The $500 million pact between UC Berkeley and one of the world’s largest oil companies went into effect Wednesday, though actual work had begun in June. -more-
Seventy-nine volunteers from across the East Bay underwent four hours of training on cleaning hazardous oil spills from the shoreline by the City of Berkeley and the East Bay Regional Park District at the Berkeley Marina Monday. -more-
Berkeley is home to the movement for the independence of disabled people and winner of the National Organization on Disability’s 2006 Accessible America competition, yet the disabled community expressed outrage at what people said was the mayor’s insensitivity at the Nov. 6 council meeting. -more-
“We have something to celebrate and something to mourn,” Joe Robinson told fellow members of the citizen panel advising the state on toxic cleanups in southern Richmond. -more-
A new report takes aim at the East Bay Regional Park District for not doing enough to ensure that low-income minority communities have access to open space. -more-
Today I conducted an act of civil disobedience (my first in quite some time). Using a common kitty litter scoop, I peeled globs of oil from a beach, and placed them in a bucket. I defied not only the Coast Guard, but our own city manager, Phil Kamlarz, who has declared the shore off-limits. -more-
Second Lt. Joseph Perkins described it as a small carnival—with its Humvee, Apache Helicopter simulator and climbing wall. A graduate of UC Berkeley, Perkins was one of the army recruiters on campus Thursday, Friday and Saturday. -more-
The State Historical Resources Commission unanimously approved the nomination for the Berkeley High School campus to be listed on the National Register as a historic district Friday. -more-
Members of the Oak-to-Ninth Referendum Committee have decided to drop their lawsuit over Oakland City Attorney John Russo’s decision last year to throw out petitions calling for a citizen vote on the controversial development project. But opponents and proponents of the lawsuit were as divided over the reason for voluntary dismissal as they were over the lawsuit itself. -more-
California State School Superintendent Jack O’Connell said in an e-mail to an Oakland education activist this week that despite his belief that state school takeovers should be a “last option,” local control of the Oakland Unified School District will continue to be withheld until “the time is right.” -more-
The Memorial Stadium tree-sit sustained its second major casualty Sunday night when one of the protesters fell, breaking an arm and a leg. -more-
Berkeley Planning Commissioners will tackle Demon Rum Wednesday night—or, more precisely, a proposal to tighten the rules on its purveyors. -more-
The Berkeley Board of Education will vote Wednesday on whether to hire Emeryville-based Baker Vilar Architects to design Berkeley High School’s new bleachers and prepare plans for demolishing its old gym. -more-
Second Lt. Joseph Perkins described it as a small carnival—with its Humvee, Apache Helicopter simulator and climbing wall. A graduate of UC Berkeley, Perkins was one of the army recruiters on campus on Friday. -more-
The Berkeley Marina was closed to incoming and outgoing boat traffic Friday after the incoming tide brought more oil globules and sick birds into its beaches and surrounding parks. -more-
The fenced-in tree-sitters at UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium oak grove gained new allies Wednesday as their counterparts in Santa Cruz climbed redwoods while their allies were driven back by an onslaught of police clubs and pepper spray. -more-
The City of Berkeley dredged the lagoon at the north end of Aquatic Park and dumped the sludge along the shoreline this week. State Water Resources Control Board officials said the city’s Public Works Department never requested a permit for the project. -more-
Amidst jeers, catcalls and demands for the mayor’s recall‚ and Mayor Tom Bates’ threats to clear the rowdy public from the chambers, the Berkeley City Council voted Tuesday to allow two powerful telecommunications companies to place antennas atop UC Storage, a five-story building owned by developer Patrick Kennedy adjacent to the neighborhood at Ward Street and Shattuck Avenue. -more-
Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee members turned thumbs down on point towers in downtown Berkeley Wednesday, voting 13-7-1 for a six-story maximum building height, while allowing for up to ten exceptions. -more-
While Berkeley Police Chief Douglas Hambleton agreed with many of the Police Review Commission recommendations aimed at preventing criminal activity among police officers, he took issue with a few. -more-
The East Bay Regional Park District temporarily closed water access at selected shoreline parks Thursday after an 810-foot container ship rammed into the Bay Bridge Wednesday and spilt oil into the bay. -more-
More than 100 home and business owners may get long-term low-interest loans through the city to add energy efficiencies and/or solar panels to their properties, if a financing plan hatched by the mayor’s chief of staff, Cisco DeVries, pans out. -more-
Community members urged UC Berkeley to keep People’s Park an open space and sharply criticized a report on possible changes to the park at the People’s Park Community Advisory Board meeting Monday. -more-
