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Andy Ross, left, and Hiroshi Kagawa announced the sale of Cody’s Books to Yohan, Inc. in September 2006. Last week Ross retired as president of Cody’s. Kagawa will serve as interim president.
Andy Ross, left, and Hiroshi Kagawa announced the sale of Cody’s Books to Yohan, Inc. in September 2006. Last week Ross retired as president of Cody’s. Kagawa will serve as interim president.
 

News

Flash: Judge Issues Key Ruling in UC Stadium Lawsuit

By Richard Brenneman
Tuesday December 11, 2007

Superior Court Judge Barbara J. Miller handed UC Berkeley a legal setback Monday evening, denying its claimed exemption from state law governing buildings on earthquake faults. 

Her nine-page order was faxed to lawyers in the legal battle over the university’s plan to build a four-story high-tech gym next to Memorial Stadium—the site of the ongoing tree-sit in the grove of oaks that would be axed to make way for the gym. 

John M. Sanger, one of two San Francisco lawyers hired to represent the UC Board of Regents in the case, had told the judge that the Alquist-Priolo Act doesn’t apply to the university. 

Passed by the California Legislature in 1972, that statute bars new construction within 50 feet of existing faults and limits additions or renovations to half of an existing building’s value. 

In Monday’s order, Miller wrote that she “has concluded that the Act does apply to the University as a state agency with the responsibility to prohibit the location and development of structures for human occupancy across the trace of active faults.” 

The judge said that nothing in the evidence before her indicates the university ever considered: 

• whether the Student Athlete High Performance Center (SAHPC) was an addition to California Memorial Stadium (CMS) under the terms of the act; 

• “whether the cost to construct the SAHPC might violate the Act’s valuation limitations,” or 

• performing a valuation analysis on the gym in relation to the stadium. 

The ruling is critical because the stadium itself is split from end zone to end zone by the Hayward Fault, the seismic fissure federal geologists say is the most likely source of the Bay Area’s next disastrous earthquake. 

University-hired experts say the gym site is outside the Alquist-Priolo Act’s 50-foot zone, exempting the structure from the law’s provisions. 

“We’re quite gratified that the court has rejected the university’s contention that the Alquist-Priolo Act doesn’t apply to them,” said Stephan Volker, one of the attorneys who brought the litigation against the university. 

He said he is also pleased that the court agreed with plaintiffs in the action that the university had failed to prove their contention that the gym and stadium were two separate and distinct buildings. 

“The university is backed into a corner,” he said. 

Dan Mogulof, Executive Director, of UC Berkeley’s Office of Public Affairs said, “While it’s going to engender further delay, we welcome the opportunity to provide the court with additional evidence from architects and engineering experts who we believe will support what we have said all along—that the Student Athlete High Performance Center and Memorial Stadium are separate buildings."  

Volker represents the California Oak Foundation, one of several plaintiffs who have challenged the university in argument’s in Judge Miller’s Hayward courtroom. 

The other lawyers are Michael Lozeau, whose client is the Panoramic Hill Association, and Harriet Steiner, representing the City of Berkeley. 

Sanger’s partner and the lead attorney for the university in the case is Charles Olson. 

 

Expert opinions 

Judge Miller’s order requires the lawyers to submit written opinions from experts about whether or not the gym and stadium are separate structures, or if the gym and stadium constitute a single building under terms of the California Building Code. 

If she finds the they form a single building, the outcome could have profound limitations for the university’s development plans by limiting the total amount of funds that can be spent on the gym and the planned retrofit and refurbishing the landmarked stadium itself. 

The judge ordered all evidence to be submitted by Dec. 31, with a deadline for objections to any of the submissions of Jan. 7. Her final Notice of Decision, barring any additional extension, will come by Feb. 6. 

Mogulof said the university has been continuing with “the huge amount of preparatory work needed before construction begins, so if we get the go-ahead from the court, construction can begin almost immediately.” 

One key issue, not addressed in the judge’s order, is the value of the stadium itself, by all accounts a structure in needed of repairs and a seismic retrofit. The stadium bears obvious signs of neglect, with unrepaired breeches in the concrete and its wooden flagpoles and fixtures shedding layers of peeling paint. 

The university claims that the Alquist-Priolo Act’s 50 percent limitation applies to the cost of replacing the existing building, while the challengers claim the limitation is based on the structure’s current sales value—potentially a nine-figure difference that could starkly limit the university’s options. 

The challenge to the stadium/gym project is encompassed in the larger legal question of whether or not the regents met all the legal steps required to adopt the gym’s budget and approve the environment impact report (EIR) for the full suite of projects included in what UC Berkeley has called the Southeast Campus Integrated Projects. 

Those projects, in addition to the gym and stadium retrofit, include an underground parking lot at the site of Maxwell Family Field northwest of the stadium, a new “connector building” housing offices and meeting space for the university’s law and business schools, repairs to the law and business school buildings, work on the Piedmont Avenue/Gayley Road streetscape, repair of some historic buildings, and demolition of some other historic residences and Calvin Hall. 


Cody’s President Steps Down

By Judith Scherr
Tuesday December 11, 2007
Andy Ross, left, and Hiroshi Kagawa announced the sale of Cody’s Books to Yohan, Inc. in September 2006. Last week Ross retired as president of Cody’s. Kagawa will serve as interim president.
Andy Ross, left, and Hiroshi Kagawa announced the sale of Cody’s Books to Yohan, Inc. in September 2006. Last week Ross retired as president of Cody’s. Kagawa will serve as interim president.

Once again, changes are afoot for Cody’s Books, with president and three-decade former owner Andy Ross announcing his retirement as president last week and Hiroshi Kagawa, former CEO of the corporation that bought Cody’s, stepping in as interim president and head of a new ownership group.  

In September 2006, Ross—after shuttering Cody’s Books on Telegraph in July—met with reporters in the airy Fourth Street store to announce the sale of the business that included both Fourth Street and the San Francisco stores to Yohan, Inc., a Tokyo-based foreign publications dealer, publisher and retailer.  

Introduced to reporters at the same time, Kagawa expressed an affinity for the store. “I’ve loved Cody’s ever since I visited the store in 1983,” he said. 

Yohan closed down the San Francisco store in April, the same month that Tokyo-based Polaris Principal Finance, an investment bank, acquired 60 percent of InterCultural Group, the holding company that has controlled Yohan since December 2006. 

“By accepting this investment from Polaris, ICG hopes to strengthen its financial standing and improve profit power. By concentrating resources on selected operations, Polaris will restructure ICG's operations portfolio and improve the company's growth with the goal of going public within three years,” according to the Yohan website. 

Kagawa resigned the positions of Yohan CEO, president of IGC and president of Yohan Book Service, Inc. on Sept. 30. 

The new umbrella group which he heads, whose name has not yet been made public, will own Cody’s, Stonebridge Press, located in Albany, which specializes in English-language books about Japan and Asia, and IBC Publishing, which publishes books that support English learners and books that introduce Japan to foreigners. 

“Polaris wasn’t interested in keeping Cody’s,” Mindy Galoob, Cody’s business manager, told the Daily Planet in an interview Saturday. 

Galoob said there may be changes at Cody’s, but first, she said, she wants to know more about what customers want—she may use surveys and/or focus groups to do this.  

“We want to be sure Cody’s stays a Berkeley institution,” Galoob said. “We want to remain a local bookstore.” 

Galoob, 30, came to Berkeley in September—from Oklahoma via Washington D.C.—to accompany her husband who is a doctoral program at Boalt Law School. She said she is pleased to be where people are community-oriented.  

She said that llike Amazon, Cody’s has a presence on the internet. The difference, however, she says, is that customers can interact by phone with a real person at Cody’s who knows about the books, while they can’t at Amazon. 

Cody’s was founded in 1956 by Fred and Pat Cody.


Council Weighs Condo Conversion Changes, W. Berkeley Auto Sales

By Judith Scherr
Tuesday December 11, 2007

Like spinning straw into gold, turning apartment buildings into individually owned condominiums could be a dream come true. But the law, intended to benefit property owners, renters-turned homeowners and the city’s affordable housing fund, has yet to turn into anything but a headache, people on various sides of the issue say.  

The City Council is holding a workshop tonight (Tuesday), 5-7 p.m. before the regular council meeting, to look at proposed changes in the conversion law. 

At the regular meeting, which begins at 7 p.m., the council will hold a public hearing on changes to the West Berkeley Plan that would permit automobile sales in parts of West Berkeley now zoned for manufacturing, inspections for alcohol outlets, measuring electromagnetic fields and more. 

 

Condo conversion 

To date, the Condominium Conversion Ordinance has not met any of its goals. It was supposed to allow home ownership for those who might otherwise not be able to afford it, fill the city’s low-income housing coffers with conversion fees, and give property owners a hefty profit. 

Tonight’s workshop panelists, in addition to city staff, will include Michael St. John representing the Berkeley Property Owners Association—property owners complained they had been left out of the discussion during an October council workshop—and former Housing Director Stephen Barton who helped write the 2005 ordinance revision.  

No Housing Advisory Commission members or elected Rent Board Members were asked to sit on tonight’s panel. “We have some pretty good ideas—I think we should be given more than three minutes [for public comment],” said Jesse Arreguin, who serves both on the HAC and the Rent Board. 

Both the HAC and property owners say they would like to modify the part of the law that says the units to be converted must be completely up to code. 

The HAC voted Dec. 6 to ask the council to consider a two-tiered approach. First, there would be a pre-application inspection in which all code violations and health and safety issues would be identified in the unit. And there would be “full disclosure of all problems in the entire building,” Arreguin said.  

Prior to conversion, applicants would have to correct all health and safety violations. Other code violations would be disclosed but not necessarily corrected.  

HAC is also proposing a 15 percent rather than 20 percent administrative fee—funds that would be diverted from the Housing Trust Fund—as proposed by city staff. 

Attorney David Wilson, who helped author the failed Condominium Conversion Ordinance on the 2006 ballot, said that property owners want a better-written law that clearly defines code compliance issues. “People can’t understand it,” Wilson said. 

Wilson said that the lack of clarity can result in high costs and wasted time: one inspector may ask for certain changes to comply with codes; when the property owner completes construction, a different inspector may ask for additional changes, Wilson said. 

Another problem in the law is that the 12.5 percent fee, based on sales price, is too high, Wilson said, noting that the property owner is required to pay that fee, the transfer tax and code compliance costs. 

 

West Berkeley auto zone 

Fearing that automobile dealers will flee the city—along with the $1.2 million sales tax they provide—city staff is proposing changes in West Berkeley zoning to allow automobile sales where only manufacturing is now permitted. 

“If [the dealers] are unable to relocate in Berkeley, it is possible they could eventually close or locate in another city,” the staff report says. 

If the new zoning is approved, the city’s solid waste transfer station at Second and Gilman streets could be impacted. The Planning Commission did not remove the transfer station property from the draft zoning changes, as a number of people—including those from the Ecology Center and West Berkeley Artisans and Industrial Companies—had requested. 

When the Planning Commission voted in favor of the new zoning, however, it added a caution that any project there should not materially interfere with the activities of the city-owned solid waste center. 

While earlier iterations of the proposal threatened to impact the Urban Ore and Ashby Lumber sites in southwest Berkeley, these properties are no longer part of the proposed zoning changes.  

 

The council will also consider: 

• The second reading of the Public Commons for Everyone Initiative. 

• Inspections for alcohol outlets. 

• Reclassifications of an assistant traffic engineer whose salary would be $6,600–$8,000 per month and a watershed resources specialist at about $5,300–$6,500 per month. 

• Policies to address foreclosures and subprime lending. 

• Measuring electromagnetic field levels. 

• A first quarter budget update. 

 


East Bay Green Corridor: Industrial Berkeley’s Salvation or Road to Ruin?

By ZELDA BRONSTEIN By ZELDA BRONSTEIN, Special to the Planet
Tuesday December 11, 2007

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part one of a two-part series. 

 

Has Tom Bates—surprising us all—suddenly become an advocate of industrial West Berkeley? You certainly could have gotten that impression if you glanced at the Dec. 3 announcement: The mayor and his counterparts in Richmond, Emeryville and Oakland have teamed up with each other, UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab to create an “East Bay Green Corridor” that will, in Bates’ words, make the region “the Silicon Valley of the green economy.” 

The East Bay Green Corridor Statement of Principles, posted on the mayor’s website, declares the partners’ commitment to helping “green industries, defined by both the production methods they employ and the types of goods and services they produce ... find fertile ground here to grow and expand.”  

But in the land of the BP—formerly British Petroleum—Energy Biosciences Institute, “green” and “industry” are highly elastic terms. A closer look reveals that Bates is using the Green Corridor to legitimate his plans to turn much of West Berkeley into an office park catering to BP associates and their ilk. The controversy swirling around the BP venture, as documented in the Planet, would be enough to raise major doubts about the mayor’s scheme. (For another good overview of that controversy, as well as UC Berkeley Chancellor Birgeneau’s little-known relevant history at the University of Toronto, see Jamail Yogis’ reports in the December issue of San Francisco magazine.) Add the fact that a host of Bay Area planning professionals say that production, distribution and repair enterprise, which includes recyling, are essential to the region’s prosperity, social equity and environmental health, and the mayor’s plans look more dubious yet. 

Bates previewed those plans last February in his 2007 State of the City address. There he equated “building the green economy” in Berkeley with “mak[ing] it easier” for environmental research companies “to open and expand” here. Putting out the welcome mat to such firms, he said, would require “more flexible land use rules…because our current zoning does not permit them.” Last week he echoed those remarks, telling KCBS that the Green Corridor Partnership “will mean” among other things “relaxed zoning.”  

If you wanted to drive industry out of West Berkeley, the first thing you’d do would be to loosen the area’s land use regulations. Here as elsewhere in California, most businesses doing production, distribution and repair (PDR) are small and medium-sized firms that rent their space. Because PDR is less dense than office, retail and housing, it yields lower rents. Predictably, landlords who have a choice prefer the more lucrative tenants. In theory, landlords whose property is zoned for industry have no choice and accordingly keep their rents at levels that industrial tenants can afford. But if owners of industrially zoned land think that a city is reluctant to enforce its zoning laws or is about to change those laws to permit non-industrial uses, they are likely to raise their rents and/or to hold their property off the market until the zoning has been revised.  

Consider, then, that this Wednesday, at the direction of the council and above all the mayor, the Berkeley Planning Commission will begin considering potential amendments to West Berkeley zoning with the express aim of increasing flexibility—that is, permitting more non-industrial uses. “Limited” means that they’re not going to throw out the industrial zoning all at once. But as the recent history of the nation’s credit and housing markets indicate, investors’ expectations are crucial. In the case of West Berkeley, even a little “flexibility” will have a ripple effect that’s likely to squeeze production, distribution and repair out of town.  

In his February speech, Bates tried to finesse the issue. “For the most part,” he said, “the heart of West Berkeley is not appropriate for major new office parks and housing development.” But in the same speech, the mayor alluded to Doug Herst’s plans to put a biotech corporate headquarters, a seven-story condominium building, space appropriate for software companies—which is to say, office space—and, to sugar the pill, an art gallery on the 5.5 acre site of the former Peerless Lighting factory at 2246 Fifth St., a location arguably in the heart of West Berkeley.  

The biggest elephant in the room, however, is the BP Energy Biosciences Institute. The mayor’s press release touting the Green Corridor noted that Berkeley was “recently ranked as one of the top five cities best situated to lead the ‘Clean Tech’ economy.” What the press release didn’t say is that the ranking, made by Sustainlane, was based on British Petroleum’s decision to give UC $500 million to create the Energy Biosciences Institute. The Institute itself will be on campus, but a BP spokesman told Sustainlane that the giant multinational’s “technical scouting members will be making relationships with start-ups and small companies in the field.”  

Sustainlane acknowledged that “the city of Berkeley’s participation in the institute is in the planning process.” In other words, the city proper had little to do with the project on which its “Cleantech” ranking was based. But it’s easy to imagine how our local officials could greatly expedite the BP venture: The council could rezone West Berkeley to accommodate those off-campus “start-ups and small companies in the field.”  

Leaving aside the big questions being asked about the scientific feasibility, moral integrity and environmental effects of the BP biofuels project, there’s the issue of rational economic development. Year after year, quarter after quarter, West Berkeley manufacturing and warehouse space has had among the lowest vacancy rates and highest asking prices per square foot of any East Bay industrial market. To quote the slogan of West Berkeley Artisans and Industrial Companies: “West Berkeley Works!” So why destroy it? 

Three big industrially zoned West Berkeley properties are currently vacant or close to it: the Peerless Lighting site(Doug Herst still has an office there), the Macauley Foundry (811 Carleton) and the Flint Ink facility (Fourth and Gilman). How these parcels are developed will shape the future character of the district and, indeed, of the entire city. I’ve already noted Herst’s gentrifying proposal for the Peerless Lighting property. Bates, proceeding as a virtual one-man planning department, has very different plans for Fourth and Gilman: He wants an auto dealership there, as a first step to commercializing all of Gilman west of Ashby.  

I invite Mayor Bates to explain how replacing the dozens of production, distribution and repair businesses in the west Gilman neighborhood with freeway-oriented retail, including a huge car dealership (the Flint Ink parcel measures 4.78 acres), would contribute to a green economy? How would it help achieve Measure G’s goal of radically reducing greenhouse gas emissions in town, 47 percent of which come from vehicles driven within the city’s limits?  

The questions are not academic: The council agenda for today (Tuesday) includes the mind-boggling proposal, backed by the mayor, to permit auto sales at the Flint Ink site and at the property occupied by Berkeley’s major recycling facility, the city transfer station, located at Second and Gilman. From an environmental perspective, the idea is preposterous: If anything, the city should be working to expand Berkeley’s renowned recyling and reuse enterprises. That means preserving, indeed extending, the industrial zoning that keeps land values at levels those businesses can afford.  

In the second half of this column (to be printed in an upcoming issue), I’ll tell how heeding the latest expert advice and building on industrial Berkeley’s distinctive strengths could foster an economy that’s radically green, sustainably prosperous and far more democratic than what we have now or what we will have if the Bates version of the East Bay Green Corridor comes to pass.  

 


W. Berkeley Zone Change on Commission Agenda

By RICHARD BRENNEMAN
Tuesday December 11, 2007

Berkeley planning commissioners Wednesday will tackle the controversial issue of what the city calls a new policy of “limited flexibility” in West Berkeley zoning. 

Also on the agenda is a proposal to convert a five-unit tenancy-in-common (TIC) property at 1552-1556 Milvia St. into five condos. 

While all parts of a TIC property are owned equally by all tenants, condominium units are individually held. Commissioners had no objections when the proposal for converting the two-building property was first brought before them last month. 

The West Berkeley rezoning was far more controversial, and two rival proposals both failed when each failed to obtain the needed five votes, due to the absence of commissioner Susan Wengraf. 

The immediate trigger was a City Council request made early this year after the council upheld a Zoning Adjustments Board vote denying a four-unit project at 2817 Eighth St. 

The denial was based on the current standards for mixed use-residential zoning, a unique-to-West-Berkeley district designed to create a transition zone between the area’s industrial and manufacturing zones and the inland residential districts. 

Developer Edward Adams, with the support of neighbors, wanted to build a four-unit housing project where zoning standards call for six—which could be increased to seven with the city’s inclusionary bonus for affordable housing. 

Some commissioners wanted to stick with the current requirements, citing the city’s need for more housing for lower-income residents, while others wanted to exclude Adams from the requirements so he could build the smaller project neighbors want. 

But Adams and some commissioners also want an exemption from the housing fee required of developers who want to exclude affordable units from their projects—hence the tension and the two failed votes. 

Commission Chair James Samuels backs the staff proposal, and typically prevails on commission votes that often divide on a five-four basis. 

But Susan Wengraf, who often votes with the majority, was one of the leading backers of the West Berkeley inclusionary policy, along with Gene Poschman, who is generally found among the dissenting minority on key development issues. 

Under the guidelines now being proposed by the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), Berkeley would have a quota of 2,712 new housing units by 2014, up from a goal of 1,269 for the previous seven years, 1999-2006. 

ABAG doesn’t require the units to be built, leaving that to the market. But it does insist local government allow development to occur up to the quota levels to maintain eligibility for funding allocated through the regional government agency. 

Wednesday night’s meeting begins at 7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave.


Sea Scout Leader Makes Bail; Police Ask Public’s Assistance

By RICHARD BRENNEMAN
Tuesday December 11, 2007

Suspended Sea Scoutmaster Eugene Austin Evans, charged with multiple counts of abusing youths under his care, was bailed out of jail Friday, pending his arraignment in January. 

Meanwhile, current and former Sea Scouts and their parents were scheduled to meet Monday night to organize a defense campaign for the 64-year-old scoutmaster, according to one parent who was invited to attend. 

Berkeley Police arrested Evans Dec. 4 at the same time they served multiple warrants to search for evidence to substantiate allegations by scouts. 

He is charged with abusing four youths, and police are seeking others they believe may have been abused during Evans’ 35 years at the helm of the SSS (for Sea Scout Ship) Farallon. 

But Scout Executive Al Westberg of the Mt. Diablo Silverado Council of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) said Evans’ membership in the organization has been terminated. 

Westberg said he is working with his counterpart at the Alameda Council to organize a meeting with parents, and the organization will offer counseling to any youths who need it. 

“We are working to set up the meeting, and we will attempt to have law enforcement there,” he said. 

Evans retains ownership of the Farallon, which is his personal property. “We don’t own any” of the boats, Westberg said, and the name “ship” as used by the scouts refers to the membership in the same way the word “troop” applies in other branches of scouting.  

Supporters have rallied to his cause, with one parent providing his family’s residence as collateral for the accused scoutmaster’s bail, which had been reduced to $190,000. 

Deputy District Attorney Mark McCannon said nothing in Evans’ bail conditions prevents him from meeting with the scouts and parents who are supporting him. 

“If that’s what the parents want to do, it’s within their right to do so,” said the prosecutor who represented the county in Friday’s Superior Court hearing in Oakland. 

The only conditions imposed on Evans Friday were the same two which all bail recipients must meet, McCannon said, “obey all laws and don’t commit any criminal offense.” 

Criminal charges include lewd and lascivious acts with a minor under the age of 14, oral copulation with a minor under age 16, sexual penetration by an object of a youth under age 14, and 18 counts of commission of a sex crime on a youth of 14 or 15 by an adult at least 10 years older. 

While the search warrants and the sworn statements from investigators used to obtain the warrants were sealed at the request of Berkeley Police, department spokesperson Sgt. Mary Kusmiss said that evidence obtained from the computer in the Evans home confirms the charges. 

Department Public Information Officer Lt. Wesley Hester said Monday that detectives have been receiving calls from community members offering information and asking questions about the case. 

Investigators believe there may be additional victims, he said, asking anyone with information to call the departments Youth Services Detail at (510) 981-5715. 

“We want to hear from anyone who may have been a victim or who has knowledge about anyone who may have been a victim,” he said. “They may remain anonymous if they chose.” 

Evans is a retired teacher who taught in Alameda at the Alameda and Encinal high schools. He joined the Sea Scouts in Berkeley 50 years ago and has been active in the movement ever since. 

Prior to his arrest, he was best known in Berkeley for filing the ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit which changed the 1997 City Council decision to end the free lease the city had given the Farallon at the Berkeley Marina. 

The denial was based on the national scouting movement’s refusal to accept gays, a violation of the city’s policies of granting benefits only to groups which do not discriminate against homosexuals. 

Evans, joined by scoutmasters, took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to reconsider an unanimous California Supreme Court decision which upheld the city’s position. 

His next court appearance will be at 2 p.m. Thursday in Alameda County Superior Court in Oakland, said Lt. Hester. 

Westberg said that in addition to the 18 members of the Berkeley Sea Scouts program, Evans has also been a leader in a larger program based in Alameda, which has about 40 members. 

Parents of members of both groups will be invited to the meeting he is working to establish with his counterpart at the Alameda Council, Westberg said. 

Under BSA regulations, Westberg said, Evans has a right to appeal his dismissal, which was outlined in the letter that severed his relationship with the BSA.


Barbara Lee Endorses Obama for President

By Judith Scherr
Tuesday December 11, 2007

Breaking with mentor and former boss Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, Rep. Barbara Lee announced her endorsement for Sen. Barack Obama for president Monday. 

“For me this is a defining moment in the history of our country, a very powerful moment,” Lee said, in a late-morning press conference by phone, hosted by the Obama campaign.  

Calling Obama “a real agent of change” who would “set a course for our country in a new direction,” Lee promised to be active in the campaign.  

“I intend to work very hard to make sure he wins,” she said, announcing a visit to Obama’s Oakland campaign office that afternoon. 

Asked how Lee, a fierce opponent of the Iraq War who has called for the immediate return home of U.S. troops, could support a candidate who has said the troops won’t all come home until 2013, Lee responded that Obama would “bring this occupation of Iraq to a quick resolve. I believe because of his early position [in opposition to the war], he will be forceful in bringing the young people home.” 

Asked how she could call for universal health care, but support a candidate with a less comprehensive plan, Lee answered that she believes “he has the vision—he’ll be able to bring a coalition of people together.” 

As for the break with Dellums, who has endorsed Hillary Clinton, Lee said she’d discussed the issue with the mayor before his endorsement of Clinton and again before she announced her support for Obama. 

“We are individuals,” Lee said. “I’m responsible for my decision. We continue to be friends and work with each other. We don’t have to be in lock step.” 

If Obama fails to get the nomination, Lee said she would support the Democrat that does. “They all have what is necessary to be president,” she said.  

 

—Judith Scherr


Landmarks Commission Approves Shattuck Hotel Revamp

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday December 11, 2007

The Berkeley Landmarks Preservation Commission voted unanimously Thursday to approve the rehabilitation and alteration of the exterior of the Shattuck Hotel. 

The hotel, at 2086 Allston Way, had allowed overnight guests to stay in one part of the hotel while renovating a different part of its interior, until it was shut down by the Berkeley fire marshal on Nov. 15 for multiple violations of the fire code. 

Two of the three long-term hotel tenants surrendered their possessions and reached settlement agreements with owner Perry Patel after the fire marshal ordered them to vacate the premises. Currently no long-term or overnight guests are being allowed to stay in the hotel. 

One of the tenants had filed a petition for a reduction in rent against former owner — Sanjiv Kakkar — which was resolved several months ago. 

According to the city’s Rent Stabilization Ordinance, if guests stay at the hotel for more than 14 days, they are entitled to rent control. The owners also have to register the tenancy. 

“The Patels had to pay $40,000 in registration fees since the Kakkars had not properly registered all the tenants,” Jay Kelekian, executive director for the Rent Stabilization Board, told the Planet. 

“The Kakkars told us that there were only three tenants whereas there were a lot more.” 

Kelekian added that the three long-term tenants were paying between $600 to $1,100 per month each for their rooms depending on how long they had lived there. 

“Mr. Patel was looking at the necessary permits to get the tenants relocated under the scenario that they could return once the construction was complete,” he said. 

“The rent stabilization ordinance requires landlords to obtain permits from the city for substantial repairs, and to give tenants a 30-day notice to leave. Prior to the fire marshal coming, Patel negotiated a settlement with one tenant. When the fire marshal red-tagged the building, two more settlements were reached ... The tenants got a lot less notice than they were entitled to but so did Mr. Patel and all the other guests at the hotel.” 

Patel, who bought the property recently with plans to develop it into a four-star hotel, refused to disclose the settlement amount to the Planet. 

“The tenants had a right to move back after the construction was complete but they reached a financial settlement instead,” said Kelekian, who did not want to disclose the amount. 

“It was a substantial sum ... More than any of them had ever paid in rent in their three years there.” 

Berkeley Deputy Fire Chief David Orth told the Planet that the fire marshal had gone to the hotel after being alerted about problems with the fire alarm system on Nov. 12. 

“The type of work that was going on had created significant fire hazards,” he said. 

“We wanted to evacuate the building right then, but we gave the tenants 36 hours to pack their bags and placed a fire watch for safety measures in the lobby and the floors. But the system did not work. Another fire alarm came in on the morning of Nov. 15 and we found out that people had not evacuated the building in the proper way. A lot of guests were unaccounted for. So I immediately closed it down.” 

According to Orth, the violations included a lack of fire alarms in some of the guest rooms and taped-up fire detectors. 

“This is one of the last hotels in the city to not have installed a sprinkler system,” he said. 

“The construction work has left openings between the floors that have created chimneys for smoke and fire to pass through the floor. Big holes have broken through the concrete floor which have deactivated the fire alarm system. These are not things that can be easily mitigated ... The owner was doing construction under a permit but I am not sure whether he exceeded the limits of the permit or not.” 

Orth added that although fire alarms had gone off at the hotel before, he had not been aware of such a high level of violation. 

“It was only when we went into the sleeping rooms that we found out how unsafe an environment it was for people to live in,” he said. 

Patel told the Planet that he had not been aware of the violations. 

“It was something that the fire marshal brought to my attention,” he said. “The goal was to relocate the tenants but we didn’t get around to it. We had a demolition permit so we started on the fifth floor and were working our way down. I didn’t know the renovations were creating an unsafe environment. I think the Permit Center was aware that we had people living in the building.”


OUSD Considers Moving Forward with New Complex

By J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR
Tuesday December 11, 2007

The Oakland Unified School District interim state administrator and—with one notable exception—the members of Oakland’s Board of Education have agreed to take up consideration of a proposed $75.5 million education complex on the east lake site currently occupied by the district’s aging and earthquake-unsafe administrative headquarters and five district-run education institutions. 

District officials are scheduled to hear a final report on the proposed financing for the complex at the administrator-board meeting scheduled for Wednesday, Dec. 12, beginning at approximately 6 p.m., at the district headquarters at 1025 2nd Ave. in Oakland. 

If approved, the proposed Second Avenue Educational Complex would completely rebuild four of the five educational institutions on the 8.25 acre site—La Escuelita Elementary, MetWest High School, Centro Infantil Child Development Center, and Yuk Yau Child Development Center—as well as the current administration complex.  

Dewey High School, the fifth school on the site, is housed in a relatively new building. The rebuilding of the new administrative complex is not included in the $75.5 million price tag of the complex.  

“No schools owned by the district are in as dilapidated condition as those four schools are,” Board President David Kakishiba said when the issue came before the board last month. “It’s an embarrassment to the district, and it’s less than a football field away from our administrative headquarters. It’s indicative of the worst images of OUSD.” 

A large group of parent and student supporters of the complex held signs and gave testimony in favor of the project during the meeting. 

Under the district’s state receivership, interim state administrator Vincent Matthews has sole and final approval of the project, but he has said that he will do so only after the board takes an advisory vote on the matter. 

Funding for the complex is expected to come from OUSD Measure A and Measure B facilities bond monies. In 2003, the district set aside $22 million for the rebuilding of La Escuelita from Measure A, and although Measure B monies are more restricted because the bond measure passed with a list of proposed projects, OUSD Facilities Manager Timothy White told board members last month that the district “has some latitude” in setting new Measure B projects. 

District staff members said that the district may qualify for approximately $50 million in state school modernization money which it had previously thought it was ineligible for, some of which could be used for the education complex. White also said that the additional money could come from developer fees from the proposed Oak To Ninth housing and commercial complex, which will be served by La Escuelita.  

OUSD’s state administration was criticized by board members and the public for failing to request developer fees from the Oak To Ninth project when the project was first considered and approved by the Oakland City Council. The district may get a second chance at requesting those fees, however, now that a Superior Court judge has ruled that Oak To Ninth must go back through the Oakland Planning Commission and Oakland City Council approval process due to deficiencies in the project’s Environmental Impact Report. 

Board members have been almost all universally supportive of the project, which was introduced by board member Noel Gallo last spring during the height of the controversy over State Superintendent Jack O’Connell’s decision to sell the east lake property to an east coast developer to help pay down the district’s debt to the state. O’Connell later broke off negotiations with the developer after intense opposition to the proposed sale throughout Oakland, and then state administrator Kimberly Statham agreed to move forward with Gallo’s proposal for developing the property. 

The sole exception to board support has been Board Member Kerry Hamill, who was skeptical of the project when it was first proposed last spring. Hamill said at the time that she thought the district should sell at least some of the east lake property to help the district get back on its financial feet. 

Criticizing the lack of specific funding sources when the proposal was presented to the interim administrator and board last week, Hamill said, “I’d feel more comfortable if we had a more detailed financing plan and breakdown. There is a very emotional and passionate group of parents here tonight concerned about the four schools on the proposed site. But we have to be concerned about the 90 additional schools in the district, and whether this project will jeopardize the financing of those.” 


Q & A With Oakland Councilmember Wilson Riles

By J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR
Tuesday December 11, 2007

Editors Note: In the months since the inauguration of Ron Dellums as mayor of Oakland, the Dellums administration has been the subject of criticism, most of it from the center and right. Dellums’ most notable criticism from the left—particularly on economic development issues—has come from former Oakland City Councilmember Wilson Riles, charging, for example, that Dellums has turned over his economic policy to the Oakland Chamber of Commerce.  

Riles ran unsuccessfully for mayor against incumbent Jerry Brown in 2002. He and his wife, Patricia St. Onge, operate a personnel management consultant company, Seven Generations Consulting.  

We interviewed Riles at his East Oakland home last month concerning his criticisms of the Dellums administration. Below is an excerpt from that interview. 

 

What’s your overall assessment of the administration a year into its administration? 

Riles: I’m still convinced that Oakland is better off with Dellums as mayor than it would have been with Ignacio De La Fuente. And that Nancy [Nadel] would not have been able to successfully defeat Ignacio. So that way, I think we’re in a better place. I think, though, that there were a lot of high expectations that are not being met. I think there’s a lot of disappointment and I’m actually surprised about the time that it’s taken for the administration to get on its feet. 

 

What were the high expectations other than in economic development that you think haven’t been met? 

Riles: I think he started out trying to bring everybody to the table. I think that’s what the task forces were about. And I think that’s his motivation for what eventually happened in terms of coming together in the Economic Summit and now working under the aegis of the Chamber of Commerce with PG&E money to bring everybody to the table to decide where the money should go. But, unfortunately, I think because of the nature of what’s now come into place and the nature of the people that he has around him, the process is failing. 

 

What process do you mean? The inclusionary process? 

Riles: The inclusionary process where we’re bringing people together and people are actually working on making the kind of fundamental changes in this community that have to happen. 

 

But it went to the point where the Task Forces met over the summer, they voted and came up with the conclusions, and the conclusions are now published. What’s happened since then? Do you think it was successful up to that point and then something happened? 

Riles: There’s two things. There was a lot of weakness in how the whole Task Force process was organized and facilitated. Because I don’t think people had a clear concept of what it takes and how to bring people together and how to move people towards a consensus. So people came together, a lot of ideas were thrown out. Very few of those ideas, as far as I can see, were actually worked through and an actual plan of action to bring those ideas about wasn’t ever followed. It’s just basically a list, a wish list, of what people wanted.  

 

How did the Task Force process evolve into the Economic Summit? Was that part a culmination of the Task Force process? 

Riles: From what I understand, it was a sidestream. The Chamber had already started looking at their own planning on economic development for the city from what was happening within the Task Forces. In January, they essentially came together with the mayor— 

 

They, meaning the Chamber? 

Riles: Yeah. I don’t know who initiated it, but they came together with the mayor and basically there was an agreement that the mayor would host the summit which originally was supposed to be a presentation of the work of the Chamber. They had actually hired a consultant and done some kind of analysis towards the writing of a report. And they wanted to incorporate—either the mayor wanted them to or on their own—they wanted to incorporate the work of the Task Forces into their own report. But a lot of the Task Force’s recommendations were put in the back of the report and, in a sense, were given lower status. And if you look at how the whole event was arranged, the Chamber’s report and Chamber’s recommendations were highlighted and given a lot of time and the Task Force’s report was shoved together, was not given the time to make the best presentation. This was in the midst of the Task Force process. They had not finalized anything. So it was unfair in terms of how it was projected and what happened. And then out of that, a decision was made to, essentially, invite some of the members of the Task Force to join the Chamber process, which was funded by PG&E to start these economic development clusters. Folks were asked whether they wanted to move over or wanted to do both, and, of course, nobody wanted to do both, so all of that planning work ended up in the cluster process that the Chamber was developing. 

 

And is that what you mean when you say that the mayor’s economic development program has been turned over to the Chamber of Commerce? 

Riles: That’s exactly what I meant about it. To some extent, the Chamber’s original thought was to be exclusive as to who could participate in that process. There were only going to be business people to participate in that process. Essentially, their work in that process was going to be massaged through a hired, paid group to do the analysis and to write the reports. I know that there was some pushback from the mayor’s office to include other folks. But you had a very limited number who were willing to go in there, and then you’re looking at a situation with very uneven representation and so-called power within those discussions areas within the Chamber. You’ve got some folks essentially being paid to be there— 

 

By their companies? 

Riles: By their companies. Their public relations people, whatever, whatever, who have a particular agenda that they’re pushing to benefit their company and a lot less looking at what’s beneficial for the overall community but looking at what’s beneficial for their companies and the agenda that their company’s are pushing. And, then, other folks who are unpaid, retired, or whatever, may have just as much expertise or knowledge but, essentially, are not given the same weight. And the broader perspective is more difficult to create in that environment. And the mayor’s office—I appreciate that he wanted to bring all those people to the table and I think that they legitimately ought to be at the table. But you would expect that there would be some recognition of the fact that just sitting at the table was not enough for people of the community. You’ve got to balance the uneven power relationships to have that be a process that is fair and just and that’s going to work for the voices that are at the table. And that’s just not going to happen. PG&E had a particular agenda, and so there was already a decision made as to how PG&E money to support this process was going to be used.  

For example, the Green Environment Task Force was already slated to look at some issues on just the questions about ship pollution at the port and was looking at spending some of that money to see how that might address the wider questions of trucking and other pollution as a result of what was going on at the port. They were also looking at broader issues of pollution in West Oakland and other parts of Oakland. These issues were not slated to be part of this analysis that was being done. And it's still an ongoing struggle as to how widespread that analysis is going to be. 

 

 


People’s Park: Competition or Cooperation?

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday December 11, 2007

It’s competition vs. cooperation at People’s Park. 

