The planned BP biofuel lab, designed to house a multinational oil giant’s $500 million research program, means profits without honor, Berkeley residents declared Monday night. 

Every speaker who commented during the 150-minute Draft Environmental Impact Report hearing had harsh things to say about the Helios building at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). 

Critics targeted the lab’s location on the hillside above Strawberry Canyon, its impacts on the city of Berkeley and the potential local and global impacts of the research planned there by one of the world’s leading oil companies. 

The principal tenant of the $150 million facility will be the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), the research program funded by BP which draws on researchers from UC Berkeley, LBNL and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

Using genetic technology, BP hopes the program will develop patented crops they can plant in Third World nations to be converted by genetically engineered microbes into fuels to power the world’s cars, trucks, buses and planes. 

Other projects planned under the EBI banner include microbes to harvest otherwise inaccessible oil from nearly depleted wells and to transform coal into vehicle fuels. 

Many speakers referred to the existing problems of soil and water contamination by radioactive tritium and the toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). 

Leading off the criticism was retired UC Berkeley engineering professor John Shiveley, whose credentials included stints at the lab and as the university’s principal engineer, with design responsibility for projects on- and off-campus. He said that the choice of sites was “a major mistake” that combined with a second imposing structure planned for the lab would be certain to create significant transportation problems. 

The university’s Richmond Field Station offered a far better site, he said, and travel times from the main campus would be only five minutes longer to the Richmond site than to the hillside location. 

“Totally inappropriate,” said Berkeley environmentalist Sylvia McLaughlin, commenting on the Strawberry Creek site for the Helios lab, citing fire danger, unstable soil, the proximity to the Hayward fault and overburdened streets. 

McLaughlin, who turns 91 next week, also cautioned about potential contamination from research with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) at the lab, and said the facility would be better located along the new regional “Green Corridor” closer to the bay shoreline. 

Terri Compost brought a pitcher of Strawberry Creek water, which she offered to the lab officials. If you trust the university to protect the environment, she said, “feel free to partake of our water.” 

She also asked if the public would have access to the nature and dangers of research being conducted at the laboratory, predicting “a grim future” in a world with GMOs. 

New Dust Bowl? 

Besides questions raised by the site itself, Barbara Robben said, other environmental impacts domestically could be a move now underway in Washington to open up formerly closed fallow lands to fuel crops, which raises the specter of a new Dust Bowl, and she said global planting raises even more questions. 

During the drought years in the 1930s , vast dust storms swept the American heartland, triggered in part by erosion spawned by the farming of environmentally senstive areas. Subsequent federal programs created reserves for the land, and compensated farmers with payments. 

“I would like you to address where you are going to grow these crops,” Robben said. 

Phila Rogers, who retired from LBNL after 20 years of part-time work as a science writer during “a kinder, gentler time,” said that the Audubon Society’s annual bird survey the day before had found 53 species in the canyon, including the Golden Eagle. Six endangered species nest in the area, she said. 

Locate the lab somewhere else, she urged, rather than in “this incredible riparian resource that can enrich our lives and those of the creatures that choose to live there.” 

Nancy Schimmel, who has been walking trails in Strawberry Canyon since she first came to Cal as a freshman in 1952, said the building “is not going to do enough good in the world to offset the damage to the canyon.” 

“Climate change is being expropriated by Big Oil,” she concluded. 

UC Berkeley student Peter Ralph asked for a specific evaluation of the life forms to be engineered at the lab and an account of what steps would be taken to prevent plants like miscanthus—a fast-growing relative of sugar cane—and GMO microbes that play a key role in research plans from escaping into the canyon environment. 

Amy Beaton, who regularly appears at protests clad as a cheerleader for the “BP Bears,” asked to see specific plans “before this world is further exposed.” 

Shuttles cut 

Phil Price, another lab employee, said it was painful to hear the lab boasting of its role in developing energy-saving technology when LBNL had cut the shuttle service mandated in its earlier Long Range Development Plan as a mitigation for the facility’s environmental impacts. 

He said other sites with buildings already earmarked for demolition would be better options than a pristine site, and accused the institution of manipulating its EIR by posing intentionally unworkable options as the legally required alternatives. 

“I approve of the research,” he said, “but the lab can go elsewhere, or to the Richmond Field Station.” 

“This machine needs to be stopped, period,” said Zachary Running Wolf, the Native American activist who inaugurated the ongoing tree-sit at Memorial Stadium. “They’re proposing to rape” the Amazon and Central America, he said, referring to possible sites for planting the fuel crops developed at the lab. 