It’s not at all unusual for the majority of Berkeley voters to wake up with a nasty political hangover the morning after a presidential election. -more-
If anyone wonders if there’s a role for classical music in the hard-edged 21st century, they should acquaint themselves with the Oakland East Bay Symphony, which had its season’s opening on Friday night at the Paramount in Oakland. We go to a good number of musical events, some of them really big hits with their audiences, but it’s only at the Paramount with Maestro Michael Morgan wielding the baton that bravura performances are rewarded with shouts of “right on” from the balcony. Sometimes (horrors) they come even after a particularly thrilling movement, in defiance or ignorance of the classical convention which counsels waiting until the whole piece is finished to cheer. It’s not just polite clapping, or even the vigorous foot-stomping on the wooden floor of Berkeley’s First Congregational Church which is used to applaud the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. When the enormous Paramount audiences like something, it’s expressed by full-throated roars, often ornamented with the kind of piercing whistles normally heard at rock concerts or baseball games. -more-
The “Emily” in the very successful Emily’s List fundraising organization is not a person but an acronym. It stands for the old political slogan Early Money Is Like Yeast, which means that a dollar given early in a campaign is worth many more dollars for the would-be candidate than one contributed at the end. Early dollars can be used to do fundraising for additional funds, and to reach out to undecided voters in time to recruit them as campaign volunteers. -more-
Despite its mission of dialogue, KPFA has become a venue for increasingly nasty attacks, which exhaust the station and turn listeners off. I would like to set the record straight on a number of allegations that have been printed in these pages and to ask the question: can KPFA afford to be at war with itself? -more-
The current conflict within the KPFA community is a cauldron of bitter feelings and resentments. There are three slates of candidates currently running for the Local Station Board. I’ll discuss the two slates that are most directly at loggerheads: “Peoples Radio” and “Concerned Listeners.” The former group has severe criticisms of current station management and governance—criticisms that have been voiced quite persuasively here in the pages of the Planet, one of the venues where this debate has taken place. -more-
Despite how he tried to portray himself in a recent East Bay Monthy article, Patrick Kennedy is no “Jane Jacobs.” He’s more like Jane’s nemesis, Robert Moses —the infamous developer who decimated New York City with freeways and oversized housing projects from 1920 to 1970. -more-
EDITOR’S NOTE: This letter was sent to the San Francisco Chronicle. -more-
Daily Planet columnist J. Douglas Allen-Taylor has been an un-abashed apologist for Mayor Dellums for too long. In a petty feud with Chip Johnson of the San Francisco Chronicle, he uses his recent column to belabor the non-issue that Chip has been treating Mayor Dellums more harshly than former Mayor Brown. In the process, Allen-Taylor sadly misses the real story. Crime in Oakland is out of control and Mayor Dellums has failed to articulate a detailed action plan to address it. I for one applaud Chip Johnson’s tenacity in reporting the issue of crime. The Reader’s Platform in the San Francisco Chronicle relates the growing frustration residents face day after day with ever increasing crime and unresponsive and overworked police. Admittedly, Mayor Dellums did not create Oakland’s crime problem, but he has a responsibility to address it. -more-
I am not a member of the “Concerned Listeners”; nonetheless I am a ”concerned” listener. -more-
For the average KPFA listener, it’s not easy to understand what—if anything—is really at stake in elections for the Local Station Board, nor how to select and rank candidates. They’re divided into myriad slates and factions, all passionately denouncing one another, but they’re all experienced progressives, and at a glance their platforms and platitudes sound pretty similar. And beyond the official election pamphlet, the station itself isn’t doing much to help voters understand the issues: There’s been only one, poorly publicized in-person candidate forum, and as of this writing, more than three weeks after the ballots were mailed, KPFA had yet to begin airing the recorded pitches candidates were asked to make weeks ago. -more-
Although our City Council on Tuesday, Nov. 7 surprised many of us naïve citizens by reversing its position made two weeks earlier in support of South Berkeley residents, it was less surprising if one examines the council’s history. On many occasions, the council had led Berkeley citizens to believe that it was truly sympathetic to neighborhood concerns over RF radiation from cell phone antennas. They cite for their reason federal law as promulgated in the 1996 Tele-Commun-ications Act which pre-empts the city from being able to defend its citizen on the basis of health concerns. -more-