A debate over whether UC Berkeley should sponsor an open competition to choose a new design for the historic site erupted after People’s Park Community Advisory Board member and architect Sam Davis suggested holding a competition last week. 

While some board members agreed that a competition would enhance plans to redevelop the park, others said the move was premature and called for more community involvement instead.  

The competition would be based on the People’s Park Assessment and Planning Study that was prepared by San Francisco-based consultants MKThink over a nine-month period. 

At an earlier meeting in November, park users and stakeholders had emphasized the need for open green space and had criticized plans in the consultant’s study that involved permanent structures.  

Almost everyone involved stressed the importance of fighting crime and homelessness in the park and keeping the spirit of social service alive.  

“There may be disagreements but the document is now finished,” co-chair Joe Halperin said. “It will be provided to anyone who wants to create a plan.” 

He also criticized community members and the university for neglecting the park’s homeless population. 

Davis, who designs homeless shelters and housing, added that recommendations to UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau for solving homeless problems had not received any feedback yet. 

He suggested that a university-appointed task force—separate from the community advisory board—including service providers, the city’s health department and UC faculty specializing in public policy, social welfare and public health, should outline a plan for providing social services to at-risk individuals frequenting the park.  

“We want the cooperation of the city instead of the health department who I am not really impressed with,” said board member Lydia Gans. 

The board also decided to add members from their group to the task force. 

“Coordinating efforts of the city, the university and the churches seems like a responsible thing to do,” said board member George Beier. “I just hope it’s not an opportunity to kick Food Not Bombs off the park.”  

Community members had complained at the November meeting that the report had undermined the importance of Food Not Bombs, which provides free meals in the park to more than 100 people every day. 

“The competition is a good idea,” Beier added. “I could see a landscape architect or a public health class getting involved in it.” 

UC student-member Ionas Porges-Kiriakou questioned whether an architecture competition would allow the public to voice its opinion.  

“It’s not the right time to have a competition,” board member Gianna Ranzzi, who voted against the idea, added. “We should work on the proposals in the report that are doable, such as drainage and solving crime … We have a lot of work to do before we set forth on something like a competition.” 

Community gardener Terri Compost emphasized the need for cooperation.  

“It’s really exciting to see riots once in a while, but I really don’t want to see that,” she said. “People’s Park was created in the spirit of cooperation, so the idea that we could find a design through a competition where one idea would win and others would lose is completely contrary to the spirit of the park … I think the park needs careful collective planning and if the university or the board is unable or unwilling to bring people together to find where we have common ground, then the process has to come from the grassroots.” 

“I think the time is good for the university to step forward, especially since the City of Berkeley is providing $1 million for homeless services,” said board member Mike Bishop. 

The board agreed that the instructions for the competition would emphasize board recommendations and community involvement and require a feature that celebrated the park’s historical significance. 

“The notion that if we hold a competition there will be a riot is absurd,” said Davis. “We need to get the ball rolling. A competition will allow people to see things we haven’t seen and to recommend things we haven’t recommended.” 

Co-chair John Selawsky told the Planet after the meeting that no parameters had been set for the competition yet. 

“People are bristling at the idea of a competition because they don’t want change and fear the unknown,” he said.  

“A lot of students have potential when it comes to contributing new ideas. The Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. was designed by a student … We need to make the park more exciting and turn it into a destination point. Irrespective of whether people like it or not, the university holds the deed to the land. They will be footing the bill and they will have the final say.” 


Trees vs. Security at Berkeley High School

By RIO BAUCE, Special to the Planet
Tuesday December 11, 2007

Last week at Berkeley High School (BHS) two of the school’s 209 trees, those in front of the on-campus first-floor entrance to the divide between the G and H buildings, were trimmed to prevent growth that would block security cameras. 

“With smaller trees, we just routinely lop off the tops of them so that they don’t grow in the way of the motion cameras,” said Al Wilright, director of maintenance at BHS. “It takes up memory space when we have trees blocking the view of the cameras.” 

However, local arborist (and Planet columnist) Ron Sullivan thinks that lopping off the tops of trees can be detrimental to tree health. 

“Topping trees is sloppy practice and not good for the trees’ health,” said Sullivan. “A tree in bad health often becomes a dangerous tree, particularly when weakly attached branches that form after topping get big enough to hurt when they break off and fall on someone. Topping also leaves a tree more prone to disease and rot than better pruning does.” 

Furthermore, Sullivan argues that while you may not see any problems for a while, they will eventually arise. 

“If the ‘smaller’ trees are so young that the tops being cut off are finger-size or narrower, you can get away with it for years,” commented Sullivan. “But you’ll end up with just a weird tree with a bouquet of pencils on top. Get a real arborist in there to redirect the growth, or cut your losses and admit that the ‘memory space’ in the cameras is more important than the trees. Cheap tree work, like any cheap surgery, will cost more in the long run.” 

Security cameras were installed on campus after school started in 2000, when an April 5 arson fire had caused $2 million in damage. Due to advice from the police and fire departments and pressure from then-Superintendent Jack McLaughlin, a large number of security cameras were installed on campus to improve campus safety and to deter students from pulling fire alarms. 

“Before I got here, the School Board voted to install these cameras so that the administration can view them to protect student’s rights,” said BHS Principal Jim Slemp. “We don’t watch the cameras unless we need to use them to follow up on an incident. They have been very effective to determine honesty when there is a fight. It’s also very helpful to have recorded evidence in case somebody pulls a fire alarm in a non-emergency.” 

In general, students don’t find the cameras to be particularly helpful, but don’t oppose their presence. 

“It’s good to have them at our school,” said BHS senior Janet Kenmotsu, 17. “I don’t have a problem with them. However, I doubt how effective they actually are. A little while ago, a person stole my teacher’s camera and after they looked at the security cameras, the security staff wasn’t able to get any information from them. I suppose that in other cases, they would be useful.” 

 

 


YWCA Touches Lives Through the Giving Tree Project

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday December 11, 2007

In a small backroom of the UC Berkeley YWCA, Santa’s little helpers are hard at work.  

They are wrapping presents, checking wish lists and rushing to get presents delivered to those who are less fortunate this Christmas. 

The helpers are the center’s student volunteer board—a group of UC Berkeley students—who are taking part in the Giving Tree Project. 

Coordinated by the Alameda County Salvation Army, the project lets students and community members choose a tag from one of the Giving trees and purchase a new gift for a needy child. 

Volunteers from the YWCA then sort the gifts by age, gender and wish and wait for the Salvation Army to pick them up for distribution on Dec. 17. 

“We request approximately fifty students from Alameda County for the Giving Tree,” said Jenny De Runtz, who oversees the project at the center. 

“Our sponsors include individuals as well as organizations. No one gets to know the names of the children the gifts will be donated to. The Salvation Army gives us a report after the event is over.” 

Wishes can range from the simple to the extravagant. This year’s most expensive gift—an electric guitar—same with a $100 price tag. 

A 10-year-old wanted a science kit—by far the most popular gift on the list—while another aimed for a skateboard. 

So far, the center has been able to attract up to 19 sponsors for 36 children. 

“Some frats have sponsored ten kids,” De Runtz said. “The Cal Band has bought gifts for eight.” 

The volunteers also organize a food and toy drive which are then packed and distributed to needy families through the Salvation Army. 

“We do it because it’s a way to reach out to the community and to get involved in making their wishes come true,” said UC Berkeley Mass Communication and Sociology major Sharon Ma. 

“Even if we are not the primary organizations we are doing our part to connect the children to them. Our location is accessible for people and we try to make it easy for volunteers and sponsors to help out ... In the future we would like to see more people giving during the holidays.” 

For UC Berkeley junior Catherine Brittain, the Giving Tree Project provides an opportunity to de-stress right before the finals. 

“Shopping for gifts is exciting,” she told the Planet last week. “We end up touching so many lives in the process.” 

The Giving Tree Project and the Toy and Food Donation will continue until Dec. 14. 

For sponsorships and donations contact: The YWCA at UC Berkeley, 2600 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, CA 94704, (510) 848-6370. 

 

 

 


Police Blotter

By RIO BAUCE
Tuesday December 11, 2007

Assault with a deadly weapon 

On Sunday at 5:11 p.m., a caller reported that three men had assaulted a 20-year old man with a knife near the Amtrak station on the 2000 block of Fourth Street. The victim was bleeding when police arrived on the scene and suffered severe head wounds. No suspects have been identified. 

 

Child abuse 

At 12:09 p.m. on Sunday, somebody called the police to report that a man was beating his 6-year-old daughter on the 1500 block of Prince Street. Police are investigating the matter. 

 

Connected series of burglaries 

A caller at 1:26 a.m. from an apartment complex on the 1900 block of Dwight Way reported that someone had broken into their apartment and stolen some cash. They thought that the burglary occurred between midnight and 1 a.m. 

In the following hour, three more people from the same apartment complex called in to report similar attempted burglaries. However, nothing was taken. 

Police believe that the same person robbed another house. At 2:16 a.m. on Sunday morning, a person who lives on the 1700 block of Parker Street, three blocks away, reported an attempted burglary. “We believe that there is a connection,” said Lt. Wes Hester, spokesman for the Berkeley Police Department.  

 

Shots fired 

At 12:16 a.m. on Sunday morning, somebody called police to report that shots were fired near the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Derby. There are no suspects in custody.


Critics Ask for More Time to Consider Lab Projects

By RICHARD BRENNEMAN
Tuesday December 11, 2007

A prominent environmental attorney and a Berkeley neighborhood activist are asking UC Berkeley to extend the review period for two projects at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 

Michael Lozeau made his plea in a letter Dec. 4 to UC President Robert Dynes, UC Board of Regents President Richard Blum, lab director Steven Chu and two other lab officials. 

He asked for additional hearings on the environmental reviews of the Helios Building—the site of the $500 million BP agrofuel program and the Computational Research and Theory Facility. 

The lab held one hearing—on the draft environmental impact report (DEIR) for CRT building—Monday night. The Helios DEIR hearing will be held on the 17th, in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave., starting at 6:30 p.m. 

As currently scheduled, the public comment periods end on Jan. 4 for the CRT building and Jan. 11 for the Helios building. 

Lozeau wrote that additional hearings should be held in January because many concerned Berkeley residents will be out of town during the holiday season. 

“The timing of the EIRs and respective comment periods does not serve the community well and breeds substantial distrust and wariness amongst the interested community,” he wrote. 

Lozeau asked the lab to extend the comment period by 30 days and to schedule two additional hearings, one on each project, in January. 

The attorney, who specializes in environmental law cases, represents the Panoramic Hill Association in their suit challenging the gym planned for a site along the western wall of Memorial Stadium as well as other building plans included in what the university calls the Southeast Campus Integrated Projects. 

A decision in that case, which also hinges on questions involving an EIR, is expected within the next few weeks. 

His letter to the land and UC officials was sent as a private citizen, said Janice Thomas, a PHA member who is also seeking an extension of the environmental review for the lab buildings. 

Thomas said the two projects represent 31 percent of a planned 980,000 square feet of new construction planned at the lab through 2025, and should be considered in the context of the cumulative impacts of the lab’s building plans. 

“To get a sense of the amount of construction proposed, consider a large resident development in the suburbs, on undeveloped land, that would be the equivalent of 150 houses, each of 2,000 square feet,” she said. 

Asked for the lab’s response, Chief Public Information Officer Ron Kolb e-mailed, “I don't believe Steve Chu has had a chance to respond yet, but when he does, we will share it with you.”


UC Berkeley Laguna Street Extension Nominated for National Register

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday December 11, 2007

The State Historical Resources Commission unanimously voted to list the UC Berkeley Extension Laguna Street Campus as a historic district in the National Register of Historic Places at its meeting in Palm Springs last month. 

UC Berkeley’s plan to convert its historic six-acre extension campus in San Francisco into a private rental-housing development has met with opposition from preservationists and community groups who want to retain the site for public use. 

First used as a city orphanage from 1854 until the San Francisco State Normal School was established in the 1920s to accommodate public school teachers, the campus has also served as the original home of San Francisco State University (SFSU). 

According to Cynthia Servetnick of Save the UC Berkeley Extension, the former San Francisco State Teacher’s College campus merits recognition for its association with the normal school movement in California, as one of two remaining normal school building complexes in the state, and for its association with Frederick Burk, the school’s first president and a significant figure in California education. 

“Unfortunately, two of the buildings, Middle Hall Gymnasium and Richardson Hall Annex will still be demolished unless we win the CEQA lawsuit,” she said. 

Citing prohibitive maintenance costs to bring the campus up to current seismic and disability codes, the UC Regents closed the UC Extension building in 2004, and it has been sitting empty since then. 

Although the Planning Commission has scheduled a meeting to approve the final EIR and rezone the site from public to private on Dec. 20, San Francisco Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi and State Senator Carole Migden have asked for a continuance because the project contains only 20 percent affordable housing. 

A public hearing on the final EIR and the campus rezoning has also been scheduled for Dec. 20 at 1:30 p.m., San Francisco City Hall, Room 400.


Zoning Board Hears Complaints About Alta Bates Parking Violations

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday December 11, 2007

Neighbors of the Alta Bates Medical Center at 2450 Ashby Ave. are planning to complain about the hospital staff’s parking violations at the Zoning Adjustments Board meeting Thursday. 

The meeting will be held at 7 p.m. at the Old City Hall, 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way. 

The board—which will adjourn for winter break after the meeting—will hear public comments and discuss violations by Alta Bates employees for exceeding the regulations for neighborhood parking specified in their use permit. 

Zoning staff has recommended that the board continue the issue until April to give staff and Alta Bates administration a time to review results of their annual traffic survey to be conducted in January. 

According to the staff report, Alta Bates has implemented new parking policies which might result in compliance with the use permit. 

Neighbors denounced what they said was an effort by the hospital to influence the results of the parking and traffic survey by lowering the number of employees parking in the neighborhood on the days of the survey. 

If too many employees park in the neighborhood, the hospital is required to take additional measures, such as moving some facilities and employees to other locations. 

 

1923 Ninth St. 

Justin Lee of San Francisco will ask the board for a use permit to demolish two residential buildings at 1923 Ninth St. to make way for two three-story buildings housing 15 condominium units. Although zoning staff recommends approving the project, neighbors have expressed concern about the size and potential impacts of the project. 

 

2516 Ellsworth St. 

William Coburn Architects of Oakland had asked the board for a use permit for a major expansion of an existing one-story building at 2516 Ellsworth St. to create a larger number of units for student housing. 

Neighbors said they will appeal the proposed project Thursday because they believe that it is out of scale and would increase parking and noise impacts. The building sits on the border of a higher-density and a lower-density residential zone. According to zoning staff, the proposed project is not detrimental and fits the scale of the neighborhood and 

 

3132 MLK Way  

James Peterson of Corporate Housing Group, Inc., will ask the board to modify the original use permit issued in 1995 for the Prince Hall Arms Senior Housing Project. 

The modified plans for the affordable housing project propose 42 residential units, a 2,492-square-foot community room and 10 parking spots within a four-story building totaling 32,262 square feet. The original approval was for 37 units, 1,200 square feet of retail and 13 parking spaces within four stories, totaling 33,921 square feet. 

 

 

 

 


In Memoriam: Andrew Imbrie

By Robert P. Commanday, San Francisco Classical Voice
Tuesday December 11, 2007

Andrew Imbrie, distinguished composer and senior in the Bay Area’s community of composers and teachers of composition, died Wednesday at his home in Berkeley after a long illness. He was 86. 

He had composed a great corpus of music, works in all of the principal genres, including two operas. One of these, Angle of Repose, based on the late Wallace Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, commissioned and performed in 1976 by the San Francisco Opera, received national acclaim. He wrote symphonies and concertos that were performed here by the San Francisco and Oakland symphonies. 

Composing was his life, occupying him almost exclusively. He never stopped, even in this year completing four works, though his health had been failing for some time. The last complete one, Sextet for Six Friends, introduced by the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble in San Francisco, Mill Valley, and Sonoma last February, was remarkably direct and clear. It was one of the more immediately engaging of all his works. Early next year, a clarinet quintet’s first movement that he finished last month will be played in Boston by Richard Stoltzman and the Borromeo String Quartet. 

His music is unique and individual, independent of any trend, current, or school, recognized by its very personal, often passionate expressiveness and the underlying vocal nature of his melodic impulse. What controls and guides the forces of Imbrie’s music is first a dialectic process, the musical idea generating both its own continuity and its contrasting response, and second his grasp of the whole, a vision of the music’s destiny. At the highest level of integrity, it has always reflected masterful craftsmanship. 

Elliott Carter, America’s most eminent composer, recalls that Imbrie “was a wonderful composer, wrote beautiful, elegant, and sensitive music. I liked him very much personally. He was an absolutely most interesting, amusing, and profound man.” The composer Wayne Peterson describes him as “a completely honest and for many years, the leading composer in the Bay Area. His work has had a great influence on my own music and many people had been influenced by him. He had lived a great life.” Alan Rich, a prominent music critic in Los Angeles, writes, “Most of my awareness of new music and its struggles for existence I owe to Andrew in my Berkeley years: the strengths in his music—the quartets, the violin concerto, that spacious and glorious opera—and the strengths in the way he could argue music’s cause. It made me proud to know him, and it still does.” 

 

A rich life 

Imbrie was born in New York City in 1921 and raised in Princeton, N.J. He graduated from Princeton University. He developed great skill and fluency at the keyboard through early training as a pianist with noted teachers Pauline and Leo Ornstein, Olga Samaroff, Rosalyn Tureck, and Robert Casadesus. Composition supplanted piano as a career aspiration after a summer studying with Nadia Boulanger in Fontainebleau, France, while working with Roger Sessions, his major teacher and inspiration both during his Princeton years and later at UC Berkeley, where he earned his master’s degree. 

Before that he served in the U.S. Army as a cryptanalytic translator of Japanese and immediately after spent two years composing while a resident of the American Academy in Rome. His career had already been launched in 1947 when his senior thesis at Princeton, the first of five string quartets he was to compose, was awarded the New York Critics’ Award and recorded by the Juilliard Quartet. 

Imbrie joined the faculty of the UC Berkeley music department in 1949, teaching there until his retirement in 1991. He also taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, at Brandeis University and after 1991 at the universities of Chicago, Alabama, and British Columbia, at Harvard, New York, and Northwestern universities, the Sand Point Music Festival, and as composer-in-residence at the Tanglewood Music Center. He was given the Alice M. Ditson Award (1947), the National Institute of Arts and Letters Grant (1950), the Boston Symphony Merit Award and Brandeis Creative Arts Award (1957), two Guggenheim Fellowships (1953, 1959), the Walter Hinrichsen Award (1971), and UC Berkeley’s Berkeley Citation (1991). 

His commissions include those from the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony and Opera, the Pro Arte Quartet, Francesco Trio, Ford and Naumburg Foundations, and the Halle Orchestra. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (from 1969) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1980) and served on the board of the Koussevitzky Foundation. 

His compositions ranged widely in genre and included three symphonies, eight concertos, many songs, sonatas, chamber works for diverse instrumental combinations, and choral compositions that revealed his unerring and sensitive ear for the chorus as a complex and human instrument—five that were major works with orchestra. Notable were Drumtaps (to Whitman), Prometheus Bound (to Greene after Aeschylus), and Adam (to medieval and Civil War texts), commissioned and performed in 1994 by Boston’s Cantata Singers. It was praised by Boston Globe music critic Richard Dyer as a “fully achieved and masterly work” and in a musical language “infinitely resourceful and responsive.” The grandest and most moving of these choral works was the Requiem (1984), in memory of his youngest son, John, which set elements of traditional liturgy reflected in poems by Blake, George Herbert, and Donne. 

Imbrie is survived by his wife, Barbara, and his son Andrew Philip, of Santa Clara. The funeral services will be at St. Clement’s Church in Berkeley (2837 Claremont Blvd.) at 4 p.m on Dec. 12. 

 

Robert P. Commanday was the music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1965 to 1993, and before that a conductor and lecturer at UC Berkeley. He was the founding editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, where this first appeared. 


Governor Comes to Oakland to Boost Foreclosure Project

By J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR
Tuesday December 11, 2007

In a renewal of the growing political alliance between moderate Republican California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and progressive Democratic Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, Schwarzenegger came to Oakland last week to announce the launching of a pilot project to help Oakland homeowners hit hard by the nation's subprime lending and home foreclosure crisis. 

Under the project, founders Tom Steyer and Kat Taylor of the Oakland-based OneCalifornia Foundation are donating one million dollars for the creation of a “Community Homeownership Fund” to help selected distressed Oakland homeowners refinance their mortgages and reorganize their credit. Families admitted to the program will receive financial literacy counseling, free banking services at foundation-affiliated OneCalifornia Bank, and have access to a line of credit to cover the gap between their current payment and a negotiated new rate with their lenders. If the project is successful, it will be expanded to other parts of the state. 

Oakland has been one of the areas of the state hardest hit by the subprime crisis, ranking 10th in the nation in foreclosure filings against homeowners hit with rising interest payments. 

At a Fruitvale district press conference flanked by Dellums, Steyer and Taylor, and members of the Fruitvale Unity Council, Schwarzenegger said that “when people lose their homes, the neighborhood loses, the neighbors lose, the local businesses lose, the city and the state loses. There are no winners here.”  

While saying “there is no simple solution or silver bullet to the subprime mortgage crisis, this is a tremendous example of the private sector working to solve a community problem.” 

However, asked by a reporter if the state would intervene to provide tax relief for embattled homeowners by deferring payment on owed taxes, Schwarzenegger threw cold water on that idea, saying tersely, “we are going to be collecting.” Referring to the state's looming $10 billion budget deficit, the governor said that “as everyone is out there struggling, we are struggling too. We have to show fiscal responsibility.” 

The state will play no role in the pilot project, but by throwing his name and prestige behind the project, Schwarzenegger appeared to be encouraging Oakland's role as a state center of pilot project innovation, as well as using it, as he said, to “encourage foundations all over the state to follow this fantastic example.” With little or no state money available to help blunt the effects of the subprime lending and home mortgage foreclosure crisis, Schwarzenegger, like Dellums, is counting on privately funded programs to fill in the gaps. 

Steyer said that the program, which would initially enlist between 20 and 50 Oakland families, would work with lenders to keep the mortgage rates at the “initial teaser rates,” and would loan money to homeowners to help them restructure the debt on their houses “to get a first mortgage they can afford. It will cost the homeowner nothing on a current monthly basis, and it will allow them to stay in their houses.” While Steyer said this would only be a small step towards alleviating the crisis, “our goal is to jump in the water and start swimming, and then to figure out how to do more. 

Sherry Powers, who manages the homeowner center for the Unity Council, said that in connection with the OneCalifornia pilot project, the council would provide foreclosure prevention workshops for homeowners. “Many of these homeowners did not have any financial counseling prior to buying their homes,” Powers said, saying this was one of the reasons homeowners were lured into mortgages that they could not afford. 

Meanwhile, Dellums called the OneCalifornia Foundation project “an extraordinary pilot program.” He said that the program will “deal with only one aspect of the subrime mortgage crisis,” and that he and his staff are working on setting up a meeting with lenders and bankers in Oakland “to come together to address the entire panorama of issues” surrounding the crisis. 

The Oakland mayor has been counting heavily on building a relationship with Schwarzenegger to help fund his proposed “model city” programs for Oakland. Under Dellums' proposals, Oakland would become “the model city,” for the state of California, with the city funneling in an array of state and private foundation-funded pilot urban development projects that can be tested in Oakland and then farmed out to other areas. 

 


Thursday Morning Crash on College Ave. Injures Three

photo by Doug Buckwald
Friday December 07, 2007

Doug Buckwald 

Three people were taken to area hospitals after two cars collided at the intersection of College Avenue and Dwight Way at 10:45 a.m. Thursday. A witness said one of the injured was a bicyclist who was struck by one of the cars following the collision. A police report was still being prepared at press time.


Berkeley Sea Scout Skipper Charged with Sexual Abuse

By Richard Brenneman
Friday December 07, 2007

By Richard Brenneman 

 

Eugene Austin Evans, the Berkeley scoutmaster who sued the city after it refused a free berth to a Sea Scout ship because of the organization’s anti-gay policies, was arrested Tuesday on six counts of child sexual abuse. 

Another 18 counts were added later by the Alameda County District Attorney’s office, charging ongoing acts with four youths. The crimes were allegedly carried out on the troop’s ship after scout meetings. 

Berkeley Police Youth Services Detail investigators served warrants at several locations, including Evans’ home in Kensington, said Sgt. Mary Kusmiss, the department spokesperson. 

Charges against the 64-year-old skipper of the S.S.S. Farallon include lewd and lascivious acts with a minor under the age of 14, oral copulation with a minor under age 16, sexual penetration by an object of a youth under age 14, and 18 counts of commission of a sex crime on a youth of 14 or 15 by an adult at least 10 years older. 

After booking at the Berkeley City Jail, he was taken to the Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, where he was initially held on $1 million bail—a figure reduced to $190,000 during his initial court appearance Wednesday. 

Evans is due back in Alameda County Superior Court Friday to enter a plea.  

The alleged victims range in age between 13 and 17, and police said the crimes took place over a period of years, “but they have yet to determine definitively how long Evans may have been molesting youths,” Kusmiss reported. 

Berkeley Police declined to offer additional details of the crimes or to provide details of the child pornography recovered from Evans’s computer. 

But, Kusmiss said, “We are quite confident in saying there is very strong evidentiary value to support what the boys are telling us.” 

Jim Novosel, a Berkeley architect whose two sons have been members of Evans’s troop, said neither of them had any suspicion of the alleged crimes. 

“My 14-year-old told me ‘no way,’” he said. Another son, a 19-year-old now attending Chico State, also had no inkling of anything amiss. 

“Gene teaches them everything,” said the architect. “Engine work, steering, navigation.” 

Troop members work every other weekend on the boat, a former World War II craft used to recover downed pilots, Novosel said. Troop members also take the craft out on the Bay and make two 10-day trips up the Sacramento River to the state capitol every year. 

Novosel said the craft holds up to 40 youths at a time. 

 

Others sought 

Police believe other youths may have been molested and are actively seeking to identify anyone who may been inappropriately approached by the scout leader. Sgt. Kusmiss asked anyone with information about Evans’s alleged crimes to call the Youth Services Detail at 981-5715. Callers may remain anonymous. 

Berkeley officers said they found sexually explicit photos of children on the computer seized during their search of the scoutmaster’s home. One former troop member said he hadn’t witnessed anything himself, but added that he was uncomfortable with the atmosphere aboard the Farallon. 

Both supporters and detractors of the scoutmaster posted online comments on the San Francisco Chronicle story of Evans’s arrest which appeared on that newspaper’s website, including several in his defense from people who claimed to be former members of his troop. 

Current and former troop members and some parents came to Alameda County Superior Court to offer Evans support during his brief appearance Wednesday. 

During many of the years he served as skipper of the scouting ship, Evans was also a teacher at Encinal and Alameda high schools in Alameda, where he and the Farallon had a second scouting group. 

According to an Aug. 10, 2006, profile by conservative columnist James J. Kirkpatrick, Evans joined the Berkeley Sea Scout troop in 1957 at age 13, and had served as the skipper of the ship since 1971. 

He became a hero of the political right when he filed a legal challenge of city policies that deny free city services to organizations which practice discrimination based on sexual preference. 

The Sea Scouts are part of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), an organization which mandates religious belief as a precondition for membership and bars anyone who is openly or commonly known to be gay. Justification of the “don’t ask/don’t tell” policy is justified by the BSA’s National Council legal issues website as part of the obligated to be “morally straight” affirmed in the scout oath. 

According to the BSA’s official position statement on diversity, posted on the organization’s website, “The Boy Scouts of America has selected its leaders using the highest standards because strong leaders and positive role models are so important to the healthy development of youth. Today, the organization still stands firm that their leaders exemplify the values outlined in the Scout Oath and Law. 

“On June 28, 2000, the United States Supreme Court reaffirmed the Boy Scouts of America’s standing as a private organization with the right to set its own membership and leadership standards.” 

 

Litigation 

The scoutmaster’s legal challenge had been celebrated by conservatives and hailed in hundreds of posts on web sites like Freerepublic.com and in stories on a large number of similar Internet forums and news sites. The conservative Pacific Legal Foundation championed Evans’ cause and took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court after the California Supreme Court upheld the city’s decision in March 2006. 

The BSA national council decried the city’s decision to charge for a marina berth, and charged that the state supreme court ruling upholding the city’s action “denied the Sea Scouts its First Amendment rights of free speech and association.” 

But the nation’s highest court announced on Oct. 16, 2006, that it would not hear the appeal, leaving intact the state decision in the case of Evans v. Berkeley. 

The state court upheld the city’s anti-discrimination policy, adopted in 1997, which barred free use of the Marina to any organization which discriminated on the basis of “a person’s race, color, religion ... age, sex, [or] sexual orientation.” 

With the adoption of the anti-discrimination policy, the city ended a half-century policy of providing free berthing space to the scouts, but the city did not bar the scouts from using the marina on the same terms as other boaters. 

While the BSA didn’t join Evans as a co-plaintiff in his suit against the city, it did file a friend of the court brief when he appealed to the state supreme court. 

The BSA, declared the brief, “has an interest in seeing that its individual members and leaders ... are not subject to unconstitutional treatment by misguided government officials who forget that their role is one of scrupulous neutrality, and not one of censorship of private views.” 

But in finding unanimously for the city, California’s justices declared: “We agree with Berkeley and the Court of Appeal that a government entity may constitutionally require a recipient of funding or subsidy to provide written, unambiguous assurances of compliance with a generally applicable nondiscrimination policy. 

“We further agree Berkeley reasonably concluded the Sea Scouts did not and could not provide satisfactory assurances because of their required adherence to BSA’s discriminatory policies.” 

Numerous conservative groups cited the decision last year in opposing Carol A. Corrigan and Joyce L. Kennard, the two State Supreme Court Associate Justices then up for reelection. Kennard, the first appointee of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, had also drawn ire from the right for endorsing same-sex marriage. 

Berkeley City Councilmember Kriss Worthington said he was saddened by the news. He said he has been working with the members of the scouting movement in the hopes the organization “will change its discriminatory policies.” 

It was former councilmember Diane Woolley who led the prolonged struggle to end the city’s policy of providing free berthing to the Farralon. 

She said the issue began when she was serving on the city’s waterfront commission and was attempting to clean up the irregularities in leases at the marina. 

“As a matter of law, the city can’t give anything away,” she said. So the relevant questions became what, if anything, Berkeley and its citizens received in return for waiving the berthing fees for the scouts, and whether the benefits, if any, were equally available to all. 

The issue then became the scouts’ discriminatory policies which selectively denied the use of the boat to certain Berkeley residents. 

After Woolley was elected to the city council, the commission voted to extend the lease for a year, but Woolley stuck to her guns, and the free lease was ended. 

The lawsuit that resulted named Woolley personally as well as the chair of the waterfront commission, but the former councilmember said she didn’t learn she had been sued until a reporter called her. 

A similar struggle just ended this week in Philadelphia, where the city is evicting the scouts from a city-owned building where they have held a low-cost lease since 1928. 

The eviction comes six months after a 16-1 city council vote which ordered the scouts out unless they dropped their ban on homosexuals. 

 

Scouts Honor 

The scouting movement has been concerned about sexual abuse of youth in its ranks, and California is no stranger to scouting scandals. 

In one highly publicized case in Santa Monica in the 1970s, an assistant scoutmaster admitted trading thousands of images of boys he had molested with other pedophiles.  

Another Southern California scandal ended in the dismissal of officers from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Hollywood Division after they became involved with underage female members of the Police Scouts. 

But the most notorious incident of recent years was the arrest of a national scouting official from Texas whose job had been to protect children from sexual predators. 

Douglas Sovereign Smith Jr., the national BSA official who had chaired BSA National Council’s Youth Protection Task Force, was himself convicted of receiving and distributing child pornography. 

The case began in November 2003, when police in Dusseldorf, Germany, arrested a man in that city for possession of child pornography, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Dallas. 

A search of the German’s computer revealed images he had received from Smith—triggering an international investigation. An undercover German officer, posing as a kiddie porn collector, began working in cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigators. 

On Feb. 3, 2005, a federal search warrant served on America On-Line turned up email video attachments he had sent of underage boys engaged in sexual acts. 

A Feb. 22, 2005, raid on Smith’s Colleyville, Texas home, confiscated a computer which contained 520 kiddie porn images, including a video file and 111 sexually explicit images of boys under the age of 12. Investigators said none of the images appeared to be Boy Scouts.  

Smith pled guilty to a single felony count and received an eight-year prison sentence on Dec. 5, 2005.


Swimmers Irate after City Decides

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday December 07, 2007

A group of local swimmers are irked by the City of Berkeley’s hastily announced closure of the King Swim Center, the last working pool in the city. 

A handwritten notice informed patrons arriving for their daily laps Monday that the pool will be closed for maintenance for three weeks, beginning Dec. 17, but a subsequent e-mail from Scott Ferris, the city’s youth and recreation services manager, informed users that the pool closure dates had been changed to facilitate the contractor’s timeline. 

According to his letter, the King pool will be closed from Dec. 25 through Jan. 13 but will open for its traditional New Year’s swim Jan. 1. 

Maintenance work includes replacement of 160 feet of benches on the north side of pool, a four-day chlorine shock to clean mold and bacteria off the main and dive pool, repainting the locker room floors and doors, and recalibrating the pool’s chemical automation system. 

Some King pool users protested the closure through letters and e-mails to Ferris and Mayor Tom Bates. 

“I am a longtime Berkeley resident who supports the pools with a $64 prepaid swim card, good for 30 days,” wrote Karen Davis. 

“I purchased this card a day before the handwritten POOL CLOSED DEC 17 notice was posted on the door of King Pool. My question is this: How can you possibly justify charging residents a monthly fee for pool use during a 30-day timespan in which the facility is open for ONE WEEK? You may say that this is an ‘unforseen-circumstance-related closure’—but to those of us paying $64 for a month of ‘use’ which consists of only seven days of pool use ... we call that a RIP-OFF, plain as day.” 

Davis demanded to know whether refunds would be issued. 

Calls to Ferris and the Deputy City Manager’s office for comment were not returned. 

“It shows you that the city disrespects its own employees,” pool regular Iain Boal told the Planet. “It did not even bother informing its own employees, one of whom sold Karen the monthly ticket.” 

Boal, along with a group of swimmers, have asked the city to reconsider the closure or to keep one of the three pools open for use. 

“We want somewhere to swim,” he said. “At least one place where we can swim all year in Berkeley. Preferably we want all three public pools open at the same time. There should be some kind of a public discussion about a public amenity.” 

According to Boal, hundreds of pool patrons signed a petition to protest closure, but the city removed the petition from the site Wednesday. 

“The Parks Recreation and Waterfront Department posted a notice saying public postings must be cleared from the main office,” he said. “It has now become a free speech issue.” 

The Willard and West Campus pools are currently closed for maintenance. All three pools are approximately 60 years old and suffer from pipe leaks, decaying concrete and faulty pumps.  

Berkeley residents approved a $200,000 bond measure to repair the pools at the last election, and the city is currently investigating costs for additional upgrades. 

At a recent disability commission meeting to discuss plans for the relocation of the Berkeley High warm water pool to Milvia Street, Pools for Berkeley had discussed the idea of a multi-pool complex. 

Deputy City Manager Lisa Caronna told the Planet in an earlier interview that the City Council had never formally discussed the idea of a multi-pool complex or directed city staff to preview needs, feasibility and sites. 

“The swimming public has worked hard for the promise to keep one pool open all year,” said Summer Brenner, another pool user. “We believed there was a commitment from the city to uphold that promise ... The issue of pools for all people and a long-term vision of an Aquatic Center is currently under discussion. However, I think it’s important to keep the short-term issues alive and well. The health and well-being of many people depend on daily access to public pools.” 

The King swimming facility is used by senior aerobic classes, lap swimmers, youth teams and a Masters class. 

For more information contact Rosemary Fonseca at 981-5152 or email at rfonseca@ci.berkeley.ca.us.


Seniors Say a Fond Farewell to Ryan

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday December 07, 2007

For some, Suzanne Ryan is the North Berkeley Senior Center.  

When Ryan stepped down from her position as the center’s director Tuesday, more than 200 seniors turned up to shake her hand, hug her, share stories or simply take part in the celebration that marked 32 years of her service to Berkeley’s elderly and disabled. 

As the short, gray-haired, blue-sweater-clad figure made her rounds inside the building’s Main Room, it was easy to spot why she was the most beloved of all the seniors there. 

“Suzanne, don’t leave us,” exclaimed Catherine Willis, 73, who serves lunch to seniors at the center. “Oh, I am going to cry ... She’s just wonderful.” 

And she has always been available, as a hundred other testimonials proved during the course of the party. 

The old and the feeble, the forgotten and the lonely—Ryan took them all under her wing one by one and created a multiracial, multicultural second home for all. 

“And believe me, with these seniors it’s not easy,” said Elizabeth Snowden, the center’s former treasurer. “But Suzanne has a rare quality. She can hold everyone together. One time two of the men here were physically fighting with each other. She was able to tear them apart. She has a kind of sweetness that’s special.” 

A native of Louisville, Ky., Ryan moved to Pasadena after attending the University of Wisconsin. 

“I was 22 at that time,” she said. “And wanted to explore different options. While working for the YWCA in Pasadena, I saw that the City of Berkeley had an ad for the director of the North Berkeley Senior Center in the Health and Human Services Department.” 

Ryan began her new job from the much smaller confines of the Lutheran Church at 1847 University Ave. Back then, her office was a hallway. 

“I got to work with the architect who designed the new North Berkeley Senior Center on Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Hearst,” she said. “Never in a million years did I think that the city would build three senior centers—North, South and West. For this building, we had to keep in mind accessibility ... especially hand rails for the disabled,” she said, hugging a man in a wheelchair. 

Despite the abundance of space at 1901 Hearst Ave., problems such as a shortage of parking space and deferred maintenance continue to plague its regulars. 

Ryan’s term at the senior center did not come without its share of problems. There were building and people problems, the latter often solved with the help of the city’s mental health services. 

