francisco Bay Area and its Built Environment” with author Susan Dinkelspiel Cerny at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Reception to follow. Tickets are $15. Sponsored by Berkeley Architectural Heritage Assoc. 841-2242. www.berkeleyheritage.com 

Mario Savio Memorial Lecture: “From Jim Crow to Guantanamo: Prisons, Democracy and Empire” with Angela Davis, social activist and UC Santa Cruz professor at 7 p.m. at Pauley Ballroom, Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Union, UC Campus. Free. 707-823-7293. 

“Last Man Out” with William Rodriguez, a janitor in the World Trade Center North Tower who was the last person to leave the tower before it fell on 9/11, at 7 p.m. at Grand Lake Theater, 3200 Grand Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $10. 650-857-0927. www.communitycurrency.org 

“A Little Bit of So Much Truth” A film on the 2006 popular uprising in Oaxaca, Mexico at 7 p.m. at La Peña. Donation $5-$10. Sponsored by the Task Force on the Americas. 415-924-3227. www.mitfamericas.org 

“Preventing Falls for 50+ Adults” Learn about changing behaviors, nutrition and medication management at 1:30 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720. 

Berkeley School Volunteers Orientation from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. Come learn about volunteer opportunities. 644-8833. 

Babies & Toddlers Storytime at 10:15 and 11:15 a.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Club meets at 6:45 p.m. at Spud’s Pizza, 3290 Adeline at Alcatraz. namaste@avatar. 

freetoasthost.info  

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.  

FRIDAY, NOV. 2 

Fiesta de los Muertos A fundraiser for the Dolores Huerta Foundation with music and dancing at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $35. Costumes encouraged. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Berkeley Public Library West Branch Grand Re-Opening from 5 to 7 p.m. at 1125 University Ave. with live music, storytelling and refreshments. 981-6278. 548-1240 (TTY). 

California Historical Society Piedmont Avenue Tour with Gary Holloway, Fri. at 10 a.m. Sat. at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., and Sun. at 2 p.m. Cost is $20-$25. For reservations call 415-357-1848, ext. 229.  

“Before the Rainbow Flag: California’s Gay History” with Jim Van Buskirk, author and former director of the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center at the SF Main Library, at 7 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, Oak at 10th St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

Dia de los Muertos Craft program and stories from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at Habitot Children’s Museum, 2065 Kittredge St. 647-1111. www.habitot.org 

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310. 

SATURDAY, NOV. 3 

Berkeley Historical Society Walking Tour of “Lower Codornices Creek” to explore the history of the creek area from early industry to WWII housing to recent restoration. Walk is from 10 a.m. to noon. Cost is $8-$10. To register and for information on meeting place call 848-0181. www.cityofberkeley.info/histsoc/ 

Healthcare for All Kids A MomsRising.org Event with Assemblymembers Loni Hancock and Mark DeSaulnier. Activities for the whole family from 11 a.m. to noon at Live Oak Community Center, 1301 Shattuck. www.momsrising.org/healthcareforkids 

Councilmember Max Anderson’s Town Hall Meeting on public safety, youth services, health, education and opportunities in the communityfrom 9:30 a.m. to noon at South Berkeley Senior Center, 2939 Ellis St. at Ashby. 981-7130. 

Alameda Literati Book Fair from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. with open mic all day at Al DeWitt O Club, 641 West Red Line Ave., Alameda Point, Alameda, at the former Naval Air Station at Alameda. 427-7974.  

Children’s Story Day at MOCHA Listen to “Snowflake Bentley” then make your own snowflake at 1 p.m. at The Museum of Children’s Art, 528 Ninth St., Oakland. Cost is $7. 465-8770. 

Samhain All Hallows Fundraiser with the Starlight Circle Players, art gallery, tarot readings, food and costumes contest, from 2 p.m. on at the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, Cedar and Bonita. Tickets are $15-$35. 647-5268. www.starlightcircleplayers.com 

Political Affairs Readers Group “Immigration” A discussion led by David Bacon, at 10 a.m. at the Niebyl-Proctor Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Sponsored by the Communist Party USA, Oakland Berkeley Branch. Articles available at www.politicalaffairs.com 

Sister Comrade An evening of words and music celebrating the lives of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker with Angela Davis and Linda Tillery at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Oakland, 2501 Harrison St., Oakland. Tickets are $25-$28. 528-3043. www.sistercomrade.com 

Ongoing Vocal Jazz Workshop Sat. from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Abany Community Center, 1249 Marin at the corner of Masonic, Albany. 524-6797. 

Central Stage Open House A space for dance, theater, music, film, yoga, meetings, and more, at 6 p.m. at 5221 Central Ave. #A-1, Richmond. Please RSVP to mtaeed@aol.com 

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.  

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

SUNDAY, NOV. 4 

Cornucopia: A Celebration of Artistic and Cultural Diversity in West Berkeley A family event with live music, make-and-take art projects and market place, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Black Pine Circle School, 2016 7th St. Cost is $5, free for children under 10. www.balckpinecircle.org/cornucopia 

The 25th Anniversary of the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant Honoring attorney Marc Van Der Hout. International food and music from 5:30 to 9 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Donations accepted. 540-5296. www.eastbaysanctuary.org 

Home Greywater Systems and EcoHouse Tour from 10 a.m. to noon or 1 to 3 p.m. in Berkeley. Cost is $15, sliding scale. Registration required. 548-2220., ext. 242. 

Drumming Workshop with Dror Sinai at 5 p.m. at Kehilla Community Synagogue, 1300 Grand Ave., Piedmont. Cost is $25-$35. For registration information call 547-2424, ext. 211. www.KehillaSynagogue.org 

Old Time Radio East Bay Collectors and listeners gather to enjoy shows together at 5 p.m. at a private home in Berkeley. For more information email DavidinBerkeley at Yahoo.com. 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

Tibetan Buddhism with Tom Meade on “Skillful Means in a Productive Enterprise” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

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. www.watersideworkshops.org 

MONDAY, NOV. 5 

The Future of People’s Park A discussion of the assessment and planning study of People’s Park at 7 p.m. at Trinity Methodist Church, 2362 Bancroft Way. 643-5296. The report is available at http://communityrelations.berkeley.edu/mkthink_oct_2007_DRAFT_report.pdf 

The Jorde Symposium “Playing by the Rules in the Age of Terror” Professor Stephen Holmes will discuss how America misunderstands the terrorist threat and that the fight has been counterproductive to longstanding American values at 4 p.m. at Boalt Hall, Room 110, UC Campus. 642-7830. 

David Loeb on “Bay Nature” on the adventures of creating and sustaining the quarterly journal, at 7 p.m. at Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin, at Masonic. Free. 848 9358. www.fivecreeks.org 

Johan Galtung on “The State of the World from a Mediator’s Perspective” at 7:30 p.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. Donation $15. 232-4493. www.uucb.org 

Progressive Democrats of the East Bay General Meeting on real healthcare reform at 7 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. 601-6456. 

“Commonsense Pest Management in the Home and Garden” A presentation at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. 524-3043. 

Berkeley School Volunteers Orientation from 10 to 11 a.m. at 1835 Allston Way. Come learn about volunteer opportunities. 644-8833. 

Red Cross Blood Drive from noon to 6 p.m. at West Pauley Ballroom MLK Student Union, UC Campus. To schedule an appointment go to www.BeADonor.com  

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.  

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. 548-0425. 

Dragonboating Year round classes at the Berkeley Marina, Dock M. Meets Mon, Wed., Thurs. at 6 p.m. Sat. at 10:30 a.m. For details see www.dragonmax.org 

Teen Chess Club meets at 3:30 p.m. at the Claremont Branch of the Berkeley Public Library, Benvenue at Ashby. 981-6280. 

ONGOING 

Donate the Fruit From Your Fruit Trees We will gladly pick and deliver your fruit to community programs that feed school kids, the elderly, the homebound and the hungry. The fruit trees should be located in or very near North Berkeley and the fruit should be organic (no pesticides) and edible. This is a volunteer/ 

grassroots thing so join in!! Please email northberkeleyharvest@gmail.com or 812-3369. 

Bay-Friendly Gardening Offers Discounted Compost Bins to Alameda County residents. In addition to the bins, they also offer free workshops, videos, brochures, and answers to your compost questions. To order a bin call the compost information hotline 444-7645. 

CITY MEETINGS 

Downtown Area Plan Advisory Commission meets Wed. Oct. 31 at 7 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7487. 

Housing Advisory Commission meets Thurs., Nov. 1, at 7:30 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5400.  