The presidential election will occur on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, less than a year from now. Because the candidates have been campaigning for 11 months, we already know quite a lot about the likely outcome. -more-
Bamboo is a plant with many faces and many reputations. It’s invasive, except when it’s not; it’s edible, tough, fast-growing. It’s good for scaffolding, houses, roofs, containers (in sizes from spice-bottle to bazooka), musical instruments (the Malagasy valiha tubular harp and sodinha flute, just for example), bows and arrows and the bowstrings too, fishing rods, curtain rods, flooring, paneling, dishes, kitchen and table utensils as well as the table and most of the kitchen itself, including water pipes. -more-
“Religion, sometimes, is a continuation of politics by other means,” notes Jon Alterman, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies Middle East division, and it was hard to avoid that thought about last month’s conference of Christians United for Israel (CUFI) in Washington, D.C. -more-
Water is the primary problem to solve if we’re to raise plants. I suspect this has always been the case almost everywhere (and offhand I can’t think of what the theoretical exception would be) and likely will be, at least until some theoretical descendants are working hydroponic plantations outside the orbit of, say, Mars, where the problem will be sunlight. Probably there’s some smiling herb grower now who’s working on an electricity-sparing solution to that. -more-
I tend to stare at the ceiling a lot. I think it’s only to be expected. If you sleep on your back or lie on the couch reading Jane Austin (as we all must), you’re bound to spend a certain amount of time staring off into space and guess what’s there … between you and space but your ceiling. There it hangs (Yes, that’s what it’s doing, hanging.) between the walls, with all those cracks and stains and Grateful Dead posters and you think, “Maybe I should do something about this mess but what can I do? It’s a ceiling, not a casserole. I don’t know where to begin!” -more-
“What do I know about a heart? To me, a man’s an asset!” Mae West’s very intonation is proverbial—though just after the start of Sex, her 1926 Broadway blockbuster now revived at the Aurora, she intones, not too piously: “Don’t give me that church business again; you’ll get me goin’ back to the old homestead.” -more-
Bamboo is a plant with many faces and many reputations. It’s invasive, except when it’s not; it’s edible, tough, fast-growing. It’s good for scaffolding, houses, roofs, containers (in sizes from spice-bottle to bazooka), musical instruments (the Malagasy valiha tubular harp and sodinha flute, just for example), bows and arrows and the bowstrings too, fishing rods, curtain rods, flooring, paneling, dishes, kitchen and table utensils as well as the table and most of the kitchen itself, including water pipes. -more-
Tenor Kalil Wilson, 26, who grew up in Berkeley and Oakland, won the annual New York Metropolitan Opera National Council competition regional finals in Los Angeles on Oct. 30 and will sing on-stage at the Met in February in the semifinals. -more-
Once in a great while, everything goes right. It’s not very often, mind you, but it does happen. This time it’s the play that’s ending its two-week run this weekend at the East Bay Jewish Community Center in Berkeley. -more-
We tend to think that once something is committed to film we have it forever. The act of recording seems by its very nature permanent, and often we forget that the very materials used to record are nearly as transient as the images they capture. For the reality is that film is a tenuous medium at best, given to disintegration and, in the case of nitrate films, spontaneous combustion. And this is compounded by the fact that cinema itself was for decades considered merely a novelty, an ephemeral entertainment of virtually no great cultural or historical value. -more-
Poets and world travelers from the international scene of the 1960s and ’70s, Ira Cohen and Louise Landes Levi will read with poet and editor Michael Rothenberg 7:30 p.m. Monday at Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue. Admission is free. -more-
Water is the primary problem to solve if we’re to raise plants. I suspect this has always been the case almost everywhere (and offhand I can’t think of what the theoretical exception would be) and likely will be, at least until some theoretical descendants are working hydroponic plantations outside the orbit of, say, Mars, where the problem will be sunlight. Probably there’s some smiling herb grower now who’s working on an electricity-sparing solution to that. -more-
I tend to stare at the ceiling a lot. I think it’s only to be expected. If you sleep on your back or lie on the couch reading Jane Austin (as we all must), you’re bound to spend a certain amount of time staring off into space and guess what’s there … between you and space but your ceiling. There it hangs (Yes, that’s what it’s doing, hanging.) between the walls, with all those cracks and stains and Grateful Dead posters and you think, “Maybe I should do something about this mess but what can I do? It’s a ceiling, not a casserole. I don’t know where to begin!” -more-