During the last three decades, Ryan created innovative programs for seniors—including the French and the Chinese clubs—and turned it into a thriving place of comfort. 

“She not only has a good brain but also the biggest heart,” said Allen Stross, a nonagenarian. “Recipes, stories, advice, she has given me everything.” 

Fred Medrano from the city’s Health and Human Services Department presented Ryan with a proclamation for being an ambassador and an advocate for seniors. 

“There have been lots of challenges and she solved them all with a lot of hard work,” he said. “When I think of the North Berkeley Senior Center, I can’t separate Suzanne from the place. When I think of what she stands for, acts of kindness and the rights, needs and aspirations for our elderly community, it’s just amazing.”  

Giving up what she loved doing was not easy for Ryan, but she admitted she was ready. 

“There’s never been one day that’s been boring at the center,” Ryan said. “But I am 60, and I need to do something else,” she said. “I am going to do what all these happy people are doing ... I will be going to a senior center, but it will probably be the one in Albany. I don’t want people here to think that I am watching behind their shoulder.”


Berkeley’s Rush for Green Sidesteps Citizen Commission

By Judith Scherr
Friday December 07, 2007

In a rush for the green, Berkeley officials and their staffs may be bypassing the city’s Energy Commission, members said at a meeting Wednesday.  

Some commissioners also expressed concern with a staff-written draft plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which aims emission-reducing policies at a limited number of energy consumers, leaving out the largest number of Berkeley residents and business owners. 

 

Solar Financing District  

process questioned 

Mayor Tom Bates’ aide Cisco DeVries’ idea to create a “solar financing district,” “caught everyone by surprise,” Neal DeSnoo, the city’s energy officer and secretary to the commission, told commissioners. 

The unintended consequence of the publicity around the idea has been that people considering going solar have stepped back to wait and see what the city has to offer. “People stopped signing contracts,” DeSnoo said. 

The financing plan, still sketchy at this point and not likely to be off the ground for months, would aggregate homeowners and business owners who want to use city-arranged financing. The city would borrow the funds through a bank or bond, which homeowners or business owners would pay back over 20 years through property taxes. 

In principle, it would cost the group less to borrow through the city than individually through a bank, although, by waiting, homeowners could lose tax credits now available, DeSnoo said.  

“I wonder why [the idea] didn’t come to us,” said Commissioner Gerry Abrams. 

Commissioner Jane Bergen agreed and asked, “How could they put it forward [prematurely]?”  

While Commissioner Bruce Chamberlain said he too was concerned about process, he underscored the value of the financing district. “This is a huge win,” he said. 

DeSnoo defended Mayor Tom Bates’ office, saying the council had approved the concept. However, a look at the mayor’s website shows that DeVries announced the plan in a press statement Oct. 23 and that the council approved it two weeks later, on Nov. 6. 

DeVries “shouldn’t be making policy,” Bergen said. “Some individual had an idea and suddenly it became policy.” 

An active member of the League of Women Voters, Bergen said she was concerned with policy made behind closed doors. The LWV believes that “the accountability of government should not be tampered with,” she said. 

Commissioner Josh Kornbluth said he understood that “experts” might feel the need to move quickly, but underscored, “It’s also vastly important [to honor] the responsibility to be democratic.”  

DeVries did not return a Daily Planet call for comment by deadline. 

 

Preliminary Greenhouse Gas  

Reduction plan unveiled 

Several commissioners criticized a portion of the preliminary draft of the city’s plan to reduce greenhouse gases, which they reviewed at the meeting Wednesday. 

The report, written by consultant Timothy Burroughs and DeSnoo, will be presented in draft form to the City Council in January, then submitted in final form for adoption in the spring.  

The question commissioners debated was whether to have a top-down or bottom-up approach to greenhouse gas reduction.  

DeSnoo argued: “You prime the pump to draw others in,” working with a limited number of users to greatly reduce emissions, rather than working with the entire community to achieve small reductions. 

“Leaders will go to near zero [emissions],” DeSnoo said, adding that they will be known as “true Berkeley heroes.” 

The plan targets “early adopters to lead by demonstrating leading edge solutions such as zero energy buildings.” These leaders will create new expectations in green building, and “existing programs will be expanded and new programs developed to increase the availability of advanced energy practices to the mass market.”  

“This is the only possible way to get to 80 percent [reduction by 2050],” DeSnoo said, arguing for the “cutting edge” approach, aimed at reaching 25 percent of Berkeley energy users. “Twenty-five percent is a huge penetration,” he said. 

Bergen, however, said the program should be directed to the average Berkeley resident, she said. “We’re not the Lawrence Berkeley Lab,” she argued. “We need to start with something that people feel they can get their hands on, that people feel they can be a part of.” 

Commissioner Scott Murtishaw argued that the approach on the ground level with the homeowners needs to be efficient. Rather than an individual going into a home to pitch lighting efficiency, that person should be “somebody who looks at the whole home,” whether windows fit in their frames and are double-paned, whether a rebate on an energy-efficient furnace is available and more. 

Funds for a range of efficiencies would be available through the proposed financing district, DeSnoo said. 

Commissioner Tim Hansen added another element. “I don’t see social justice in the conversation,” he said, asking how renters and Section 8 people could be included in the mix. 

The draft proposes that the city look at incentives for landlords to install efficient energy and water systems. The report suggests that an increase in rent, to pay for the efficiencies, would be limited to “the monthly cost savings tenants experience on their energy/water bills as a result of the landlord’s investment in energy saving measures.” 

 

Community Choice Aggregation  

moves ahead 

While new solar energy and financing initiatives have made large demands on city resources, the Community Choice Aggregation proposal continues to be a high priority for a number of members of the Energy Commission. 

The proposal, which would have to be approved by Berkeley voters, would create a district to combine Berkeley, Oakland and Emeryville as an independent entity which would be responsible for supplying energy to the three cities. While PG&E would still own the power lines through which the energy would be distributed, the cities’ joint agency would purchase the power.  

A report from Navigant, the city consultant on the project, is slated to go to the commission in January and to the council in March, according to DeSnoo. 

 

Whither the Green Corridor? 

Asking why they had not been informed of the collaboration in advance, commissioners said they learned about the “green corridor” plan—a grouping of the mayors of Richmond, Oakland, Emeryville and Berkeley, along with UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley Lab—from media reports.  

The collaboration is supposed to benefit green industries and job creation and put the group, as opposed to single cities or agencies, in a favorable position to receive grants, according to news releases on the collaboration. 

DeSnoo said he had not been briefed. “I can’t explain it,” he said, promising to fill the commission in on the details at its January meeting.


Berkeley School District Kindergarten Fair This Saturday

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday December 07, 2007

Parents attending Berkeley Unified School District’s annual Kindergarten Fair on Saturday will get to sample classroom life and ask questions about the district’s assignment process. 

Hosted by LeConte Elementary, the fair aims to make enrollment easier for parents and to introduce them to faculty, staff and special programs. Francisco Martinez, the district’s manager for attendance and enrollment, will give a presentation on Berkeley's Student Assignment Plan. 

The district’s assignment system came under scrutiny in 2003 after it was sued by the Sacramento-based Pacific Legal Foundation on behalf of a parent who charged the district with race-based assignment of students. 

The foundation also filed a lawsuit against the district last year for allegedly violating California’s Proposition 209 by racially discriminating among students during placements at elementary schools and in programs at Berkeley High. 

Although the district went on to win both lawsuits, a recent U.S. Supreme Court hearing—which limited the consideration of race in school integration plans—poses a new challenge for the district. 

District officials continue to defend the assignment system and have even called it a model for other schools. 

“Everything around the student assignment process is of great interest,” said district spokesperson Mark Coplan. “Not only to those who will be going through it now, but everyone else interested in Berkeley's role in integrated classrooms ... 99 percent of the population are happy with it. There’s a very small fraction who don’t like the program. They want specific assignments for their child and continue to ask the question about whether it’s fair or not.” 

The district’s assignment system allows parents to register their first, second and third school choices, and then a computer lottery—which takes account of factors such as race, ethnicity, student background and parental income and education—gives the final placement.  

The students are assigned schools based on their address, which falls into one of three distinct geographical categories. 

“No individual student is identified by race, ethnicity or economic background,” said school board Vice President John Selawsky. “It’s based on where they live. We don’t have to change our process because we prevailed twice in the California Supreme Court.” 

Selawsky added that the U.S. Supreme Court ruling left room for the kind of approach the district was trying. 

“Schools can use strategic-attendance zoning as well as magnet schools and special programs to ensure diversity,” he said. “I occasionally do hear complaints, but we have no intention of changing what we have. Parents who are new to the district should know that the assignment system has been used for a long long time now and it’s what ensures diversity at each school site. It serves a bigger good and the interest of our students and education.” 

According to Martinez—who analyzes multi-year enrollment patterns to calculate enrollment numbers every year—610 students are expected to enroll in kindergarten in 2008. 

Last year, the number was 630. 

“The enrollment numbers for kindergarten have ranged between 570 to 630 for the last five years,” he said. “It’s very stable ... Applications from out-of-district students will be accepted over the summer. We first enroll students who are Berkeley residents and then open it up to others if there is space.” 

With 427 students, Thousand Oaks Elementary School has the largest enrollment rate, followed by Rosa Parks (386) and Cragmont (382). 

The district’s Office of Admissions and Attendance will begin accepting forms for the first lottery for fall 2008 on Jan. 7 with the deadline of Feb. 8 at 4 p.m. 

Assignments for the first lottery will be mailed out by March 7. 

Besides representatives from the 11 elementary schools, volunteers from the city’s transportation services, after-school programs and libraries will also be present. 

The schools will also be open to visitors from Nov. 27 to Dec. 18 and Jan. 10 to Feb. 8 on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. 

Kindergarten Nights—mainly directed at new families—will also be hosted by each elementary school in January.


Missing Berkeley Teen Found Unconscious in Tilden Park

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday December 07, 2007

A Berkeley High senior who had been missing since Wednesday morning was found unconscious in Tilden Park Thursday afternoon and taken to the hospital. 

Last spotted riding her bike from her house in Kensington to school, the student did not show up at school Wednesday and failed to return home at night. The teenager suffers from Type I diabetes and wears an insulin pump. 

Berkeley Unified School District spokesperson Mark Coplan declined to comment on the incident or the students current condition. 

The Kensington Police Department launched a massive search with the help of the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department, the Berkeley Police Deparment early Thursday 

An initial search—aided by tracking dogs—did not yield any results. 

According to media reports, the student had been depressed for the last six months and some of her blogs had caused the police to be concerned about her mental state. 

Calls to the Kensington Police Department for comment were not returned.


City Proposes Meter Hike Will Yield $1 Million per Year

By Judith Scherr
Friday December 07, 2007

In an e-mail to the Planet Thursday, Budget Manager Tracy Vessely shared city staff calculations showing that a 25-cent hourly parking meter fee increase would yield $1 million per year in new funds. These funds are earmarked for programs for chronically homeless persons, in conjunction with the mayor’s “Public Commons” initiative.  

It will take further council action to formalize the fee increase and also take council action to specify where the new funds are to be spent. There are no fee hikes projected for non-metered city parking lots. 

There are a total of 3,110 meter spaces, plus or minus about 50 at any given moment due to construction. 

In fiscal year 2006 (July 1, 2005–June 30, 2006), the city generated $3 million in parking meter revenue with rates set at $.75 per hour, averaging $965 per meter per year. 

Effective March 2007, rates increased to $1 per hour. For the first four months of the current fiscal year, meter revenue was $3.45 million. 

Current projected FY 2008 revenue, based on a full year of $1 per hour, is $4 million, averaging $1,286 per meter per year.  

Based on the current inventory of spaces and hours of operation, each additional 25 cents generates about $1 million per year. 

An increase of 25 cents per hour to $1.25 per hour of parking will result in total annual meter revenue of about $5 million, averaging $1,608 per meter per year. That yields $1 million in new revenue for the program. 

Vessely further noted that costs for conversion to the higher rates would cost $12,500 for new decals and $14,000 for staff time. 


Fire Log

By Richard Brenneman
Friday December 07, 2007

Arson suspected 

Investigators believe an arsonist set the blaze that caused more than $50,000 in damage to a Berkeley apartment at 1912 Addison St. Wednesday morning, said Deputy Fire Chief David P. Orth. 

Orth said the apartment’s tenant had apparently befriended several homeless people who had moved into the apartment after he left. 

“The situation had become untenable, and so he left, but the other people apparently stayed on,” said the firefighter. 

The blaze, which was reported at 6:04 a.m., caused an estimated $50,000 to the apartment and $3,000 in damage to its contents. Additional damage to nearby units was caused by water and by firefighters breaching the walls to see if flames had spread. 

No one was injured in the blaze.


Berkeley Cartoonist Takes Presidential Race to La Peña

By Judith Scherr
Friday December 07, 2007

You won’t have to remove your shoes when you enter Khalil Bendib’s White House. 

“I will not bring the mosque into the oval office,” promised the Algerian-Berkeleyan cartoonist, who’s mounting a run for the presidency. 

“I want to be top dog in a top-dog country—master of the universe,” he told the Planet in an exclusive one-on-one interview in his light-filled north Berkeley home, surrounded by his sculptures, paintings and campaign signs. It would be unthinkable to run for a lesser office, such as mayor or governor, he said. 

Unfazed by what might be seen as a technical lack of eligibility as a naturalized citizen—“I’ll ride Schwarzenegger’s coattails. After he has the law changed for him, I’ll pass him up,” Bendib said, ignoring the timing problem that may present for the 2008 election cycle. And undaunted by the lack of funds and a heightened prejudice against Arabs since 9/11, Bendib’s taking his “Pres in the Fez” campaign—inspired he says by Dr. Seuss’ Cat in the Hat—to the people. 

He has a campaign stop Dec. 13, 7:30 p.m., at La Pena, 3105 Shattuck Ave. Bendib will bring along copies of his newest book: Mission Accomplished: Wicked Cartoons by America’s Most Wanted Political Cartoonist, Interlink Publishing Group, $17.95. 

Cynthia McKinney and Howard Zinn’s accolades appear on the book cover. The forward is written by Norman Solomon. “This book refuses to accept … false choices. Bendib’s cartoons scramble a deck that has been stacked by the demagogues and crusaders who feel that they must diminish the humanity of others to exalt their own,” Solomon writes. 

Unabashedly, Bendib admits marketing the book is behind the idea to run for president. When he saw photos of huge lines of people snaking around city blocks to buy Jimmy Carter’s and Bill Clinton’s books, “I thought—I have a book, too. I have got to become an ex-president. Unfortunately—and I’ve researched it—in order to become an ex-president, you have to be President first,” he said. 

The first thing Bendib would do as president is get rid of the influence of money, which, he says, has corrupted politics and “so-called public education” along with academic freedom.  

“You see it right here in Berkeley,” he said, flipping open Mission Accomplished to a cartoon depicting a man giving directions to a freshman. The man was pointing the way to the university president’s office on a campus map dotted with corporate logos and saying: “Go towards the McDonald’s Nutritional Science Building, past the Monsanto Sustainable Agriculture Department, down to the Lockheed-Martin World Peace Hall, turn right at the Enron School of Business Ethics, and you’ll see it there: Doctor Faust’s office….”  

Born to parents seeking refuge in France during the Algerian war for independence, and having spent his youngest years in Morocco, Bendib became keenly aware of politics as a small child. 

His earliest memories were of his parents sitting in their Rabat, Morocco living room listening intently to the radio for every scrap of news from Algeria. Politics permeated every conversation. Friends were killed; an uncle working for the resistance—an artist—was captured and tortured. “It was a very popular war. Everyone was involved in it in one capacity or another,” he says. Of 10 million Algerians, 1.5 million died. “It was an incredibly bloody war; we call it a genocide,” he said. 

Bendib says he uses humor as a way to speak to those who may not otherwise listen to what he has to say.  

“To reach people, I have to sugar-coat my argument, otherwise I run into a wall in the face of a huge propaganda machine on the other side,” he said. 

For example, he often uses cartoons to show the hypocrisy he sees in George Bush’s politics. In the Mission Accomplished cartoon, labeled “Habeas Corpus Suspended,” the statue of liberty has been hung; the U.S. House and Senate are saying, “You’re guilty until proven innocent,” and G.W. Bush is saying to the hung Statue of Liberty, “Sorry, Ma’am, but in times of war…” Then the little bird Bendib calls his alter ego reminds the reader what Bush has said about the cause of 9/11: “Because the terrorists hate our freedom,” the little bird says. 

A call for justice runs through Bendib’s work, with special consideration for the rights of the Palestinian people. “Nobody else in this country does cartoons about Palestine from a fair perspective,” Bendib said. “There’s incredible censorship when it comes to Palestine. I feel it’s my special mission to bring a little bit of the alternative view.” 

He brings this perspective to all of his work, as he is also a serious sculptor, painter and radio show host of KPFA’s Voices of the Middle East and North Africa. 

One of his best-known sculptures is a 1994 statue, which stands in Santa Ana Civic Center, of Alex Odeh, once regional head of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, killed by a pipe bomb in his office. Bendib describes the work as a tribute to Odeh’s “courageous defense of the maligned Arab-American community.” 

Bendib’s sculptures and paintings can be seen at www.studiobendib.com and his cartoons at www.bendib.com. His campaign website is not up yet.


Legislative Leaders Announce Oil Spill Response

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday December 07, 2007

As the City of Berkeley entered its fourth week under a state of emergency, State Assembly Legislative leaders un-veiled a bill package in response to last month’s massive oil spill from the Cosco Busan crash in the San Francisco Bay. 

It included proposals addressing shipping safety, spill containment standards, communications between agencies and communities, clean-up responses and on-going monitoring of the bay. 

Legislators also called on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to create an independent commission to “review the oil spill and recommend additional reforms to improve spill prevention and response policies.”  

Mary Kay Clunies-Ross, Berkeley’s public information officer, told the Planet Thursday that the prohibitions imposed by City Manager Phil Kamlarz—including staying 50 feet away from the shoreline—were still in place. 

“The re-ratification of the state of emergency will be on the City Council’s agenda for Tuesday, so yes, we’re continuing it until at least then,” she said, adding that small boats were now being allowed to sail in the bay. 

“There were some contractors cleaning around the boat launch earlier today, but I would imagine it would hard to clean during the weather that’s expected for the next couple of days.” 

Berkeley Animal Care Services is currently serving as the drop-off point for sick birds in the East Bay. 

“The bird rescue group comes and collects from us when we call them,” Clunies-Ross said. “We’ve had about six to 10 dead ones and a couple of live ones in the last ten days or so.” 

More than 2,700 birds were injured or killed in the aftermath of the spill, which spread from the East Bay to San Francisco to the Gulf of Farallones and eventually as far south as the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. 

The federal government sued Cosco Busan owners Regal Stone Ltd. of Hong Kong; the company’s insurer, Shipowners’ Insurance & Guaranty Co.; and ship’s pilot John Cota Friday, seeking compensation for clean-up costs and the harm caused to natural resources from the 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel.


Reverend Gustav Hobart Schultz, Jr., 1935-2007

Friday December 07, 2007

The Rev. Gus Schultz, pastor emeritus of the University Lutheran Chapel in Berkeley, died Monday at his home in Berkeley. He was 72 and had suffered for the past 10 years from Lewy body disease. 

As pastor at the Lutheran Chapel, Rev. Schultz was a tireless advocate for social justice, both locally and globally. He was widely recognized for his work and received the first Berkeley Peace Prize in 1985. He played an integral role in 1970 in starting the Berkeley Emergency Food Project, which serves a hot meal daily to those in need. 

Born in Foley, Ala., Rev. Schultz attended the University of Alabama at Tus-caloosa before entering Concordia Seminary in Illinois. Ordained by the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, he served parishes in Rome, Georgia, and Riverside, Illinois, before he came to his post in Berkeley in 1969. 

Rev. Schultz was at the forefront of the Sanctuary Movement. Under his leadership, the Lutheran Chapel offered sanctuary to American soldiers during the Vietnam War, to Central American refugees and to American soldiers during the first Gulf War. He was president of the board of the SHARE Foundation (Salvadoran Humanitarian Aid Research and Education), founder and board president of the National Sanctuary Defense Fund, and a founder of the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant.  

He traveled frequently to Central America, sometimes accompanying Salvadoran refugees as they returned to their homes from camps in Honduras. 

And in the 1970s and 1980s he traveled as part of delegations to both North and South Korea to promote democracy, reunification and communication between American and Korean Christian churches. In 1980 he and the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union played a crucial role in saving the life of South Korean opposition leader Kim Dae Jung, who had been sentenced to be hanged. Kim later was elected president of South Korea and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In the 1990s, along with the members of the Committee for Korea Studies at UC Berkeley, Reverend Schultz organized an annual symposium at the university on Korean reunification, hosting guests from North and South Korea together in the United States for the first time.  

He was also active in local civic affairs, serving as a member of the Berkeley Planning Commission from 1981 to 1983. In 1981, Rev. Schultz was endorsed for a city council seat by Berkeley Citizens Action (BCA) and finished second among the BCA candidates in the municipal election. But after one of the city’s nastier campaigns, the entire BCA slate was defeated. 

During the 1970s, Rev. Schultz helped form the American Evangelical Lutheran Church, later to merge into the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and was elected Bishop.  

As pastor of the Lutheran Campus ministry at UC Berkeley for over 28 years, he touched the lives of many students and counted his friends from all over the globe. He retired from active ministry in 1997. 

Rev. Schultz is survived by Flora Redd Schultz, his wife of 49 years; his brother Ken Schultz of Dallas, Texas; his sister Kathryn Ann Schultz Ford of Foley, Alabama; son Bart Schultz, daughter Locke Schultz Jaeger, daughter Betsy Pauley, all of Berkeley; son Tim Schultz of Walnut Creek; daughters-in-law Gina Lim and Kristie (Kunich) Schultz; son-in-law Chuck Jaeger; and grandchildren Jackson, Matt, Lee, Jesse, Eva and Ross. 

A memorial service will be held on Saturday, Dec. 8, at 2 p.m. at University Lutheran Chapel at 2425 College Ave. in Berkeley. Donations may be made to University Lutheran Chapel, 2425 College Ave. Berkeley, CA 94705; SHARE Foundation 598 Bosworth St. #1, San Francisco, CA 94131; Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, 2770 Marin Ave. Berkeley, CA 94708; or Committee for Korea Studies, 2223 Fulton St., room 508, Berkeley, CA 94720-2318 

 


Robbery Spree Ends in Arrests

By Richard Brenneman
Friday December 07, 2007

Berkeley police have arrested three men they believe are responsible for a string of armed robberies at Bay Area Radio Shack stores, reports Lt. Wesley Hester, the department’s Public Information Officer. 

In a statement released Thursday, Lt. Hester said the arrests followed a 5:11 p.m. Sunday call that a robbery was underway at the 2500 Shattuck Ave. store, where a single gunman entered the store, robbed the clerk and leapt into a waiting car. 

Berkeley officers Scott O’Donnell and David Bartiani spotted a vehicle matching the description broadcast after the robbery as it was leaving the city limits southbound into Oakland. 

The officers gave chase and managed to stop the car at 59th St. and Shattuck. 

The officers arrested three suspects, Frederic Tillman, 21, and Jason Brooks, 24, both of Oakland, and Richmond resident Tiffany Raab, 26. Police also recovered the cash they believed was taken during the hold-up, as well as a pistol and a mask, Hester said. 

The three were charged with armed robbery, use of a firearm while committing a felony and probation violations.  

The three suspects have admitted their participation in three more Radio Shack robberies in Berkeley, including another one at the 2500 Shattuck store on Sept. 10, as well as two separate robberies at the 1652 University Ave. store on Sept. 30th and Nov. 23rd. 

The three are the principal suspects in a string of Radio Shack robberies in San Leandro, Hercules, Vallejo, El Cerrito, Albany, Oakland, Union City, Hayward and in the unincorporated areas of Alameda County. 

The county District Attorney’s office has charged the suspects in a total of 18 robberies in Alameda County—including those in Berkeley—though not all three are charged in all of the cases county-wide, Hester reported. 

“These guys have been very, very, very active,” said Lt. Hester.  

They are also suspected in a number of other commercial and gas station robberies in addition to the Radio Shack stick-ups, he said.


YEAH Opens Shelter for Homeless Youth in Berkeley

By Lydia Gans
Friday December 07, 2007

For the sixth year in a row YEAH (Youth Emergency Assistance Shelter) has opened their winter shelter for homeless 18- to 24-year-olds—and their pets—at the Lutheran Church of the Cross on University Avenue in Berkeley.  

It might have as many as 55 or 60 young people—no one has ever been turned away. If someone appears with nowhere else to go, “we put a mat on the floor and they’re there,” says Sharon Hawkins Leyden, co-founder and co-director of YEAH.  

When people come in, they get a number which is put on a chart, and they are given boxes with that number containing blankets, pillow and linens and toiletries which are theirs for the whole time that they’re in the shelter. They can stay in the shelter as many nights as they need to. Pets are allowed in and sleep on the mats with their owners.  

“The pets are often an extension of people’s family and you can’t ask them to leave their pets somewhere or get rid of their pets just because they don’t have a house. Sort of feels like a social justice issue,” Leyden says. “So we say pets are really important—they’re really important to housed people, they’re really important to unhoused people.”  

Besides providing a bed for the night, YEAH offers a number of programs and activities that go on throughout the year: men’s groups and women’s groups, a youth council to gain leadership skills, workshops and a GED program to prepare the youth for the General Education Diploma test, which is being run and paid for by the First Congregational Church. In the evenings in the shelter there are games, movies, creative writing and poetry groups. Dinner and breakfast are provided; there are showers, laundry and referrals to doctors and community resources. “And,” Leyden says, “they get a community of people.” 

It would be hard to underestimate the importance of that community of people, something so many of these youth are lacking. Of the young people coming to the YEAH shelter, many of them are out of the foster-care system. Others have left or been forced out of abusive family situations. 

“We have about 80 percent of our youth come completely unattached. They don’t have any support systems,” Leyden explains. “We have emergency cards at intake. We ask them who should we contact in case of an emergency and nine out of ten times they say there’s no one. Which is stunning! To be 20, 21, and have no one that you could call.”  

She tells about talking to youth who have tried to kill themselves, “and I say to them, ‘Who should we call if you die?’ And they’d say, ‘No one’. And I’d say ‘Who’s going to bury you?’ and they say ‘YEAH.’ It’s profound isolation with some of these kids. Just profound.” By comparison a group of UC Berkeley students asked to name the most important factor contributing to their success unanimously responded “family support.” 

“That’s why we want to make YEAH not a social service organization ... we want to make it a community. Because if you belong to something, and you feel valuable, and you feel worthwhile, then from that you get a sense of responsibility and from that you get to actually make strides in your life ... But if you don’t have that and you feel it doesn’t really matter if you’re on the planet or not, nobody really cares whether you’re on the planet, you do all kinds of [negative] behavior.” 

The YEAH community encompasses not only the youth who come to the shelter and those who participate in the year- round programs offered there but also the many volunteers. 

Leyden talks about the “community volunteers who want to come because they feel like they have something to give. But they also want something too. This is reciprocal. People don’t come down here because they’re saints, they come down here because they too want to be part of something that’s bigger than themselves and their day-to-day struggles. They too want to feel like what they do is important in their communities.” 

In contrast to other churches, Pastor Sarah Isakson and her congregation at the Lutheran church of the Cross have opened their doors and their hearts to YEAH. Many of the YEAH volunteers are members of the congregation. Pastor Sarah is on the board and participates actively in the program.  

What Leyden says YEAH really needs is a building of their own where they can operate full time to provide year-round shelter and comprehensive services in a supportive environment.


Opinion

Editorials

Why Some Kids Go Bad

By Becky O’Malley
Tuesday December 11, 2007

Possibly a weekend front page editor with a sense of irony laid out the big metro daily I saw on Sunday. At the top of the page was an all-to-familiar story about young black men destroyed by absentee parenting and the allure of street life. It featured the obligatory map of Oakland. “OAKLAND: A PLAGUE OF KILLING” was the overline. And the subhead: “Trapped in a bleak world where drugs and violence offer a chance for money and respect, many young black men quickly resort to murder.” 

Below the fold, right below the picture of the barbed wire fence of a state prison, but in pointed contrast to it, was a soft feature about yet another perk for the lactation, latte and laptop set: “While their children play and learn, parents can visit cafe, business center or fitness facility at Ghirardelli Square—Kids [sic] club hopes to double as a parental playground.” Deliberate or not, the juxtaposition of the two stories couldn’t have made a clearer statement about what’s wrong with what’s happening to many young people today. 

San Francisco papers enjoy using Oakland as the poster site for urban horror stories, but the story could just as well have been written about Hunter’s Point, or Richmond, or Vallejo, or Antioch, or even about Berkeley. The young men tracked into their prison cells by the reporter were black, but they could have been Latino, or even, as we learned from last week’s headlines, white boys in Nebraska or Colorado. There are neglected throwaway children everywhere these days.  

It is a familiar story, and its many causes are also familiar to any thinking reader. If the reporter had chosen to, she could have listed them on the back of an envelope. It’s a problem well-described by a medical term: multifactorial. The ready availability of guns, of course. The war on drugs, which has turned possibly unhealthy recreation into a billion-dollar illegal industry. Racially-tinged sentencing disparities, which send black crack cocaine dealers to jail for long terms while white powder cocaine dealers walk.  

But most of all, the cause of what is sometimes called the violence epidemic is the cental organizing principle of American life in the last thirty years, pointed up by the stories juxtaposed on Sunday’s front page: The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The parents of a few kids have jobs that pay very well, enough so that they can afford the kind of deluxe child care offered by the Ghirardelli Square club. But other parents work most of their hours at hard jobs that don’t pay much, and their kids are raised on the street with predictable consequences. Mothers of the three convicts featured in the Sunday spread were a nurse, a hairdresser and a night clerk in a liquor store—all jobs requiring long hours and hard work just to pay a few bills. Fathers were mostly unemployed and unemployable, absent, incarcerated or dead.  

It’s easy to blame George W. Bush for this situation, and it wouldn’t be completely wrong to do so. But it was William Jefferson Clinton, lovable old Bill, whose welfare-to-work program kicked parents off Aid to Families with Dependent Children and into dead-end low-paying jobs which left them no time to take proper care of their kids. The welfare moms I knew in the sixties when my own kids were little, though they could never have competed in the job market, loved their kids and knew where they were most of the time, but most low-income parents today can’t manage that.  

The AFDC check made it possible in those days for some family member to be home after school—that’s now an unaffordable luxury for a growing number of families. Most of these families are not white, though some of them, like the mother of the unfortunate young man in Omaha, are. The parents of today’s kids of all races and in all income brackets would benefit from the program at the San Francisco “family club”, but few can afford it (fees start with a $2000 annual membership.)  

Even proven government programs like HeadStart have never come close to being fully funded and available to everyone. My oldest daughter was in one of the first HeadStart classes during Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, since we were living on a graduate student’s stipend in a low-income minority neighborhood. It was spectacularly good, as good as the private nursery schools my younger children and grandchildren attended. If every child in Oakland could be in a program like that from age 2, and if every parent in Oakland made enough money in few enough hours on the job to have some energy left for parenting, fewer boys would end up on the streets and ultimately in jail. But we’ve chosen instead as a nation to give ever-bigger tax cuts to people who are already too rich. 

The Sunday story had a Monday follow-up using the standard formula: first document a disaster, and then offer a feel-good tale of big-hearted individuals making a difference. Here the feel-good factor was supplied by the Big Brothers, one-on-one mentoring for boys in the troubled teen years. The featured encounters were heart-warming indeed, but no panacea for the bigger social problem. (There’s a theory that all boys need to keep them on the straight-and-narrow is a male role model, but Berkeley news in the last week provided some cause to question that idea as a universal solution.) Much more is actually needed—we need to do a huge number of things to create and empower a complete social support network for our young. That means some subsidized downtime for harried mothers and grandmothers of little kids. It means comprehensive school-based programs to make sure that every child has adequate nutrition and competent supervision all day every day, not just over-crowded classes from 8 to 2 and the occasional poor quality slice of free pizza for lunch.  

And it’s not just minority kids, though many African-American children at the bottom of the class structure are still suffering disproportionately from the social consequences of slavery, and many Latino and Asian-American kids are carrying the stress of their parents’ migration struggles. Any child whose family members work too many hours for too little pay is an at-risk child. And as these kids grow up and become over-stressed parents themselves, problems are compounded in each successive generation.  

Families need genuine support for their child-rearing efforts, and where they aren’t succeeding they need efficient and compassionate substitutes to take over some of their responsibilities. What’s needed now is nothing less than a New-Deal-scale program to take care of all our kids, paid for by realistic taxes on the obscene wealth now being amassed by a few favored clients of the current administration. Are any of the Democratic (or even Republican) candidates in the next election ready to get behind this kind of effort? Ask them when they solicit your vote and your dollars. 

 

—Becky O’Malley 


No Conflict: Opposing Military, Supporting Free Speech

By Becky O’Malley
Friday December 07, 2007

“The issue of support for the presence of a USMC Officer Selection Office in Berkeley pits Berkeley’s traditional anti-war stance against its historic commitment to free speech and assembly.  

Citizens, and some City Council members, have spoken out against the location of a Marine Officer Selection Office in Berkeley—a city that officially opposes the current conflict in Iraq. There is a desire to protect our youth from contact with recruiters and a concern about the actions of dishonest recruiters in other parts of the country. 

As traditional as is Berkeley’s anti-war philosophy, the city has an equally long and passionate history of support for the rights of free speech and assembly, which supports the right of this Office to exist in Berkeley. The essence of the Free Speech Movement was protecting the right of all voices to be heard, even those at odds with the prevailing political climate of the time and place. 

Free Speech must not be limited to speech with which one agrees. To allow a legally permitted Office to be shut down, or to limit its right to do business because one disapproves of its message, gives lie to Berkeley’s claim as a city tolerant of diverse viewpoints, and home of the Free Speech Movement. 

No one can limit the right of individuals to ignore a recruiting office, but a city must not take the position of opposing the existence of that Office. It is appropriate that the City Council of Berkeley affirm the right of this office to exist and allow it to succeed or fail on its own merits. 

Should Council Members support the right of this Office to exist in Berkeley?” 

 

This current “issue” as posed on the website of the Kitchen Democracy organization is an excellent illustration of my old friend George Lakoff’s theory that how something is framed makes all the difference. Why the ironic quotes around “issue”?  

Well, has anyone proposed silencing the marine recruiter who’s currently working Berkeley? Not that I’ve noticed. And yet, consider the frame in the first sentence: 

“The issue of support for the presence of a USMC Officer Selection Office in Berkeley pits Berkeley’s traditional anti-war stance against its historic commitment to free speech and assembly.”  

The whole statement is called an “article” on the website, also misleading, since that’s a term normally associated with professional journalism or with academic research—it carries with it the aura of impartial scholarship. But the piece is really a somewhat poorly informed expression of opinion. It creates a polarity where none exists: Do you say yes or no to free speech? Have you stopped beating your wife yet?  

Allowing wishy-washy “neutral” or “maybe” votes (oh, “positions,” they don’t call them votes anymore) doesn’t make much difference, since few correspondents select them. And since anonymous posting is allowed, there’s a lot of arm-waving taking up space on the site in both the “yes” and the “no” columns.  

Among the posters who’ve signed their names are a good number of people I know to be ordinarily intelligent and thoughtful. Here they’ve come down on both sides of the non-issue, clearly because they haven’t given it much thought this time. The format encourages knee-jerk reactions even among the best and the brightest. It’s too easy to “vote” without thinking much about what you’re doing.  

In fact, no one—no surprise in Berkeley—goes on record as being opposed to free speech. Most, though not all, are opposed to the war in Iraq and even to militarism in general. Most of them, however, don’t seem to be thinking very hard about what the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, traditionally the mainstay of support for freedom of speech, is all about, and to whom it applies.  

Quick review: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” 

Historically, this has been extended to include lower governmental entities such as the Berkeley City Council. The council even takes an oath each year to support and defend the U.S. Constitution, as well as the California constitution, which has similar prohibitions. So why, in this case, does anyone think the council needs to have a whole special discussion about whether or not the marine recruiter is free to do his business in Berkeley? Don’t they have other things to do? 

Now, we do have a City of Berkeley tradition, not mentioned on the K-D site, of hoping to ignore those constitutional law decisions which say that you can’t control the content of speech. That’s why City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque, thankfully now just a bad memory, went all the way to losing in federal court trying to keep panhandlers from asking for money on the street. But in this case no one at City Hall seems to be saying that the marines aren’t allowed to talk about signing up kids up to make war, or that their opponents aren’t allowed to tell them that they’re dead wrong. 

It is accepted legal doctrine that some restrictions on the time, place and manner of speech are allowed, of course. If the marines decided to hire a sound truck and cruise the hills in the middle of the night blasting residents out of bed with John Phillip Sousa marches and their recruiting message, they could be stopped in a hot minute. But does running a discreet, low-key office downtown during business hours qualify? Probably not. 

The more interesting question is what restrictions, if any, could be placed on their current opponents, who favor, shall we say, more colorful and graphic expressions of opinion. If I were their lawyer, I’d enjoy arguing that because they don’t have the same grandiose taxpayer-funded budget the marines do, they’re forced to make their point in creative ways. The aggregate excitement around the recruiting office might be used as an argument for limiting all such activities to streets which aren’t so busy, but that would be a hard one to make. 

The whole discussion is yet another demonstration of the deficiencies of the Kitchen Democracy format. Anonymous or pseudonymous comments are almost always pointless, which is why the Planet doesn’t print them, though we will occasionally withhold a name from publication on request if we know the writer faces some real threat. The comments on news articles which many papers are starting to allow on their websites signed by cutesy false names are similarly poor, verging on illiterate.  

On the other hand, we’re constantly amazed at the excellent signed submissions we get for our printed opinion pages, even when we don’t agree with them. There seems to be something about knowing that your ideas will appear on paper with your real name attached that makes writers pull up their socks—think things through a bit before writing, revise text if needed, use normal grammar and spelling—refinements which are usually lacking in quick responses posted only on the web. We appreciate them, and our readers do too. 