Landmarks Preservation Commission meets Thurs., Nov. 1, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7419. 

Public Works Commission meets Thurs., Nov. 1, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-6406.  

Peace and Justice Commission meets Mon., Nov. 5, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5510.


Arts Calendar

Friday October 26, 2007

FRIDAY, OCT 26 

THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave., through Nov. 17. 525-1620. 

Altarena Playhouse “Morning’s at Seven” A family comedy by Paul Osborn, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Altarena Playhouse, 1409 High St., Alameda, through Nov. 11. Tickets are $17-$20. 523-1553.  

Central Works “Every Inch a King” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., through Nov. 18. Tickets are $9-$25. 558-1381. 

International Theater Ensemble A Propos of the Wet Snow” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Metal Shop Theatre, Willard Middle School, 2425 Stuart St. Tickets are $20-$30. 415-440-6163.  

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.  

Women’s Will “Antigone” Fri.-Sun. at 8 p.m. at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St. between Telegraph and Shattuck, Oakland, through Nov. 11. Tickets are $15-$25 sliding scale. 420-0813.  

Youth Musical Theater Company “Man of La Mancha” Fri.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 7 p.m. at Longfellow Auditorium, 1500 Derby St. Tickets are $8-$15. 595-5514. info@ymtcberkeley.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

RIP.MIX.BURN.BAM.PFA Opening and performances at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

FILM 

Arab Film Festival Berkeley Fri.-Sun. at California Theater 2113 Kittredge St. Tickets are $8-$10. www.aff.org 

“Canto a lo Poeta” A documentary about La Paya, a style of improvisational singing in Chile, at 8 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $8-$10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Midnight Movies “Serenity” Fri. and Sat. at midnight at Piedmont Cinema, 4186 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Cost is $8. 464-5980. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Lonny Shavelson and Fred Setterberg introduce “Under the Dragon: California’s New Culture” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com  

George Taber discusses “To Cork or Not To Cork: Tradition, Romance, Science, and the Battle for the Wine Bottle” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Miami City Ballet at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $34-$90. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Russian Patriarchate Choir at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church, Durant at Dana. Tickets are $42. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

martha and monica, cello-piano duet of Monica Scott and Hadley McCarroll at 8 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Tickets are $15. www.hillsideclub.org 

“Witches & Warlocks, Ghosts & Goblins” Opera scenes and art songs at 7 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church of Alameda, 2001 Santa Clara at Chestnut, Alameda. Tickets are $12-$15, children 13 and under, free. 522-1477. www.alamedachurch.com 

University Symphony Orchestra at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $4-$12. 642-9988.  

Crooked Road Tour, mountain music from Virginia at noon at Down Home Music Store, 1809b Fourth St. 204-9595. 

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

Hot Hot Caribbean Nights with Steele in motion and other performers at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10-$12. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Ron Thompson at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Wake the Dead at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $22.50-$23.50. 548-1761.  

Nomad and Alex Schumacher at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Plum Crazy, Shelley Doty at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $TBA. 841-2082.  

San Pablo Project at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Isul Kim Band at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Oliver Mtukudzi & Black Spirits at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $20-$24. 238-9200.  

SATURDAY, OCT. 27 

CHILDREN  

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with Amy Meyers Band at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5 for adults, $4 for children. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

“The Stone Flower” Puppet show Sat. and Sun. at 11 a.m., 2 and 4 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave. 452-2259. 

EXHIBITIONS 

Halloween Happenings The art of Kim Bass, Ed Monroe and Kynthia. Opening reception at 7 p.m. at 4th Street Studio, 1717d Fourth St. Come in costume. 527-0600. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Ancient Roots/Urban Journeys: expressions for Dias de los Muertos” Gallery Talk at 2 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts., Oakland. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

May-Lee Chai reads from her new book “Hapa Girl: A Memoir” at 3 p.m. at Eastwind Books of Berkeley, 2066 University Ave. 548-2350. 

Diana Nyda and Bonnie Stoll introduce their new fitness DVD and book at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Janet Fletcher discusses “Cheese & Wine: A Guide to Selecting, Pairing and Enjoying” at 4 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Miami City Ballet at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $34-$90. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Live Oak Concert “Harvest of Song” at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Cost is $12-$15. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

Dr. Drew Mays, winner of the Van Cliburn Amateur Competition, Sat. and Sun. at 7:30 p.m. at the Interstake Auditorium, 4780 Lincoln Ave., Oakland, located just inside the entrance to the Mormon Temple. Free. 

Kensington Symphony with Daniel Glover, piano, at 8 p.m. at Northminster Presbyterian Church, 545 Ashbury Ave., El Cerrito. Suggested donation $12-$15. 524-9912. 

An Afternoon of Chopin with Rebecca Trujillo, piano, at 4 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. Cost is $20. 

University Symphony Orchestra at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $4-$12. 642-9988.  

Unplugged, joined by Skylar and Mother of Pearl, at noon at Cafe Zeste, 1250 Addison St. 704-9378. 

The Wild Magnolias at 1 p.m. at Down Home Music Store, 1809b Fourth St. 204-9595. 

Yancie Taylor Jazztet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ.  

Baba Ken & Kotoja at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Moment’s Notice, improvised music, dance and theater at 8 p.m. at Western Sky Studio, 2525 8th St. Costumes welcome. Tickets are $8-$15. 992-6295. 

Land of the Blind and Anna Laube at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

The Stairwell Sisters at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

The Refuge Trio 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. 

Murder Ballads Bash featuring 5Cent Coffee, Joe Rut, the Happy Clams at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Disappear Incompletely, the music of Radiohead, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Oliver Mtukudzi & Black Spirits at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $20-$24. 238-9200.  

SUNDAY, OCT. 28 

CHILDREN 

Colibri at Ashkenaz at 3 p.m. Cost is $5 for children, $10 for adults. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

“Act in a Box” Owen Baker Flynn’s show of juggling, fire eating and more Sat. and Sun. at 10:30 a.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave. 452-2259. 

Spooky Stories in the Redwood Grove with Jean Ellisen and Bobbie Kinkead from 1 to 2:30 p.m. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Dr. Tickets are $3-$10. Come in costume and bring a blanket. 643-2755. 

THEATER 

“By George, It’s War” A musical satarization of the Bush administration by Dale Polissar at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $18-$20. 849-2568. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Bill Evans describes “Banjo for Dummies” at 4 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. Concert at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. 559-9500. 

“The Harlem Renaissance” with Dennis M. Chester at 1 p.m., followed by a screening of the film “Their Eyes Were Watching God” at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6275. 

“The Pastor’s Family” A dramatized reading in English of the 1891 Finnish drama by Minna Canth, at 2 p.m. at Finnish Kaleva Hall, 1970 Chestnut St. Donation $5. 849-0125.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Miami City Ballet at 3 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $34-$90. 642-9988.  

Concert/Labyrinth Walk with musician Margie Adam and special guest, Lauren Artress, from 4 to 6:30 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant. Benefit for Berkeley Marina labyrinth installation. Tickets are $25-$30. 526-7377. 

Live Oak Concert “Harvest of Song” at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Cost is $12-$15. 644-6893.  

Pandit Anindo Chatterjee, tabla artist at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Tickets are $15. www.hillsideclub.org 

Indian Classical Jugalbandi at 4 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $20-$30. 925-798-1300. 

Dr. Drew Mays, winner of the Van Cliburn Amateur Competition in 2007, at 7:30 p.m. at the Interstake Auditorium, 4780 Lincoln Ave., Oakland, located just inside the entrance to the Mormon Temple. Free. 

Songs and Stories from Ukraine with Kitka at 7 p.m. at Oakland Metro Opera Theater, 201 Broadway, Oakland. Tickets are $20-$25. 444-0323. 

Grupo Falso Baiano at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Ron Thompson at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Americana Unplugged: Jeannie & Chuck’s Country Round-up at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Yaelisa, flamenco, at 7:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $8. 525-5054.  

Susan Muscarella Trio at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $20. 845-5373.  

Jody Stecher and Bill Evans “The Secret Life of Banjos” at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

MONDAY, OCT. 29 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“New Media Art: In Search of the Cool Obscure” with Geert Lovink, Media Theory, Amsterdam University, at 7:30 p.m. at 160 Kroeber Hall, UC Campus. 643-9565.  