“I am concerned that a public school is being influenced by a corporation,” he said. 

“BP actually stands for Bloody Profit,” said Marcella Sadowski, a UC Berkeley student. “Where is this stuff going to be planted?” she asked. BP has already displaced indigenous peoples in Colombia in its search for oil, and more would be displaced in that country and throughout the Amazon basin by GMO fuel crops, she said. 

“This money is covered with the blood of indigenous people,” she said, adding that BP’s past record in other countries needed to be addressed. 

Tom Kelly said the lab—if it’s built at all—should be sited in the Richmond Field Station. And when it is built, construction should be to the highest, Platinum, environmental certification, not the easily obtained lower Silver ranking as currently planned. 

“This is not the place another building should be built in what should be a pristine Strawberry Creek watershed,” a site with a history of landslide and “crisscrossed with earthquake faults,” said Gene Bernardi of the Committee to Minimize Toxic Waste. 

She said British Petroleum—BP’s earlier corporate name—was working with lab officials to make the lab and university “more privatized and corporatized than it was before.” 

“We shouldn’t be taking away land used by indigenous people to grow crops,” she concluded. 

More students 

Another UC Berkeley student who identified himself only as “anonymous 22” said that LBNL was legally required but failed to examine all areas where the project would have both direct and indirect impacts—including global warming. 

Noting that EBI research also aimed to develop microbes to recover otherwise inaccessible oil and gas reserves, further climate impacts should be examined. He cited the recent announcement that BP planned to extract oil from the tar sands of Canada, a project one British newspaper, the Independent, headlined “‘The biggest environmental crime in history.’” 

Another student, Matthew Taylor, said reality itself refuted promises of climate improvement raised by agricultural fuel boosters. “Indonesia has gone from 17th to number three” in greenhouse gas emissions, he said, due to forest burning to clean land for palm trees grown for biofuels. 

Juliet Lamont, a UC Berkeley graduate and former lab employee who now works as an environmental consultant, said the decision to build the lab in Strawberry Canyon “was a bad idea to begin with,” one that shouldn’t be reinforced with even more new construction. 

Carole Schemmerling, a member of the Urban Creeks Council who is now forming a group called the Strawberry Creek Watershed Council, said the idea of siting the lab, “one of the least attractive industrial facilities I’ve ever seen” was “one of the worst things we could have done to the canyon.” 

She said lab scientists have ignored the serious problems posed by the site’s abundant groundwater. 

One speaker pushed the rhetoric over the top, depicting UC Berkeley as the tool of a cabal of British bankers, Freemasons and Skull and Bones members, and declaring that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been put in place by a prominent Jewish banker from London. 

Down to earth 

Janice Thomas, a neighborhood activist from Panoramic Hill and a near neighbor of the project, said the draft EIR’s focus had been “way too narrow, way too local” when the focus should have been on the project’s global environment impacts. 

Thomas asked the lab to explain why the buildings had to be grouped in what officials called the nanotechnology cluster—referring to work with microscopic-sized particles, and asked: “Do you know exactly what research you will be doing?” 

Lesley Emmington, a preservationist and former member of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, faulted the draft report for dismissing the notion raised by the commission that the canyon was eligible as a cultural landscape for entry into the National Register of Historic Places. 

“We all understand it as a special place in the whole Bay Area,” she said. 

Emmington said the fact that the same institution that proposed the project also served as the body to certify its environmental status raised serious questions: “I urge you please to tell me why you have the right to self-approve” the project. 

The public has until Feb. 1 to comment on the draft EIR. The report and other information are available at www.lbl.gov/Community/Helios/documents/ 

Berkeley environmentalist Sylvia McLaughlin, who turns 91 next week, spoke at a public hearing Monday to criticize the Helios building planned for LBNL and the research that will happen there. Photograph by Richard Brenneman.

By Richard Brenneman  

The long-running battle between neighbors of the “Trader Joe’s” building is headed for a March 3 showdown in an Oakland courtroom. 

Stephen Wollmer and Neigh-bors for a Livable Berkeley Way filed their action in August, challenging the city’s approval of the 148-unit apartment building planned for 1885 University Ave. 

The city granted developers Chris Hudson and Evan McDon-ald an additional 25 apartments in exchange for their promise to deliver a grocery store. 

If Trader Joe’s moves into the proposed building, it will bring the grocery store that even critics of the project agree is needed somewhere in downtown Berkeley. 

But the project, located at the intersection of University Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Way, alarmed neighbors, both because of its five-story height and because of the traffic a popular grocery store is certain to attract. 