—Becky O’Malley


Public Comment

Letters to the Editor

Tuesday December 11, 2007

IRAQ OCCUPATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Conn Hallinan’s Dec. 7 column “The Algebra of Occupation” is a succinct popularization of Guerrilla Warfare I. It is what every military historian and analyst—not to mention counterinsurgency specialists like U.S. Army Special Forces and General Petraeus—know, and are largely helpless to overcome. 

The military solution should be withdrawal, but the geo-political strategy of imperialism is ascendant. Hence victims and victimizers do the suffering. 

Al Sargis 

Oakland 

 

• 

HYPOCRITES MULTIPLY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I read in the Planet and elsewhere that Sea Scout master Eugene Evans was just arrested for molesting some of his young charges after being the chief plaintiff before the Supreme Court against Berkeley denying cheap berthing rights to his group due to the Boy Scouts of America barring gay youths from joining. 

So another self-righteous moralizer joins the homophobic parade of hypocrites, which include the likes of evangelist honcho Ted Haggard, Senator Larry Craig (R), the airport men’s room prowler, and Rep. Mark Foley (R), the would-be hassler of Congressional pages. 

What Richard Brenneman neglected to mention in his story was that atheists are also barred from joining the BSA and thus its Berkeley-affiliated Sea Scouts. This means that the following nonbelievers would have been stiffed had they had been our contemporaries as youngsters: Mark Twain, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Edison, Noam Chomsky, Woody Allen, George Carlin, Percy Bryce Shelley, Albert Einstein and computer tycoons Bill Gates and Larry Ellison. 

Harry Siitonen 

 

• 

METRO LIGHTING  

EXONERATED 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Metro Lighting Exonerated 

Metro Lighting recently received a letter from the acting regional director of Region 32 (Oakland) of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) containing the following findings: 

 

The Region (Oakland NLRB) has carefully investigated and considered the (unfair labor) charges against Metro Lighting and Crafts... Based on that investigation, I have concluded that further proceedings are not warranted and I am dismissing the charges.” 

The charges dismissed were that Metro Lighting: 

1. Locked out pro-union workers. 

2. Disciplined workers differently after they picketed. 

3. Fired a worker for union organizing. 

The investigation concluded that: 

1. Workers walked out, they were not locked out. 

2. The discipline was in response to the workers’ refusal to obey direct orders and unrelated to the picketing activity. 

3. The worker was terminated for non-union related reasons involving his job performance. 

Therefore the NLRB has determined that these claims were not substantiated.  

 

Of course we knew that, but it is great to have it in writing from the government! 

Lawrence Grown 

METRO Lighting & Crafts 

 

• 

OAKLAND POLICE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

This is following up on J. Douglas Allen-Taylor’s Undercurrents column two weeks ago of “Who Will Manage: The Police 12-Hour Shift Decision” Allen-Taylor does mentions the problems associated with trying to fit three ten hour police shift schedules into a 24-hour day, resulting in six hours of unintended overlap time. He does not mention the potentially bigger problem arising from half the patrol department works Sunday to Wednesday, and the other half works Thursday to Sunday, which results in a double overlap all day Sunday and partial quadruple overlap for six hours on Sunday. I have been told that these double and quadruple overlaps results in a 24 percent loss of effectiveness of OPD (Oakland Police Department.) 

The 12-hour shifts proposed by the Oakland mayor and police chief will result in one officer per patrol beat at all times with the total elimination of all the double and quadruple overlaps, which should be an improvement. After some online research, I am not as concerned about the 12-hour days as I initially was. There seem to be about as many different officer schedules as there are police departments. In many police departments the officers intentionally chose 12-hour shifts, and even see it as a positive recruitment factor. In the 19th century, officers often worked much longer hours six days a week, and often bunked at the station house like firemen do today. Yes, fatigue can be a factor. But officers on 12-hour shifts tend to get full days off every second or third day. Research shows that many officers with eight- or 10-hour shifts and less frequent breaks are equally likely to have some fatigue even before their shift begins. Also, many officers with shorter shifts are much more often mandated to extend their shifts, the worst of both worlds. My biggest current concern for Oakland is the morale issue where the Oakland police officers union is dead set against the twelve-hour schedule which they feel is being forced down their throats. 

However, I think Oakland could do even better by following Berkeley’s model which has four day 10-hour staggered shifts which Oakland officers want. Oakland does not seem to be taking advantage of the quieter times to have more officers available during the more active times of the day with much higher calls for service. 

A patrol officer is normally supposed to handle all the calls for service that arise in his beat during his patrol time. Beats in the Oakland flats on the Berkeley-Oakland Border are about 50 blocks in size. Just over the border in Berkeley, beats are a much more manageable 30 blocks in size. However, during the quieter hours of the night and early morning, Berkeley assigns one officer to cover two beats, a total area just slightly larger than one of Oakland’s adjacent beats. This much more closely follows the pattern of calls for service with smaller areas during the busy times and bigger areas during the quiet time. Berkeley does this with just small intentional 15 and 30 minute overlaps for roll call. 

Two subsequent letters by Charles Pine and Phil McArdle responding to Allen-Taylor’s feature article by make the arguments that Oakland should have either 1,100 or 2,000 officers. Many cities, especially on the east coast, would have 1,600 or more officers for a city the size of Oakland. Oakland has approximately 720 officers for 395,000 population, Berkeley has approximate 182 officers for 104,000 population, almost an exact four to one ratio in both officers and population. However, if Berkeley had the same murder rate as Oakland, there would be 20-25 deaths each year in Berkeley rather than the middle single digits. Yes, the demographics are different, but do the demographics account for the entire four or five to one difference in the murder rate? 

Osman Vincent 

 

• 

IRAN WAR IS NOT  

ABOUT TERRORISM 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Bush and his co-conspirators have known since 2003 that Iran is not producing and does not intend to produce nuclear weapons. Why then are they still insistent that war be perpetrated upon the nation and people of Iran? 

The answer is the I.O.C.: the Iran Oil Bourse, which is also called the International Oil Bourse. Although Iran has delayed opening its own new market for oil transactions three times since Spring of 2006 it has begun using the Euro in as many oil transactions as it can. 

When the dollar is no longer used in the majority of oil transactions world-wide the United States will no longer be in a controlling position in world oil markets. This is why ex and not-so-ex kingpins of the oil cartel in D.C. are pushing for war. 

Glen Kohler 

 

• 

PLANET COVERAGE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It is with great pleasure that I read Ron Lowe’s weekly editorials...I mean letters. Becky, I can’t imagine what he’s done to gain such favor with you. Johanna Graham is another who seems to share your special editorial slant and enjoys a regular space for her misinformed rants. I so enjoy theirs and others’ perspectives on the world that find their way into this silly paper. It’s so dang entertaining! 

Anyway, I look forward to reading your fair and balanced coverage from outside the annual AIPAC dinner coming up. 

May I pass along any message on your behalf to all the elected officials inside the event? Remember, they’re ALL committed supporters of the Jewish state 

Jonathan Wornick 

 

• 

CANYON OAKS II 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Canyon Oaks II, as is, paves the way for destructive over-development in Richmond/El Sobrante Hills. The Hillside Ordinance calls for minimal grading and tree removal. The Tentative Tract Map imposes a typical suburban subdivision layout on steep hills and riparian corridors. The result is excessive grading and tree removal, contradicting the intent of the Hillside Ordinance. 200 to 400 significant trees are proposed to be removed where the Ordinance calls for careful consideration of tree-by-tree removal when “reasonably” necessary; implying only when other options are unavailable. 

Tree removal or grading should be allowed only after the CLB is formally established and irreversible. A prior, widely accepted working model should be presented for all to see, and then followed. 

Parts of the unusually large 32 lower lots could be left in their natural state (ungraded, with no trees removed). Homes could be placed flexibly. This could preserve significant wildlife habitat and make the project more appealing to both residents and neighbors. 

The upper lot pads for the custom home should be carefully conditioned. The upper lots are extraordinary habitats, laterally steep and tremendously scenic. These homes should not be towering mansions.. 

We want to condition Canyon Oaks II so that it adequately conforms to the Hillside Ordinance and General Plan; a win-win solution. This appeal will be heard at 7 p.m. Dec. 11, Richmond City Council Chambers, 1401 Marina Way South. 

Herk Schusteff 

El Sobrante 

 

• 

MORE ON CANYON OAKS II 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

At the Canyon Oaks II planned development site, a grove of at least 200 healthy, mature California Live Oak trees are slated for removal along the northern steep slope. This fails to weigh the ecological impacts on the larger community. Hillside stability will be compromised. Tree dwelling mammals, birds and insects lose their homes, food sources and nesting areas. Ground mammals, reptiles, amphibians and insects lose damp, shady areas that protect them from hot sun. 

Trees are nature’s most energy efficient air-cooling, filtering, and oxygen enriching systems. Loss of shade on this expanse of hillside creates a hotter microclimate. In addition to compromised air quality, this means increased water needs (for artificially imposed landscaping) and more electricity for home cooling. It seems contradictory for Richmond to allow this, while committing to “go green". While environmentally friendly industry should be applauded, could they also commit to “stay green"?  

The words “minimizing impacts, preserving and integrating natural features” appear repeatedly throughout the Richmond Hillside Ordinance, yet the Canyon Oaks II development is moving through, as is, in spite of failure to comply with these regulations. Please attend the Dec. 11 Richmond City Council meeting. There is a better solution. 

Mary De Benedictis 

El Sobrante 

 

• 

BRT’S IMPACT ON BUSINESS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Steve Geller keeps implying that I have avoided addressing the likely impact on local businesses if Bus Rapid Transit were implemented in Berkeley. That’s simply untrue. I have consistently stated that the removal of on-street parking spaces on Telegraph Avenue and in downtown would hurt small businesses.  

AC Transit’s current BRT proposal calls for the elimination of many parking spaces -- without replacement. Anyone who doubts that this would affect business revenue should talk with the merchants on Telegraph whose businesses suffered significant drops in income after the city removed parking spaces in front of their stores earlier this year. (The spaces have since been restored). 

Comparisons between Eugene, Oregon’s BRT system and AC Transit’s proposal are of limited value because conditions are different here. For example, their BRT route is not lined with businesses that rely upon on-street parking, while our route would pass businesses that need this parking along virtually the entire route. In addition, when parking was removed in Oregon, the planners made sure that ample alternate parking was available nearby, while in our case, the lost parking would not be replaced. 

I would be happy to discuss BRT with Steve Geller or anybody else at any time. I am 

hardly guilty of trying to duck this issue. As your readers know, I called for a public debate on this topic months ago, and I am still waiting for any BRT proponent to take me up on this offer. 

I think the public would benefit from a fuller discussion of the facts surrounding 

the BRT controversy. That’s our best hope to avoid making a disruptive $400 million mistake that would cost even more millions of dollars to correct later. 

Doug Buckwald 

 

• 

DECISIONS, DECISIONS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

So which candidate am I rooting for as our next president? I vacillate on this decision almost daily. One day I’m high on Hillary, the next day it’s Obama. But this is what I know. In light of the horrendous Omaha and Colorado killings, whichever candidate demonstrates the courage to risk the wrath of the National Rifle Association by demanding tighter gun control laws will win my vote. 

Dorothy Snodgrass 

 

• 

CITY POOLS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Several years ago I remained in “good faith” as I watched and worked with the city, particularly the Parks and Recreation Department, to find a way to keep our city pools open for use by the citizens of Berkeley. 

In 2001, the first year I was involved with P&R, COB, and citizen pool users in the effort to keep pools open, we experienced the same tactics and lack of good faith communication expressed in the Dec. 7 Daily Planet article, “Swimmers Irate after City Decides to Close the Last Open Pool.” It all sounds sadly and, unfortunately, totally familiar! 

Five and a half years ago, in that year’s attempt to close our pools, we found that apparently at least several thousands of dollars collected for city swim programs had been deposited in a private account and not turned over to the City of Berkeley. 

After we discovered and exposed the person responsible for these city swim programs and the money involved, said person was placed on administrative- leave with full pay pending investigation. I was told I would probably be called for testimony before the police department in regard to what I knew. But I was never called. 

The better part of a year transpired until the city again decided to close the pools in 2002. Citizens, now naming themselves the “United Pools Council,” attempted once again to work with the COB/P&R Dept. to find a way to keep pools open. During this time, he “United Pools Council” (UPC) raised over $30K in a fund raising marathon. Evidently, however, none of our efforts were sufficient. The COB/P&R had decided to close pools, and close pools they would—regardless, regardless, regardless! The decision had been made. 

But the most astonishing revelation of this period was when we found out that the person, “alleged” to have fraudulently collected several thousands of dollars in pool revenues which were never turned over to the city, was still on administrative leave, at full salary, pending investigation. This was 10 months after his initial removal. His annual pay was equal to the amount stated by P&R needed to keep a pool open for the entire year. 

Since then, it has become impossible to get any additional information about this case. When I/we call City of Berkeley Parks and Recreation Department to inquire of the status of the investigation, I/we are told, it is city policy that they are not allowed to discuss personnel matters. 

However, I don’t see this as a personnel matter. I see it as an investigation into a possible criminal matter. 

To this day, I have no idea what has happened in this matter. For all I know, the person in question may still never have been investigated, may still be on administrative leave, receiving full pay, pending investigation. 

What does this say to you about City of Berkeley? I know what it says to me. 

Sydney Vilen 

 

• 

OUR PLACE IN  

HISTORY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The United States used to be a symbol of justice, fairness, democracy, and human rights. We cannot say that we have a perfect history. However, we have never gone down as low as we stand today. The first decade of this millennium will put the United States side by side with dictatorial governments that committed atrocities and behaved with blatant disregard for international law. As a U.S. citizen and Army veteran, I would love to see justice and true democracy restored in my country. We owe it to ourselves, our children, and our place in history. 

Gustav Davila 

 

• 

STEM CELL RESEARCH  

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Last month, independent research teams from Japan and the University of Wisconsin announced that they had successfully reprogrammed adult skin cells to function as embryonic stem cells (ESCs.) This means that researchers need not engage in cloning for the purpose of deriving ESCs; and, importantly, there’s even less good reason to subject women to the health risks of ovarian hyperstimulation to extract the eggs needed to do the cloning. Further, one of the Wisconsin researchers, James Thompson, who also happens to be one of the pioneers who first derived ESCs, confesses now that he had always been uncomfortable doing ESC research. According to a bioethicist he consulted, the “technological power” of the research was disturbing. What would happen, for example, if someone were to place human stem cells into a rat’s brain? For Thompson, then, reprogramming adult cells came as a relief. Similarly, Ian Wilmut, one of the researchers responsible for cloning the sheep, Dolly, is so taken with cell reprogramming that he intends to give up cloning. “It seems we should all focus our efforts on reprogramming,” said Wilmut. So why does the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) insist that cloning research must continue? 

The justification for continuing ESC cloning seems to be that the new technology of cell reprogramming is too new and untried. Reprogrammed cells must prove themselves to be “pluripotent” (i.e. capable of maturing into other cell types) and safe. But truth be told, ESC cloning research is itself new and highly speculative. And its safety is far from certain—ESCs cause tumors. So why should ESC research—relatively new, highly speculative and of questionable safety—be held as standard bearer? Could it be that the potentially lucrative link between cloning and human genetic engineering accounts for the reluctance to drop cloning? The fact is that CIRM already has dedicated funds to conduct cloning research and millions of dollars in patenting opportunities are at stake. If CIRM wanted to avoid human genetic engineering and cared more about women’s health it would stop funding cloning research and invest solely in the less socially fraught enterprise of cell reprogramming. 

M. L. Tina Stevens 

Diane Beeson 

Alliance for Humane Biotechnology 

 

• 

EDUCATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Without a doubt, I can honestly say, I am overjoyed by the three commentaries the Daily Planet printed as a response to my Nov. 23 commentary, “The State of Education.” Given the fact that my motivation to write this article derived from a sense of duty to our young people, it is extremely rewarding to see my hope for a dialogue realized. I am also pleased that several individuals found cause enough in my words to defend the education system as an institutional success. Obviously, this is not a stance I find very compelling, as my experiences as an educator substantially differ from those individuals who wrote responses to my article. 

I believe these individuals fail to understand, however, that I wrote my article in deference to a personal inclination to protect the status-quo of my profession. In his respect, my article robbed from me, the ability to insulate myself against the spiritual atrophy of personal failure. The phenomenon of personal failure is something that haunts teachers as they assess their life’s work in the shadow of the systemic failure that defines their trade over the last quarter century. 

This is not to say that everyday is a failure in our public schools. In regard to this point, I would be forever in the debt of any person who could point out where exactly in my previous article, as the three respondents claim, I stated that nothing positive ever happens in our schools. No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to find that particular passage. At this point I would be doing my self-esteem a huge service by finding this passage, removing it and imploring the Daily Planet to reprint the revised version. 

All kidding aside, in my life I have found that people attack a person’s credibility to win an argument only if they feel that facts don’t back up their claims. Therefore, it would be arrogant of me to sit here and deconstruct every article that was written in response to mine, given that the crux of these argument were, like mine, anecdotal. If these individuals view the quality of our schools as adequate, I cannot argue against their contention, by virtue of the fact that I was never in the classroom with any of these individuals. The only thing I can do is report the world as I see it. From where I am standing, our schools do not present as rosy a picture as these teachers implore upon the readers of this newspaper to believe. Hopefully, the greater percentage of people who consider my article carefully, would realize that I made no pretense to undermine the individual educator or student, only the system as a whole. Frankly, I am confused by the fact that trained educators (assuming they are formally trained), as the authors of these articles, can not distinguish between conjectural and anecdotal writing. 

Another thing that confounds me is that no letters were printed in this newspaper which hinted at anything positive I wrote in my article. If no letters were forthcoming in this respect, I would be very surprised. I make this claim, because I can attest to the fact that there are many educators who agree with my assessment of our educational system. Anyone who has had the chance to spend a day in a teacher’s lounge in the bay area would not argue this claim. I am aware that I cannot speak for every educator, and there are certainly those eternally optimistic few who scoff at my views. In fact, I have had a several discussions when a teacher disagreed with me outright. Although I didn’t agree with them on many of the issues we discussed, at least they had the forethought to utilize proper grammatical structure when addressing me. 

Jonathan Stephens 

 

• 

HUCKABEE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Mike Huckabee’s rise in polling numbers, voter approval, is coming from one source only—white evangelicals and fundamentalists —and is not in anyway a representative picture of the overall voting electorate. Huckabee’s support comes from the religious right, from a group intent on tearing down the wall between church and state and having prayer in school. Huckabee represents a segment of society that is anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-immigration pro-war and out of touch with reality. 

Has United States become the bully pulpit of religious politics and does America need another Republican in the White House expanding his ministry? 

Ron Lowe 

Grass Valley 

 

• 

KPFA ELECTIONS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It is no surprise that KPFA ( 94.1 FM) listeners elected five Bay Area notables in the recent Local Station Board election (Sherry Gendelman, Warren Mar, Matthew Hallinan, Susan McDonough and Dianne Enriquez, all Concerned Listeners) who ran positive campaigns focussed on the strength of their experience and their vision for KPFA. Four candidates from other slates were also elected. Perhaps it also should not be a surprise that candidates who have lost, such as Steve Zeltzer, are now contesting the election. What is alarming is that Pacifica Election Supervisor Casey Peters has indulged in partisan behavior throughout the election process and is now threatening not to certify the election on grounds that can only be described as politically motivated. 

We would be the first to point out the problems with this election. The most egregious violation of Pacifica’s Fair Campaign rules was the serial defammation by one slate, personally attacking Concerned Listener candidates as well as KPFA staff and board members, which was published with Pacifica resources and sent to the tens of thousands of KPFA subscribers with their ballots. Despite the fact that Peters allowed this to happen, we feel that it is in KPFA’s best interest for the election to be certified rather than going to the expense of another election, which has cost the station $70,000 of the listeners’ money, although we are confident if it were done over, our slate would win again. 

Zeltzer is challenging the election based on specious grounds, claiming that commentaries written by KPFA staff in the Planet violated the Fair Campaign rules. Those rules state that no station resources may be used to advocate in favor or against any candidate, but staff clearly have First Amendment rights and are allowed to state their opinions in non-Pacifica public fora. Zeltzer even argues that an email written in 2005 by radical journalist Doug Henwood about Bob English, who ran for the board this fall, was a violation of this election’s Fair Campaign rules! 

Zeltzer also argues that the elections should be overturned because of an email Larry Bensky sent endorsing Concerned Listeners. Bensky, who is no longer a KPFA employee, emailed listeners who had asked to stay in touch with him following his retirement. He contacted the Local Elections Supervisor beforehand to see if it was okay for him to do this and was never told he should not send it. Pacifica Election Supervisor Peters now refuses to certify the elections until Larry Bensky makes a public statement in favor of listener-elected boards and vows to never endorse candidates in any future election -- which Pacifica does not ask of any staff or listener and which is a violation of his free speech rights. Peters has already punished Bensky by banning him from Pacifica’s airwaves until Peters’ term is over, extended into 2008. 

It is time for Peters to move beyond partisanship and act in KPFA’s best interest by certifying this election, which had record listener turnout, so that the Local Station Board can get to work to improving that wonderful and priceless resource. 

Mary and Jon Fromer, Warren Mar, Susan McDonough, PhoeBe Sorgen, John VanEyck, Sherry Gendelman, Conn Hallinan


Who Owns The Commons?

By Thomas Lord
Tuesday December 11, 2007

Who “owns” the commons is, indeed, the right question but we must ask it clearly. There are two, relevant meanings of “own” in modern English: Ownership in rights, and ownership in disposition. Children use the latter sense when, for example, one might say “A-ha—I owned you in that videogame,” meaning that the speaker’s skills were so fabulous the competitor couldn’t do much. 

You can see the difference in meaning in a statement like: “Cal owns the grove but the protesters have owned the trees.” 

O’Malley ponders the difference between Telegraph and another, posher neighborhood. In both she finds boisterous, potentially quite dangerous behavior, offenses against the public health, infringements on the enjoyment and mobility of others through the space—in short, she uncritically finds in both places nothing but “city life.” 

Finding no serious difference in the sharing of public space between the two places, she then makes a very serious insinuation: that those of us who want new rules must be acting out of prejudice against poverty, tattoos, general scruffiness, and age. In short, she finds us to be, at best, uptight, snobbish squares. Sells papers, I guess. 

But, who “owns” the commons is the right question. By definition, all of us collectively own the commons “by right.” It should follow that no one or group of us owns it by disposition. 

So, what is the difference between Telegraph and some of the posher neighborhoods? Why is a dog pooping on a school yard less of an issue than a desperate homeless person, for want of a restroom, pooping in some comparable place? Why is a sprawl of strapping bikers less of an issue then a resting, itinerant, scruffy youth? 

The difference is in what, on the basis of history, we expect the effectiveness of policing to be. 

If the bikers in the posh neighborhood start to get too out of hand, the police (more likely the zoning commission) will be called. Owners of stores, bikers, neighbors, and other people from town will all participate. Complainers, the accused, and the town will all submit to an orderly, civil, conflict resolution process. Those people are accountable. We live by rule of law in those neighborhoods, even if compliance with the law is perpetually imperfect.  

In contrast, the problems on Telegraph have been illusive and troubling for as long as I’ve known the place (about 20 years). It ebbs and flows but, on average, you’ve got: (a) a small set of poor, some homeless, arguably pretty darn nuts people that everyone around has known and loved for years; (b) a larger set of adventure-seeking itinerant youth who have long found some of the free floating socialist spirit of Berkeley a great place to regain one’s feet, or at least energy to resume seeking; (c) a set of truly criminal youth who prey on group (b) and become both cover and retail front for petty drug trade, fencing trade, etc. (d) a longer-lived, multi-generational set of loose criminal organizations who compete to gain the benefits of group (c). 

In good times, group (d) is extremely benign, thus group (c) is well policed, group (b) is helped rather than exploited, and group (a) gets well fed and a lot of work helping group (b). In bad times, this soft, friendly atmosphere becomes a hot potato because competition for the economic niche of group (d) increases: people come to Berkeley hoping to gain “territory". With that increased stakes, things do start to get nasty and aggression by members of groups (c) and (d), especially, comes to be rewarded by group (d). It’s all quite Shakespearean when you see it up close. 

In short, the reason that some people feel unsafe going to Telegraph Avenue is because of a criminal conspiracy to make them feel that way. Our police, by virtue of our carefully restrained laws, are hampered in their right to directly address this conspiracy. 

Well, “conspiracy” is too strong a word. It isn’t that organized. There is no evil mastermind, just lots of people trying to survive in the moment. The pattern whereby people who might put a foot down about the criminal trade are chased away before they can form a complaint is just a natural side-effect of how the economics work out. 

This is bad news for O’Malley, in my view. When she says we should not crack down on the reports that places like downtown and Telegraph are out of hand, she is basically helping “group (d)” during a period of time when the criminality and aggression are on the rise. 

People in the posh neighborhoods, when they behave badly, are a problem, certainly. I’m all in favor of reminders to clean up your dog poop, leave room on the side walk, control your animals, etc. It’s good to have conversations about those hypocrisies. But—it’s entirely folly to glibbly equivocate between those issues and the smoldering brush fire we see in less fortunate neighborhoods. 

 

Thomas Lord is a Berkeley resident.


Options Recovery Services — Fighting the Good Fight

By George Beier
Tuesday December 11, 2007

Dan McMullan’s charges against Options Recovery (see last Tuesday’s Commentary) are simply baseless and cannot go unchallenged. 

Let’s take a quick look at the facts.  

Our Facilities: Options operates a free-of-charge drug and alcohol recovery center out of its offices at 1931 Center St. (the old, once-glamorous Veterans Building near City Hall). The building, which requires an extensive earthquake retrofit, also houses facilities for BOSS and the Berkeley Food and Housing Project. Most of Options’ classes take place on the old ballroom floor, and the staff is crowded onto the stage. In addition to this building, Options operates a mental health clinic and has four clean-and-sober group living homes housing 55 clients. We also operate a car wash to supplement our shoestring budget. (Might I suggest that car wash gift certificates are the perfect holiday gift!) 

Our Clients: Eighty percent of our clients are from Berkeley—not “mostly Oakland” as claimed by Mr. McMullan. Sixty-two percent of our clients are homeless when they enter the program. 99 percent of Options clients are classified has having extremely low or poverty-level income. About 60 percent of our clients are African American, about 30 percent are white, and the rest are Hispanic, Native American, or Asian.  

Our Program: The program is a year long, and consists of detox referral, denial management, a three-phase recovery program, and aftercare. We have about 250 men and women in the program at any given time and see about 800 clients a year. If necessary, we also offer housing in our group homes, coordinated mental health services, and acupuncture. Our recidivism rates are consistently significantly better than state and national averages. Yet Mr. McMullan calls our graduations ceremonies “smoke and mirrors.” Such an insult to the clients who’ve made the tough passage from addiction to recovery! Please come and see for yourself. The tears of pride and determination, the joyful reunification of families—some things just can’t be faked.  

Our Funding: Almost all of our funding comes from foundations, state reimbursements, and private contributions. In addition to free use of the Veterans Building, Options receives about $50,000 annually from the City of Berkeley, which ranks it in the lower-tier of Berkeley-sponsored non-profits. We have recently been budgeted for receiving up to $200,000, though this depends on the actual availability of those funds in the future. 

Our Board: Options is committed to using the system that we have. We believe that all of us—from service providers to the criminal justice system—are partners in the fight against substance abuse. Reforming the system—rather than fighting it—is the most pragmatic way to help our clients get back on their feet. For this reason, our board and donors consist of service providers, police officers, retired judges, probation officers and committed citizens.  

My Role: I joined the board because I wanted to be part of the solution for Telegraph Avenue and People’s Park. (It’s also categorically untrue—and just plain mean—to suggest that I “whipped up fear and hatred for the poor and homeless” in my campaign for the City Council. Really, Dan.) Over the last six months, I’ve spent hundreds of hours getting the database on-line so that we can be more efficient and see more clients each year. 

As for Dr. Davida Coady, the executive director, there’s no doubt that she’s a passionate advocate for the program and is working hard to shake up the status quo. She’s got a quick smile and a quick tongue. But there’s also no doubt that she gives selflessly of her time, money, and heart. And as the bumper sticker says, “well behaved women rarely make history.” Rock on, DC! 

Finally, on a personal note, I hope that all of Options’ volunteers and staff realize that for every Dan McMullan there are thousands of Options supporters. To paraphrase the Serenity Prayer, we’ve got to accept the things we cannot change—there will always be a few detractors. But there are many things we can change. We can work hard every day to help our clients get off drugs and on their feet (many of you know first-hand how difficult this struggle is). We can help our clients get into housing and get their kids back. We can try to rectify the injustices of an often unfair world—one client at a time, one day at a time. 

You are all doing good work and fighting the good fight. Keep the faith. 

 

George Beier is a board member and volunteer for Options Recovery Services. 

 

 


Who Benefits From the Surge?

By Kenneth Thiesen
Tuesday December 11, 2007

Ever since the Bush regime began its escalation of the war in Iraq by sending tens of thousands of more troops this year, media pundits and politicians have been debating whether the “surge” is working. In the last couple months, the administration and it apologists are claiming that the escalation has been working and that more time should be allowed to give the Bush regime the chance to prove that the “new strategy” will be successful. But the debate has been waged entirely on the wrong terms.  

The real question that needs to be asked is who benefits from a “successful surge.” 

Bush administration supporters claim that violence is down. They cherry pick the statistics and announce that Iraq is now “more secure” than some other arbitrarily picked date. Others, including many Democrats pick other statistics and argue the opposite. But neither side discusses what the real purpose of the escalation is and why it is not in the interests of the Iraqi people or the people of the world for the Bush regime to be “successful” in Iraq. 

The initial invasion of Iraq in 2003 had nothing to do with making the Iraqi people more secure, but everything to do with ensuring U.S. control of the Middle East in order for U.S. imperialism to dominate the world. So why do people think that when the Bush regime escalated the war this year that suddenly their motives have somehow changed. Despite all the rhetoric, “success” for the Bush regime still is the control of Iraq and the region in order achieve and maintain hegemony over the world. 

Bush and his henchmen are responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the displacement of over four million, and the daily horrors for millions of others. So when we hear Bush or his generals cite some stats about fewer deaths this month, does anyone think they really care how many Iraqis were killed in the latest reporting period, how many returned to their homes, or how many now do or do not have electricity, jobs, potable water, or other daily necessities to survive. 

“Security” in Iraq is only a concern for the Bush administration to the extent that the U.S. Empire is secure. And if the Bush regime achieves security for the empire that will only make the rest of the world and its population less secure. Let us assume for the sake of argument that the escalation will achieve relative success for the Bush regime and that they are not just cooking the books. This will only allow it to launch further attacks, most likely against Iran. The most recent National Intelligent Estimate report stating that Iran is not seeking nukes at this time will not deter the administration from launching a new war. 

When the regime launched the war against Afghanistan and quickly achieved “success” by overthrowing the Taliban regime it did not rest on it laurels. It immediately began preparations for invading Iraq. Top regime people, such as Cheney, have openly declared that the war they launched is a multi-generational or lifetime war. Every “success” achieved will only mean more death and destruction for the people of the country attacked and ultimately for people throughout the world. Was Hitler satisfied when he took over Austria, then Czechoslovakia, and then country after country? Hitler’s modern- day counterparts are no different. 

The people of Iraq have no interest in seeing the “surge succeed.” And as people who reside in the belly of the beast we must do everything possible to not only expose what our rulers are doing but to bring an end to their imperialist dreams as soon as possible. Doing so will be the only real success for the people of Iraq, the people of the world and the people here at home. Failure to halt the “success” of the Bush regime will only mean more of the same and worse for generations to come. 

 

Kenneth J. Theisen is an organizer with the World Can’t Wait! Drive Out the Bush Regime! 


A 2020 Vision for Berkeley Education

By Santiago Casal and Michael Miller
Tuesday December 11, 2007

We are blessed to live in a community with international renown for having one of the most prestigious universities in the world. We are also blessed in that we nurture some students in our own K-12 schools who are sought after by some of the most elite universities in the country.  

Berkeley is also known for being at the forefront of meaningful change. We pat ourselves on the back for being the third most sustainable community in the country, the first school system to desegregate, the birthplace of the disability civil rights movement, or for our progressive stands against war, capital punishment, and the exploitation of others. Such distinction is part of what makes us proud to live here. 

Yet, underlying this activist and progressive image of ourselves is a serious misperception, a disconnect really, between how we think our school system is perfoming and what actually goes on in our K through 12 schools. We are miles away from having the kind of educational system that many, if not most, of us mistakenly believe we already have. 

 

75 percent score at Basic or Below 

In September 2007, a new generation of our beautiful children began kindergarten in the Berkeley school system. They will graduate in the year 2020. They and their parents entered the system full of hope and excitement that they were beginning a journey toward a much-improved life. They entrust that hope to their wonderful teachers, to the district and to this community.  

Unfortunately, if we do not change things dramatically, so many of those who began kindergarten this year in Berkeley will end up by the time they reach grade twelve in the year 2020 at the same or at a worse level of “achievement” than when they started. When an African American or Latino child starts in our elementary schools and is tested in grade 2, only 25 percent score at “Proficient or Advanced.” That means that 75 percent score at “Basic or Far Below Basic.” Compare that to 75 percent of white children who score at “Proficient or Advanced” (25 percent scoring at basic or far below). Move that along to high school and 75 to 85 percent of African American and Latino children still score at “Basic or Far Below Basic,” and about 20 percent of White children score at that level.  

 

Lost potential 

These scores are not just numbers, these are real children and families failing in our community, and it is profoundly hurtful. How does a young person or a parent internalize the stigma of the message—a message that represents the daily loss of potential, slipping away across ground that cannot be easily made up, like trying to catch a train pulling out of the station? That slippage, that distance, is like a wound aggravated by the regular comparison to those who excel through their advantage – those on the train. To the parents and children left behind, it creates resentment, division and a profound loss of hope. One ugly outcome of the disparity, which is not so uncommon among those who set the style standards for youth culture today, is to wrap it all up into a self-fulfilling rationalization to not only stop trying, but to even ridicule effort and intelligence. As the rapper Saafir tells us, it gets to the point that “showing your brains implies that you are weak.” Sometimes we can be our own worst enemy. 

 

An urgent 2020 Vision 

Because school failure is a Whole Community problem not just a school problem, we will ultimately need to challenge and systematically mobilize all sectors of Berkeley into the effort—the city, our local colleges, the teachers union, our profit and non-profit organizations and businesses, and the parents. We do not need to look backward for blame, but rather forward at solutions to the real culprit. That culprit is failure and we need to urgently prioritize the issue, see it for the crisis that it is, and mobilize the entire community to invent or import the proven programs and leaders that can convert failure to success.  

Our 2020 Vision is the blueprint that guides us in developing the structure, support, resources and relationships to help our children attain educational success at all levels. The Vision makes this the first year of our partnering effort with all sectors of Berkeley to educate all of our children in a total community approach.  

The most immediate and urgent step we can do to accomplish the 2020 Vision is to make absolutely sure that the new Superintendent (still not finalized) is a demonstrated leader in making achievement the Number One educational priority.  

Beyond that, the effort to change the course of education will require (1) a bold new educational framework and model, (2) a refocusing & integration of city, school, university, and business and private resources (3) an extensive expansion of parental engagement, (4) an aggressive recruitment of innovators and professionals at all levels, and (5) the development of more culturally sensitive and student centered measures of educational success that do not stigmatize a whole class of people.  

Our schools, particularly the elementary level, are the central institution through which we can preventively address an entire range of community issues before they become resistant, if not impossible, to turn around. At the same time we can deliver what the “public” in public education is all about—the primary instrument of making outcomes humanly enriching and equitable. That is the promise we need to make to the 2020 generation. 

 

There are solutions 

Jeffrey Sachs, the author of “The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time,” argues that “There are two overwhelming barriers in this country: People think there are no solutions other than what we are doing, and that we are doing enough.”  

There ARE solutions and we are NOT doing enough! For too long we have been asked to be patient. We cannot be patient any longer. Let’s address educational equity with the urgency that it merits and make success for all of our children a central benchmark of what Berkeley is all about?  

Please join us in supporting the formation of a city-wide partnership, spearheaded by an Equity Task Force made up of local and national experts, who will help us jump start our children’s world class educational journey to 2020 and beyond. 

 

Santiago Casal and Michael Miller are members of United In Action, a multi-ethnic organization devoted to making the case for urgent change in our schools. Combined they sent four children through 52 years of BUSD education. 

 


Letters to

Friday December 07, 2007

CURSE OF THE GROVE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

On Monday, Oct. 1, Judge Richard Keller issued a UC-requested injunction against the tree sitters who were protecting the disputed oak grove. Within two weeks, Saturday, Oct. 13, the Bears—almost ranked number one nationally—lost to Oregon and continuing losing five out of the next six games. The UC Athletic Department should pause in its pursuit of the grove’s destruction. It took the Boston Red Sox 87 years to shake the Curse of the Bambino!  

Don Santina 

Oakland 

 

• 

RECRUITMENT OFFICE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

An e-mail from Kitchen Democracy this week asks “should Berkeley City Council affirm that free speech and assembly rights apply to U.S. military recruiters?” Is this a survey about the Marine Recruitment office controversy, and if so, why is it incorrectly framed as a free speech issue? This question will produce survey results that are irrelevant, misleading, and useless. Even worse, the results could be used to convince the City Council to allow the recruitment office to remain open. Free speech is not at the heart of this issue, and I urge City Council members to disregard the results of this survey. I’m also asking Kitchen Democracy to pull the survey right now and instead ask a question that provides meaningful information. 

Our community wholeheartedly supports free speech for everyone, but a “yes” to free speech rights doesn’t mean “yes” to the recruitment office. 

In my view, this isn’t about the First Amendment rights of military recruiters, who aren’t merely handing out literature, holding meetings, or writing letters to the editor. They are operating a business and are subject to the laws governing any business. No exceptions for the military. The fact is, we don’t allow some businesses in Berkeley, particularly when the business is immoral, unethical and illegal. The nature of this business is war, killing people and destroying lives, including lives of military personnel and innocent civilians, and squandering our tax dollars. But morals aside, this business employs illegal business practices, including lying to potential employees about their job descriptions, luring recruits to sign up by promising benefits they don’t get, unilaterally extending the length of service specified in the employment contract, and discriminating against employees based on sexual orientation. We have an obligation to require businesses operating in our community to obey the laws. 