Joshua Henkin reads from his new novel “Matrimony” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Poetry Express theme night on “life and death” at 7 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Project Attacca Children’s choral music at 7:30 p.m. at Holy Names University, 3500 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. Free. Suitable for all ages. http://piedmontchoirs.org 

Yolanda and Ric, opera and lieder, at 7 p.m. at Le Bateau Ivre, 2629 Telegraph Ave. 849-1100. www.lebateauivre.net 

Parlor Tango, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Tito y su Son De Cuba at 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200.  

TUESDAY, OCT. 30 

THEATER 

“Quilombo” Performance and fundraiser for Kim McMillon’s play on the Diaspora at 6 p.m. at Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, 1616 Franklin St., Oakland. 836-4649.  

FILM 

“Alternative Requirements” Works by Bay Area students at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Tell on on Tuesdays Storytelling at 7:30 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Cost is $8-$12 sliding scale. www.juiamorgan.org 

“Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol Between Jews and Christians” with author David Biale at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. www.universitypressbooks.com 

“Journey in Ancient Arabia” with photographer Mamade Kadreebux at 7:30 p.m. in the Home Room, International House, UC Campus. Cost is $5. http://ihouse.berkeley.edu 

Freight and Salvage Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $4.50-$5.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Don Lattin describes “Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

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 

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

The Bluesbox Bayou Band at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Eddie Palmieri Salsa Orchestra at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $22-$26. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

WEDNESDAY, OCT. 31 

FILM 

“The Last Man on Earth” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Amiri Baraka, founder of the Black Arts Movement, and winner of the American Book Award reads at 6:30 p.m. at 315 Wheeler Hall, the Maude Fife Room, UC Campus. http://holloway.english.berkeley.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Frederica von Stade in a benefit for the Sophia House, at noon at Oakland City Center, 12th and Broadway. www.oaklandcitycenter.com, www.sophiaproject.org 

Music for the Spirit HAlloween Concert with Ron McKean on harpsichord at 12:15 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church of Oakland, 2619 Broadway. 444-3555. 

Erin Inglish & Joe Ridout at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

UC Jazz Ensembles at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $6. 841-JAZZ.  

Zabava!, Disciples of Markos, Yalazia at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Costumes welcome. Cost is $10-$12. 525-5054.  

Orquestra Borinquen at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

The Soul Burners at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Eddie Palmieri Salsa Orchestra at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $22-$26. 238-9200.  

THURSDAY, NOV. 1 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Goya: The Disasters of War” An exhibition of prints by the Spanish artist opens at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way, and runs through March 2. Cost is $3-$8. 642-0808. 

Photographs of Hill Tribe Women in Northern Thailand by Adrienne Miller opens in the Catalog Library, Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6241. 

“One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now” Guided tour at 12:15 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft. 642-0808. 

FILM 

“Un Poquito de Tanta Verdad” about the people of Oaxaca, Mexico at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $15-$20. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Lunch Poems with Amiri Baraka at 12:10 p.m. at the Morrison Library, inside the Doe Library, UC Campus. 642-0137 

Susan Dinkelspiel Cerny on “Observations: The San Francisco Bay Area and its Built Environment” at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Reception to follow. Tickets are $15. Sponsored by Berkeley Architectural Heritage Assoc. 841-2242.  

Joshua Clover, D.A. Powell and Juliana Spahr read in celebration of the publication of “American Poets of the 21st Century: The New Poetics” at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

Alan Williamson explores both Buddhism and Christianity in his new series of long, interrelated poems at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720 ext 17.  

Lucy Jane Bledsoe reads from her new novel “Biting the Apple” at 7:30 p.m. at Laurel Bookstore, 4100 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland. 531-2073. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Mud, The New Up, Phonofly, female-fronted rock, at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $8. 525-5054.  

Iva Bittova, fiddler and vocalist, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $20.50-$21.50. 548-1761.  

Roberta Picket Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 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 

Superthief at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Kinsella, Thurs.-Sat. at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Eddie Palmieri Salsa Orchestra at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $22-$26. 238-9200.  


The Theater: ‘Rosencrantz & Guildenstern’ at Live Oak

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Friday October 26, 2007

Among the bodies in the famous heap at the end of Hamlet, two are notably missing: the Melancholy Prince’s schoolmates (though Hamlet himself can’t seem to tell them apart), summoned by his usurper uncle to spy on him in his presumed madness, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. 

It’s this uneasy anonymity in the highest profile of tragedies that Tom Stoppard hit upon for his breakthrough play of the ’60s, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a skewed buddy tale (though owing a lot to an off-beat parody of a much deeper comedy, Waiting for Godot). 

Actors Ensemble is presently essaying Stoppard’s unmannerly comedy, under the able direction of Stanley Spenger at Live Oak Theatre. It’s not a bad Halloween treat, with its atmospherics of a rotting Elsinore Castle, from part of the beautifully painted set, a Gothic crypt, from Helen Pau’s Viaticum. 

To describe what he was up to, Stoppard lifted a line from Jean Cocteau, saying Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was a view of Elsinore as seen by tourists driving by. It is a playful piece of chance meetings, with ominous overtones that the meetings aren’t so chancy. The audience’s familiarity with Hamlet’s plot and the aura of fate borrowed from this great original give ballast to the burlesque sense of what goes on behind the famous scenes and soliloquies.  

What are the other characters saying or whispering? 

According to Stop-pard, not much: just killing time and trying to square their seemingly meaningless lives with the bigger issues playing out around them, in which they find themselves caught up and finally swept away. It opens with the two pitching coins, which seem to fall heads up, against all probability, and closes at sea, a road trip to England, the voyage wherein Hamlet is spirited away by pirates, but not before he makes the switch of a secret order of execution.  

On the way, the ill-starred pair meet up with the band of itinerant players Hamlet ends up hiring for his mousetrap to catch the king. The players make a kind of mirror between one play and another, the venerable tragedy and contemporary comedy. 

Harold Pierce shines as the resilient and matter-of-fact Player King, good at dying over and over, or knowing when to slip away. Marcus Liefert plays a truly doddering Polonius, who all but paralyzes Claudius (Jerome Solberg) and Gertrude (Melanie Curry), offering up Ophelia (Wendy Welch, who seems made for the part) to the Prince (a slightly punkish Ariel Herzog), who spurns her famously. Snippets of Hamlet are cleverly shoehorned into this study of the least of his retainers, played by Patrick Glenn and Gabriel Ross, each taking up the slack for the other—even though they, too, can’t really tell themselves apart. 

It’s a long play, not as long as Hamlet, but sometimes hitting doldrums when Rosen-crantz and Guildenstern quibble over inconsequentials without the sharp edge of British club humor. But in the end, even though “the rest is silence,” even those quibbles are caught up in the sweep of artistry that grants an elusive meaning to life and lives. 

 

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley at Live Oak Theatre, 1301 Shattuck Ave. 8 p.m. Thurs.-Sat.through Nov.17. 525-1620.


The Theater: Altarena Playhouse Presents ‘Morning’s at Seven’

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Friday October 26, 2007

Altarena Playhouse, Alameda’s venerable community theater, is celebrating its 70th anniversary—and 50 years at its present location on High Street—with a venerable old comedy of just about the same vintage as the troupe, Paul Osbourn’s Morning’s at Seven (1939).  

The production offers something more than nostalgia. With the direction of Sue Trigg, whose Death of a Salesman at Altarena was one of the best shows in the Bay Area last year, Morning’s at Seven gives audiences a chance to see a finely tuned ensemble show and to witness a compelling interpretation of a prewar family stage comedy. The play shows what’s become unfamiliar to many of us and what is, after all, strangely familiar—the way Americans looked at themselves right before the start of an ongoing period of change that hasn’t abated. 

The two porches and doorways into backyards that take up much of the set mark the comings and goings (and the interplay) of the two families, the Swansons and the Boltons, around whom the story is built. They’re related: Cora Swanson (Maureen Coyne) and her live-in spinster sister, Aaronetta (Arry) Glass (Sarilee Janger), are two of four sisters, one right next door (Sue Williams as Ida Bolton) and the other up the road a piece (Peggy DeCoursey as Esther “Esty” Crampton), married to a seemingly snobbish academic (David Crampton, played by Chris Chapman), who’s forbidden her to associate with “those morons” down the road. 

Those morons are an eccentric bunch, even if their extravagances are just stretched-out normal peccadilloes. Homer Bolton (Richard Robert Bunker), pushing 40 and still living at home, brings his fiancee of some years, Myrtle Brown (Shauna Shoptaw) to meet the folks—and Homer’s father, Carl (Tom Leone), picks the day to have a spell.  

Carl’s long felt he’s a failure, not knowing who he is. Meanwhile, everybody’s speculating on what the relations might be between Homer and Myrtle during their long wooing, and if there’s a triangle among the in-laws in the arrangement that’s dragged on for a half-century; Arry insists on her place in the home, and Theodore (Thor,” played by T. Louis Weltz) agrees but doesn’t want to talk about it. 

As in classic comedies, there are many funny reversals. Underneath the stolid or squirrely exteriors of the tightly knit neighbors lurk opposite tendencies, which prove very amusing when seen in the light of day. The interplay among characters and dilemmas prove dense, and more accrues as this well-written plot unfolds, tying the audiences up in knots—of laughter. 

It’s great to see a present-day crowd fall under the spell of something that by current standards of urban self-image seems light years away from our present state of affairs. But one thing Altarena’s production demonstrates is the enduring nature of Americans’ ability to laugh at our own foibles when they’re presented in an appropriate light. 

An older kind of play, well-wrought, Morning’s at Seven holds hidden delights and entertainment, thanks to the sensitivity of Sue Trigg’s direction and the wonderful ensemble’s ongoing discovery of their characters’ true interrelationship.  

Every time the play seems to be slipping into the maudlin or the sentimental, which characterized much popular culture then—and now—there’s a happy surprise reversal, right up to the classically comic happy end. The cast is composed of regulars in the little theater (and even dance) scene of the East Bay; here, together, they show what they can really do. It’s a great evening, a great celebration of seven decades of Altarena Playhouse and of a perennially pleasing American comedy. 

 

MORNING’S AT SEVEN 

Alterena Playhouse, 1409 High St., Alameda. 8 p.m. Fri.-Sat., Sun. 2 p.m. 

through Nov. 11. $17-$20. 523-1553.


Harvest of Song at Berkeley Art Center

Friday October 26, 2007

The seventh annual Harvest of Song features new vo-cal and instrumental compositions by Bay Area composers headed by Ann Callaway, Allen Shearer and Peter Josheff, in collaboration with writer Jaime Robles. Composers Alexis Alrich and Laurie San Martin join this year’s mix. Performers include the Harvest Players, some of the Bay Area’s finest musicians, augmented by marimba and vibraphone. A women’s vocal ensemble adds to the festivities.Sat.Oct. 27 and Sun. Oct. 28 at 7:30 p.m.  

A pre-concert discussion will be held at 6:30 p.m. Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. $15–$12. 644-6893.  

www.berkeleyartcenter.org.


Moving Pictures: Arab Film Festival at California Theater

By Justin DeFreitas
Friday October 26, 2007

The 11th annual Arab First Festival continues this weekend at the California Theater in downtown Berkeley.  

This year the festival has turned its focus to issues of youth and urban life, with a range of films on these topics showing at venues in San Francisco, San Jose and Berkeley. 

The festival’s mission is to explore the depth and diversity of filmmaking in the Arab world with an array of documentaries and feature-length and short narrative films.  

Hisham Zaman’s Winterland makes its American debut at 7 p.m. Sunday.  

The film examines the relationship between Renas, a middle-aged Kurdish immigrant from Iraq who has made his home in the snow-covered hills of rural Norway. Renas has been looking forward to the arrival of his bride-to-be from Iraq. It is an arranged marriage with a woman he has never met, except by way of a few letters and phone calls. He has pictures of Fermesk, however, that depict a young woman, perhaps still a teenager, gently smiling and wearing a flowing dress.  

Upon her arrival, however, Renas is perturbed to find a larger and older woman. She is still young, but it is clear that the photos are quite outdated. And Fermesk too faces disillusionment, for Renas too sent photos of his younger self, dashing and svelte in military garb, and also managed to greatly inflate his status and income from his humble job in Norway. And each has still more surprises for the other along the way.  

What follows is a tense drama of disillusionment and reconciliation, of hopes dashed on the snowy banks of cold reality. Renas and Fermesk must deal simultaneously with their estrangement from one another and from their home country, from family, friends and culture. The stunning photography of the wide-open fields and snow-blanketed hillsides of rural Norway presents a beautiful but alienating environment, pristine and harrowing at the same time. Zaman’s camera transforms the landscape into a vast white desert, where the two protagonists have no reference points other than each other. 

Nasser Bakhti’s Night Shadows examines similar themes of Arab displacement but in a dark, urban environment. His film follows the interlocking lives of five characters, each adrift in the darkness and decadence of Geneva nightlife.  

A jaded cop, nearing retirement, faces another night on the beat with his obnoxious brute of a partner. Hans’ dedication to his job has cost him his health and his marriage, and those losses have in turn cost him his passion for his job. His partner, a brash, insensitive thug, cares nothing for the immigrants he is tasked with tracking down, and his cruelty and ignorance are only brought to his attention when his wife threatens to pack up the kid and leave him. Claire is a down-and-out junkie with no friends or family, forced to consider prostitution to sustain her habit. Adé is an illegal Malian immigrant who dreams of a professional soccer career while working as a waiter. And Mohammed, a Moroccan immigrant, has been forced to abandon his medical studies just to get by while supporting his family back home.  

Each, whether a native or an immigrant, faces the same hostile environment, one that undermines their common humanity and puts them at each other’s throats much of the time in a thoughtful parable of ignorance and xenophobia. 

 

ARAB FILM FESTIVAL 

Through Sunday, Oct. 28 at the California Theater in Berkeley and at the Castro Theater and Roxie Film Center in San Francisco. 

 

Image: Two Kurdish immigrants from Iraq struggle with displacement and romance in rural Norway.


Moving Pictures: A Few Days in the Life Of Jimmy Carter

By Justin DeFreitas
Friday October 26, 2007

Jimmy Carter is more active in his 80s than I was at any time during my 20s. If that’s an exaggeration it’s not much of one. The man’s zest for life is well known, but it is still awe-inspiring to see. In addition to his work with Habitat for Humanity and the Carter Center and a writing career that results in a book per year, the man somehow manages to find time to paint, preach, hike, bicycle and travel the world. 

And that seems to be at least one of the points director Jonathan Demme is trying to make with his new film, Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains, opening today (Friday) at Shattuck Cinemas. 

The film follows Carter during his 2006 book tour after the publication of his best-selling book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Demme and his crew tracked Carter across the country as he answered myriad questions on countless radio and television shows, defending his positions and clarifying his arguments in the face of a storm of controversy. Usually the debate in these appearances centers on the title of the book, since that is as far as most of these media types, and, it seems, many of Carter’s critics, have read. The result, as so often happens in discussions of the Middle East, is a debate that can quickly degenerate into name-calling and deeper entrenchment into opposing camps. Throughout the film Carter is seen struggling to keep honest debate alive, never allowing himself the luxury of the tactics chosen by many of his critics. 

Demme too has problems with his title, for one might easily get the impression that the film will provide an overview of Carter’s life and career, or at least his post-presidency career. Nothing doing. The film might well have been titled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid — The Movie. If you subscribe to the Hemingwayesque notion that a man is best defined by his performance under pressure, the film does indeed provide something of a portrait of the man, with plenty of evidence of his honesty, his optimism, his sincerity and his mettle. And though it touches on the depth and range of Carter’s work, with side trips to Habitat for Humanity projects in New Orleans and to meetings of the Carter Center board, the film consists primarily of countless scenes of media interviews and behind-the-scenes chatter in transit to and from those interviews. Most of it is fun and fascinating, but some of it is simply repetitive, and at 126 minutes, the film drags a bit, with Demme at times losing sight of any larger purpose for the production. 

Still, it is instructive and inspiring to see Carter in action, still working for a better world at a time when most of his fellow former presidents were content to while away the hours on a golf course.  

 

JIMMY CARTER:  

MAN FROM PLAINS 

Directed by Jonathan Demme. 126 minutes.  

Playing at Shattuck Cinemas.


Moving Pictures: Mamet's "House of Games"

By Justin DeFreitas
Friday October 26, 2007

House of Games, David Mamet's 1987 directorial debut, was and still is like no other film.  

 

Mamet had already established himself as a successful writer for both stage and screen, receiving Oscar nominations for a couple of screenplays and Tony nominations for his plays. His 1984 play Glengarry Glen Ross won the Pulitzer Prize. 

 

When it came time for Glengarry to adorn the silver screen, Mamet had to break the news to his long-time collaborator, actor Joe Mantegna, that he was going to replaced in the lead role by Al Pacino for the film version. As Mantegna recounts in an interview in Criterion's new DVD release of House of Games, Mamet walked into the actor's backstage dressing room after a performance, broke the bad news, and immediately dropped two screenplays on the table, and said "But I won't make these without you."  