I wondered why the recruiters aren’t located on the UC campus if, as they say, they are strictly interested in hiring college graduates? This item from the upcoming Dec. 10 issue of the “National Law Journal” may provide the answer: At Stanford Law School, 80 percent of the law school faculty, including the dean, signed an e-mail asking students to meet with recruiters off-campus, because the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy violates the nondiscrimination policies for job recruiters of nearly all law schools. 

I encourage you to join Kitchen Democracy and let your views be known at www.kitchendemocracy.org. 

Cynthia Papermaster 

 

• 

BERKELEY PARKS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Wendy Schlesinger writes in the Nov. 30 Planet that I erred in my Nov. 27 article on Berkeley parks by placing the planning and creation of Ohlone Park in the “late ’70s and early ’80s” rather than 1969. 

I’m guessing she’s referring to the creation of an instant “People’s Park Annex” by demonstrators on the land which had been cleared of houses so the BART tunnel could be dug. 

That was certainly an important milestone in the process of making the land a permanent city park. 

The Berkeley park centennial exhibit organizers dated the city’s official approval of plans for Ohlone Park to 1978, the dedication to 1979, and the final acquisition of the surface land from BART to 1990. 

In her Nov. 29 talk on the exhibit and Berkeley park history, one of the exhibit organizers, Louise Mozingo, noted that accurate dating of the creation of parks—even those established in the relatively recent past—is a challenge. 

There are often several relevant dates. They include when the idea of a park on a particular site came about, when the idea was incorporated into city plans or policies, when the property was formally acquired or designated as open space, when park acquisition or “improvements” were funded and took place, when people could finally use it as a park, and when it was “officially” dedicated. 

In Berkeley, as Wendy Schlesinger suggests, the dates that community members took independent action to turn a vacant space into public open space are also quite relevant in park history. 

These events extend over years and, sometimes, decades, making the creation of a park an evolutionary process, rather than a single moment in time. 

The exhibit organizers—Mozingo, Marcia McNally, and Sadie Graham Mitchell—are very open to expanding and amending their park history and chronology as community members supply further information and insights. 

Marcia McNally suggests that comments and information on the history of Berkeley parks can be sent to her at cdbydesign@earthlink.net. 

Steven Finacom 

 

• 

STAGNATING  

BUSINESS CLIMATE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have worked and managed several businesses in downtown Berkeley since 1978.  

Occasionally there have been complaints about panhandlers and street people, and naturally I’ve had positive and negative experiences with many of them myself over the years. These complaints have been few and far between, and more often than not come from folks who already have a bee in their bonnet about how “unruly” Berkeley is anyway.  

But in the last few years the resounding complaint from our patrons, which we hear over and over and over, is how unpleasant downtown Berkeley has become because of the lack, and high cost, of parking. 

The notion of moving to greater reliance on mass transit is appealing to all of us and a necessary goal. However, forcing people to drive all the way to places like Emeryville and El Cerrito to do their shopping and moviegoing will do nothing to save the environment—nor freshen the “stagnating business climate” of downtown Berkeley. 

Instead, the city could try making it much easier to come to downtown, by lowering—not raising—parking rates, by adding longer hours and more routes to mass transit schedules, and by offering vibrant local businesses that provide necessary goods and services. That might just do the trick. 

Dale Sophiea 

 

• 

QUEEN ELIZABETH’S DEPTHS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I’ve been queried about my reference to the “Queen Elizabeth’s depths” in the Nov. 27 edition of the Planet. Regarding friends who had enlisted, I wrote: “Another was shipped overseas in the Queen Elizabeth’s depths and stationed outside London…”  

During her World War II career, the RMS Queen Elizabeth carried service women and men across the Atlantic—without convoy, zigzagging every seven minutes, with no air-conditioning and very little ventilation. Figures vary, but on most voyages as a converted troop ship, she carried between 13,000 and 15,000 persons, with lifeboat accommodations for 8,000. A Canadian veteran recalls a four-day voyage in 1943 between Halifax and Scotland with 17,000 aboard. On stormy days it was not possible to walk without being shifted from one side to the other; on good days, a few minutes’ exercise and fresh air were possible. 

Cunard’s QE liner had been launched in 1938 with luxury accommodations for 2,283 passengers; at 83,637 gross registered tons, she was the largest passenger ship afloat… and fast. But on her River Clyde wharf, the QE was a target for German Luftwaffe-pilots and saboteurs. She was painted gray, and on March 3, 1940 headed for open waters. False rumors were spread that the QE was going to Southampton; some guessed that she would head for Halifax. Once out at sea, Captain John Townley opened his sealed orders to head for New York at full speed with a crew of only 400. Four days later, the “gray ghost” arrived in New York. 

By 1942 the Admiralty planned to convert both Queens (Elizabeth and Mary) into aircraft carriers, but their troop-carrying role was deemed more important. Accommodations were altered to provide for 10,000 personnel. Installation of degaussing gear was completed. In August she began shuttle service between New York and Gourock, Scotland.  

The QE’s high speeds enabled her to outrun German U-boats. Troops aboard were told that her top speed was a military secret. Adolf Hitler offered the Iron Cross and $250,000 to any U-boat commander who could sink the Queen Elizabeth or Queen Mary. Winston Churchill declared that they shortened World War II by a year. They could transport almost an entire division to Europe, usually in four to six days. 

On one trip in 1944, 500 WAACs and 18,000 men were crammed onboard the QE as she sailed out of New York headed for Europe. Viola B. Smith had enlisted in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (later the Women’s Army Corps): “We were chased by German submarines, and we weren’t told where we were going. To conserve fresh water, we washed with salt water, and I bunked with the four other women officers in a former bathroom. I was on the bottom underneath four hammocks. … Without an escort, the ship relied on its speed and arrived about a week later in Scotland to the news that the European invasion had begun.” Thirty of these women, including Captain Smith, were assigned to the 5th Army Airways Communications System, providing air traffic control for the 8th Air Force. 

By the end of the war in Europe the Queens’ next duty was to redeploy troops for the war against Japan. Repatriation of American troops continued until October 1945, when the QE was released from U.S. service and allocated to the repatriation of Canadian troops. 

Helen Rippier Wheeler 

 

• 

CLEANING UP  

THE STREETS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

People blocking sidewalks and using public areas as toilets do make areas uninviting and difficult to navigate. But using language like “cleaning up the streets” in reference to individuals may be part of the problem. We read and hear often about “street sweeps,” but what is being “swept” are individuals. Street cleaning once meant literally cleaning the street—not disposing of humanity. Humans are not filth. This (mis)use of language cannot be ameliorated by prescribing treatment as a remedy. C. W. Nevius and Chronicle editors challenge the mayor to “Clean up the streets.” I assume that if the mayor and other elected officials accept this challenge (basing their acceptance on the dangers these particular people on the street pose), they will certainly include “sweeping the streets” of and forcefully medicating all individuals who, due to cell phone use and/or skateboarding, etc. pose a hazard to others. Sidewalk cell phone users, double parkers, and sidewalk skateboarders/cyclists are clearly not aware of their surroundings or the hazards their behaviors pose. Perhaps they are suffering from “selfish “disorder” and Medicare, MediCal and private insurance will pay for their treatment. 

Kathie Zatkin 

 

• 

KANDY’S CAR WASH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As a neighbor of Kandy’s carwash, I believe I too need to voice my observations about this neighborhood business. There’s been a great deal of emotional energy shared, but there’s a few pieces of information that have rarely made it to print. Such as:  

1) The property owner, Craig Hertz, has offered current tenant Kandy Alford, who lives in Oakland and is six months behind on his rent, several other suitable locations to relocate to. Mr. Alford has turned those down. 

2) Because of some sort of “grandfather” loophole, the Kandy’s business has been allowed to dump their toxic chemicals directly into our Berkeley sewage system. It’s doubtful that many other businesses are permitted to do this. 

3) Both walking or driving past Kandy’s, I’m surprised that this business has been allowed to exist as long as it has. The music is often distracting to motorists, and the area looks and feels dangerous because of the continued blight. 

4) Finally, I’ve used Kandy’s cleaning service once (and only once). I wanted to support a local business, and have my car cleaned and detailed. Well, their promise of a cleaned vehicle wasn’t fulfilled. After assuring me of both removal of bumper stickers and my satisfaction, the stickers remained and I was left feeling cheated. After that, I had no intention of ever supporting that business again. 

When our neighborhood meeting heard about the biofuel station moving in, everyone cheered. Of the 30 or so people in attendance there were plenty of questions, but we knew that it would be a vast improvement over the current eyesore that exists on that corner. This is not a black/white issue, this is a quality of life issue. 

Name withheld 

(A neighbor of ROC) 

 

• 

UNWARRANTED ALLEGATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Dick Bagwell, in his recent letter entitled “Allegation of Anti-Semitism,” characterizes former Congresswoman Cynthia Mckinney and Venezuelan President Chavez as anti-Semites. 

Cynthia McKinney and Sr. Chavez are hardly anti-Semitic. Mr. Bagwell is conflating their criticism of the Israeli governments’ disastrous occupation of the West Bank over the last 40 years with criticism of the Israeli people. 

It is same as conflating the criticism of Bush and Cheney administration’s disastrous policies in Iraq and elsewhere with criticism of the American people. 

Scoundrels everywhere wrap themselves in their respective flags, and unfortunately even well-meaning people, like I am sure Mr. Bagwell is, fall for it. 

Akio Tanaka  

Oakland 

 

• 

HOLIDAY LIGHTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I’ve been pondering my feelings about the holiday lights around the area and the range of what they may mean to those who of us who are displaying them. For me, the holiday lights express the brightness of what Jesus introduced to the world through his devotion to God and mankind. The lights point to the joy and gratitude, comfort and peace which this season evokes. These qualities of thought and expression are the epitome of a Christian’s hope and purpose, but they belong not exclusively to one religion, philosophy, or another. They stand as way marks by which to measure the good we do, the practical application of our ideals. In the Bible, God said “Let there be light” and Jesus said to let our light shine. I look to the lights of the season as reminders of how high the human spirit can reach when inspired by good works and good will towards all. 

Marilyn McPherson 

 

• 

BUS RAPID TRANSIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Mary Oram thinks I’m dismissing honest objections to BRT. Here’s what I think are some honest objections to Berkeley’s BRT plan: 

• The bus-only lane on Telegraph between Parker and Bancroft will indeed increase congestion. What slows down traffic on this part of Telegraph is the numerous unsynchronized traffic lights. 

• Removal of street parking at BRT stations is unavoidable unless we have stops instead of stations, but it’s possible to provide nearby replacement parking. Eugene appears to have dealt successfully with this issue. 

• Motorists who decide not to commute by car are supposed to make a major contribution to GHG reduction. This is unlikely to happen unless BRT travel really becomes more attractive than car driving—which probably requires bus-only lanes. 

• All-day parking should be eliminated and converted to short-term parking for Berkeley visitors and shoppers (ref: the 2000 TDM Study). All-day parkers should get bus/BRT passes from their employer . 

• Stores, restaurants and theaters should be planning to provide day-passes to encourage patrons to come by BRT, instead of adding to our parking problem. 

• Local bus service should be improved to complete the transportation network and serve the BRT stations. 

• The BRT should be planned to extend down University Avenue, ready to connect with the Ferry at the Marina. 

One objection that I do not regard as honest is the claim made by Doug Buckwald and a few others, that BRT will destroy retail business along its route. This sure doesn’t need to happen, and to my knowledge there are no BRT deployments where this has happened. I repeat my challenge to Doug to cite even one example of BRT becoming the bane of business. It sure didn’t happen in Eugene. 

BRT should provide faster and more frequent bus service, which will motivate a major mode-shift among motorists. My vision includes fewer vehicle miles traveled, reduced consumption of oil, less traffic on our streets, more people doing business in our stores and less bad gas in our air. Should this vision be dismissed? 

Steve Geller 

 

• 

HELPING THE HOMELESS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Never let it be said that churches and religious organizations in the Bay Area are indifferent to the sad plight of the homeless and low income citizens in our community. Quite the contrary. Many churches in Berkeley and Oakland provide hot meals and a warm atmosphere of camaraderie—some daily, others weekly, or monthly. To mention just a few, there’s St. Vincent de Paul, the College Avenue Presbyterian Church, and my own parish, Newman Hall/Holy Spirit. 

Newman Hall has, over the years, sponsored a very active program called, appropriately, “Loaves and Fishes,” held the first Saturday of the month. Last Saturday, Dec. 1, was the occasion of a festive Christmas party, attended by 120 guests. Feeding that many people is no easy task, but thanks to wonderful organization by the many volunteers, directed by Debbie Tatto, the event was a huge success. I might add, in all candor, that the mood was somewhat somber at the beginning, not exactly an animated party atmosphere. When the doors opened promptly at 12, there was a rush for seats, but little conversation. Guests were mainly men, though there were a few women and children. The men were carrying with them bulky bedrolls, knapsacks, even a couple of shopping carts (perhaps containing the owners’ worldly possessions). Children were seated in the lounge, with volunteers offering them toys and games. 

Since I’m a total klutz in any kitchen, I was assigned the role of host at one of the l7 long tables. My job was to make guests feel welcome and to start a dialogue. Once everyone was seated, servers rushed in with large plates of cheese and crackers and bottles of Martinelli Sparkling Cider, followed by bowls of green salad. Little by little, conversation developed and diners engaged in small talk, jokes and sports. Then came the entree—generous slices of ham, mounds of creamy mashed potatoes and green beans, with rolls and butter, of course. Though portions were exceedingly generous, servers came around with seconds which were eagerly accepted. The meal was topped off with gigantic pieces of cake and ice cream. 

Next came the entertainment and awarding of gifts. All those born in December had their own special birthday cake and presents. Then came the Christmas carols with nearly everyone singing lustily. There were some excellent voices; “Go Tell it to the Mountain” was clearly a favorite. The party came to a happy conclusion with the always eagerly awaited raffle, everyone having received a ticket during the course of the meal. On a long table at one end of the room were 18 very large holiday shopping bags filled to the top with attractive and useful gifts—warm scarves and gloves, gift certificates from Ross, BART tickets, etc. It appeared that everyone went home with a gift. And where the mood had been somber at the beginning of the event, there was now the sound of laughter and high spirits. 

But even more than the warm meal and gifts they received, the 120 people attending the Loaves and Fishes Christmas party took with them the warm memory of having been treated with respect and affection, not as objects of pity. 

Dorothy Snodgrass 

 

• 

HUCKABEE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

A demographic of white conservative Christians has vaulted Mike Huckabee into the lead in Iowa caucus polls. This is not representative of America. 

Mike Huckabee is a social conservative, anti-abortion, pro-war and anti-immigration; did someone say a George Bush carbon copy. But wait, Republican presidential hopeful Huckabee doesn’t believe in evolution. Is this who we want 60 million American school children to look up to; a president who is an anti-evolutionary? That America would be the laughingstock of the rest of the world with Huckabee as president is an understatement. 

Be clear about the upcoming presidential election and its field of candidates. We don’t need a repeat of the 2000 election when George Bush misled the electorate. 

Ron Lowe 

Grass Valley  


Public Education is Alive and Well

By Cathy Campbell and Cynthia Allman
Friday December 07, 2007

Our experience in public education couldn’t be more different than the cynical and gloomy picture painted by Jonathan Stephens in his recent editorial. (The State of Education, Nov. 23.) As longtime Berkeley teachers (Malcolm X and Willard), as parents of students who have nearly completed their education in Berkeley public schools and as leaders of the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, we have a good perspective from which to view public education in our community.  

When we look at public education in Berkeley, we see a caring, committed community of teachers and families working as hard as they possibly can to make sure every student learns and thrives.  

In preschool and elementary school, teachers create lessons and activities to meet state standards in developmentally appropriate ways. They work with families, seek out social services for children, and collaborate with each other to improve their teaching practice. In middle and high school, teachers find ways to cut through the distractions of adolescence to prepare students to think critically and have access to the skills and information they need to function in our community. They work long into the evening preparing lessons, grading papers and leading the extracurricular activities that teens value so much. At Berkeley Adult School, teachers provide literacy, language and job skills classes so that students can improve their economic status through lifelong learning. At every level, teachers are striving to eliminate the achievement gap between racial groups and socioeconomic classes. 

There are indeed obstacles to success in this endeavor. Excessive standardized testing, underfunded and contradictory mandates from the government and a shortage of qualified and experienced teachers frustrate our best intentions, but we have found that Berkeley teachers struggle against these obstacles and find amazing and creative ways to succeed despite the odds. Step into any school in Berkeley to see the fruits of our labor.  

While it is true that many teachers enter the profession as idealists, hoping to change their community for the better, it does not follow that adequate resources for education, fair salaries and good working conditions are not necessary. All of us know of talented teachers who have left the district or the profession to make a more livable salary. All of us know of teachers who can’t afford to live in the community where they teach, who have no chance to buy a home in Berkeley or who struggle to raise their own families in this high priced area.  

None of us believe that simply throwing money in the general direction of education will solve these problems, but a targeted use of increased resources is crucial to improvement. To find and keep the best possible teachers, our communities need to offer excellent salaries and working conditions. We need to keep class sizes small, compensate teachers for the extra duties they take on outside the classroom, and provide teachers and parents with authentic involvement in school governance and reform. Luckily in Berkeley our citizens are very generous and supportive of public education and they have voted to tax themselves more to provide some of these things. Not all communities are so lucky, and some of these items can only come through sharply focused and disciplined priorities on the part of School Boards. To say that money is irrelevant to providing the best possible education for children is just flat out wrong. 

Despite the well-publicized challenges, public education is alive and well in Berkeley. Great things are happening every day. Don’t just take our word for it—get involved in a Berkeley public school, and come and see for yourself!


Open Letter to Stand Up for Berkeley

Friday December 07, 2007

We received a letter from Stand Up for Berkeley requesting donations to support litigation against the university’s plans for Memorial Stadium and the Student-Athlete High Performance Center. As longtime Berkeley residents, we are equally concerned about maintaining our quality of life. But we do not believe these projects will adversely affect our neighborhoods and feel it is time to move on. 

With so much public information available on these projects, it is difficult to understand why there continues to be such gross misrepresentation of the facts. We can understand and accept that reasonable, well-informed people can wind up on different sides of these issues. But we cannot accept an effort to solicit additional support based on falsehoods and distortions. For example: 

• The description of the stadium project in the “fact sheet” is profoundly misleading. On the east side, there will be permanent lighting to replace the temporary lighting that is currently brought in for late afternoon games, but the university has worked closely with consultants to ensure these are slim vertical elements, not “huge prominent” towers such as are seen at the Oakland Coliseum. On the west side, a new low, press box would replace the existing temporary press box–is this what the “fact sheet” refers to incorrectly as “two additional stories above the current rim”? The stadium plan does not include VIP luxury boxes. The stadium already has a “subterranean concourse” that would, in a final phase of the project (depending upon funding availability), be extended to the entire perimeter of the stadium to provide improved disabled access, add bathrooms, and remove the dozens of “porta potties” lined up along Rim Way and Centennial Roads for every game. In each instance, the “fact sheet” misleads and fails to explain the real “fact”—that existing facilities at the stadium are substandard and need to be upgraded. 

• These projects will not change the character of use at the stadium or “commercialize” its use. For nearly 20 years university chancellors have agreed to limit the use of the stadium in consideration of the community. The university has already stated flatly that the stadium will not be used for rock concerts and the university will not be installing a sound system that would support such use. The new system would direct sound down and towards the field and away from surrounding areas, an improvement over the current system. While the university has limited the number of “capacity” events to no more than seven events beyond football games, the definition of “capacity” is any event that would draw more than 10,000 attendees. In addition, the campus has offered to discuss with the city parameters and protocols concerning future use of the stadium. 

• There will be some disruption and truck traffic due to construction, but we will get through it. This is unfortunate but unavoidable if the stadium is to be retrofit for the safety of athletes, staff, and fans, which we feel must be done. The City of Berkeley has undertaken many large-scale projects to retrofit historic public buildings or to build new ones—the main library, Berkeley High School, City Hall, and the Brower Center, to cite a few. These have disrupted traffic flow for a period of time, but the results are well worth the temporary inconvenience. The alternative to renovating an historic structure like the stadium is to let it deteriorate or tear it down—Is that really what we want? 

• The project will not make the area more dangerous; in fact, it will provide better emergency access and reduce the capacity of the stadium by 10,000 seats. As part of the project, a portion of campus property at the southeast corner of the stadium would be dedicated to the city to widen the roadway and improve pedestrian safety and emergency access. Removing the portable bathrooms along the roadway will also improve access and open Rimway and Centennial during stadium events. 

• The trees that are removed will be replaced three to one, with one substantial tree for every specimen tree removed. Although the city passed a moratorium on the removal of coast live oaks in 2006, the ordinance does not apply to state agencies. On the other hand, most individual property owners do not have the resources or opportunity to replace oaks as the university has pledged to do. An interesting fact: There are more oak trees on campus property today than there were 100 years ago. 

• The stadium and student-athlete center will be built with private funds. Why should the community care how the university raises these private funds? 

• There will not be additional demands for police or emergency services due to the stadium/high performance center projects. The university pays the city for any damage to city infrastructure caused by its construction projects. The university pays the city for police services associated with stadium events and pays the city annually for fire services and equipment. In the event of a major earthquake we will all depend on our fellow Californians and the federal government for assistance. The university will be working alongside local, state, and federal agencies to provide emergency response and shelter. 

Whatever the court’s decision on the current lawsuit, it does not benefit the city, the university, or the community to continue this adversarial relationship. It’s time to move on and work together, as one community. We would rather spend our dollars on projects to help the poor, support our schools, or protect the environment than to waste them on more lawyers. We ask our neighbors to join us. 

 

Sandy and Dick Bails, Hilde and Robert Clark, Fred Conrad, David Drubin, Karin Cooke, David Schlessinger, John Gage , Linda Schacht, Edward and Alexis Kleinhans, Martin and JoAnn Lorber, Bruce and Judy Moorad, Fred Nachtwey, Jenny Wenk, Jeff Williams, Michael Wilson, and Jacqueline Peters Hammond.


Response to Open Letter to Stand Up for Berkeley

By JANICE THOMAS
Friday December 07, 2007

Accusations have been flung far and wide against project opponents. Innuendo, bordering on slander, has substituted for argument and debate which references the legal documents under review. A partial project description summarized in response to the most recent vitriol can be referenced in this newspaper in the prepared table and throughout the text of this commentary. Meanwhile, reflections on this state of affairs are offered as follows:  

 

What is the stadium area development and who says so?  

A public process was held, as required by a state law, in which the University of California presented a project planned for the Berkeley campus, studied the environmental impacts of the proposed project, and provided opportunity for the public to comment on the project.  

www.cp.berkeley.edu/SCIP/DEIR/SCIP_DEIR.html 

www.cp.berkeley.edu/SCIP/FEIR/SCIP_FEIR.html 

Separate and apart from this legally mandated public process, extralegal dialogue has occurred throughout Berkeley and the region, led by the university, athletic support groups, environmental groups, neighborhood groups, civil rights groups, academicians and scholars, and individual activist of all stripes. In this dynamic environment of casual and impassioned communications on all sides, the “project,” legally known as the Southeast Campus Integrated Projects, informally known as the stadium area development, inaccurately minimized as a mere retrofit and remodel, has been reduced in people’s minds to ever smaller bits of digestible information. Meanwhile, the project in all its complexity has been aired before the Alameda County Superior Court over a nine day period of oral argument.  

On one occasion I was privileged to sit in an auditorium at a private event with 100 other people and hear the Athletic Director tell the group that the stadium area development would be “good for neighbors.” Having studied the Draft Environmental Impact Report, I was incredulous but as Director Barbour was giving a speech as an honored guest, there was no opportunity for comment.  

In other venues as well, various private events have been held in which the university’s planning department representatives are noticeably absent yet various high ranking representatives of the university have described the project to a selective audience. Other sources of information with uneven access include television, radio, newspapers, magazines (including alumnae publications), websites, and e-mails all of which have informed people for better or worse.  

Hired to deliver a project, some university administrators have become self-invested cheerleaders for development. Aside from the confidence of their speech or how much we might like or respect them, their opinions lack the weight we would wish. What matters is the project that’s been reviewed pursuant to all applicable laws – and that would be the project as laid out in the EIR for the Southeast Campus Integrated Projects (SCIP).  

 

How would the project affect the environment?  

“Substantial adverse Impacts” are anticipated in the following seven areas and cannot be mitigated to below significance: Aesthetics, Cultural Resources, Geology, Seismicity and Soils, Hydrology and Water Quality, Noise, Transportation and Traffic, and Utilities–Wastewater and Steam/Chilled Water.  

When reviewing the DEIR, many people are surprised to find, for example, that “construction of the first phase of seismic retrofit and program improvements to the CMS, including the SAHPC, would cause a significant adverse change in the historical significance of the CMS.” (DEIR p. 4.2-32)  

A city-wide perspective on project impacts can be found by reading the City of Berkeley’s Comment Letter on the SCIP DEIR. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/manager/lrdp/COBCommentsSCIPDEIR1-070706.pdf 

Among the observations are the following:  

• “The DEIR … fails to recognize that hydrologic impacts extend downstream from the project site.” p. 27  

• “This DEIR underestimates the responsibilities of the City of Berkeley Police and Fire Departments in regard to addressing emergency needs on campus, and then continues to underestimate the impacts of the project on that responsibility.” p. 28. 

• “Memorial Stadium will continue to have a capacity over 60,000 people and is located in a highly constrained area, on an earthquake fault in a high fire risk area. It would be very hard to find a more vulnerable site with worse access for a stadium anywhere in the Bay Area.” p. 29  

 

Could the project be scaled back so as to reduce the impacts and the effect on the environment?  

In fact, the university greatly expanded the proposed project at the 11th hour. As described in Petitioner Panoramic Hill Association’s Opening Trial Brief 9/19/07,www.panoramichill.org/SCIP/PHA_opening_brief.pdf. 

“(b)eginning in 1999 and continuing through the Design Guidelines prepared in March 2005 for the Stadium Project, the University proceeded to plan on a seismic and program improvement project for the Stadium that respected the historical importance of the Stadium and its immediate surroundings by designing the improvements to fit within the Stadium’s existing walls. In 2005, the University suddenly not only needed a seismically safe Stadium with modernized program facilities comparable to other PAC-10 schools, but in addition it sought to build a much larger facility, outbuilding and apparently outshining its PAC-10 rivals. Beginning in late 2005, the Design Guidelines and previous planning were set aside in favor of the planned facility extending outside of the Stadium walls and into the adjacent oak grove.” (p. 6, 7) 

The athletic training center would not only serve football players but would also be the primary hub of operations for 13 teams. Eight of these teams – men and women’s golf, men and women’s crew, men and women’s gymnastics, and men and women’s soccer —would not even play or practice in the southeast quadrant of campus. By expanding the facility, the university reduced its options for locating the facility.  

 

How would the project be financed?  

Not under the purview of the California Environmental Quality Act or the Alquist-Priolo Earthquake Fault Zoning Act and noticeably absent until recently in public dialogue is the question of financing the stadium and all its program improvements including the Student Athlete High Performance Center (SAHPC). Although some people would suggest that privately-funded stadium financing is not a legitimate public concern and is outside the scope of Berkeleyans’ self-interest, this is hardly the case.  

There is devil in the details of what private financing means. It is not the same as charitable gifts but instead, as explained by Vice-Chancellor of Administration Nathan Brostrom, while speaking before the Berkeley City Council, much of the stadium retrofit and renovation would be financed with a privately funded bond.  

Berkeleyans might well ask from where the money will come to pay back the non-charitable investors. And who would these investors be? And would there be legally bound constraints on stadium use that cannot be changed by issuing a new EIR?  

As the Athletic Department has already increased their TV broadcasting opportunities to include night time games yet still struggles financially, (http://ope.ed.gov/athletics/Search.asp), a financing scheme based on a privately financed bond might affect revenue-generating pressures on stadium use. In short, private investors will expect a return on their investment, and the return might well be paid for with revenue-generating events at the stadium.  

In closing, the project as described in the environmental review documents is antithetical to lovers of Berkeley, the environment, public safety and common sense. The environmental impacts are significant and substantially adverse. The financing scheme adds to the potential detriment from this project. In short, no one likes an adversarial relationship, but when one exists, it does not help matters to pretend otherwise.  

 

The Stadium Renovation and its Use 

Comparative illustrations to show the added height above the rim 

Comparison of existing view looking west from Centenial Drive at Stadium Rim Way and visual simulation of proposed project. (DEIR Fig. 4.1-19A)  

“Visual simulation of proposed project (press box and east stadium improvements)” (sic) DEIR Fig. 4.1-19B 

Also see Historic Structure Report by Siegel & Strain Architects, commissioned by the university, titled “University of California Berkeley California Memorial Stadium,” in which recommendations include the following: “No additions or alterations should project above the historic rim of the stadium.” (p. 60)  

 

Definition of capacity events 

“The project proposes up to seven night- or day-time events annually at CMS apart from football games, scheduled for evenings or weekends, that might fill the CMS to capacity, defined as attendance anticipated to be in excess of 30,000 people. The events would potentially bring large numbers of people to the project area on any day of the week, not just the weekends when football games normally take place. These events would occur throughout the year, whereas the football season is limited to a few months out of the year and home football games limited to up to eight times a year within the football season.” (FEIR, p. 9-1-24).  

Thus, does the SCIP EIR establish a baseline of eight home games, seven additional capacity events (>30,000), and unlimited number of less than capacity events (<30,000).  

 

VIP luxury boxes 

“At a mezzanine level located above the main concourse, an interior club with adjacent club seating in the seating bowl, with new wider treads and seats, is proposed. The new seating would be provided with 2 feet 6 inch spacing between the benches. Located on a new elevated section, the seating would allow for a larger club space with views of the San Francisco Bay to the 

Southwest and into the seating bowl in the other direction.” (DEIR p. 3-53) 

 

The cultural and historic significance of the oak grove west of the stadium 

Although a 3 for 1 planting scheme is proposed to “limit the loss” (DEIR p. 4.2-33), even with this mitigation there would be a “significant change in the historical significance of the CMS.” (DEIR p. 4.2-32). “This portion of the existing site retains a relatively high level of historical integrity, including trees paths, and stairs which contribute to the historical significance of the site…This zone of the site is significant and plays a substantial role in conveying the historical significance of the CMS, the landscape, and their relation to the main campus to the west.” (DEIR p. 4.2-32) “The project would eliminate much of the existing character of this site and likely reduce the number of “rustic” landscapes on campus to two—Founders’ Rock and Observatory Hill, with the latter also likely to change in character as the CV Starr East Asian Library and eventually the Tien Center for East Asian Studies…is completed.” (DEIR 4.2-33). 

 

Prominent light towers of undetermined size  

“Currently the CMS is lit only by practice lighting and temporary lighting for night games. Permanent practice lighting is mounted on four arrays on the east rim, and four arrays in the west bowl…. On the east rim, four new vertical profile structures would be installed and would be approximately 43 feet above the phase II new elevated deck (+485’-9”) or 58’-3” above the east 

rim promenade…The four new vertical profile structures may eventually be reinstalled atop the proposed east seating structure.” (FEIR 9.1-13 (emphasis added) 

 

Information about the expanded subterranean concourse 

There will be a “new Lower Concourse on the east side of the seating bowl…” (DEIR p. 3-50) (emphasis added).  

“The grade under the east side of the CMS would be excavated to allow construction of new programmatic spaces…” (DEIR, p. 2-29). (emphasis added) 

 

Janice Thomas is a Berkeley resident.


Columns

2007: The War in Iraq

Tuesday December 11, 2007

During 2007, the major news item continued to be the war in Iraq. On Jan. 4, the 110th Congress convened—the first time during the Bush administration Democrats had controlled both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Many of us expected this changing of the guard would produce a shift in Iraq policy, a real plan for withdrawal of U.S. troops. Sadly, this didn’t happen; the war not only continued, but President Bush upped the number of troops with his “surge” initiative. At year’s end, many Berkeley residents wondered whether it was possible to change anything while Bush was still in office. 

A recent Pew Research Poll found that nearly half of the public (48 percent) believe the military effort in Iraq is now “going well or fairly well.” However, a majority of Americans (54 percent) continue to believe our troops should come home as soon as possible—a plurality that has remained remarkably constant throughout the year. As the war has dragged on, the United States has become deeply polarized—41 percent of the public wants our troops to stay in Iraq as long as it takes to achieve “victory.” 

Most Berkeley residents view President Bush as dogmatic and inflexible and his attitude about the war has reinforced this assessment. Even though his approval ratings have hovered in the thirties throughout the year, Bush has rebuffed all Congressional attempts to change course in Iraq. (As a result, the approval ratings for Congress are now lower than those of the president.) 

If you are a supporter of George W. Bush, then it’s likely you believe he’s doing the right thing by staying the course in Iraq. But if you’re not a Bush fan, then you became very frustrated this year: you thought the Democrats in Congress didn’t stand up to the president. Finally, at the end of the year, Democrats in the House of Representatives responded to Bush’s intransigence by postponing consideration of additional Iraq funding. There was increasing indication that Dems were ready to battle the President on this issue. 

If Democrats do confront the White House, they won’t get help from the Republican Presidential candidates. The GOP front-runners—Giuliani, Huckabee, McCain, Romney, and Thompson—all want the United States to stay in Iraq until we “win.” The Republicans are running as mini-Dubyas even while they carefully avoid mentioning Bush’s name. (On the Democratic side, Clinton, Edwards, and Obama favor a withdrawal plan, but with caveats that could result in thousands of American troops remaining in Iraq at the end of 2011.) 

In 2008, two factors may force a change in Iraq policy. The first is the continuing deterioration of the U.S. economy. In November, a Newsweek poll reported that, for the first time all year, the public considered “the economy and jobs” to be a more important issue than Iraq.  

As America’s focus shifts to the mortgage crisis, the credit crunch, and the possibility of recession, Bush’s scare tactics about Iraq have had less traction. Since 9/11, the administration’s message to the American people has been, “You can have it all, tax cuts and a profligate war on terror, because the economy is robust.” Now, as U.S. financial systems tank, more and more Americans are asking if it’s reasonable to continue a war that is costing $2 billion per week and whose estimated total cost could exceed $2 trillion. (So far, the war in Iraq has cost Berkeley residents $171 million. That’s roughly $1,710 for each man, woman, and child in the city.) 

Mounting concern about the cost of the war has been accompanied by the refrain, “when are Iraqis going to be able to govern themselves?” Democrats have long taken the position that it is unreasonable for the U.S. military to be asked to serve in the role of the Iraqi police force in the middle of a civil war. The Iraqi government has yet to achieve any of the political objectives that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki delineated a year ago.  

Nonetheless, the White House downplays the lack of political progress. Now, key Republican Senators such as Lindsey Graham of South Carolina argue that if the Iraqi government doesn’t show progress by the end of the year, it’s time for a change in U.S. strategy. Recently, Washington Post military writer Thomas Ricks noted: “Senior military commanders here now portray the intransigence of Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government as the key threat facing the U.S. effort in Iraq, rather than Al Qaeda terrorists, Sunni insurgents or Iranian-backed militias.” 

Early in 2008 there will be another showdown over Iraq: whether U.S. involvement is worth the price. It’s likely that when President Bush says it is, that America has to stumble on, regardless of the cost, he will find he has lost the support of a veto-proof majority in Congress. Then our troops will begin to come home. 

 

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


Arboreal Estate and a Yule Tradition: Mistletoe

By Ron Sullivan
Tuesday December 11, 2007

One of the several “pagan” plants that appear all over in the midwinter holiday season is one that lives in trees: mistletoe. It’s Frazer’s eponymous Golden Bough.  

What’s it doing up there in the doorway? Amalgamating at least two pagan lineages: Kissing under the mistletoe is a Nordic peace gesture, and a Druidic fertility blessing. Both ideas spring from mistletoe’s odd lifestyle, as not quite a terrestrial plant.  

Balder, the Norse god not of comb-overs but of sun and joy, had a premonition of death. His mother Frigga, hearing this, was rattled enough to extract a promise from every creature of the air, water, and land never to harm her son. They agreed—after all, to harm the sun god would leave them freezing in the dark—except for mistletoe. As it isn’t of any realm, but suspended between sky and earth, Frigga forgot to ask. Now that Balder was invulnerable, the gods made a game of using him for target practice. Boy, the Aesir knew how to have fun.  

Loki, the god of mischief, wickedness, and general nasty doings, noticed Frigga’s lapse and made a spear with a mistletoe tip. (It’s reputedly tough as well as toxic.) He handed it to Balder’s blind brother, Hoder, who launched it and killed Balder. After much weeping and grief, Frigga managed to resurrect him. Her tears became mistletoe’s white berries, the plant was forgiven and made sacred to her, and warriors who met under it kept peace.  

The Druids noticed mistletoe’s aerial habits, too. It was gathered with a gold knife or sickle and caught on cloths before it could touch the ground and discharge its power. Some Europeans preferred knocking it down with a rock or arrow and catching it. This does limit one’s chance of breaking one’s neck falling out of a tree. There are various times for gathering mistletoe; one is the fifth (or sixth) night after the winter solstice’s new moon.  

It was used in cultures from northern Europe to Africa, North America to Southeast Asia, as a healing herb. (Don’t try it; leaf, branch, and berry, mistletoe is poisonous.) It was also a fertility charm: a sprig was fed to the first cow who calved after New Year’s to bless the whole herd. Some saw the Green Man in it. As it’s evergreen, and gets noticed in deciduous trees when their own leaves have fallen, it was thought to be the tree’s green soul. Some used it to ward off fire and lightning; it was thought to be engendered by lightning strikes and have the power to control its source.  

Its name, also based on an idea about its origin, is less romantic than it sounds: By some accounts, it translates to “dung on a twig.” In the good old days of the Dark Ages, when maggots rose spontaneously from manure piles and geese from barnacles, bird droppings were thought to turn into mistletoe. That’s close to the truth. Mistletoe spreads its sticky seed via the birds who eat its berries and either plop undigested seed onto another branch, or wipe it off their bills onto the bark. It grows slowly and takes a few years to reach maturity. 

Mistletoe has separate sexes; the berries are on females. It’s a denizen of the air only with help, standing on the shoulders of giants. It’s mostly parasitic, getting water and nutrients from its host trees through haustoria, a functional combination of roots and vampire fangs. It has leaves and chlorophyll, and can make its own food on too. There are dwarf mistletoe species without much in the way of leaves, entirely parasitic and pests mostly of conifers. Mistletoe can hurt an individual branch, and infestation to the point of threatening a tree is not unheard of. Most mistletoes aren’t all that dangerous to trees, though (as with Spanish moss) you might find an arborist eager to make a buck “curing” your tree of the green plague. 

Our native mistletoe is not the same species as the one the Druids and the Aesir were messing with, though they’re related. Our most common species locally are Phoradendron macrophyllum and P villosum; the European is Viscum album. There are other species in North America, most fairly similar.  

There’s lots of the native growing on oaks in the hills around Livermore, for example. Don’t go knocking it down; it’s an important food for interesting birds like cedar waxwing and phainopepla, an elegant glossy black songbird with a cardinal-style crest.  

We also have the legendary European species nearby. Luther Burbank imported some and tried his hand at raising it. As he was Luther Burbank, of course it worked, and now a population of Viscum album is radiating, tree by tree, from his working lab farm in Sebastopol. As far as I know, he didn’t try crossing his mistletoe with cacao beans to produce homegrown chocolate kisses.


The Algebra of Occupation

By Conn Hallinan
Friday December 07, 2007

In 1805, the French Army out-maneuvered, outsmarted and out-fought the combined armies of Russia and Austria at Austerlitz. Three years later it would founder against a rag-tag collection of Spanish guerrillas. 

In 1967 it took six days for the Israeli Army to smash Egypt, Jordan and Syria and seize the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. In 2006, a Shiite militia fought the mightiest army in the Middle East to a bloody standstill in Lebanon. 

In 1991 it took four days of ground combat for the United States to crush Saddam Hussein’s army in the Gulf War. U.S. losses were 148 dead and 647 wounded. After more than five years of war in Iraq, U.S. losses are approaching 4,000, with over 50,000 wounded; 2007 is already the deadliest year of the war for the United States.  

In each case, a great army won a decisive victory, only to see that victory cancelled out by what T.E. Lawrence once called the algebra of occupation. Writing about the British occupation of Iraq following the Ottoman Empire’s collapse in World War I, Lawrence put his finger on the formula that has doomed virtually every military force that has tried to quell a restive population. 

“Rebellion must have an unassailable base … it must have a sophisticated alien enemy, in the form of a disciplined army of occupation too small to dominate the whole area. It must have a friendly population … sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel movements to the enemy. Rebellions can be made by a 2 percent active striking force, and 98 percent passive sympathy. Granted mobility, security … time and doctrine … victory will rest the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive.”  

There is an inexorable trajectory to this process: an army vanquishes another army, only to find that wars don’t always end when generals surrender and capitals fall. When a few locals take up arms because they object to being occupied by “aliens,” the occupiers act like armies, which are designed to kill people, not to win their hearts and minds.  

So the occupiers break down doors and search for weapons, terrorizing and humiliating people in the process. They call in air strikes, which kill innocent bystanders. They choke off commerce and impose curfews to teach the locals a lesson, lessons that are never learned. For over 800 years the English beat, imprisoned, transported, shot, and hung hundreds of thousands of Irish, and it made the natives not the slightest bit quieter or more respectful. Indeed it made them quite the opposite. 

In this process of trying to get the occupied to accept defeat, a certain corruption of spirit begins to seep into the soul of an army, transforming it from a war-fighting machine into a kind of monster.  

Listen to some of these voices: 

Reporter Chris Hedges, who talked with solders, officers, and medical personnel in Iraq, said his interviews “revealed a disturbing pattern of behavior by American troops: innocents terrorized during midnight raids, civilian cars fired upon when they got too close to supply columns. The campaign against a mostly invisible enemy, many veterans said, has given rise to a culture of fear and even hatred among U.S. forces, many of whom … have, in effect, declared war on all Iraqis.” 

Sgt. Camilo Mejia told Hedges that, as far as the deaths of Iraqis at checkpoints, “This sort of killing of civilians has long ceased to arouse much interest or even comment.” 

Except among the survivors and relatives, of course, who now know who their enemy is. 

“Our children are being killed. Our homes are being destroyed. We are bombed. What should we do?” asks Abdul Qader, who lost seven family members in a June 29 U.S. air strike that killed 60 people in southern Helmand province, Afghanistan. 

“The Americans are killing and destroying a village just in pursuit of one person [Osama bin Ladin],” one man told the New York Times. “So now we have understood that the Americans are a curse on us, and they are here just to destroy Afghanistan.” 

Israeli psychologist Nofer Ishsai-Karen and psychology professor Joel Elitzur interviewed 21 Israeli soldiers who served in the Occupied Territories. They found that the soldiers routinely engaged in murder, assault, threats and humiliation, and many of them enjoyed it. 

“The truth is I love this mess—I enjoy it. It is like being on drugs,” one soldier told them. Another said, “What is great is that you don’t have to follow any law or rule. You feel you are the law, you decide. Once you go into the Occupied Territories, you are God.” 

One soldier told a story about seeing a four-year old boy playing in the sand in his front yard during a curfew in Rafah. The soldier says his officer “grabbed the boy. He broke his hand here at the wrist, broke his leg here. And started to stomp on his stomach, three times, and left. We are all there, jaws dropping, looking at him in shock … the next day I go out with him on another patrol, and the soldiers are already starting to do the same thing.” 

A few hours with the works of Goya will give one an idea of how the French Army behaved in Spain. 

An occupation is not a war against an army, it is a war against all. There are no front lines and no distinguishing uniforms, only an ambush or a roadside bomb that strikes without warning.  

And when one does, a veteran told Hedges, “people just open up.” A roadside bomb in 2005 set off a massacre by U.S. Marines in Haditha that killed 24 civilians. On Mar. 4, 2007, following a suicide bomb, Marines in Afghanistan went on a rampage that killed 12 civilians. 

Occupation is only possible if the occupied are reduced to a category that places them outside the boundaries of a shared humanity So the Iraqis becomes “Hajji,” just as two generations ago the Vietnamese became “slopes.” The Israeli right routinely refers to the Palestinians as “cockroaches.”  

Soon, everyone becomes an enemy. 

When U.S. helicopter gun ships killed 16 people Oct. 23 in a small northern Iraqi village near Tikrit, military officials said the dead were insurgents, because many of them were “military-age males,” a category that embraces about one-third of the population. 

Not many “hearts and minds” were won this past October near Tikrit. 

But “winning over the population” continues to be the illusion of every occupier. Testifying before Congress, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, “Army soldiers can expect to be tasked with reviving public services, rebuilding infrastructure, and promoting good government.” 

And then there is the real world. 

A Pentagon survey found that only 38 percent of Marines and 47 percent of Army soldiers thought civilians should be treated with dignity. Some 45 percent of the Army solders and 60 percent of the Marines said they would report the killing of innocent civilians. 

A recent ABC/BBC poll found that 78 percent of Iraqis say things are getting worse, almost 80 percent want U.S. troops out, and 57 percent of them support violence against Coalition forces. 

Those are the “algebraical factors” of occupation, and as Lawrence concludes, “against them perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in vain.”


Moving Forward on Oakland’s Violent Crime Problem

By J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR
Friday December 07, 2007

For some months there has been intense, local speculation asking “what is Dellums doing?” Which is a good thing, all things considered. We ought to be attentive to the people we place in public office, keeping their activities under a constant monitor. It’s how the gears and inner workings of democracy are greased. 

Those who have been paying the closest attention will have noticed—despite all the constant hallooing that Mr. Dellums has been doing nothing in response to Oakland’s crime and violence problems (one local blogger has nicknamed him “Mayor McNothing”)—he has in fact, been doing something, the outlines of which are just beginning to become manifest.  

Mr. Dellums has been saying that he believes adopting a “community policing” makeover is the major step needed to attack crime and violence in Oakland. It is understandable why this position should attract little excitement in Oakland these days. “Community policing” has been Oakland police policy since City Council approved its adoption in 1996 (Resolution No. 72727, you can look it up), a time when Natalie Bayton, John Russo, Nate Miley, and Dezzie Woods-Jones were still on council, and Elihu Harris was still mayor. Both Jerry Brown—when he was mayor of Oakland—and Robert Bobb—when he was City Manager—were described as community policing advocates. Yet during those times, what was officially described as “community policing” went through radical swings in Oakland in purpose and approach, while crime and violence remained virtually consistent. 

At one of Mr. Dellums’ first press conferences, when he was announcing his then-new police initiatives, I asked him when he was going to provide us with his definition of “community policing.” Looking a bit imperially peeved—as only Mr. Dellums can—he replied that he had just done so in his statement. I told him that this, however, had been simply a one-liner definition, and given that many Oakland officials before him had also defined their police programs as “community policing,” I wondered if Mr. Dellums would provide us with a more detailed evaluation of what he meant by the word. He looked at one of his staff members, and told me he’d get back to me. 

It’s been a long time, but I’ve grown patient with age. 

What has become clear in recent weeks is that “community policing” advocates both inside and outside the Dellums Administration have been working on a comprehensive community policing plan that will be layered over the existing public service delivery system (SDS) put in place by Mr. Bobb. In addition, we now know that Mr. Dellums’ “community policing” model is a rejection of the complete carving out of “community policing” as the sole responsibility of “problem solving officers” or “community policing officers,” and a step towards former Police Chief Joseph Samuels’ slogan that “every officer is a community policing officer.” While Mr. Samuels may—or may not, depending upon who you listen to—have intended this as a way of doing away with “community policing” altogether, Mr. Dellums’ concept appears to be to create a parallel definition of “community policing” as having police officers assigned to defined communities rather than to the city as a whole, while simultaneously keeping the defined corps of one-to-each-beat problem-solving officers intact. It was probably difficult—in the beginning—to conceive of such a dual-track “community policing” policy, much less to begin the administrative and bureaucratic mechanics to put such a dual policy into place, one reason, I imagine, why there has been something of a delay in the release of a Dellums administration comprehensive crime and violence policy. 

We know, from Chief Wayne Tucker, that one of the steps in implementation will be to divide the city into three police divisions—North and West Oakland, East Oakland from the lake to High Street, and High Street to the San Leandro border—with patrol officers assigned to one of those divisions, and one, only. The chief’s ability to effect such a change was made possible by the city’s victory over the Oakland Police Officers Association union in the recent 24 hour shift arbitration, and we understand that the changeover will be completed effective the 19th of next month. 

Once, Willie McCovey went to bat at Dodger stadium against Don Drysdale in a tight Giants-Dodgers game in the years when that rivalry meant something in the National League pennant race. The L.A. crowd was up and roaring at every one of Drysdale’s monster pitches, the announcer booming encouragement and the scoreboard exploding with messages, until McCovey sent a fastball far out over the right field wall into the Southern California night, putting the Giants ahead late in the game. A dead silence went over the stadium. Over in the left-field stands, a lone Giants fan stood up, an SF cap on his head, looked around the crowd, put a finger to his lips, and said, “Shhhhhh.” 

We seem to be having one of those “shhhhhh” moments now, with something of a silence from Dellums critics following the arbitration ruling. One should not expect that to last long, but it is nice to get a break from the clamor, however short-lived it may be. We need to be having serious, community conversations over how to address the problem of crime and violence in Oakland, conversations that include all elements of the community. The constant shouts that Mr. Dellums is doing “nothing” on the crime and violence issue might stir up the Dellums critics, but it has also drowned out those who want to sit in the city’s common spaces and work out our differences. 

One of those policy discussions ought to be on what we might call—for want of a better term—former mayor Brown’s “youth crime and violence” policies. 

It is one of the more interesting aspects of current Oakland life, how little we talk of the legacies of Mr. Brown’s recently-passed administration. A product, one imagines, of the American worship of instantaneity. During the California Attorney General’s race as well as in the few weeks after Mr. Brown left Oakland City Hall, there was a lot of stabbing at the issue of the Brown Oakland Legacy, but this was more in the way of a laundry list of things done and not done than it was a real analysis. Little wonder. Mr. Brown was elected mayor of Oakland on a downtown development platform. The three major projects coming out of that platform—Forest City Uptown, Oak To Ninth, and the redevelopment of Jack London Square—have yet to be completed, a major portion not even started. It’s difficult to determine, in advance, the legacy of things that are yet unseen, a task made infinitely more difficult by the fact that a good portion of the records of the Brown administration were destroyed—by the Brown administration—on their way out the door. 

Still, there are some important areas of Mr. Brown’s work that are available for examination, particularly as it is the crops the former mayor left in our fields that we will have to eat off of for many years to come. One of those areas, as we have said, involves “youth crime and violence.” 

Consider, for example, Mr. Brown’s sideshow policy (please don’t wince and ask “Why is he still writing about sideshows? Hasn’t that long been over?”—actually, as I will show, in brief, Mr. Brown’s sideshow policy never went away, and continues to affect the city’s ongoing crime and violence policy as well as its social policy.) 

It’s instructive to remember—as so many fail to—that sideshows began as peaceful, non-intrusive, late-night auto gatherings in parking lots—not the streets and intersections—by young people of color seeking alternatives to violence-plagued “official” entertainment events. Oakland police chased the events out of the parking lots and into the streets—a policy no city official has ever publicly explained, to my knowledge, and which former Police Chief Richard Word later publicly admitted was a “mistake”—and the events gradually, over a period of a couple of years, changed into the more violent, thrill-seeking venues of recent years. 

It took years for Oakland to create an official definition of “sideshows”—that came, finally, with Mr. Brown’s arrest-the-sideshow-spectators ordinance—and that ambiguity allowed city and police officials to apply “sideshow crackdowns” to large sections of East Oakland. Oakland eventually adopted a special set of traffic enforcement policies which were supposed to be aimed at sideshows but, in fact, were enforced in what police officially called “sideshow zones.” These were broad areas of the flatlands and foothills stretching from High Street, roughly, to the San Leandro border. Within these “sideshow zones”—which police told us were areas where sideshows had happened in the past—police operated stepped-up scrutiny of vehicles driven by people deemed “likely” to participate in sideshows. In practice, that meant cars driven by young African-Americans and Latinos within the “sideshow zones” were subject to intense lookover for any possible violation of the Vehicle Code, moving or non-moving, not because those vehicles had been observed breaking the code, but because police—according to their own admission—wanted to alert the youngsters of the police presence and discourage them from breaking those codes (more specifically, creating a sideshow). There are some amongst us who characterize Oakland’s “sideshow zone” enforcement policies as unconstitutional in the most basic sense, textbook discrimination, as they target people not for what they have done, but because they look like other people who may have done something in the past. Still, the “sideshow zone” enforcement policy continues in Oakland, to this day. 

What is Oakland’s “sideshow zone” enforcement policy? How does it work, is it working to reduce crime and violence, as claimed, and, even if it has, is the price of our loss of constitutional rights too high? How does it help—or hinder—the administration’s new crime and violence policies? This is a public discussion—not a shouting match or a trading of accusations—but a public discussion that we have long needed to have, and that we cannot long continue to put aside. 

More, as we move forward.


Historic Holiday Houses On View Around East Bay

By Steven Finacom
Friday December 07, 2007

Stately older houses can be at their best when festively decorated for the winter holidays.  

Up and down the East Bay shore this holiday season there are several historic homes—particularly Victorians—decked out for special tours and events, starting today and tomorrow. 

One of the most impressive is the Patterson House, a wedding cake white Victorian in the midst of the historic Ardenwood Farm in Fremont, a property that embodies Alameda County’s agricultural roots. 

The Patterson House itself was built as a big country farmhouse in the 1850s. In the late 1880s Samuel Newsom, of the Newsom Brothers of San Francisco, redesigned it as an expansive Queen Anne style country manse of some 7,000 square feet, with a main façade embellished with carved wooden scrollwork, balcony, corner tower and turret. 

Inside, there’s an ornate entry hall flanked by two massive sliding doors to formal parlor (left) and family parlor (right). A spindled wooden arch frames a switchback main staircase to an ample second floor with master, guest, and children’s bedrooms and baths. 

The twisty back stair descends to a well-stocked rear kitchen with a working iron stove. A pantry connects to a long formal dining room with elaborate place settings laid, adjoined by a smoking room, which was the original dining room. 

Most of the furnishings are family pieces original to the house. There’s even a side library with generations of books collected by the residents. 

As a “Forty Niner”, George Washington Patterson was an informant for, and early subscriber to, the seminal series of western histories produced by Hubert Howe Bancroft. 

His wife Clara later traveled extensively, and son Henry went to the University of California, while son William attended Stanford. See if you can spot the Cal yearbooks. 

The staff and volunteers who keep the Patterson House open are outgoing, friendly, enthusiastic, and know everything about the house. Dressed in period wear, they invite visitors to examine the household objects and talk about the family and earlier eras. 

In one room during our visit, a staff member cranked up a working Victorola next to copies of postcards sent from around the world by the well-traveled Clara Patterson. The kitchen smelled of fresh baking. In the guest bedroom a costumed volunteer did embroidery and explained her technique to curious children. 

An early Cal songbook sat on the piano in the family parlor, while logs crackled in the fireplace. Stained glass windows sparkled across the hall in the formal parlor, starting point for tours, where a guide invited children to count the number of Christmas trees throughout the house. 

Christmas decorations are up, and the house is open for tours this weekend as well as Dec. 15 and 16. Saturday and Sunday tours are on the hour from 11:00 a.m. to 3 p.m. Today, December 7, and next Friday, Dec. 14, there are also tours at 1, 2, and 3 p.m. 

Today, there’s also a 5-8:45 p.m. “Christmas Evening at the Patterson House” event with holiday music. 

For all events there’s a small admission charge, $5 or less. 

It’s wonderful this house and property have survived. George Washington Patterson, the builder, grew up in Ohio and Indiana. In 1849, age 26, he headed to California as a gold seeker, joining a company that made an arduous trip down the Mississippi, then by sea and land to San Francisco. 

He prospected awhile, then relocated to the Bay Area and turned to farming. He leased, later purchased, land of his own in what was then called Washington Township. 

Patterson gradually developed a vast holding of nearly 6,500 acres, making him one of the largest property owners in Alameda County. The fertile alluvial plain produced abundant harvests, and a nearby creek inlet provided convenient access to ship the output of the farm across the Bay. 

The property typified the extensive and productive farms that spread across southern Alameda County in the second half of the 19th century, and have now almost entirely vanished beneath housing tracts, office parks, and highways. 

Ardenwood almost suffered that fate. It remained in the Patterson family until a sale to a developer in 1971. Seven years later a complex arrangement resulted in the acquisition of 205 acres, including the house, by the City of Fremont. The East Bay Regional Park District was enlisted to operate the historic farm, which formally opened in 1985. 

The surviving land tract is large enough to retain the open character of an early California farm, including views to the distant hills. It includes fields and orchards, a deer park, stands of eucalyptus where monarch butterflies overwinter, a horse-drawn railroad, and a complex of outbuildings—from blacksmith shop to water tower—forming a demonstration farm with numerous activities and programs throughout the year. 

Free range peacocks, an aviary of white doves and brilliant pheasants, and penned goats, sheep, draft horses, cows and calves lend diversion to the grounds. 

Highway 880 provides a direct route to Ardenwood, about 30 miles from Berkeley. Take the exit west towards the Dumbarton Bridge. The road hugs the Ardenwood grounds on the right. Keep to the right, and watch for the entrance signs to the farm. 

Coming or going, an alternative to part of the freeway is a drive or bus ride down Hesperian Boulevard. Although the street sprouts several decades of housing tracts, a few miles north of Ardenwood on Hesperian you’ll find the McConaghy House, built in 1886, and now operated by the Hayward Area Historical Society.  

I wrote about this historic home exactly three years ago in the Dec. 7, 2004, issue, which you can find in the Planet online archives at www.berkeleydailyplanet.com. 

The Christmas decorations are up again this year, and you can tour the house on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays through Dec. 30. The house is open 1-4 p.m., with the last tour at 3:30 p.m. There’s a small admission charge. 

Further north, and closer to Berkeley, there are also holiday decorations and events at Dunsmuir House in Oakland, also discussed in more detail in the 2004 Planet article. 

This year, Dunsmuir is open for tours of the opulently decorated house on December weekends through the 23rd. There’s a Holiday Breakfast on Dec. 16, and Holiday Teas on various days.  

Dining tickets should be purchased in advance and entry to the house is strictly timed, so plan accordingly. 

In Oakland, the Cohen-Bray House is a remarkably pristine 1884 Victorian that, like Ardenwood, preserves the décor, furnishings, and traditions of the family that built it. 

It’s open on the fourth Sunday of the month for tours (call to confirm) and has two special holiday events. On Dec. 29 there’s a $25 per person Christmas Tea and Tour (repeated at 1, 2, and 3 p.m. in the afternoon), and on Twelfth Night—Jan. 5, 2008—a gala celebration with a five course meal for $125 per person.  

Space is limited, and reservations are needed, for these events. 

Tomorrow—-Saturday, Dec. 8--there’s a 9:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Holiday Home 

Tour in Alameda, a community that’s both close by and rich with period houses, particularly Victorians. The event is sponsored by the Alameda Family Services League. 

Tickets to visit the holiday decorated private homes are $30 on the day of the tour. There’s also a separately priced lunch at the Encinal Yacht Club, a Holiday Dessert Tea, and a Boutique and Gourmet Shoppe. 

Tonight, Dec. 7, a 6-9 p.m. “Candlelight Preview” visits the houses after dark and includes a “post tour party (with) champagne a light supper, and dancing” for $75. 

 

IF YOU GO: 

Ardenwood Historic Farm is at 34600 Ardenwood Boulevard in Fremont. 

General information can be found at www.ebparks.org/parks/ardenwood. Call 791-4196 for Patterson House information. 

The McConaghy House is at 18701 Hesperian Blvd., Hayward, next to Kennedy Park. Check www.haywardareahistory.org or call 276-3010. 

Dunsmuir House information including hours and ticket prices and purchase details can be found at www.dunsmuir.org 

The Cohen-Bray House is at 1440 29th Ave. in Oakland. www.cohen-brayhouse.info Call 843-2906 for availability of event tickets and to make reservations. 

Alameda Holiday Home Tour details are at 222.alamedaholidayhometour.info/ or call 510-522-8363 x 165 for tour information. 

 

IMAGE D: “Costumed staff and volunteers greet visitors in the fully stocked Patterson House kitchen.” 

 

IMAGE E: “The elaborate Patterson dining room is arranged for a festive, Victorian era, family meal.” 

 

 

 

 

 


More Gift Ideas for Your Favorite Gardener

By Ron Sullivan
Friday December 07, 2007

You don’t need an official occasion, you know. If you know a gardener, go ahead and give her a gift just ‘cuz. Call it an Unbirthday Present; I do a certain amount of that with my rellies because after 58 years of living in it I still don’t track time very well.  

So here’s a second short list of things I and others have found useful, messing around in dirt. 

Body Time, which we old farts remember as the original Body Shop, sells a little round hand-care bar with a string on it like a shower-soap’s. It’s beeswax and other handy ingredients like mineral oil, a bare touch of scent, and stays solid even when I leave it in the car. (In serious heat it greases up the paper it’s wrapped in, and doesn’t ooze any farther than that.) It’s good for fast treatment of dry hands and does not leave them too slippery to grasp the steering wheel, which is why it’s in my car. It’s also good to drag one’s fingernails through before digging in the mud because it’s easier to get the dirt-wax mix out of them afterward than plain dirt.  

Comes in two sizes for around $9 and $15; get one for yourself too. Long-lasting enough to be worth the price. Oh—being a solid, not a liquid, it’s also ideal for Homelandishly Secure air travel. Accessorize it with one of Body Time’s funny and effective fish-scale nailfiles for a manicure kit that’s above reproach. 

My favorite gardening hat is one that, like the Felco pruners I mentioned last week, needs to be tried on, which tends to spoil the surprise element. It’s washable stiff canvas, in off-white and a few darker shades, has an interior adjustable band to secure it when the wind’s blowing, and a decently broad brim all ‘round, like a cowboy hat but flexy enough to take other shapes. It’s sturdy enough to protect my head from the odd branch I’ve managed to drop on it while pruning.  

The fun part is finding it. Parker-Dahl Enterprises (a.k.a Shapeskins, for its line of sheepskin slippers) of Davis sells it; you might have seen them at craft or other fairs, or the March Garden Show in SF. They show up at the Davis Farmers’ Market, and that’s worth a trip in itself. Or call the number below; the Web site’s still under construction. 

There’s a gift I can’t have but would be any gardener’s envy. A friend just bought a house in El Sobrante with a perfect-sized yard, and her fox terrier showed me a talent not just for digging, but for digging on command, and in the place pointed out to him. He digs narrow holes, too—a more precise partner than most of the humans I’ve worked with, and easier to please.  

Other than a gift-wrapped ton of well-aged horse manure, he’d be the Number One holiday gift. I swear I’d suborn him if I weren’t allergic to him. 

 

 

 

 


Our Mushy Landscape, Part Two

By Matt Cantor
Friday December 07, 2007

I was out with a young contractor at the home of a client he wanted me to talk with the other day. The homeowner had a wet basement and garage that never seemed to dry out. We walked around and I looked up the hill to find a line of extraordinarily healthy and prolific trees and shrubs marching to the crest of the hill. They ran in a line from north to south, roughly. “Creek”, I cried, “Well, maybe an aquifer.” 

Well actually, that’s the easy part (diagnosis). The hard part is draining the site effectively, but, indeed, the first things is to see if you can figure out where the water is coming from and it helps to understand the kind of source you’re dealing with. I knew that there was a lot of water and it came all year long, although, obviously more in the rainy season. The homeowner readily agreed with this assessment. That’s the way our creeks, streams, springs and aquifers work. They can run all year long, although more so in the winter. Some springs run copiously all year round, and this can change the way we think about moisture issues. 

Why do we want dry properties? Does it really matter? What is the downside to inaction? 

The answer to these questions is not consistent from one house to the next. It’s site and owner specific. Like many things in life, the answer requires some personal inquiry and the acknowledgement that most of us live within a range of imperfect conditions. We’d all go nuts if we tried to fix everything and it seems to me, at times, that the folks who actually do fix absolutely everything are a little nuts. 

Here are some guidelines: Does your house show signs of current settlement? Is the foundation rotated or cracked? Does it appear to be drifting this way AND that at the same time? It’s best to involve an engineer or inspector to help make a determination about this but some cases are really obvious. If your floors make for great fun with marbles or topple small children, you might have a settlement problem. If these things are true for you, you might want to invest in drainage because it can almost always slow this process, although there are surely soils which will move despite our best efforts. In some cases it can make a huge difference, however the time scales are such that it may not be apparent for some years. 

If you have water or damp soils under your house for part or all of the year, this may contribute to fungi growing in the crawlspace, basement or the house proper.  

This varies a lot, but if you have windows that are perennially coated with condensation, this is one likely cause (don’t ignore this because there are other possible causes including faulty gas appliance venting which might prove quite serious).  

When drainage is installed properly, it can help damp houses dry out, lessening the effects of these various microscopic organisms.  

Fungi (which includes molds and most mildews) and Protists (which include at least one mildew) nearly all require elevated humidities to propagate and when things are dry, most of them simply will not grow, throw spores or otherwise annoy.  

If you’re ready to really attack this problem, the type of drainage system that seems to be most effective and popular is the “French” (or, more properly, subsurface) drain. This is essentially a moat. The notion is this. If you can give the water that is heading toward your house a faster and easier path around the house via gravity to a point beyond harm’s way, you’ve won the battle. This usually takes the form of a trench around the entire perimeter of the structure, though a horshoe shape often works well on a hillside since the water on the downhill side tends to be moving away from the house anyway. Usually. 

Given that water travels toward your basement or crawlspace from below ground as well as from the surface, you want to be able to catch it as it approaches your basement and so must cut this moat deeper than any portion that might be wetted within the bounds of your home. Since water is generally traveling through the soil in roughly the incline of the hillside, it is not typically necessary to make a trench at the uphill end as deep as one might think. If your basement is 6 feet below ground and near the lower end of the building, you do not necessarily have to make a 12 foot deep trench at the back. A 6 to 8 foot trench might do just fine. This is tricky stuff though, since we just don’t know exactly how the plates of clay, silt and rock are layered below your house and we also don’t know how waterways have crafted themselves over the eons (especialy springs, eek). But, all that said, if it looks like a wet, slimy frog, it’s probably a wet, slimy frog. 

Nonetheless, the smart money tends to be on making the trench a little deeper than everyone thinks is enough and when you’re already digging, the cost usually isn’t much more to trench another foot or two. 

A moat will still work just fine if it’s filled with something that leaves big voids for water to flow, so rather than having a trench around the house (to go with the pikemen and the drawbridge), we fill it in with gravel. To be sure that there is an extra big void, most systems include a large perforated pipe that works simply by providing a space where water can flow. Water flows in the entire body of gravel and pipe as it chooses. A fabric encasement is wrapped around the pipe and gravel to keep soil from slowly nullifying this diaphanous mechanism. 

The trench must be sloped to direct water to one or more safe end points. On a hill, this might be down to the street-gutter, but on a flatter lot, it may be necessary to end the slope in a sump (or well) where it can be pumped out to the gutter. Sometimes there are other safe places to dump the water but not usually and please don’t dump it anywhere near your neighbor if you want to get invited back to the annual BBQ. 

There’s too much to say about pumps to get started in this forum but let it be enough to say that these require many carefully considered details and the oversight of an electrician. 

Clearly, these are heady, complex issues and when funguses and wet basements are involved, this is not the time to try and go it alone. So if this sounds like your home, get some professional help and put the fungi on the dinner table where they belong. 

 


Arts & Events

Arts Calendar

Tuesday December 11, 2007

TUESDAY, DEC. 11 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Finding Women of Valor: The Daily Lives of Women in Ancient Israel” An archeology exhibit at the Badé Museum, Holbrook Building, Pacific School of Religion, 1798 Scenic Ave. Open Tues. and Thurs. from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. to Jan. 31. 849-8272. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Dave Weinstein, author of “Signature Architects of the San Francisco Bay Area,” will give a slide talk about notable architects and homes in El Cerrito and Kensington at 7 p.m. at El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Ave. 526-7512.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Piedmont Choirs at 7:30 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 114 Montecito Ave. www.stpauloakland.org 

CZ & the Bon Vivants at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Singers’ Open Mic with Keyy Park at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ.  

Take the Stage Band workshop performances at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $4.50-$5.50. 548-1761.  

Trombonga at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Chick Corea Elektric Band at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $40-$45. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 12 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Hans Peeters in conversation with Doris Kretschmer on “Field Guide to Owls of California and the West” at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. www.universitypressbooks.com 

“Ferruccio Busoni, Italian Piano Prodigy” A lecture by pianist Daniell Revenaugh, with latest Busoni Recording, at 5 p.m. at The Musical Offering Café, 2430 Bancroft Way. 849-0211. www.themusicaloffering.com 

Daniel Marlin and Janell Moon at 7 p.m. at Nefeli Caffe, 1854 Euclid Ave. 644-3977. 

Berkeley City College Digital Arts Club and Milvia Street Art and Literary Journal host a benefit poetry reading and printmaking exhibition at 6 p.m. at Berkeley City College, 2050 Center St. Cost is $5.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Oakland City Center Holiday Concert with Mariachi Tradicion Mexicana at noon at 12th and Broadway, Oakland.  

SFSU Jazz Choir & Afro Cuban Ensemble at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ.  

La Peña’s Latin Jazz Orchestra Recital at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $8. 849-2568.  

Za’atar at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054.  

Rachel Efron at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Peace Nick with Roy Zimmerman at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

THURSDAY, DEC. 13 

EXHIBITIONS 

Kala Artist Annual Exhibition New works in a variety of media. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Kala Art Institute, 1060 Heinz Ave. 549-2977.  

“Ashes to Life” An art exhibit examining the mass exodus of Azoreans to America, and the 50th Anniversary of the eruption of the “Vulcão dos Capelinhos” Reception at 7 p.m. at The Stone Gallery, 600 50th Ave. Oakland. RSVP to 536-5600. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“The Living New Deal Project: Excavating a Lost Civilization Around Us” with Gray Brechin on a statewide collaborative effort to document and map the physical legacy of the New Deal in California, at 7:30 p.m. at the Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $8-$10. Sponsored by Oakland Heritage Alliance. 763-9218. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Darol Anger & Mike Marshall at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $22.50-$23.50. 548-1761.  

Josh Nelson Quartet, with guest Natasha Miller, at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ.  

Jenny Ferris and Laura Klein, jazz, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

Willow Willow, Mushroom, Emily Jane White at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. 

FRIDAY, DEC. 14 

CHILDREN 

“Alice in Wonderland” puppet show at 2, 4 and 6 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave., off Grand Ave., Oakland. Cost is $6. 452-2259. 

THEATER 

Altarena Playhouse “The Man Who Saved Christmas” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Altarena Playhouse, 1409 High St., Alameda, through Dec. 16. 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. 23. Tickets are $28-$50. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

BHS Drama and Shift Theatre “Noises Off” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Florence Schwimley Little Theater, Berkeley High Campus. Tickets are $6-$12. 332-1931.  

Berkeley Rep “After the Quake” at the Trust Stage, 2025 Addison St., through Dec. 21. Tickets are $33-$69. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Black Repertory Group “A Rasin in the Sun” at 8 p.m. at 3201 Adeline St., through Dec. 12. Tickets are $10-$20. 652-2120. 

Brookside Repertory Theatre “Hiliday Shorts IV” at noon at The Claremont, 41 Tunnel Rd. Tickets are $65-$75, includes lunch. 549-8512. 

Encore Theatre Company & Shotgun Players “The Shaker Chair” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m., at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., through Jan. 27. Tickets are pay what you can. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

Impact Theatre “A Very Special Money & Run Winter Season Holiday Special” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave., through Dec. 22. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. http://impacttheatre.com 

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, through Dec. 15. Tickets are $18. 232-4031. www.masquers.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

Touchable Stories “Richmond: The Story Continues” Fri. at 8 p.m., Sat. at 2 and 6 p.m. at Old Kaiser Cafeteria, Shipyard #3, 1303 Canal Blvd., Richmond. Cost is $6-$12. Reservations required. 619-3675. www.touchablestories.org 

Holiday Arts from 4 to 8 p.m. at ACCI Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

The Best of Actors Reading Writers “Serendipity” at 8 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. 932-0214. ricaisabella@yahoo.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Ballet Theater “Nutcracker” Fri. at 7 p.m., Sat. at 2 and 7 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave., through Dec. 16. Tickets are $16-$22. 843-4689. 

The Venezuelan Music Project at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $13-$15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Mark Morris Dance Group “The Hard Nut” at 7:30 p.m., Sat. at 2 and 8 p.m., Sun. at 3 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$60. 642-9988. www.calperformances.net 

Holiday Gospel Extravaganza with Zoe Ellis, Caitlin Cornwell, Carmen Jones and Ashling Cole at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Farlow-Kirch Band, David Gans, Pat Nevins at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

TC Brewitz and Trio at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Rebecca Riots at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Jeff Oster plays selections from his new CD “True” at 7:30 p.m. at Sacred Space Yoga Sanctuary at Rudramandir, 830 Bancroft Way. Tickets are $15-$20. 486-8700. 

The Nomadics, jazz, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

El Capitan, Axton Kincaid, The Whoreshoes, bluegrass and country, at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

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

Broun Fellinis at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Chick Corea Elektric Band at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $40-$45. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, DEC. 15 

CHILDREN  

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with Bonnie Lockhart at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5 for adults, $4 for children. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Boswick the Clown at 11 a.m. at Studio Grow, 1235 Tenth St. Cost is $7. 526-9888. 

“Children’s Theater Holiday Program” Sat. and Sun. at 12:30 and 3:30 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave., off Grand Ave., Oakland. Cost is $6. 452-2259.  

Bugs Bunny/Road Runner cartoons at 10 a.m. and noon, Sun. at noon at Elmwood Theater, 2966 College Ave. at Ashby. Benefit for local PTAs. 433-9730. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Of Ignorance and/or Mystery” A location-inspired project by Ken Fandell opens at Traywick Contemporary, 895 Colusa Ave. 527-1214. www.traywick.com 

“Robots are Art” Art show and contest at 6 p.m. at Float Gallery 1091 Calcott Place #116, Oakland. 535-1702. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

The Best of Actors Reading Writers “Serendipity” at 8 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. 932-0214. ricaisabella@yahoo.com 

Wilde Irish Productions “A Joycean Christmas” with readings from James Joyce’s masterpiece “The Dead” at 8 p.m. at Gaia Arts Center. Tickets are $25. 644-9940. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Pacific Boychoir Academy “Harmonies of the Season” at 7 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 114 Montecito Ave., Oakland. 652-4722. 

Berkeley Ballet Theater “Nutcracker” Fri. at 7 p.m., Sat. at 2 and 7 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave., through Dec. 16. Tickets are $16-$22. 843-4689. 

Trio Concertino with Amy Likar, flute; Madeline Prager, viola; Miles Graber, piano at 8 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana St. Tickets are $8-$12. 549-3864. www.trinitychamberconcerts.com 

“Carols Around the World Concert” at 5 p.m. at first United Methodist church, 201 Martina St., corner W. Richmond Ave., Point Richond. 236-0527. 

Sacred and Profane Annual Holiday Concert, traditional and contemporary music for Swedish Lucia, Channukah and Christmas, at 8 p.m. at St. Leo’s Catholic Church, 176 Ridgeway Ave., Piedmont. Tickets are $12-$15. www.sacredprofane.org 

Rebecca Riots at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

The Ravines at noon at Cafe Zeste, 1250 Addison St. at Bonar, in the Strawberry Creek Park complex. 704-9378. 