 

The two screenplays were House of Games and Things Change, films that would firmly establish Mamet as a film director and Mantegna as a solid screen actor. 

 

Mamet is known for is precisely mannered, crisply delivered dialogue. It is his hallmark, a unique approach that brings the enunciation and stylization of the stage to the screen, but without the requisite staginess that hinders the efforts of so many lesser talents. Mamet instills his words with a heightened dramatic tension, much in the way that the rapid-fire cadences of the Warner Bros. gangster films and noirs of the 1930 and '40s brought a dramatic hyper-realism to their melodramatic plots. 

 

Like those earlier films, House of Games is full of deep shadows and drifting smoke that obscure motivations; of steam rising from sewers like forbidden thoughts rising furtively to the surface; of backroom dealings and shifting alliances that remake the world as a dangerous game of intrigue and deceit. 

 

Twenty years later, the film still packs a punch. Mantegna's smooth, street-wise hustler Mike is captivating as he dismantles the pretensions of respectability that shackle Lindsay Crouse's Margaret to an unsatisfying bourgeois life. The labyrinth of lust and greed, of cons and revelations, is still mesmerizing even after multiple viewings. 

 

Extra features on the new release include current interviews with Crouse and Mantegna, the two actors reflecting on the film and their work with Mamet; a commentary track by Mamet and Ricky Jay, a con artist turned actor who served as a consultant on the film; an essay by film critic Kent Jones; and a short documentary, made at the time of filming, featuring interviews with Mamet, information on the genesis of the film, and rehearsal sessions in which Mamet walks his principal players through their characters' motivations. 

 

 

 

HOUSE OF GAMES (1987) 

Written and directed by David Mamet. Starring Joe Mantegna and Lindsay Crouse.  

102 minutes. $39.95. www.criterion.com.  

 

 

 

 


Open Home in Focus: Elegant and Cozy North Berkeley House on View

By Steven Finacom
Friday October 26, 2007

Around a North Berkeley bend, quickly by-passed by those busily headed someplace else, there’s a gem of a creek side house. The architecture and setting embody much of what gives residential Berkeley a special sense of place. 

1214 The Alameda is a three bedroom, two-story home currently on the market for $799,000. Terry Pedersen of Marvin Gardens Real Estate is the listing agent, and information on the house is available at www.1214TheAlameda.com  

An Open House will be held 2-4:30 p.m., this coming Sunday, Oct. 28. 

The real estate listing describes this as a “Hansel and Gretel” house. It also has an English Cottage feel, with more than a touch of Berkeley Craftsman on the interior. 

The street side (east) elevation of the house is dominated by a large, two-story, gable and a dormer projecting from the steep roof. A quirky garage is off to the left; more about that later.  

Walk the narrow porch lengthwise to the front door, which turns left through a vestibule into the living room. Three casement windows look out on the porch and a bay window faces south. A working fireplace of clinker brick is centered on the west wall. Box beam ceilings, redwood paneling, and diamond-paned windows establish an Arts and Crafts character.  

The living room is in the southeast corner. Southwest, entered from the living room on either side of the fireplace, is a tile-floored sun-porch. Northwest, diagonal from the living room, is a formal dining room also with a bay window, but here modified into a west-facing window seat.  

The kitchen is at the northeast corner of the house, reached from the dining room. Like the living room it looks out to the east through diamond casement windows. Turn the corner into a small pantry/laundry/half-bath area. 

A stairway ascends to the second floor from the far northwest corner of the dining room. Although this is curiously far from the front door it gives the upstairs a welcome, private, feel. Square wooden balusters, rising from stair tread to ceiling, screen the stairwell from the dining room.  

Upstairs a short central hall runs at right angles to the stair. Straight ahead, the master bedroom is underneath the south gable of the house. Like the living room below it has a fireplace and French doors open to a balcony, perched above the front porch.  

Right, off the hall, there’s a second bedroom above the dining room, facing west. A pair of interior French doors connects it on the south to a sleeping porch which has another door to the master bedroom, linking the three rooms in an “L” shaped circuit.  

The bathroom tucks into the eastern gable, off the hall. Open the low door to the right of the shower to a closet neatly outfitted with its own built-in chest of drawers. Bathroom and bedrooms have sloping ceilings in parts and angled corners where the dormer and gable roofs meet. The feeling is more cozy than claustrophobic, but watch your head as you walk about. 

Listed at a little less than 1,500 square feet this is not an especially large house and it could easily become crowded with several residents or a McMansion load of possessions. But it also feels instinctively comfortable and has a lot of versatility if you think of it as two-bedroom, with two generous “plus” rooms. The current owner, the realtor reports, raised two children here and has owned the house for about 17 years. 

Scattered through the house are several handcrafted Sue Johnson lamps. Some built-in fixtures—including a butterfly-decorated wall sconce in the upstairs hall, and a ceiling fixture with a dragonfly motif over the dining table—were designed for the house and stay with it, according to the realtor.  

The diamond-paned windows—true divided lites, with sturdy mullions—set much of the character of the house inside and out. The living room and dining room bays have a larger, undivided “picture window” in the middle to frame the view, flanked by the smaller-paned windows. 

Hardwood floors are found in most rooms, cork floors (perhaps from a mid-century remodel?) in the second bedroom and sleeping porch upstairs.  

The unpainted woodwork is nut brown or tan, lighter in color than you might expect for an old Craftsman house. The realtor says the present owner was told by earlier residents that it was once darker, but the original finish was removed and the walls—and, my guess is, the box beams downstairs—lightened with a wash.  

The exterior of the house is now painted a light cream yellow with white trim. The first story is shingled, while the gable ends above have a sort of English-Tudor false work timber pattern. Deep eaves give the house a sheltered feel. From the window box outside the second story bathroom window an immensely long tubular succulent trails like some topiary Rapunzel’s hair, all the way to the ground. 

The only early photographs that can be readily found—black and white, from 1951, and 1971—show a dark exterior, probably unpainted wood.  

Behind and below the house an open stretch of Codornices Creek—burbling, not roaring, this time of year—loops through the property. A small wooden footbridge crosses to a surprisingly spacious rear yard. Two light-standards with large glass shades stand on each side of the creek. They look rather like salvaged early Berkeley street lamps to me.  

Much of the garden is under the canopy of an immense, thick-trunked, California live oak. Most is informally landscaped, with a light covering of ground covers and shrubs. Large, tropic-looking crinums with white flowers punctuate the landscape as do an interesting variety of unusual shrubs and perennials. 

“That site is California pastoral!” says Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association’s Lesley Emmington. Rustic house, huge oak, embracing creek, and artfully informal plantings front and back come together for a quintessentially Berkeley “living with nature” feel. 

Adjacent to the house a one-car garage, tilting a bit, perches on wooden supports above the steeply sloping creek bank. Notice how it’s “inside out”, with visible exterior framing and interior board siding.  

It angles towards a similar freestanding garage that juts out from the property just south of the creek. Garages show up on the 1929 Sanborn map, and in the 1951 photograph, although whether the present day ones are modified originals or later “rebuilds” is not entirely apparent at first look. 

Who designed and created this house and placed it so? 

It seems to have been built in the early 1910s. The Ormsby Donogh file at Berkeley Architectural Heritage notes for 1913 that the house was owned by, or perhaps had a mortgage through, the Berkeley Bank of Savings, and was valued at $1,900. The 1951 real estate listing says it was then-38 years old (which equates to around 1913) and it was certainly there by 1929 when the Sanborn map for that year shows the house footprint and detached garage. 

When former BAHA President JoAnn Price interviewed one Frederick Peake nearly 40 years ago, he told her—according to an entry in Dave Bohn’s 1971 book, From East of This Golden Shores—“he had built the entire block. I asked if Maybeck had been involved and he replied ‘Oh no’.”  

“However, he said he had employed a draughtsman for the house who had been an employee of Maybeck. He also said he and Maybeck had been charter members of the Hillside Club, which was a social club for residents of Northeast Berkeley.” 

A 1951 real estate listing notation preserved at BAHA says the house had “Maybeck design” and “Style: Maybeck,” according to BAHA Executive Director Anthony Bruce. Not firm evidence that Maybeck was the architect, especially given Peake’s contrary statement.  

And maybe it’s not even a relevant question. The Maybeck influence was strong in this neighborhood without Berkeley’s best-remembered architect being professionally involved in every project. 

The Maybeck family lived just a block to the south of this lot in what’s now a much altered house, and a City Landmark, on the southwest corner of Berryman and Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. It was there in the 1890s that Bernard Maybeck, a drawing instructor at the University, invited some of his UC engineering students for extracurricular talks about architecture. 

“I think that neighborhood has more unknown influences by him than he’s been given credit for,” says Emmington of BAHA. “There’s a lot between 1892 (when the Maybeck’s moved here) and when they went uptown, that they were doing in that neighborhood.”  

“An important part of his legacy is his effect as a catalyst who changed the world round him, not only through his own buildings, but through his persuasiveness in converting others to pursue his visions,” a BAHA brochure from 1986 notes. “He encouraged friends to design their own homes and worked with them on drawing the plans…Maybeck’s ideas are a source of communal inspiration…”  

And “architecture” was not back then the codified, licensed, practice it is now. Many people in Berkeley who had no formal training came up with their own ideas for houses and capably had them built without ever employing a “design professional.” Skilled contractors and builders also executed what, today, are often misinterpreted as architect-designed homes. 

In sum, there’s no good reason to feel that a house like 1214 The Alameda had to have had plans done by a formal architect or had to have been directly associated with someone like Maybeck in order to end up the way it did. 

The house is on the southern fringe of the Northbrae subdivision, one of Berkeley’s early 20th century “streetcar suburbs.” Stately landmark stone gateway pillars are just half a block north of the house.  

To the south, southwest, and east, the neighborhoods are somewhat older and eclectic with Victorians, cottages, Colonial Revival houses, modest bungalows, and architecturally unclassifiable homes. Walk through some of the surrounding blocks if you can and enjoy them house by house. For a long time this area was near the northern fringes of urban settlement in the inner East Bay. The natural topography and creek-carved landscape are evident in the dips and rises of the district.  

Nearby community fixtures include Martin Luther King, Jr. Junior High a few blocks to the southwest and the elegant North Berkeley Library one block north at an extensive angled intersection where The Alameda meets Hopkins. A tiny street island south of the Library grew into a landscaped pedestrian park after neighbors gathered there for post 9-11 memorials. 

The Monterey Market district, beloved by North Berkeley shoppers, is a left turn and several blocks down Hopkins to the west, and the “Gourmet Ghetto” and North Shattuck shopping district are uphill to the east, along with Live Oak Park through which Codornices Creek also flows. The Solano Avenue shopping district is a bit further to the north along The Alameda, and Downtown Berkeley and the UC campus are a long walk or short drive southeast.  

One change between Maybeckian days and the present. The Alameda and Martin Luther King, Jr. Way (once Grove Street) have turned into a busy commute route and cross-town thoroughfare. The block where 1214 The Alameda is located curves northwest to south, as The Alameda narrows from a broad boulevard to a narrow two-lane street headed towards Downtown Berkeley.  

The house sits back and downhill a bit from the street and inside it seems fairly quiet, while the bulk of the building may shield much of the rear garden from street noise. Still, traffic is a factor to consider.  

Those hunting for a home in a setting like this should also make sure to become familiar with Berkeley’s ordinances detailing the rights and obligations of those whose property includes a creek, along with city regulations concerning heritage oak trees on private property. 

 

 


Garden Variety: NWF’s Connie Award Goes to Local Wildlands/Garden Patron Kathy Kramer

By Ron Sullivan
Friday October 26, 2007

One of our own is on her way to Washington DC to receive a long-deserved award. Kathy Kramer, who founded and runs the annual Bringing Back the Natives garden tour, will be honored on Nov. 1—appropriately enough, All Saints’ Day—along with Bill McKibben (The End of Nature), Al Gore, Rev. Richard Cizik (who has stirred up a hornets’ nest with the Evangelical Climate Initiative’s “Call to Action” statement, insisting on Christians’ responsibility toward stewardship of the earth), Steve Curwood (host of NPR’s Living on Earth show) and others including more dubious company like Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.  

OK, the Guv gets it for continuing to resist offshore oil drilling. For that he deserves a cookie.  

The “Connie Award” is given by the National Wildlife Federation, which has worked with Kramer over the past three years to facilitate the free and fascinating local springtime tours.  

The tours’ premise is that gardens on the tour should have at least 30 percent California native plants; usually they have more, and some, like Scott and Jenny Fleming’s treasure of a native garden in the Berkeley hills, are entirely natives.  

Others, like Idell Weydemeyer’s delightful patch of El Sobrante, combine human-food production with wildlife habitat: the perfect blend of responsible land use and sensual fun. There’s every shade of nativity in between, and I’ve sung the tour’s praises here before. I’m right, too. Don’t miss the next one: Sunday, May 4, 2008.  

Kramer also got The Watershed Project off the ground, back when it was the Aquatic Outreach Institute. It’s been featuring educator-training programs for over a decade: Kids in Creeks, Kids in Marshes, Kids in Gardens, Watching Our Watersheds; wildlife and composting workshops, lots more.  

TWP has helped local creek-lovers found seven grassroots watershed/friends-of-creeks organizations, and continues to help sustain them. It has a fiscal sponsorship program and does fundraising assistance—the sort of thing that hands-on nature fiends like me need and typically don’t do well ourselves—and individual consultation for people who want to start such groups and keep them going.  

The Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour arose from the same set of concerns as Kramer’s watershed work: “My interest in native plants stems from the fact that they don’t need the pesticides that non-natives do, they don’t require much water, they are the best for attracting wildlife, and they are part of California’s natural landscape.” 

When she wanted natives for her own garden, “It was harder to find out what native plants would do well in your area than it should have been. It should be easier for people to learn how to select and care for native plants.” 

The free, self-guided annual tour includes teaching sessions by garden owners and experts; plant, book, and poster sales and plant give-aways in individuals’ gardens and in plant nurseries; children’s activities, and most importantly, chances to see native gardens flourishing in the various climates of Alameda and Contra Costa counties.  

Past Connie award recipients include Jimmy Carter and Lady Bird Johnson, two people who made graduating from top-tier American politics look like a great vocation. Kramer’s in good company, and the National Wildlife Federation dignifies itself by giving her recognition. 

 

www.thewatershedproject.org 

www.bringingbackthenatives.net 

 

 

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Daily Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Daily Planet.


Quake Tip of the Week

By Larry Guillot
Friday October 26, 2007

More Earthquake Tidbits 

 

Each year the southern California area has about 10,000 earthquakes. Most of them are so small that they are not felt. Only several hundred are greater than magnitude 3.0, and only about 15-20 are greater than magnitude 4.0. If there is a large earthquake, however, the aftershock sequence will produce many more earthquakes of all magnitudes for many months 

Alaska is the most earthquake-prone state and experiences a magnitude-seven earthquake almost every year, and a magnitude eight or greater on average every 14 years. 

Make your home secure and your family safe. 

 

 

Guillot is owner of QuakePrepare, an earthquake consulting, securing, and gas shut-off valve installation service. Call him at 510-758-3299 or visit www.quakeprepare.com 


About the House: Insurance: Knob and Tube Wiring

By Matt Cantor
Friday October 26, 2007

The other day a recent inspection client of mine called up and asked if I could help answer a few questions. She proceeded to ask if her new house had copper piping. 

I clicked, dragged and said, in sequence, “You have mainly copper piping with some galvanized steel, you have knob and tube wiring and fuses at a subpanel but breakers at the main, your roof is roughly 3 years old and your foundation is bolted and braced.”  

She laughed, asking how I knew what the rest of her questions had been. I told her that she was pursuing the answers to a series of questions that her insurance provider had asked her to declare. I could hear the smile over the phone. We talked a bit more and said our so-longs. 

Although these queries are all fairly silly and not very useful in determining the safety of the home (mostly because of the lack of specificity), insurance companies continue to ask these same questions. I tried to sit down with a S.F. based insurance provider many years ago and help them to develop a better form but it was, sadly, beyond them. Something about falling on dead ears comes to mind. 

Though there was much in my client’s list of questions worthy of further discussion, I’d like to explore just one today, that being the merits or failings of knob and tube wiring. 

Knob and tube was the first wiring type installed in our homes. The term comes from the insulators used to keep the wiring out of contact with the flammable wooden framing it bobs and weaves though on its way though walls, floors and ceilings. Knobs are two-part insulators that nail onto wooden framing, snugly sandwiching the insulated wire between two neatly cast porcelain cylinders as the nail gets its final smack. 

Tubes are also porcelain and are long hollow pipes with a flared end that can be slid partly through a hole drilled in a joist or stud. A wire can be run through the inside of the tube and be thus kept away from rough and flammable edges. These also sometimes get used when wires cross over one another. 