Brian Andres & the Afro-Cuban Jazz Cartel at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$12. 849-2568.  

Christie McCarthy & Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ.  

Pellejo Seco at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cuban salsa dance lesson at 8:30 p.m. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Gateswingers Jazz Band at 8 p.m. at Central Perk,10086 San Pablo Ave. at Central, El Cerrito, 558-7375. 

Moment’s Notice improvised music, dance and theater at 8 p.m. at Western Sky Studio, 2525 8th St. Tickets are $8-$15. 992-6295. 

Fred Odell and Bob Harp at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Flowtilla at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Dave Gleason, 77 El Deora, The B Stars, alt country, at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

SUNDAY, DEC. 16 

EXHIBITIONS 

“One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now” Guided tour at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Community Chorus and Orchestra “Puccini’s Messa di Gloria” at 8 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Free, donations appreciated. 

A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at 5:30 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way at Ellsworth. 845-0888. 

San Francisco Choral Artists “Glorious Sounds of Christmas” at 4 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 114 Montecito Ave. www.stpauloakland.org 

Rebecca Rust, ‘cello and Friedrich Edelmann, bassoon at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Cost is $10. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

Al Stewart at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $29.50-$30.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Mamadou Sidibe & Music Mali at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Tom Huber and Misisipi Mike at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Pappa Gianni & the North Beach Band at 2 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198. 

MONDAY, DEC. 17 

CHILDREN 

“Alice in Wonderland” puppet show at 2, 4 and 6 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave., off Grand Ave., Oakland. Cost is $6. 452-2259. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Express with Jeanne Powell at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Yolanda and Ric, opera and lieder, at 7 p.m. at Le Bateau Ivre, 2629 Telegraph Ave. 849-1100. www.lebateauivre.net 

Trovatore, traditional Italian music, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Classical at the Freight with San Francisco Chamber Orchestra at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761 www.freightandsalvage.org 

Dann Zinn at 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

 


Classical Music Shop Celebrates Busoni

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Tuesday December 11, 2007

The premiere recording of Ferruccio Busoni’s Complete Two Piano Works (EMI/Angel) will be celebrated by the Musical Offering (Bancroft Avenue below Telegraph), this Wednesday 5-7 p.m., with a reception for and signing by pianists Daniell Revenaugh of Berkeley and Lawrence Leighton Smith, currently musical director of the Colorado Springs Philharmonic.  

“Fantasia Contrappuntistica” and the “Berceuse Elegiaque,” as well as works based on Mozart and Bach, were transcribed by Egon Petri, Busoni’s protegé, who later taught at Mills College in Oakland. While Busoni was composing his opera, Doktor Faust, and reducing his own concert schedule, he composed these two works for a full concert program both would play, in order to promote Petri’s career.  

Busoni and Petri memorabilia will be featured, including photos, as well as letters and manuscripts related to the compositions, which were recovered by Revenaugh in Europe. The public is invited, free of charge, and refreshments will be served. 

“I was associated with Petri for about 10 years,” said Revenaugh, “looking him up due to his relationship to Busoni. In 1960, I rescued the papers and photographs Petri had left behind, in chaos, in the wake of the War, in Zakopanje [Poland]. Over 300 letters, including some to Brahms. He knew everybody, including Rilke and Joyce, from the years spent in Zurich. He was a fascinating character. I’ll have pictures as well as manuscripts and letters relating to the compositions in the Musical Offering’s glass cases.” 

The collaboration on this project, recorded at Yale, began when Smith conducted a premiere work for the Louisville Orchestra of Revenaugh’s schoolmate, Ellen Zwillich. When Zwillich introduced the two, Smith said to him, “You conducted the great recording of the Busoni Concerto. Let’s do something wild like that!”  

Revenaugh is pursuing another project of compositions from notable friends, like Smith (who will be represented by three pieces), including a piano sonata by Carlisle Floyd, composed at the time he was working on his opera, Susannah (1955), “which has been performed more than West Side Story,” according to Revenaugh, “the premiere American folk opera, after Porgy and Bess.” 

Revenaugh owns the ex-slave cabin in which Floyd lived in Tallahassee, now moved to a preservation plantation where Revenaugh plans to have it restored for seminars and study, “as Floyd House.” 

 


Shift Theatre, BHS Present ‘Noises Off’

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Tuesday December 11, 2007

“I’m going to do something wrong here ...” Those ominous words, emblazoned on the cover of the program to the Shift Theatre/Berkeley High School Drama production of Michael Frayn’s backstage bungler, Noises Off, telegraph the message of this non-message play clearly. And a great deal is going to be done wrong. Repeatedly. That’s the whole show. 

A favorite with companies large and small, and their audiences—what stage actor doesn’t want to do a pratfall while playing something serious, and who doesn’t enjoy watching them do it?—Noises Off is really a 3-D look, fore and aft (onstage and backstage) of the same doomed show, from dress rehearsal (onstage) to a month on the road (backstage) to a couple of months later.  

A typical three-act entertainment, as defined by George M. Cohan: Act One: hero goes up tree; Act Two: throw rocks at him; Act Three: get him back on ground again. But in Noises Off, the ground itself is shaky. And the rocks—thrown by all, including the hero(es)—never stop flying. 

“All these doors!” exclaims dubious ingenue Brooke, a.k.a. Viki (Kelly Friedman) with a big sweep of the arm, at the beginning of “Nothing On,” the play we see deteriorate from scratch. And it does seem to be an old-fashioned door-slammer. “Only a handful, really,” breathes her escort, Garry/Roger (Nico Kiefer). And they’re both right: the doors commence to open and slam as the various couples and solitary characters file in, in syncopated entrances unbeknownst to each other—and they’re all a handful, in costume or in mufti. 

The great comedy of Frayn’s play, which the director, Molly Bell, and her cast of nine have a handle on, is the underbelly of the beauty of live theater. That is, what happens when the difference between the real people who act and the characters they’re playing gapes open, big as a chasm—and what happens when the spectacle you’re watching is the resulting implosion of the one you were supposed to watch? 

Door-slammers rely on pinpoint timing—and a door-slammer deliberately gone awry has to turn over that beat with a funny flourish. The Shift Theatre bunch bit off a lot with Noises Off, and they have a lot of fun bringing it off, from Dotty/Mrs. Clackett’s (Elena Wagoner) dottering entrance as the old housekeeper: “I can’t open sardines and answer the phone!” in East End drawl, constantly (and dryly) interrupted by her director Lloyd (Eli Wirtshafter), to the chorus of three burglars who serially break and rebreak the same window to enter onstage, covering (so they think) a missed exit, all finally reciting the lines in unison as the set breaks up in mayhem. 

The two-story set itself, on wheels, as meticulously built by Mathison Ott and Samuel Owens, is rotated twice—to thunderous applause—so the audience may glimpse the many doings onstage and off. 

The cast, crew and director of “Nothing On” all bring their own baggage along, especially Lloyd the philanderer, who—like various stage tyrants—enjoys making his victims cry, in particular the stage manager (Anne Yumi Kobori), constantly in motion, though he can’t seem to get a rise out of Belinda/Flavia (Sonia Decker), of his leading ladies. These three have the most pronounced characters, and get the most out of them. 

The rest are, more or less, real characters in the scenic sense: Selsdon/Burglar (Mark “Thor” Sorenson), the cast lush; Tim Allgood (Peter Walton), the sleep-deprived stage carpenter and erstwhile stand-in; and Frederick/Philip (Eric Chiang), whose nose gushes red when the going gets thick. 

Shift Theatre has a few more coming up at various locations: The Vagina Monologues in February at the Ashby Stage, Independent Theater Projects in Feb. and March at the Hillside Club—and back at the Schwimley at Berkeley High in late April-early May for Grease. 

 


The Life and Music of a Legendary Singer-Songwriter

By Art Goldberg, Special to the Planet
Tuesday December 11, 2007

One of the most enjoyable and inspiring films I’ve seen in a long time comes to Berkeley for one day only, this Thursday, Dec. 13 at the California Theater, a benefit for the local Gray Panther chapter. Screenings are at 2 p.m. and 7:15 p.m. Tickets are $10. 

Pete Seeger: The Power of Song played briefly in San Francisco this fall, but never made it to the East Bay. It is an exceedingly well-made biography of the rugged iconoclast who has insisted on living and working on his own terms for most of his 88 years. 

Of course there are marvelous clips of Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter Paul and Mary, and the Weavers playing and singing, but the film is focused on Seeger, his life, music and activism.  

In one way or another he has participated in most of the great social movements of the twentieth century, singing at union rallies with Guthrie in the late thirties, writing and singing anti-fascist songs in the forties, staring down the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) in the ’50s, going south and playing for the civil rights movement in the early ’60s, singing at countless anti-Vietnam war rallies later in the ’60s and ’70s, then helping to launch the environmental movement with his drive to clean up the Hudson River.  

Finally, there’s a scene showing Seeger, in his mid-’80s, standing in the snow with a few friends beside a well-trafficked road at the beginning of the Iraq war, holding up a sign that says “Peace.”  

Through it all, Seeger has taken great pains to avoid celebrity and commercialization. He hated playing nightclubs and refused to stay in fancy hotels while the Weavers were at the top of the pop charts with “Goodnight Irene” and “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena.” He left the group when, after they had been blacklisted and out of work for a long time, they decided to make a commercial.  

Unable to find work in a mainstream setting for 17 years, Seeger made his living by singing at schools, colleges, and summer camps all across the country, “poisoning the students’ minds,” as he put it.  

During this time, he wrote or co-wrote (he liked collaborative efforts) wonderful songs like “If I Had A Hammer,” “Turn, Turn, Turn,” “We Shall Overcome” “Guantanamera,” “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.”  

The film also contains some chilling footage of the McCarthy-era Peekskill riots, a right-wing backlash against a Paul Robeson concert north of New York City, at which Seeger also sang, as well as his performance on the Smothers Brothers TV show in 1968, which effectively broke the blacklist.  

Beyond music and politics, The Power of Song also goes into Seeger’s personal life, making for a well-rounded portrait of the man who has tried to live by the principles he believes in, and has pretty much succeeded. His wife Toshi and their children talk about life around the isolated log cabin home which Seeger and friends built more than 50 years ago.  

Anyone who has ever participated in a protest march, walked a picket line, been to a rally or fought for social justice will love this film. Why it will be here for only one day is at this moment unfathomable, but it opened in New York City last week to excellent reviews and is being distributed by the Weinstein brothers who distributed Michael Moore’s Sicko. 

 


Nuclear Power in the Wake of Chernobyl

Tuesday December 11, 2007

Living With Chernobyl: The Future of Nuclear Power, a new documentary by Berkeley filmmakers and journalists Cliff Orloff and Olga Shalygin, will air at 11 p.m. Thursday on KQED Channel 9.  

As the threat of climate change forces environmentalists to reconsider the virtues of nuclear power, Orloff and Shalygin explore the myths and misconceptions surrounding the world’s worst nuclear accident. In 2006, the United Nations established the Chernobyl Forum, a task force charged with putting together a definitive report on the aftermath of the 1986 disaster. The filmmakers interviewed scientists, environmentalists and Chernobyl survivors in an effort to illuminate the truth behind the accident, as well as the arguments in favor of and in opposition to the use of nuclear power as an energy source. 

The broadcast will be repeated on KQED’s Life-Encore channel at 1 p.m. and 2 a.m. Friday and on KQED World at 9 a.m. and noon Dec. 25.  


Arboreal Estate and a Yule Tradition: Mistletoe

By Ron Sullivan
Tuesday December 11, 2007

One of the several “pagan” plants that appear all over in the midwinter holiday season is one that lives in trees: mistletoe. It’s Frazer’s eponymous Golden Bough.  

What’s it doing up there in the doorway? Amalgamating at least two pagan lineages: Kissing under the mistletoe is a Nordic peace gesture, and a Druidic fertility blessing. Both ideas spring from mistletoe’s odd lifestyle, as not quite a terrestrial plant.  

Balder, the Norse god not of comb-overs but of sun and joy, had a premonition of death. His mother Frigga, hearing this, was rattled enough to extract a promise from every creature of the air, water, and land never to harm her son. They agreed—after all, to harm the sun god would leave them freezing in the dark—except for mistletoe. As it isn’t of any realm, but suspended between sky and earth, Frigga forgot to ask. Now that Balder was invulnerable, the gods made a game of using him for target practice. Boy, the Aesir knew how to have fun.  

Loki, the god of mischief, wickedness, and general nasty doings, noticed Frigga’s lapse and made a spear with a mistletoe tip. (It’s reputedly tough as well as toxic.) He handed it to Balder’s blind brother, Hoder, who launched it and killed Balder. After much weeping and grief, Frigga managed to resurrect him. Her tears became mistletoe’s white berries, the plant was forgiven and made sacred to her, and warriors who met under it kept peace.  

The Druids noticed mistletoe’s aerial habits, too. It was gathered with a gold knife or sickle and caught on cloths before it could touch the ground and discharge its power. Some Europeans preferred knocking it down with a rock or arrow and catching it. This does limit one’s chance of breaking one’s neck falling out of a tree. There are various times for gathering mistletoe; one is the fifth (or sixth) night after the winter solstice’s new moon.  

It was used in cultures from northern Europe to Africa, North America to Southeast Asia, as a healing herb. (Don’t try it; leaf, branch, and berry, mistletoe is poisonous.) It was also a fertility charm: a sprig was fed to the first cow who calved after New Year’s to bless the whole herd. Some saw the Green Man in it. As it’s evergreen, and gets noticed in deciduous trees when their own leaves have fallen, it was thought to be the tree’s green soul. Some used it to ward off fire and lightning; it was thought to be engendered by lightning strikes and have the power to control its source.  

Its name, also based on an idea about its origin, is less romantic than it sounds: By some accounts, it translates to “dung on a twig.” In the good old days of the Dark Ages, when maggots rose spontaneously from manure piles and geese from barnacles, bird droppings were thought to turn into mistletoe. That’s close to the truth. Mistletoe spreads its sticky seed via the birds who eat its berries and either plop undigested seed onto another branch, or wipe it off their bills onto the bark. It grows slowly and takes a few years to reach maturity. 

Mistletoe has separate sexes; the berries are on females. It’s a denizen of the air only with help, standing on the shoulders of giants. It’s mostly parasitic, getting water and nutrients from its host trees through haustoria, a functional combination of roots and vampire fangs. It has leaves and chlorophyll, and can make its own food on too. There are dwarf mistletoe species without much in the way of leaves, entirely parasitic and pests mostly of conifers. Mistletoe can hurt an individual branch, and infestation to the point of threatening a tree is not unheard of. Most mistletoes aren’t all that dangerous to trees, though (as with Spanish moss) you might find an arborist eager to make a buck “curing” your tree of the green plague. 

Our native mistletoe is not the same species as the one the Druids and the Aesir were messing with, though they’re related. Our most common species locally are Phoradendron macrophyllum and P villosum; the European is Viscum album. There are other species in North America, most fairly similar.  

There’s lots of the native growing on oaks in the hills around Livermore, for example. Don’t go knocking it down; it’s an important food for interesting birds like cedar waxwing and phainopepla, an elegant glossy black songbird with a cardinal-style crest.  

We also have the legendary European species nearby. Luther Burbank imported some and tried his hand at raising it. As he was Luther Burbank, of course it worked, and now a population of Viscum album is radiating, tree by tree, from his working lab farm in Sebastopol. As far as I know, he didn’t try crossing his mistletoe with cacao beans to produce homegrown chocolate kisses.


Berkeley This Week

Tuesday December 11, 2007

TUESDAY, DEC. 11 

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 Redwood, Canyon Meadow. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233. 

End the Occupation Vigil every Tues. at noon at Oakland Federal Bldg., 1301 Clay St. www.epicalc.org 

Tai Chi for Peace at 1:30 p.m. in front of the Marine Recruiting Station, Shattuck Square. Open Sidewalk Studios at 3 p.m. 524-2776. 

Snowcamping 101 with Karen Hoffman of the Sierra Club’s Snowcamping Section at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Family Storytime at 7 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043.  

American Red Cross Blood Services Volunteer Orientation in Oakland, from 6 to 8 p.m. Various East Bay opportunities available. Advanced sign-up is required; please call 594-5165.  

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

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 

Street Level Cycles Community Bike Program Come use our tools as well as receive help with performing repairs free of charge. Youth classes available. Tues., Thurs., and Sat. from 2 to 6 p.m. at at 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991.  

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 12 

Richmond Main Street Initiative Community Holiday Celebration from 10 a.m. to noon for preschool and kindergartners and 5 to 7 p.m. for the entire community at the corner of Marina Way and Macdonald Ave. www.richmondmainstreet.org 

Civilian War Victim Series “The Pathology of Survivors” with Dr. Brian Gluss with the film “Survivor Guilt” by psychoanalyst William Niederland, at 1 p.m. at Emeryville Senior Center, 4321 Salem, Emeryville. 596-3730. 

“Field Guide to Owls of California and the West” with author Hans Peeters in conversation with Doris Kretschmer at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585.  

Poetry Writing Workshop with Alison Seevak at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, Edith Stone Room, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 526-3720. 

Cancer Prevention and Survival Cooking Class on Antioxidants and Phytochemicals at 8:30 a.m. at Manzanita, 2409 E. 27th St., Oakland. To register call 595-6445. 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. Heavy rain cancels. 548-9840. 

Berkeley Copwatch: Know Your Rights Training and Copwatching Workshop at 7 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. 548-0425. 

THURSDAY, DEC. 13 

“The Living New Deal Project: Excavating a Lost Civilization Around Us” with Gray Brechin on a statewide collaborative effort to document and map the physical legacy of the New Deal in California and to honor the surviving veterans, at 7:30 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Aven., Oakland. Tickets are $8-$10. Sponsored by Oakland Heritage Alliance. 763-9218. 

“Pete Seeger: Power of Song” a documentary at 2 and 7:15 p.m. at the California Theater, 2119 Kittredge St. Cost is $10. Benefits Berkeley Gray Panthers. 486-8010. 

“And Let There Be Light” A Holiday Procession for Immigrant Justice at 4:15 p.m. at Frank Ogawa Plaza, 14th St. and Broadway in downtown Oakland. Sponsored by East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy. 893-7106, ext. 27. 

Evening of Remembrance Ceremony Remember Victims of Violence In Oakland at 5:30 p.m. at 1st Christian Church, 111 Fairmount Ave., OaklandSponsored by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Silence the Violence Campaign and others. 428-3939. 

Oakland Workers Center’s Annual Holiday Party with Cruz Reynoso, guest speaker, and dinner, music and dancing from 6 to 10 p.m. at 2501 International Blvd., Oakland. Cosat is $50-$125. RSVP to 437-1554, ext. 112. 

Juggling for Peace Learn juggling and plate spinning at 11:30 a.m. in front of the Marine Recruiting Station, Shattuck Square. 524-2776. 

Teen Book Club meets to discuss light reading at 4 p.m. at Claremont Branch Library, 2940 Benvenue at Ashby. 981-6121. 

FRIDAY, DEC. 14 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Christine A. Hastorf, Prf. of Anthropology on “Local Work and World Heritage: How Archeologists Work on the Ground to Learn About the Past as well as to Protect it for the Future” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925.  

Conscientious Projector Film “Life in Occupied Palestine” at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar at Bonita. Donation $5-10. No one turned away. 528-5403. 

Teen Playreaders meets to read “Hamlet” and other plays based on the classic, at 4 p.m. at Claremont Branch Library, 2940 Benvenue. 981-6121. 

SATURDAY, DEC. 15 

Open The Farm Meet and greet the animals at the Little Farm in Tilden Park as you help the farmer with morning chores, from 9 to 10:30 a.m. 525-2233. 

Reptile Rendevous Learn about the reptiles that call Tilden Park home, at 1:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Berkeley Farmers’ Market Holiday Crafts Fair at Civic Center Park with live music from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and handmade gifts by local craftspeople. 548-3333 . 

Berkeley Artisans Open Studios Sat and Sun. from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. through Dec. 16. 845-2612. www.berkeleyartisans.com 

Celebrate a Muir Christmas at John Muir National Historic Site, 4202 Alhambra Ave., Martinez. Music from 10 a.m. to noon, 1 to 3 p.m., House tours at 10:30 and 11:30 a.m. and storytelling at noon and 3 p.m. Cost is $3. 925-228-8860. 

Chapel of the Chimes Historical and Botanical Tour at 10 a.m. at 4499 Piedmont Ave. Other events throughout the afternoon. RSVP to 228-3207. 

Create Your Own Card with an Origami Star at 2 p.m. in the Edith Stone Room, Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 526-3720. 

Family Workshop: Wrapping Paper and Gift Cards, Sat and Sun. from 1 to 4 p.m. at Mocha, Museum of Children’s Art, 528 9th St., Oakland. Cost is $7. 465-8770. 

SUNDAY, DEC. 16 

Berkeley Hiking Club Hike on Mt. Tamalpais meet at 8:30 a.m. at Berkeley Way and Shattuck. Bring lunch and liquids hike about 8 miles. Rain cancels. 492-0470. 

Women on Common Ground Make decorations for the Women’s Drop-In Center, and some for yourself also. Bring a pair of small hand clippers and a bag lunch if you plan on joining an early winter hike afterwards. From 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $15-$17. Registration required. 1-888-EBPARKS. 

Waterside Workshops Sustainable Holiday Event and Toy Making Workshop with hands-on activities, music, food, and fun for people of all ages. Learn how to make your own wooden toy, or sew up a fleece hat to keep your ears warm. All of our materials are from sustainable sources, and non-toxic. From noon to 5 p.m. at 84 Bolivar Dr. in Berkeley’s Aquatic Park. Sliding scale donation is requested. 644-2577.  

Women on Common Ground Early Winter Hike from 2:30 to 5 p.m. from the Tilden Nature Center to Wildcat Peak, returning to the Nature Center for a warm fire and hot cider. Registration required. 525-2233. 

Berkeley Artisans Open Studios from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. through Dec. 16. 845-2612.  

Community Labyrinth Peace Walk at 3 p.m. at Willard Middle School, Telegraph Ave. between Derby and Stuart. Everyone welcome. Wheelchair accessible. Rain cancels. 526-7377. 

Free Sailboat Rides from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Cal Sailing Club, Berkeley Marina. Wear warm, waterproof clothing and bring a change of clothes in case you get wet. www.cal-sailing.org 

“Chimes Winter Starscape” events from 10 to 5 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. 228-3207. 

“The Cross-Walk Walk” for war resistance, every Sun. at noon at the corner of Solano and San Pablo. Bring signs, ideas, young people. 

Tibetan Buddhism with Jared Baird on “The Value of Spiritual Retreat” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 809-1000.  

MONDAY, DEC. 17 

Public Hearing for the Helios Energy Research Facility, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst St. 486-5183. 

Two-and-a-Quarter-Mile Monday Join a short but strenuous hike from shoreline to ridge in Miller/Knox, from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Led by naturalist Meg Platt. Bring lunch, layers, and hiking poles. For meeting place call 525-2233. 

CITY MEETINGS 

City Council meets Tues., Dec. 11, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers. 981-6900.  

Citizens Humane Commission meets Wed., Dec. 12, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-6601.  

Commission on Disability meets Wed., Dec. 12, at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-6346.  

Energy Commission meets Wed., Dec. 12, at 6:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5434.  

Homeless Commission meets Wed., Dec. 12, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5426.  

Library Board of Trustees meets Wed., Dec. 12, at 7 p.m. at the South Branch Library. 981-6195.  

Planning Commission meets Wed., Dec. 12, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7484.  

Police Review Commission meets Wed., Dec. 12, at 7 p.m. at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-4950.  

Community Health Commission meets Thurs., Dec. 13, at 6:45 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5356.  

Mental Health Commission meets Thurs., Dec. 13, at 6:30 p.m. at 2640 MLK Jr. Way, at Derby. 981-5213.  

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., Dec. 13, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. 981-7410.


Arts Calendar

Friday December 07, 2007

FRIDAY, DEC. 7 

THEATER 

Altarena Playhouse “The Man Who Saved Christmas” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Altarena Playhouse, 1409 High St., Alameda, through Dec. 16. Tickets are $17-$20. 523-1553.  

Aurora Theatre Company “Sex” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St., through Dec. 23. Tickets are $28-$50. 843-4822.  

BHS Drama and Shift Theatre “Noises Off” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Florence Schwimley Little Theater, Berkeley High Campus. Tickets are $6-$12. 332-1931.  

Berkeley Rep “After the Quake” at the Trust Stage, 2025 Addison St., through Dec. 21. Tickets are $33-$69. 647-2949. 

Black Repertory Group “A Rasin in the Sun” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2:30 p.m. at 3201 Adeline St., through Dec. 14. Tickets are $10-$20. 652-2120. 

Contra Costa Civic Theatre “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., selected Sun. at 2 p.m. at Contra Costa Civic Theatre, 951 Pomona Ave., (at Moeser), El Cerrito, through Dec. 9. Tickets are $11-$18. 524-9132.  

Impact Theatre “A Very Special Money & Run Winter Season Holiday Special” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave., through Dec. 22. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468.  

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, through Dec. 15. Tickets are $18. 232-4031.  

EXHIBITIONS 

“Tree of Life” Works by Berkeley High School students opens at Addison Street Windows Gallery, 2018 Addison St. 981-7533. 

“Duopolis” contemporary art from New York and San Francisco. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, 25 Grand Ave., upper level, Oakland. www.chandracerrito.com 

“Made In Equilibrium” works by Michele Elizabeth Lee, Brady Nadell and Ross Drago. Reception at 6 p.m. at ABCo Artspace, 3135 Oakland, Oakland. www.abcoartspace.com 

“12X12X12” Thirty-six works by three artists for the holidays. Reception at 7 pm. at Front Gallery, 35 Grand Ave, Oakland. 444-1900. 

Radical Graphics of Taller Tupac Amaru Reception at 6 p.m. at 550 Second St., Jack London Square. www.proartsgallery.org  

Touchable Stories “Richmond: The Story Continues” Fri. at 8 p.m., Sat. at 2 and 6 p.m. at Old Kaiser Cafeteria, Shipyard #3, 1303 Canal Blvd., Richmond. Cost is $6-$12. Reservations required. 619-3675.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

The Best of Actors Reading Writers “The Tender Trap” at 8 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. 932-0214.  

MUSIC AND DANCE  

Berkeley Ballet Theater “Nutcracker” Fri. at 7 p.m., Sat. at 2 and 7 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave., through Dec. 16. Tickets are $16-$22. 843-4689. 

“Amahl and the Night Visitors” at 8 p.m. at St Augustine’s Catholic Church, 400 Alcatraz, between Telegraph and College, Oakland. Free. 653-8631. 

Sacred & Profane Annual Holiday Concert with traditional and contemporary music for Swedish Lucia, Channukah and Christmas at 8 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. Tickets are $12-$15. www.sacredprofane.org  

Piedmont Choirs “Silver Bells” at 7:30 p.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd. Kensington, Cost is $10-$15. http://piedmontchoirs.org 

Bay Area Classical Harmonies “Messiah” at 7:30 p.m. at the Arlington Community Church, 52 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Tickets at the door are $12-$15.  

University Symphony Orchestra, 19th century masterpieces and and new works at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $4-$12. 642-4864.  

The Christmas Revels at 7:30 p.m., Sat. and Sun. at 1 and 5 p.m. at Scottish Rite Theater, 1547 Lakeside Dr., Oakland. Tickets are $15-$50. 452-8800. www.calrevels.org 

Bobi Cespedes’ Grupo Bayano at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$15.. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Darryl Rowe & His Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Sambada, Omo Aiya, Afro-Brazilian-funk at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Oaktown Jazz Workshops at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

The Cowlicks at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

An Irish Christmas at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $24.50-$25.50. 548-1761.  

Star Ledbetter and Theresa Perez at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

The Go Girls Animal Rights Benefit Concert with Phonofly, Vanessa Van Spall, Aoede and Jenn Grinels at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082.  

Jennifer Johns & Doria Roberts perform for lesbian and bi-sexual women and their allies at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $7-$15. 548-1159.  

The Brothers Goldman at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

SATURDAY, DEC. 8 

CHILDREN  

Young People’s Chamber Orchestra Concert for school age children and up at 3 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with Gary Lapow at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5 for adults, $4 for children. 849-2568.  

“Children’s Theater Holiday Program” Sat. and Sun. at 12:30 and 3:30 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave., off Grand Ave., Oakland. Cost is $6. 452-2259. 

“Peter Pan” the movie at 10 a.m. and noon, Sun. at noon at Elmwood Theater, 2966 College Ave. at Ashby. Benefit for local PTAs. 433-9730. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Plein-air Landscape Paintings of Bodega Bay” by Adam Wolpert. Reception for the artist at 2 p.m. at the Environmental Education Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

NIAD’s “Art from the Heart” Annual Holiday Festival from 2 to 5 p.m. at the National Institute of Art and Disibilities, 551 23rd St., Richmond. 620-0290. 

“The Great Outdoors” Group show of landscapes. Opening reception at 3 p.m. at A Different Day Gallery, 1233 Solano Ave., Albany. 868-4904. www.ADifferentDaygallery.com  

Albany Community Art Show from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin Ave., Albany. 524-9283. 

ActivSpace Open House Sat. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 2703 7th St. 508-8943. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

PEN Oakland, Josephine Miles 17th Annual National Literary Awards from 2 to 5 p.m. at the Rockridge Branch Library, 5366 College Ave., Oakland. Winners read from their works. www.penoakland.org 

Chad Sweeney and Kaya Oakes read their poetry at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

The Best of Actors Reading Writers “The Tender Trap” at 8 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. 932-0214. ricaisabella@yahoo.com 

Michelle Bautista, author of “Kali’s Blade,” Eileen Tabios, author of “The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes,” Jean Vengua, author of “Prau” at 3 p.m. at Eastwind Books of Berkeley, 2066 University Ave. 548-2350.  

Prosody Castle 4: Dont Rhine in Conversation at 7 p.m. at The Gallery of Urban Art, 1746 13th St., West Oakland. Cost is $5. 706-1697. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Ballet Theater “Nutcracker” Sat. at 2 and 7 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave., through Dec. 16. Tickets are $16-$22. 843-4689. 

Bella Musica Chorus at 7:30 p.m. at Chapel of the Great Commission, Pacific School of Religion, 1798 Scenic Ave. Donation $12-$15.525-5393. www.bellamusica.org 

Voci “Voices in Peace: VII: Winter Stillness” at 8 p.m. at St. Mary Magdalen Parish, 2005 Berryman St. Tickets are $15-$20, free for children under 12. www.vocisings.com 

University Symphony Orchestra, 19th century masterpieces and and new works at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $4-$12. 642-4864. http://music.berkeley.edu 

Oakland Youth Chorus “In the Arms of Winter” at 7 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Oakland 2501 Harrison St. Tickets are $5-$20. 287-9700. www.oaklandyouthchorus.org  

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra “The Majesty of Christmas” at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $30-$72. 415-252-1288. 

“Chimes Winter Starscape” with John Muir Holiday Choir at 3 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Other events from noon on. 228-3207. 

Musica Viva, violin, cello and harpsichord at 7:30 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 114 Montecito Ave. Tickets are $10-$15. www.stpauloakland.org 

Mahealani Uchiyama “A Walk By the Sea” at 8 p.m. at Regents Theater, Holy Names University, Oakland. Tickets are $30-$55. For reservations call 925-798-1300. 

North Country at 1 p.m. at Down Home Music on Fourth St. 525-2129. 

Bomberas de la Bahia at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $8-$10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Eric Swinderman’s “In Pursuit of the Sound” at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Motordude Zydeco at 7 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Zoyres with Sandor Elix Katz at 7:30 p.m. at 1236 23rd Ave. at International Blvd., Oakland, Admission by donation; no one turned away for lack of funds. Bring jars to fill, some veggies to chop, a cutting board, knife, and grater. RVSP to Zoyres@gmail.com 

Mike Eckstein and Marc DiGiacomo Trio at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Chris Williamson, Teresa Trull & Barbara Higbie at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $22.50-$23.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

The Snake Trio at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Matt Lucas and Cotillion at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

CV Dub at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

SUNDAY, DEC. 9 

EXHIBITIONS 

“One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now” Guided tour at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Bella Musica Chorus at 4 p.m. at St. Mary Magdalen Church, 2005 Berryman St. at Milvia. Donation $12-$15. 525-5393.  

Berkeley Ballet Theater “Nutcracker” at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave., through Dec. 16. Tickets are $16-$22. 843-4689. 

“Sounds of the Season” at 7 p.m. at First United Methodist Church, 201 Martina St., Point Richmond. Donation $10. 236-0527. 

“Amahl and the Night Visitors” at 3 p.m. at St Augustine’s Catholic Church, 400 Alcatraz, between Telegraph and College, Oakland. Free. 653-8631. 

Organ Recital by Christopher Putnam at 6 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. Donations accepted. 845-0888. 

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra “The Majesty of Christmas” at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $30-$72. 415-252-1288. 

Lucy Kinchen Choir Holiday Concert at 4 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 114 Montecito Ave. www.stpauloakland.org 

Michael Jones, violin and John Burke, piano, perform sonatas by Bach and Mozart at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Cost is $10. 644-6893.  

Soli Deo Gloria “Time Enough for Joy” at 3:30 p.m. at St. Philip Neri, 3108 Van Buren St., Alameda. Tickets are $20-$25, childen K-8 free. www.sdgloria.org 

Caffe Mediterraneum 50th Anniversary Party with music at 2, 7:30 and 8:30 p.m., poetry and anecdotes at 4 p.m. at 2475 Telegraph Ave. 549-1128. 

Chris Williamson, Teresa Trull & Barbara Higbie at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $22.50-$23.50. 548-1761.  

Mariusz Kwiecien, baritone, at 3 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $42. 642-9988.  

Jonathan Kreisberg Trio, CD release party, at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $15. 841-JAZZ.  

Tito y Su Son de Cuba at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15. 845-5373.  

MONDAY, DEC. 10 

CHILDREN 

“Snow Scene from the Nutcracker” by Kathryn Roszak’s Childrens’ Dance at 4:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz, 1317 San Pablo Ave., Free, but RSVP requested 233-5550. 

EXHIBITIONS 

Civic Center Art Exhibition 2007-2008 from 3:30 to 5 p.m. at Martin Luther King, Jr. Civic Center Building, 6th flr., 2180 Milvia St. 981-7533. 

“Visions of Berkeley’s Past” Acrylic mural on canvas by Nilda Ovalles Bello. Reception at 4 p.m. at 2991 College Ave. 883-7004. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Debbie Stoller on “Son of Stitch ‘N Bitch: 45 Projects to Knit and Crochet for Men” at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Poetry Express with Donna M. Lane for United Nations Human Rights Day at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Chanticleer at 8 p.m. at Firdst Congregational Churhc, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $22-$44. 415-392-4400.  

Jazz Mime at 7 p.m. at Le Bateau Ivre, 2629 Telegraph Ave. 849-1100.  

Parlor Tango with Baguette quartette at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Refugees: Cindy Bullens, Deborah Holland & Wendy Waldman at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. 

TUESDAY, DEC. 11 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Finding Women of Valor: The Daily Lives of Women in Ancient Israel” An archeology exhibit at the Badé Museum, Holbrook Building, Pacific School of Religion, 1798 Scenic Ave. Open Tues. and Thurs. from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. to Jan. 31. 849-8272. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Dave Weinstein, author of “Signature Architects of the San Francisco Bay Area,” will give a slide talk about notable architects and homes in El Cerrito and Kensington at 7 p.m. at El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Ave. 526-7512.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Piedmont Choirs at 7:30 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 114 Montecito Ave. www.stpauloakland.org 

CZ & the Bon Vivants at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Singers’ Open Mic with Keyy Park at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ.  

Take the Stage Band workshop performances at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $4.50-$5.50. 548-1761.  

Trombonga at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 12 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Hans Peeters in conversation with Doris Kretschmer on “Field Guide to Owls of California and the West” at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. www.universitypressbooks.com 

“Ferruccio Busoni, Italian Piano Prodigy” A lecture by pianist Daniell Revenaugh, with latest Busoni Recording, at 5 p.m. at The Musical Offering Café, 2430 Bancroft Way. 849-0211. www.themusicaloffering.com 

Daniel Marlin and Janell Moon at 7 p.m. at Nefeli Caffe, 1854 Euclid Ave. 644-3977. 

Berkeley City College Digital Arts Club and Milvia Street Art and Literary Journal host a benefit poetry reading and printmaking exhibition at 6 p.m. at Berkeley City College, 2050 Center St. Cost is $5.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Oakland City Center Holiday Concert with Mariachi Tradicion Mexicana at noon at 12th and Broadway, Oakland.  

SFSU Jazz Choir & Afro Cuban Ensemble at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ.  

La Peña’s Latin Jazz Orchestra Recital at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $8. 849-2568.  

Za’atar at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054.  

Rachel Efron at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Peace Nick with Roy Zimmerman at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

THURSDAY, DEC. 13 

EXHIBITIONS 

Kala Artist Annual Exhibition New works in a variety of media. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Kala Art Institute, 1060 Heinz Ave. 549-2977.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“The Living New Deal Project: Excavating a Lost Civilization Around Us” with Gray Brechin on a statewide collaborative effort to document and map the physical legacy of the New Deal in California, at 7:30 p.m. at the Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $8-$10. Sponsored by Oakland Heritage Alliance. 763-9218. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Darol Anger & Mike Marshall at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $22.50-$23.50. 548-1761.  

Josh Nelson Quartet, with guest Natasha Miller, at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ.  

Jenny Ferris and Laura Klein, jazz, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

Willow Willow, Mushroom, Emily Jane White at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. 

 


Around the East Bay

Friday December 07, 2007

AMAHL AND THE NIGHT VISITORS 

 

A modern Christmas tradition will be observed this weekend when Giancarlo Menotti’s opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors, a charming retelling of the story of the Three Wise Men and Epiphany, will be performed at 8 p.m. tonight (Friday) and 3 p.m. Sunday afternoon at St. Augustine’s Church, 400 Alcatraz. Menotti was Italian-born, but his very successful career was mostly in America. He has been too easily dismissed as “facile,” as other worthy successes have often been, musical tastes having changed since his heyday. But the founder of the Spoleto Festival and composer of The Consul, that unsentimental opera about the wife of a resistance figure seeking asylum from a police state, deserves a sympathetic ear and eye. His productions, including the much-loved Amahl, were that modern rarity: both popular and intelligent, never talking or playing down to an audience, or oversentimentalizing themes that often get kitschy treatment. 