Knob and tube wiring is inferior to modern wiring in a few respects but these deficiencies are often not significant, especially in the face of the poor wiring sometimes done using modern methods. 

Knob and tube wiring is almost never grounded. That means that the devices in your home that need grounding, such as your fridge, computer or microwave oven are left without a requisite safety feature; so for these, please add a new grounded outlet. However, if you were to spread all your plug-in devices out on the lawn (yardsale!), you’d find that a very small number of them had three-prong (grounding) plugs and therefore do not require grounding.  

This means that, whatever upgrade you may require, it is not axiomatic that those old, two-prong, knob and tube fed outlets, need to be replaced. They need only be augmented with a few modern circuits bearing three-prong grounded outlets. 

This works out nicely since almost all houses with knob and tube wiring (which haven’t been the subject of upgrade) are lacking in an adequate distribution of outlets and possibly lighting. Therefore, the need for more outlets and the need for some to be grounded can be fulfilled in one fell swoop. 

Some of the other disadvantages of knob and tube wiring include its unsuitability to 240 volt devices such as electric stoves, oven or dryers. This can be done, but is rarely done properly as knob and tube was being phased out before most of these devices had arrived on the scene. Also knob and tube is generally coupled with fuses (our next article will go there) and so there is no way to make one of these big devices fully disconnect, when a fuse blows, as can be done with breakers. 

Knob and tube systems were also designed for far fewer electrical devices than most people have today. In 1925 there were no computers, microwave ovens or TVs and refrigerators were few and far between. The systems are generally too small for today’s watt-hungry world. 

Early knob and tube systems are also sometimes wired with the fusing on the neutral wire, allowing a blown fuse to leave current running and to shock the explorer who attempts to fix the seemingly dead device. 

All this said, I like knob and tube and have rarely found original, unaltered, wiring to be less than impressive in the neatness and care of its layout and assembly. One of the best things about this wiring is that it is soldered at the connections. The Western Union splice, developed during the era of telegraph wiring, is far superior to today’s methods of connecting wires because they virtually never pull apart. A sticky, thick, cloth-covered tape was well applied to the wire splices and is rarely faulty after as much as 85 years.  

One of the great things about these soldered connections is that they are much less prone to overheat because the connections have very low resistance. I have often opened a “modern” junction box to see wires, bound in a plastic “wire-nut” spring apart due to having been joined with almost no diligence or care. It’s actually much easier to perform this sort of screw-up today than it would have been in 1925 when knob and tube wiring was king (and quality control was rote). 

This bit about soldering means that fires are less likely to occur and circuits are less likely to behave badly. 

So with all these plusses and minuses, what should a person do if they’ve just moved into a 1925 house with two, two-prong outlets per room and no grounding outlets for the fridge or computer. My advice is to have the wiring checked, upgrade the panels that feed the knob and tube wiring and add some new circuits. That’s all. Now see, that didn’t hurt a bit! 


Berkeley This Week

Friday October 26, 2007

FRIDAY, OCT. 26 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Camille Minichino, author of “Sister in Crime: Who Will Murder Whim, and How?” 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.  

Tilden Tots Join a nature adventure program for 3 and 4 year olds, each accompanied by an adult (grandparents welcome)! We’ll have a nature scavenger hunt from 10 to 11:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 1-888-327-2757. 

Computer Recycling, Safe Medicine Disposal and Thermometer Exchange from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. at 1000 Folger Ave. at San Pablo. near Ashby. Please bring unwanted medicine in original containers with your name marked out. Bring thermometers in two plastic zipper bags to prevent spills. 287-1651. 

“Until When” a film by Dahna Abourahme which follows four Palestinian families living in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp at 7 p.m. followed by update & discussion with Jeanne Shaterian at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists Hall, 1924 Cedar at Bonita. Donation requested, no one turned away. 841-4824. 

“10 Questions for the Dalai Lama” A documentary by Rick Ray, at 7:30 p.m. at Unity of Berkeley, 2075 Eunice St. Cost is $10. 528-8844.  

Community Dance/Barn Dance at 8 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$10. 650-365-2913.  

Auction and Sale of Beardless Irises at 8 p.m. at the Lakeside Park Garden Center, 666 Bellevue Ave., Oakland. Sponsored by the Sydney B. Mitchell Iris Society. Free. http://bayareairis.org. 

SATURDAY, OCT. 27 

Bat Show at 1 and 3 p.m. at the Kensington Community Center, 59 Arlington Ave., Kensington. For ages 5 and up. Free, but tickets required. 524-3043. 

Fall Fruit Tasting at the Saturday Farmers’ Market with appleas, Asian and European pears, and persimmons, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Center St. at Martin Luther King, Jr. Way 

Fall Birdwalk in the UC Botanical Garden with Dennis Wolf and Chris Carmichael from 9 to 10:30 a.m., 200 Centennial Dr. Cost is $12-$15. Registration required. 643-2755. 

Haunted House and Pre-Halloween Party from 6:30 to 8:15 p.m. at St. John’s Church, 2727 College Ave. For all ages, adjustable scariness. Wear costumes. Bring a book, food item or toy for a hungry or homeless child. Donations also welcome. Grades 6-12 invited to come at 3 p.m. to help set up the Haunted House. 845-6830. 

Halloween Celebration in Albany and Berkeley from 5 to 8 p.m. at Ray’s Pumpkin Patch, 1245 Solano Ave., Albany. 527-5358. www.SolanoStroll.org 

Celebrate Halloween at the Haunted Harbor Festival from 3 to 7 p.m. at Jack London Square. Safe and fun activities for children including live music, puppet show and costume contest.  

Jack O’ Lantern Jamboree A Halloween Celebration for the whole family Sat. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Belleview Ave., Oakland. Cost is $8. www.fairyland.org 

Feast of the Angelitos Come build a “nicho,” and other arts and crafts and enjoy traditional sweets, Sat. and Sun. from 2 to 4 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Dias de los Muertos Procession, featuring Ernesto Olmos at 6 p.m. Free and open to all ages. 228-3207. 

“Demystifying the Tarot, It's in the Cards” with a Halloween Happening from 7 to 9 p.m. at 4th Street Studio, 1717d 4th St. 527-0600. 

Monster Bash Aboard the Aircraft Carrier USS Hornet from 7:30 p.m. to midnight at 707 W Hornet Ave., Pier 3, Alameda. Tickets are $20 for adults, $10 for children. 521-8448, ext. 282. www.hornetevents.com 

Rebecca’s Books Grand Opening in South Berkeley from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 3268 Adeline St. 852-4768. 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around Preservation Park to see Victorian architecture. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of Preservation Park at 13th St. and MLK, Jr. Way. Tour lasts 90 minutes. For reservations call 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

3rd Not-So-Silent Church Auction with live music by jazz ensemble The House Band, at 7:00 p.m. at Epworth United Methodist Church, 1953 Hopkins St. at Napa. $10. 524-2921. www.epworthberkeley.org 

Berkeley Digital Media Conference “Current and Emerging Intersections” from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. at Haas School of Business, UC Campus. Organized by Berkeley MBA students and hosted by the Berkeley Digital Media and Entertainment Club. http://www.haas.berkeley.edu/haas/maps.html 

Computer Recycling from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Elephant Pharmacy, 1607 Shattuck Ave. 549-9200.  

Meet Your Friendly Firefighters For ages 3 to 7 at 10:30 a.m. Central Berkeley Public Library, 4th Floor, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6223.  

Protest the War in Iraq from 2 to 4 p.m. on the corner of Acton and University. Sponsored by the Strawberry Creek Lodge Tenants Assoc. and Berkeley-East Bay Gray Panthers. 841-4143. 

“Uyghurs on the Silk Road” A celebration of people and culture, dinner at 6 p.m. followed by program at 7:30 p.m. in the Home Room, International House, UC Campus. Cost is $5, plus $9.25 for dinner. http://ihouse.berkeley.edu 

“Creating a Mixed Border for Year Round Color” with gardener Aerin Moore at 10 a.m. at Magic Gardens, 729 Heinz Ave. 644-2351. 

Ongoing Vocal Jazz Workshop at Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin at the corner of Masonic, on Saturdays from 2:30 to 4 p.m. 524-6797. 

“Savvy Woman’s Guide to Buying a Home” at 2 p.m. at The Bellevue Club, 525 Bellevue Ave.. Oakland. 451-1000. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

SUNDAY, OCT. 28 

Oakland Heritage Alliance House Tour of the Historic San Antonio Neighborhood A self-guided tour of ten houses open from 1 to 5 p.m. Tour begins at 2002 10th Ave. Tickets are $25-$35. 763-9218.  