 

GEORGE CABLES  

BENEFIT AT YOSHI’S  

 

Eminent jazz pianist George Cables, long-time Bay Area favorite and collaborator with many great players here and in New York, recently received liver and kidney transplants. This Saturday afternoon, 1-3:30 p.m., there’ll be a benefit at Yoshi’s, to help defray medical and recuperation costs, featuring such notables as Bobby Hutcher-son, Gary Bartz, Jeff “Tain” Watts, Mel Martin, Ray Drummond, Eddie Marshall, Mary Stallings, Denise Perrier, Babatunde Lea, Calvin Keys and over a dozen other well-known players and singers, plus special surprise guests. $30 donation. Tickets available through www.yoshis.com or 238-9200.


‘Wild Christmas Binge’ at SF Playhouse

By Ken Bullock , Special to the Planet
Friday December 07, 2007

In Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge, directed by Berkeley favorite Joy Carlin at the San Francisco Playhouse off Union Square, what at first flush seems to be a loopy burlesque of that seasonal chestnut, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, proves postmodern. 

As an unrepentant Ebenezer Scrooge (Victor Talmadge) is led up a few blind alleys by a genial but confused all-purpose ghost guide in UPS browns (Cathleen Riddley), the familiar tale jumps the storyline tracks, muddling vignettes from other Dickens morality tales with a morphed slab of O. Henry thrown in, eventually fusing with a handoff riff from cinema—to wit, It’s a Wonderful Life, as fumbled by an even more mixed-up downy winged angel (Brian Degan Scott)—and finally crash lands in the NYC tabloids of the Reagan Era, “when Being Filthy Rich became acceptable, and a ‘virtue.’”  

What playwright Christopher Durang came up with in this ’80s take (now in its San Francisco premiere) is less an antidote to the heartwarming tale of redemption through memory awakening compassion that’s cranked up every year than a kind of dramatic version of Jeb Stuart’s Ride around the hymn-singing Army of the Potomac (or maybe it’s Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride), skirting the edges of a whole slew of the kind of holiday routines and antics that either warm the cockles of kind hearts—or drive the rest of us up the wall. 

At the dark heart of the matter is that accomplished comic performer Joan Mankin playing the title role, a no-nonsense realist trapped in a cheerfully downtrodden family—with a crippled and grinning Tiny Tim (Lizzie Calogero), sweatshop toiling L’il Nell (Jean Forsman), dozens more squalling kids in the root cellar, and a happily masochistic Mr. Cratchit (Keith Burkland) bringing home yet another foundling to swell the squalid menagerie.  

All poor Mrs. Cratchit wants to do is adjourn to a pub for a tequila and then jump off London Bridge. In the meantime, she’s tormented by the treacliest of holiday cheer, including an agonizingly slow rendition of “Silent Night,” constant one-upmanship in gleeful poor-mouthing, and a painful table-side sawing of a Christmas swan, captured at a pond with burlap bag by Child #2, Berkeley’s Gideon Lazarus. 

Mrs. C. also hears voices—those of the UPS-uniformed ghost and an admiring Scrooge, who senses a kindred spirit, as the manic festivities of the Victorian gutter swirl around her. 

Clearly, its anachronism runneth over. Even at the start, the Ghost (who really just wants to croon a Billie Holiday standard) exclaims she’s glad to be a childless phantom, shouting at young Ebenezer (Gideon Lazarus again) that she’d like to take a strap to him—then turning to the audience with, “but you politically correct types wouldn’t like that.”  

It’s a good escape for those who blanch at canned carols in shopping malls and the digital jingle of all those bells. There’s enough crutch-kicking to please any Grinch, though the hilarious audience of concierges yelped when a present in giftwrap got stomped. 

Terry Rucker’s musical direction moves the show along with a goofy repertoire at a good clip. Carlin, who teamed up well with Mankin in the Aurora’s recent production of a more “serious” NYC dark comedy of the ’70s, BOSOMS AND NEGLECT, has put her quick-change cast of a dozen through the hoops perfectly, skimming the schmaltz off the milk of human error in this silly burlesque turn that cries out, Ho Ho Ho Humbug!


Revels Open at Oakland Scottish Rite Auditorium

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Friday December 07, 2007

The California Revels opens tonight (Friday) at the Oakland Scottish Rite Auditorium on Lake Merritt, celebrating its 22nd season in two weekends of music, dance and pageantry. 

It’s a festive visit to the 19th-century English countryside, where a Songcatcher, collecting traditional folktunes and the tales around them, encounters various rustic characters, each with a story, and more than one of them played by popular Bay Area clown and comic actor Geoff Hoyle, himself hailing from Yorkshire. 

The figure of the Songcatcher “is central to the show,” said Revels director David Parr. “Perhaps the best known was Cecil Sharpe, who, along with others, also combed the Appalachians in search of material preserved by immigrant communities. His transcription of the Ritchie Family singing ‘Nottamun Town’ provided Bob Dylan with the tune for ‘Masters of War’ so many years later. The Songcatchers took an interest in the folk customs they saw vanishing and tried to preserve them in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and the homogenization of culture—like standardized children’s stories, where over 100 known versions of Cinderella went through a kind of Disney-fication.  

“The Revels this year is a kind of salute to the Songcatchers,” Parr went on, “but also shows how sometimes those academic teams missed the forest for the trees, with expectations of finding druids in everything. It shows the power of folklore isn’t in its historicity, but in what it does for people, to move and delight them, and bring them together for celebration.” 

Parr touched on the panoply of Revels entertainments: “There’s a lot of dancing—two English country dances, one a parlor dance and a women’s clog dance; the RapperSword dance by Swords of Gridlock, a border short-stick dance, and of course Morris dancing. An unusual version of ‘John Barleycorn’ will be sung with a melody different than what people are used to hearing. Our music director, Shira Kammen, has arranged ‘Nottingham Town’ and ‘The Wexford Lullaby,’ and there’s the Yorkshire ‘Ilka Moor Baht Tat’—‘on the moor without a hat,’ a phonetic transcription of dialect. Storyteller Jan Herlington will tell ‘The Buried Moon,’ from Lincolnshire, one of the rare English children’s tales with elemental features, which will be acted out by the children’s chorus. And we’ll have a town band of our choristers playing West Gallery music. That was another type of cooptation of folk culture: the Church of England installing pump organs and insisting on standard arrangements, banishing the old vernacular bands, where a clarinetist would sit next to someone playing serpent!” 

On Geoff Hoyle’s shape-shifting appearances, playing five different characters during the course of the show, Parr would only say that “Geoff channels his Yorkshire aunt” and something about being a pig story and performing in drag—”Geoff, of course, not the pig. And you know he plays fiddle, sings and dances.” 

This Revels, partly inspired by Thomas Hardy’s UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE, will feature its traditional close, when the audience is invited to join hands and line-dance through the hall, singing “Lord of the Dance,” the old Shaker tune “Simple Gifts” with modern lyrics by Sydney Carter. On Oct. 28 this year, Discovery astronauts were awakened with the Revels Records version of John Langstaff singing “Lord of the Dance”—which fittingly declares, “I danced in the morning, when the world was begun; I danced in the moon, and the stars, and the sun.” 


Moving Pictures: 'I Am Cuba' — A Long-Neglected Masterpiece of Political Filmmaking

By Justin DeFreitas
Friday December 07, 2007

When art dabbles in politics it runs the risk of its politics subsuming its art. No matter how great the artistic achievement, there is always the danger that critical and popular reception may be held hostage to considerations that go far beyond artistic merit.  

Such was the case with I Am Cuba, an extraordinary 1964 Cuban-Soviet production that deserves a place alongside Triumph of the Will (1935) and Battleship Potemkin (1925) as a landmark of political filmmaking. The movie’s vast ambitions, which it largely fulfills, ultimately fell victim to the very politics it espoused. After just a few screenings it languished in a vault for 30 years before finally receiving its due recognition in the 1990s. And now it finally gets a DVD release worthy of its grandeur in the form of a three-disc set from Milestone Films. 

The project began just after the Cuban Revolution, as Castro’s government was settling in after the overthrow of dictator Fulgencio Batista. The Soviet Union, eager to show support for the budding socialist nation, sent writers and artists and intellectuals to help foster Cuba’s burgeoning cultural movement.  

Included among these cultural ambassadors were film director Mikhail Kalatozov and his cinematographer Serguey Urusevsky, who had collaborated on several films already, and poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. They set out to make a sort of cinematic epic poem about contemporary Cuba and about the revolution itself. Yevtushenko and Cuban writer Enrique Pineda Barnet were put to work on a script, but with strict instructions from Urusevsky to keep the words to a minimum—this would be a visual film, not a verbal one. 

The result is one of the most stunning and inventive visual feasts ever put on film. It relates four separate stories of the suffering and rising political consciousness of the Cuban people, the episodes united by a narrator, “the Voice of Cuba,” who reiterates the themes and provides the transitions between the tales.  

Kalatozov and Urusevsky took a bold visual approach that expanded on their previous work. The film consists of stirring, swirling camera movements that flow effortlessly from one indelible image to another. Long, unbroken shots lure us further into this highly stylized world, into the reality of its unreality. The camera moves relentlessly, following characters around corners, up staircases, through open fields and crowded nightclubs; it views them from extreme angles, high and low; it floats up the sides of buildings, through windows, over streets and even into swimming pools.  

When asked why his sentences were so long and at times convoluted, novelist William Faulkner replied that he was trying to fit everything into one sentence, to fit the entire sweep of history on the head of a pin. I Am Cuba’s sustained shots and graceful, engrossing camera movements serve a similar purpose, taking us on a journey through a political and social landscape where history itself is unfolding, where a revolution is igniting, where a certain political consciousness is enveloping the land and its people.  

Some of the shots seem to defy logic. Even an experienced filmmaker like Martin Scorsese was dumbfounded after his first viewing of the film, unable to figure out how several shots were achieved. An accompanying documentary reveals a few secrets, but not all. But although the film’s style is bold and intoxicating, it is never gratuitous, for its distinctive form is wedded perfectly to its content.  

One facet that goes unexplained on the DVD’s extra features is Kalatozov and Urusevsky’s use of the wide-angle lens throughout the film. Its distortions call to mind the expressive shots from Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, in which the wide-angle lens seems to represent the distorted visions of grandiosity of the film’s title character—reality seen through a fragmented snow globe. Perhaps Kalatozov and Urusevsky saw it as another method by which to establish the film’s heightened poetic tone. Or perhaps they simply liked the aesthetics of it, for it allowed them to take in as much of the landscape as possible. But in retrospect, four decades after the revolution, the imagery takes on an entirely different quality, that of the distorted lens through which participants and idealists saw the revolution at the time, before the utopian dream settled into disillusionment, before the hopes and dreams of a nation faded into day-to-day subsistence and struggle. Cuba, vast and glorious in black and white, bends at the edges of the frame, curling inward like facts bending to fit the beholder’s vision. 

There were great hopes for the project—as a symbol of the revolution, as a plea for international support, and as a sign of collaboration between the Soviet Union and the nascent socialist island state. But when the film opened, after two years in production, Cubans and Russians alike were disappointed. The Russians saw it as naive and tepid; the Cubans felt the filmmakers had misunderstood and stereotyped their people, infusing characters with a distinctly Russian brand of slow deliberation. As actor Sergio Corrieri put it, the film was “Cuban reality seen through a slavic prism.”  

The film showed for a week, then disappeared for three decades, never screening outside the nations that produced it. 

I Am Cuba finally got its first screenings in the West in the early 1990s. It was soon brought to the attention of New York’s Milestone Films, who secured the rights, and, with the help of Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, gave the film a theatrical release in 1995, whereupon the film was hailed as a masterpiece. Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman said the film’s rediscovery was “like finding a preserved Siberian mammoth in the sands of a tropical island.” 

Now Milestone has released the film in a lavish DVD set (packaged in a cigar box) that includes a beautiful new transfer of the film and extra features which delve into the production and its legacy, including a documentary about the film itself (called I Am Cuba: Siberian Mammoth), another about the distinguished career of director Mikhail Kalatozov, and interviews with Scorsese and poet Yevtushenko. 

This is one long-forgotten classic that is more than deserving of the praise heaped upon it—a truly revolutionary film that might have radically altered the cinematic landscape had it been distributed in its time. As Scorsese says in his introduction to the film, if I Am Cuba had been widely seen when it was originally released, “movies would have looked a lot different a lot sooner.”


Historic Holiday Houses On View Around East Bay

By Steven Finacom
Friday December 07, 2007

Stately older houses can be at their best when festively decorated for the winter holidays.  

Up and down the East Bay shore this holiday season there are several historic homes—particularly Victorians—decked out for special tours and events, starting today and tomorrow. 

One of the most impressive is the Patterson House, a wedding cake white Victorian in the midst of the historic Ardenwood Farm in Fremont, a property that embodies Alameda County’s agricultural roots. 

The Patterson House itself was built as a big country farmhouse in the 1850s. In the late 1880s Samuel Newsom, of the Newsom Brothers of San Francisco, redesigned it as an expansive Queen Anne style country manse of some 7,000 square feet, with a main façade embellished with carved wooden scrollwork, balcony, corner tower and turret. 

Inside, there’s an ornate entry hall flanked by two massive sliding doors to formal parlor (left) and family parlor (right). A spindled wooden arch frames a switchback main staircase to an ample second floor with master, guest, and children’s bedrooms and baths. 

The twisty back stair descends to a well-stocked rear kitchen with a working iron stove. A pantry connects to a long formal dining room with elaborate place settings laid, adjoined by a smoking room, which was the original dining room. 

Most of the furnishings are family pieces original to the house. There’s even a side library with generations of books collected by the residents. 

As a “Forty Niner”, George Washington Patterson was an informant for, and early subscriber to, the seminal series of western histories produced by Hubert Howe Bancroft. 

His wife Clara later traveled extensively, and son Henry went to the University of California, while son William attended Stanford. See if you can spot the Cal yearbooks. 

The staff and volunteers who keep the Patterson House open are outgoing, friendly, enthusiastic, and know everything about the house. Dressed in period wear, they invite visitors to examine the household objects and talk about the family and earlier eras. 

In one room during our visit, a staff member cranked up a working Victorola next to copies of postcards sent from around the world by the well-traveled Clara Patterson. The kitchen smelled of fresh baking. In the guest bedroom a costumed volunteer did embroidery and explained her technique to curious children. 

An early Cal songbook sat on the piano in the family parlor, while logs crackled in the fireplace. Stained glass windows sparkled across the hall in the formal parlor, starting point for tours, where a guide invited children to count the number of Christmas trees throughout the house. 

Christmas decorations are up, and the house is open for tours this weekend as well as Dec. 15 and 16. Saturday and Sunday tours are on the hour from 11:00 a.m. to 3 p.m. Today, December 7, and next Friday, Dec. 14, there are also tours at 1, 2, and 3 p.m. 

Today, there’s also a 5-8:45 p.m. “Christmas Evening at the Patterson House” event with holiday music. 

For all events there’s a small admission charge, $5 or less. 

It’s wonderful this house and property have survived. George Washington Patterson, the builder, grew up in Ohio and Indiana. In 1849, age 26, he headed to California as a gold seeker, joining a company that made an arduous trip down the Mississippi, then by sea and land to San Francisco. 

He prospected awhile, then relocated to the Bay Area and turned to farming. He leased, later purchased, land of his own in what was then called Washington Township. 

Patterson gradually developed a vast holding of nearly 6,500 acres, making him one of the largest property owners in Alameda County. The fertile alluvial plain produced abundant harvests, and a nearby creek inlet provided convenient access to ship the output of the farm across the Bay. 

The property typified the extensive and productive farms that spread across southern Alameda County in the second half of the 19th century, and have now almost entirely vanished beneath housing tracts, office parks, and highways. 

Ardenwood almost suffered that fate. It remained in the Patterson family until a sale to a developer in 1971. Seven years later a complex arrangement resulted in the acquisition of 205 acres, including the house, by the City of Fremont. The East Bay Regional Park District was enlisted to operate the historic farm, which formally opened in 1985. 

The surviving land tract is large enough to retain the open character of an early California farm, including views to the distant hills. It includes fields and orchards, a deer park, stands of eucalyptus where monarch butterflies overwinter, a horse-drawn railroad, and a complex of outbuildings—from blacksmith shop to water tower—forming a demonstration farm with numerous activities and programs throughout the year. 

Free range peacocks, an aviary of white doves and brilliant pheasants, and penned goats, sheep, draft horses, cows and calves lend diversion to the grounds. 

Highway 880 provides a direct route to Ardenwood, about 30 miles from Berkeley. Take the exit west towards the Dumbarton Bridge. The road hugs the Ardenwood grounds on the right. Keep to the right, and watch for the entrance signs to the farm. 

Coming or going, an alternative to part of the freeway is a drive or bus ride down Hesperian Boulevard. Although the street sprouts several decades of housing tracts, a few miles north of Ardenwood on Hesperian you’ll find the McConaghy House, built in 1886, and now operated by the Hayward Area Historical Society.  

I wrote about this historic home exactly three years ago in the Dec. 7, 2004, issue, which you can find in the Planet online archives at www.berkeleydailyplanet.com. 

The Christmas decorations are up again this year, and you can tour the house on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays through Dec. 30. The house is open 1-4 p.m., with the last tour at 3:30 p.m. There’s a small admission charge. 

Further north, and closer to Berkeley, there are also holiday decorations and events at Dunsmuir House in Oakland, also discussed in more detail in the 2004 Planet article. 

This year, Dunsmuir is open for tours of the opulently decorated house on December weekends through the 23rd. There’s a Holiday Breakfast on Dec. 16, and Holiday Teas on various days.  

Dining tickets should be purchased in advance and entry to the house is strictly timed, so plan accordingly. 

In Oakland, the Cohen-Bray House is a remarkably pristine 1884 Victorian that, like Ardenwood, preserves the décor, furnishings, and traditions of the family that built it. 

It’s open on the fourth Sunday of the month for tours (call to confirm) and has two special holiday events. On Dec. 29 there’s a $25 per person Christmas Tea and Tour (repeated at 1, 2, and 3 p.m. in the afternoon), and on Twelfth Night—Jan. 5, 2008—a gala celebration with a five course meal for $125 per person.  

Space is limited, and reservations are needed, for these events. 

Tomorrow—-Saturday, Dec. 8--there’s a 9:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Holiday Home 

Tour in Alameda, a community that’s both close by and rich with period houses, particularly Victorians. The event is sponsored by the Alameda Family Services League. 

Tickets to visit the holiday decorated private homes are $30 on the day of the tour. There’s also a separately priced lunch at the Encinal Yacht Club, a Holiday Dessert Tea, and a Boutique and Gourmet Shoppe. 

Tonight, Dec. 7, a 6-9 p.m. “Candlelight Preview” visits the houses after dark and includes a “post tour party (with) champagne a light supper, and dancing” for $75. 

 

IF YOU GO: 

Ardenwood Historic Farm is at 34600 Ardenwood Boulevard in Fremont. 

General information can be found at www.ebparks.org/parks/ardenwood. Call 791-4196 for Patterson House information. 

The McConaghy House is at 18701 Hesperian Blvd., Hayward, next to Kennedy Park. Check www.haywardareahistory.org or call 276-3010. 

Dunsmuir House information including hours and ticket prices and purchase details can be found at www.dunsmuir.org 

The Cohen-Bray House is at 1440 29th Ave. in Oakland. www.cohen-brayhouse.info Call 843-2906 for availability of event tickets and to make reservations. 

Alameda Holiday Home Tour details are at 222.alamedaholidayhometour.info/ or call 510-522-8363 x 165 for tour information. 

 

IMAGE D: “Costumed staff and volunteers greet visitors in the fully stocked Patterson House kitchen.” 

 

IMAGE E: “The elaborate Patterson dining room is arranged for a festive, Victorian era, family meal.” 

 

 

 

 

 


More Gift Ideas for Your Favorite Gardener

By Ron Sullivan
Friday December 07, 2007

You don’t need an official occasion, you know. If you know a gardener, go ahead and give her a gift just ‘cuz. Call it an Unbirthday Present; I do a certain amount of that with my rellies because after 58 years of living in it I still don’t track time very well.  

So here’s a second short list of things I and others have found useful, messing around in dirt. 

Body Time, which we old farts remember as the original Body Shop, sells a little round hand-care bar with a string on it like a shower-soap’s. It’s beeswax and other handy ingredients like mineral oil, a bare touch of scent, and stays solid even when I leave it in the car. (In serious heat it greases up the paper it’s wrapped in, and doesn’t ooze any farther than that.) It’s good for fast treatment of dry hands and does not leave them too slippery to grasp the steering wheel, which is why it’s in my car. It’s also good to drag one’s fingernails through before digging in the mud because it’s easier to get the dirt-wax mix out of them afterward than plain dirt.  

Comes in two sizes for around $9 and $15; get one for yourself too. Long-lasting enough to be worth the price. Oh—being a solid, not a liquid, it’s also ideal for Homelandishly Secure air travel. Accessorize it with one of Body Time’s funny and effective fish-scale nailfiles for a manicure kit that’s above reproach. 

My favorite gardening hat is one that, like the Felco pruners I mentioned last week, needs to be tried on, which tends to spoil the surprise element. It’s washable stiff canvas, in off-white and a few darker shades, has an interior adjustable band to secure it when the wind’s blowing, and a decently broad brim all ‘round, like a cowboy hat but flexy enough to take other shapes. It’s sturdy enough to protect my head from the odd branch I’ve managed to drop on it while pruning.  

The fun part is finding it. Parker-Dahl Enterprises (a.k.a Shapeskins, for its line of sheepskin slippers) of Davis sells it; you might have seen them at craft or other fairs, or the March Garden Show in SF. They show up at the Davis Farmers’ Market, and that’s worth a trip in itself. Or call the number below; the Web site’s still under construction. 

There’s a gift I can’t have but would be any gardener’s envy. A friend just bought a house in El Sobrante with a perfect-sized yard, and her fox terrier showed me a talent not just for digging, but for digging on command, and in the place pointed out to him. He digs narrow holes, too—a more precise partner than most of the humans I’ve worked with, and easier to please.  

Other than a gift-wrapped ton of well-aged horse manure, he’d be the Number One holiday gift. I swear I’d suborn him if I weren’t allergic to him. 

 

 

 

 


Our Mushy Landscape, Part Two

By Matt Cantor
Friday December 07, 2007

I was out with a young contractor at the home of a client he wanted me to talk with the other day. The homeowner had a wet basement and garage that never seemed to dry out. We walked around and I looked up the hill to find a line of extraordinarily healthy and prolific trees and shrubs marching to the crest of the hill. They ran in a line from north to south, roughly. “Creek”, I cried, “Well, maybe an aquifer.” 

Well actually, that’s the easy part (diagnosis). The hard part is draining the site effectively, but, indeed, the first things is to see if you can figure out where the water is coming from and it helps to understand the kind of source you’re dealing with. I knew that there was a lot of water and it came all year long, although, obviously more in the rainy season. The homeowner readily agreed with this assessment. That’s the way our creeks, streams, springs and aquifers work. They can run all year long, although more so in the winter. Some springs run copiously all year round, and this can change the way we think about moisture issues. 

Why do we want dry properties? Does it really matter? What is the downside to inaction? 

The answer to these questions is not consistent from one house to the next. It’s site and owner specific. Like many things in life, the answer requires some personal inquiry and the acknowledgement that most of us live within a range of imperfect conditions. We’d all go nuts if we tried to fix everything and it seems to me, at times, that the folks who actually do fix absolutely everything are a little nuts. 

Here are some guidelines: Does your house show signs of current settlement? Is the foundation rotated or cracked? Does it appear to be drifting this way AND that at the same time? It’s best to involve an engineer or inspector to help make a determination about this but some cases are really obvious. If your floors make for great fun with marbles or topple small children, you might have a settlement problem. If these things are true for you, you might want to invest in drainage because it can almost always slow this process, although there are surely soils which will move despite our best efforts. In some cases it can make a huge difference, however the time scales are such that it may not be apparent for some years. 

If you have water or damp soils under your house for part or all of the year, this may contribute to fungi growing in the crawlspace, basement or the house proper.  

This varies a lot, but if you have windows that are perennially coated with condensation, this is one likely cause (don’t ignore this because there are other possible causes including faulty gas appliance venting which might prove quite serious).  

When drainage is installed properly, it can help damp houses dry out, lessening the effects of these various microscopic organisms.  

Fungi (which includes molds and most mildews) and Protists (which include at least one mildew) nearly all require elevated humidities to propagate and when things are dry, most of them simply will not grow, throw spores or otherwise annoy.  

If you’re ready to really attack this problem, the type of drainage system that seems to be most effective and popular is the “French” (or, more properly, subsurface) drain. This is essentially a moat. The notion is this. If you can give the water that is heading toward your house a faster and easier path around the house via gravity to a point beyond harm’s way, you’ve won the battle. This usually takes the form of a trench around the entire perimeter of the structure, though a horshoe shape often works well on a hillside since the water on the downhill side tends to be moving away from the house anyway. Usually. 

Given that water travels toward your basement or crawlspace from below ground as well as from the surface, you want to be able to catch it as it approaches your basement and so must cut this moat deeper than any portion that might be wetted within the bounds of your home. Since water is generally traveling through the soil in roughly the incline of the hillside, it is not typically necessary to make a trench at the uphill end as deep as one might think. If your basement is 6 feet below ground and near the lower end of the building, you do not necessarily have to make a 12 foot deep trench at the back. A 6 to 8 foot trench might do just fine. This is tricky stuff though, since we just don’t know exactly how the plates of clay, silt and rock are layered below your house and we also don’t know how waterways have crafted themselves over the eons (especialy springs, eek). But, all that said, if it looks like a wet, slimy frog, it’s probably a wet, slimy frog. 

Nonetheless, the smart money tends to be on making the trench a little deeper than everyone thinks is enough and when you’re already digging, the cost usually isn’t much more to trench another foot or two. 

A moat will still work just fine if it’s filled with something that leaves big voids for water to flow, so rather than having a trench around the house (to go with the pikemen and the drawbridge), we fill it in with gravel. To be sure that there is an extra big void, most systems include a large perforated pipe that works simply by providing a space where water can flow. Water flows in the entire body of gravel and pipe as it chooses. A fabric encasement is wrapped around the pipe and gravel to keep soil from slowly nullifying this diaphanous mechanism. 

The trench must be sloped to direct water to one or more safe end points. On a hill, this might be down to the street-gutter, but on a flatter lot, it may be necessary to end the slope in a sump (or well) where it can be pumped out to the gutter. Sometimes there are other safe places to dump the water but not usually and please don’t dump it anywhere near your neighbor if you want to get invited back to the annual BBQ. 

There’s too much to say about pumps to get started in this forum but let it be enough to say that these require many carefully considered details and the oversight of an electrician. 

Clearly, these are heady, complex issues and when funguses and wet basements are involved, this is not the time to try and go it alone. So if this sounds like your home, get some professional help and put the fungi on the dinner table where they belong. 

 


Berkeley This Week

Friday December 07, 2007

FRIDAY, DEC. 7 

Golden Gate Audubon Society Walk at Jewel Lake in Tilden Park. Meet at 8:30 a.m. at the parking lot at the north end of Central Park Drive. be prepared for muddy paths. Heavy rains cancels. 848-9156. 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Jim Wilson on “Education Finance in California” 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.  

“Fair Trade Fair” Learn about fair trade porducts with Laurie Lyser of TransFair at 7 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker School, 2125 Jefferson St., 2nd flr (not wheelchair accessible). Fair trade items will be available for purchase. 482-1062. 

“China’s Environment: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?” A forum on the scientific as well as social, political, economic, public health and cultural aspects, Fri. and Sat. Free and open to the public. http://ieas.berkeley.edu/events/2007.12.07w.html 

Teen Playreaders meets to read “Hamlet” and other plays based on the classic, at 4 p.m. at Claremont Branch Library, 2940 Benvenue at Ashby. 981-6121. 

SATURDAY, DEC. 8 

PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles 17th Annual National Literary Awards & 11th Annual PEN Oakland Censorship Award from 2 to 5 p.m. at the Rockridge Branch Library, 5366 College Ave. Free and open to the public. 228-6775. 

Golden Gate Audubon Society Bike Trip in Coyote Hills via Alameda Creek and Quarry Lakes. Meet at 9 a.m. on the east side of the Fremont BART for an all-day trip, returning to BART at 3 p.m. Total distance is about 24 miles. Bicycle helmet required. Bring lunch and dress in layers. 547-1233. 

Dramatically Speaking Toastmasters with Victor Bogart on “Explore the Undiscovered You” at 9 a.m. at 1950 Franklin St., Oakland. RSVP required. ID required to get into building. 581-8675. 

The East Bay Chapter of The Great War Society meets to discuss “The Military Career of George Patton” by A. Melomet at 10:30 a.m. at the West Berkeley Library, 1125 University Ave. 527-7118. 

“The Care Crisis: How Women Are Bearing the Burden of a National Emergency” with Ruth Rosen, visiting professor of History and Public Policy at UCB at 7 p.m. at Alameda Free Library, Conference Rooms A, 1550 Oak St. at Lincoln, Alameda www.alamedaforum.org  

Oakland Public Conservatory of Music Annual Open House with food, fun and music for the whole family, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. and Sun. from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. at 1616 Franklin Ave Oakland. 836-4649. 

Palestinian Bazaar with embroidery, glassware, wood, ceramics, textiles and more, from noon to 6 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. 548-0542. 

Berkeley Farmers’ Market Holiday Crafts Fair from 10 a.m. on with local crafts and live music. 

Berkeley Artisans Open Studios Sat and Sun. from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. through Dec. 16. 845-2612. www.berkeleyartisans.com 

Oakland Museum of California Community Celebration for differently-abled community members from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 10th and Oak St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2022. 

Berkeley Rent Board Housing Counselling available at 11 a.m. in the Berkeley History Room, second flr, Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 644-6128, ext. 116. 

Winter Fest Learn about snowshoeing, skiing, snowboarding and more from noon to 4 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Program for Adults on Children’s Financial Literacy with Lu Vazquez, Edward Jones Financial Advisor, and John Abrate, Wells Fargo Bank Business Banking Specialist from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library Community Meeting Room, 2090 Kittredge. 548-1240. www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org 

Mini-Farmers in Tilden A farm exploration program, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. for ages 4-6 years, accompanied by an adult. We will explore the Little Farm, care for animals, do crafts and farm chores. Wear boots and dress to get dirty! Fee is $6-$8. Registration required. 1-888-EBPARKS. 

Vegetarian Cooking Class “Healthful and Humane Cooking and Baking” featuring savory tofu spread, corn-meal-crusted tempeh, brussel sprouts, chocolate bread pudding, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at First Unitarian Church of Oakland, 685 14th St. at Castro. Cost is $55 plus $5 material fee. to register call 531-COOK. www.compassionatecooks.com 

Family Workshop: Candleholder using wood, tin and paints, Sat and Sun. from 1 to 4 p.m. at Mocha, Museum of Children’s Art, 528 9th St., Oakland. Cost is $7. 465-8770.  

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732.  

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755.  

SUNDAY, DEC. 9 

Progressive Democrats of the East Bay Annual Holiday Gathering, from 6 pm on, at Albatross Pub, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 601-6456. 

Make Natural Holiday Wreaths Learn about fir, bay and other flora and how to use them, from noon to 3:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Please bring a pair of small hand-clippers, a large flat box and a bag lunch. Not appropriate for children under 8. Cost of $25-$34. Registration Required. 1-888-EBPARKS. 

Caffe Mediterraneum 50th Anniversary Party with music at 2, 7:30 and 8:30 p.m., poetry and anecdotes at 4 p.m. at 2475 Telegraph Ave. 549-1128. 

“Building Commons and Community” A book launch party for the late Karl Linn's book at 3 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarion Universalists Hall, Cedar at Bonita. www.KarlLinn.org 

Grow Edible Mushrooms at Home A worksop from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at EcoHouse, 1305 Hopkins St. Enter via garden entrance on Peralta. Bring extra newspaper, cardboard, sawdust, wax, cordless drills, drill bits, and leave with some mushrooms of your own. Cost is $15, sliding scale. 548-2220 ext. 242. 

Berkeley Artisans Open Studios from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. through Dec. 16. 845-2612. www.berkeleyartisans.com 

Oakland Museum of California Community Celebration for differently-abled community members from noon to 5 p.m. at 10th and Oak St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2022.  

Archecture Tour of the Oakland Museum of California at 1 p.m. at 10th and Oak St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

“The Cross-Walk Walk” for war resistance, every Sun. at noon at the corner of Solano and San Pablo. Bring signs, ideas, young people. 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. 

Tibetan Buddhism with Sylvia Gretchen on “The Path of Liberation” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 809-1000.  

MONDAY, DEC. 10  

Public Hearing for the Computational Research & Theory Facility, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at 6:30 p.m. at North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst St. 486-5183. 

Berkeley Green Mondays with a presentation on “What Progressives Can Learn from the Disability Movement” with Paul Longmore and Anne Finger, at 7:30 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 848-4681. 

Human Rights Day 2007 “Update on Burma” with Nyunt Than, head of the Burmese American Democratic Alliance, and Ruth Mauricio, educator at 7:30 p.m. at Home Room in International House, 2299 Piedmont Ave. www.unausaeastbay.org 

TUESDAY, DEC. 11 

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 Redwood, Canyon Meadow. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233. 

End the Occupation Vigil every Tues. at noon at Oakland Federal Bldg., 1301 Clay St. www.epicalc.org 

Tai Chi for Peace at 1:30 p.m. in front of the Marine Recruiting Station, Shattuck Square. Open Sidewalk Studios at 3 p.m. 524-2776. 

Snowcamping 101 with Karen Hoffman of the Sierra Club’s Snowcamping Section at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Family Storytime at 7 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043.  

American Red Cross Blood Services Volunteer Orientation in Oakland, from 6 to 8 p.m. Various East Bay opportunities available. Advanced sign-up is required; please call 594-5165.  

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

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 

Street Level Cycles Community Bike Program Come use our tools as well as receive help with performing repairs free of charge. Youth classes available. Tues., Thurs., and Sat. from 2 to 6 p.m. at at 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991.  

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 12 

Richmond Main Street Initiative Community Holiday Celebration from 10 a.m. to noon for preschool and kindergartners and 5 to 7 p.m. for the entire community at the corner of Marina Way and Macdonald Ave. www.richmondmainstreet.org 

Civilian War Victim Series “The Pathology of Survivors” with Dr. Brian Gluss with the film “Survivor Guilt” by psychoanalyst William Niederland, at 1 p.m. at Emeryville Senior Center, 4321 Salem, Emeryville. 596-3730. 

“Field Guide to Owls of California and the West” with author Hans Peeters in conversation with Doris Kretschmer at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585.  

Poetry Writing Workshop with Alison Seevak at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, Edith Stone Room, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 526-3720. 

Cancer Prevention and Survival Cooking Class on Antioxidants and Phytochemicals at 8:30 a.m. at Manzanita, 2409 E. 27th St., Oakland. To register call 595-6445. 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. Heavy rain cancels. 548-9840. 

Berkeley Copwatch: Know Your Rights Training and Copwatching Workshop at 7 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. 548-0425. 

THURSDAY, DEC. 13 

“The Living New Deal Project: Excavating a Lost Civilization Around Us” with Gray Brechin on a statewide collaborative effort to document and map the physical legacy of the New Deal in California and to honor the surviving veterans, at 7:30 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Aven., Oakland. Tickets are $8-$10. Sponsored by Oakland Heritage Alliance. 763-9218. 

“Pete Seeger: Power of Song” a documentary at 2 and 7:15 p.m. at the California Theater, 2119 Kittredge St. Cost is $10. Benefits Berkeley Gray Panthers. 486-8010. 

“And Let There Be Light” A Holiday Procession for Immigrant Justice at 4:15 p.m. at Frank Ogawa Plaza, 14th St. and Broadway in downtown Oakland. Sponsored by East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy. 893-7106, ext. 27. 

Evening of Remembrance Ceremony Remember Victims of Violence In Oakland at 5:30 p.m. at 1st Christian Church, 111 Fairmount Ave., OaklandSponsored by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Silence the Violence Campaign and others. 428-3939. 

Oakland Workers Center’s Annual Holiday Party with Cruz Reynoso, guest speaker, and dinner, music and dancing from 6 to 10 p.m. at 2501 International Blvd., Oakland. Cosat is $50-$125. RSVP to 437-1554, ext. 112. 

Juggling for Peace Learn juggling and plate spinning at 11:30 a.m. in front of the Marine Recruiting Station, Shattuck Square. 524-2776. 

Teen Book Club meets to discuss light reading at 4 p.m. at Claremont Branch Library, 2940 Benvenue at Ashby. 981-6121. 

CITY MEETINGS 

Youth Commission meets Mon., Dec. 10, at 6:30 p.m., at City Council Chambers, Old City Hall. 981-6670.  

City Council meets Tues., Dec. 11, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers. 981-6900. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Citizens Humane Commission meets Wed., Dec. 12, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-6601.  

Commission on Disability meets Wed., Dec. 12, at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-6346. TDD: 981-6345.  

Energy Commission meets Wed., Dec. 12, at 6:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5434.  

Homeless Commission meets Wed., Dec. 12, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5426.  

Library Board of Trustees meets Wed., Dec. 12, at 7 p.m. at the South Branch Library. 981-6195.  

Planning Commission meets Wed., Dec. 12, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7484.  

Police Review Commission meets Wed., Dec. 12, at 7 p.m. at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-4950.  

Community Health Commission meets Thurs., Dec. 13, at 6:45 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5356.  

Mental Health Commission meets Thurs., Dec. 13, at 6:30 p.m. at 2640 MLK Jr. Way, at Derby. 981-5213.  

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., Dec. 13, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. 981-7410.