Fall Colors of Briones Join a moderate 4 mile hike with naturalist Tara Reinertson to learn about the diversity of oaks. Bring lunch, sunscreen and water. 525-2233. 

Haunted Caves of the Environmental Education Center at Tilden Explore and learn the facts and fictions of Halloween at 1 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center. Cost is $3 for ages 3 and up. 525-2233. 

Spooky Tales in the UC Botanical Gardens at 1 p.m. at 200 Centennial Drive. Come in costume and bring a blanket. Cost is $3-$10. 643-2755.  

Dia de los Muertos Festival from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on International Blvd., between Fruitvale Ave. and 40th Ave. with community altars, traditional dance, live music, children’s ativities, international food and more. 535-6900.  

Chabot Elementary School Fall Carnival with games, activities, refreshments and entertainment for all ages, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at 6686 Chabot Rd. at Patton, Rockridge.  

Ghostwalk and Graveyard Tales from 7 to 9 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. 228-3207. 

Free Market at Oak Grove Tree-Sit from 1 to 5 p.m. at Piedmont Ave. north of Bancroft. Autumn Ritual at 5:30 p.m. 938-2109. www.saveoaks.com 

Women of Color Resource Center 9th Annual Sisters of Fire Awards Ceremony at 11 a.m. at Oakland’s Scottish Rite Center. Honorees are Assemblywomen Karen Bass, Ishle Park, Linda Tillery. Tickets are sliding scale from $45-$75. 444-2700, ext. 306. 

Ecumenical Peace Institute Annual Dinner with Dr. Joseph Gerson on “Empire and the Bomb, from Hiroshima to Iraq and Iran” at 6 p.m. at Redwood Gardens, 2951 Derby St. Suggested donation $15-$35, no one turned away. RSVP to 655-1162.  

Tour of the Berkeley City Club, Julia Morgan’s “little castle” at 1:15, 2:15, and 3:15 p.m. at 2315 Durant Ave. Free, donations welcome. 883-9710. 

Alameda Architectural Preservation Society “Historic Wood Finishes” A presentation by John Dilks at 7 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church, 2001 Santa Clara Ave., Alameda. Cost is $5 for non-members. www.alameda-preservation.org 

“The Question of the Supernatural” with Sarah Lewis at 10 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302, ext. 306. 

“Marx’s Ecology” A discussion of Ralph Bellamy Foster’s book presented by Raj Sahani at 10 a.m. at Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave, Oakland. 595-7417. www.tifcss.org 

beatsitasana UrbanYoga Open House from 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at Center for Urban Peace, 2584 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. 866-732-2320. 

Tibetan Buddhism with Elizabeth Cook on “Sacred Places of the Buddha: Teaching the Dharma” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812.  

“What is Humanistic Judaism?” with Rabbi Jay Heyman and Marcia Grossman from 10 a.m. to noon at the Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin Avenue. Suggested donation $5. To register call 428-1492.  

MONDAY, OCT. 29 

“Diaspora Talk with From Heart to Hand Teens” with film screening, at 6 p.m. at Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, 1616 Franklin St., Oakland. Free. 836-4649. 

Halloween Spooktacular! Join us for not so scary stories, songs, and a costume parade fro ages 3-8 at 6:45 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 4th Flr Children’s Story Room, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6223.  

“Green and Healthy Homes” A presentation on indoor environmental quality and sustainable design at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. 524-3043. 

TUESDAY, OCT. 30 

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 Sobrante Ridge, Coach Drive. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233. 

Fall Fruit ‘n’ Fright at the Tuesday Berkeley Farmers’ Market with pears, pomegranates and persimmons, a Pumpkin Carving Contest, Day of the Dead festivities, and Fall Fruit Pies by Mission Pies from 3 to 7 p.m. on Derby St. at MLK, Jr. Way. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter.org 

“Volunteer at Any Age” A Peace Corps Information Session at 6 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 1-800-424-8580. www.peacecorps.gov 

“Quilombo” Performance and fundraiser for Kim McMillon’s play on the Diaspora at 6 p.m. at Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, 1616 Franklin St., Oakland. 836-4649. 

“Reincarnation and Buddhism” with Reverend Harry Bridge, Lodi Buddhist Temple from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at the Jodo Shinshu Center, 2140 Durant Ave. at Fulton St. Donation $20. 809-1460. 

End the Occupation Vigil every Tues. at noon at Oakland Federal Bldg., 1301 Clay St. www.epicalc.org 

Community Sing-a-Long every Tues, at 2 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. 524-9122.  

Family Storytime at 7 p.m. at Kensington Library. 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043.  

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704. www.ecologycenter.org 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. 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. 31 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland uptown to the Lake to discover Art Deco landmarks. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of the Paramount Theater at 2025 Broadway. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. 

Ancestor Night “Quilombo Communities of Rio de Janeiro” with Robert King at 6 p.m. at Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, 1616 Franklin St., Oakland. 836-4649. 

Halloween Storytime and Costume Party for ages 3 to 8 at 3:30 p.m. at Claremont Branch, Berkeley Public Library, 2940 Benvenue Ave. 981-6280.  

Halloween at Habitot A not-too-spooky event for infants, toddlers and pre-schoolers, from 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 2065 Kittredge St. Cost is $6-$7. 647-1111. 

Howl-o-ween Celebration with tricks and treats, for dogs and humans from 5 to 6 p.m. at Ohlone Dog Park, Grant St. and Hearst Ave. Dress up your pup and bring them out to the ball! Treats for dogs and humans, costume pageant at 5:45 p.m. Sponsored by the Ohlone Dog Park Association. 845-4213. ohlonedogpark.org 

Studio One Art Center Annual Pumpkin Potluck with sharing of squash recipes and treat bags for youth, from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. at 1428 Alice St., off 14th St. Costumes welcome. 597-5027. 

Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning Colloquium with Caroline Chen on Dancing in the Streets of Contemporary Beijing: improvised USes of Space” at 1 p.m. at Wurster Hall, Room 315A, UC Campus. All welcome. laep.ced.berkeley.edu/events/colloquium 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. Heavy rain cancels. 548-9840. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Sing for Peace at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www. 

geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, NOV. 1 

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  

“Observations: The San Francisco Bay Area and its Built Environment” with author Susan Dinkelspiel Cerny at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Reception to follow. Tickets are $15. Sponsored by Berkeley Architectural Heritage Assoc. 841-2242. www.berkeleyheritage.com 

Mario Savio Memorial Lecture: “From Jim Crow to Guantanamo: Prisons, Democracy and Empire” with Angela Davis, social activist and UC Santa Cruz professor at 7 p.m. at Pauley Ballroom, Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Union, UC Campus. Free. 707-823-7293. 

“Last Man Out” with William Rodriguez, a janitor in the World Trade Center North Tower who was the last person to leave the tower before it fell on 9/11, at 7 p.m. at Grand Lake Thearer, 3200 Grand Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $10. 650-857-0927. www.communitycurrency.org 

“A Little Bit of So Much Truth” A film on the 2006 popular uprising in Oaxaca, Mexico at 7 p.m. at La Peña. Donation $5-$10. Sponsored by the Task Force on the Americas. 415-924-3227. www.mitfamericas.org 

“Preventing Falls for 50+ Adults” Learn about changing behaviors, nutrition and medication management at 1:30 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720. 

Berkeley School Volunteers Orientation from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. Come learn about volunteer opportunities. 644-8833. 

Babies & Toddlers Storytime at 10:15 and 11:15 a.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Club meets at 6:45 p.m. at Spud’s Pizza, 3290 Adeline at Alcatraz. namaste@avatar. 

freetoasthost.info  

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.  

ONGOING 

Donate the Fruit From Your Fruit Trees We will gladly pick and deliver your fruit to community programs that feed school kids, the elderly, the homebound and the hungry. The fruit trees should be located in or very near North Berkeley and the fruit should be organic (no pesticides) and edible. This is a volunteer/ 

grassroots thing so join in!! Please email northberkeleyharvest@gmail.com or 812-3369. 

Bay-Friendly Gardening Offers Discounted Compost Bins to Alameda County residents. In addition to the bins, they also offer free workshops, videos, brochures, and answers to your compost questions. To order a bin call the compost information hotline 444-7645. 

CITY MEETINGS 

Council Agenda Committee meets Mon. Oct. 29, at 2:30 p.m., at 2180 Milvia St. 981-6900. 

Downtown Area Plan Advisory Commission meets Wed. Oct. 31 at 7 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7487.