The City Council approved the project on a 5-3 vote July 16, prompting the lawsuit Wollmer had threatened after the Zoning Adjustments Board approved the project by the same margin in the early minutes of Dec. 15, 2006, at the end of a six-hour session. 

Oakland attorney Stuart M. Flashman filed the opening brief on behalf of Wollmer and his neighbors earlier this week, and the defendants—the city and 1950 MLK, LLC.—have until Jan. 22 to file their response. 

The legal issues revolve around the question of just how much additional building the city is allowed to grant a developer in exchange for providing the community with desired amenities—in the case of 1885 University, low-income housing and a grocery store. 

The courtroom action, and the ensuing decision by Superior Court Judge Frank Roesch, could mark the final battle in a five-year struggle that has engaged developers, city officialdom, neighbors and advocates of so-called smart-growth policies in endless hours of heated debate and consumed barrels of ink. 

While the project initially included 183 units of housing and no grocery store, after a scathing reception at ZAB—where one member compared the design to a prison—Hudson and McDonald came back with a 156-unit project with a larger ground-floor retail space. 

Throughout the ZAB discussions, planner and board secretary Deborah Sanderson insisted that the developers were entitled by right to the full 183 units, a point the developers themselves made on more than one occasion.  

The developers scored their greatest triumph when they hooked up with Trader Joe’s, which prompted ZAB member Bob Allen to urge that the building be dubbed the Trader Joe’s building. 

Earlier, the proposal was usually called the Kragen project, after the auto parts store that dominates the small strip mall which will be demolished to make room for the one-acre development. 

But after Allen made his suggestion, the new name stuck. 

Whether or not that appellation will continue to remain valid may depend on the result of Wollmer’s litigation and any ensuing delays. Hudson told ZAB members in May, 2006, that their deal with the grocer required the building to be ready for a store opening date in 2009. 

Flashman is arguing that the city’s decision to approve the project should be overturned because that action violated the state and city statutes governing bonuses granted to builders who add affordable housing units by failing to made legally required findings and certifications. 

The brief also alleges that the city violated the California Environmental Quality Act by adopting a mitigated negative declaration saying that the project had no significant adverse environmental impacts. 

The legal responses will come from the Berkeley City Attorney’s office and from Andrew B. Sabey, a San Francisco attorney representing the developers. 

Judge Roesch, who will decide the case, is the same jurist who handed the city a defeat last week in litigation over another bonus building—the Gaia Building, and its two floors of additional “cultural bonus space.” 

Judge Roesch ruled that the council had acted improperly in its decision to uphold the planning staff’s interpretation of how use of the space was to be allocated. The council had acted after then-owner Patrick Kennedy had threatened a lawsuit.

Alarmed by a recent surge in newspaper theft, a coalition of Bay Area newspaper publishers is asking local authorities to help pursue thieves both on the street and at the recycling businesses where they fence the stolen goods.  

The group, which includes the San Francisco Examiner, the East Bay Express, the East Bay Daily News, Open Exchange Magazine, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Common Ground and the Berkeley Daily Planet, has taken shape in the past few months, as the papers discovered that they were all having the same problem: losing thousands of dollars of merchandise, often within a week, to poachers. In a Dec. 17 e-mail that went to other newspapers and to Oakland officials, Open Exchange publisher Bart Brodsky wrote that “[t]he theft situation is so bad that publishers who have not had occasion to talk with each other in decades are now in regular correspondence.”  

The publishers are doing more than exchanging e-mails. For example: After complaints to the Oakland and Berkeley police failed to result in the apprehension of a man who in November was repeatedly seen stealing newspapers from racks on Telegraph and College Avenues, the East Bay Express hired a private investigator.  

On his first night out, early on Dec. 12, the private detective caught and filmed the man and an accomplice in the act. The thieves ended up in front of KMC Paper, a recycling business on Oakland’s Poplar Street, where they were met by eight police cars. The man lacked a driver’s license, and his pickup truck had no license plate. He was issued a citation, and his vehicle was impounded.  

According to East Bay Express president Hal Brody, the truck contained over 500 copies of the Express and nearly that number of Bay Guardians, as well as substantial numbers of the Daily Planet, the East Bay Daily News, Bay Area Business Woman, Classified Flea Market, El Men-sajero, El Avisador Magazine, Diablo Dealer Auto Mart, Bay Classifieds, and Jobs and Careers.  

On Dec. 17, Brody received an email from the head of the Oakland Police Department’s Theft Section, Lieutenant Michael Yoell, saying he was glad the thief was captured and sorry that the Express had to hire a private investigator. “We were unable to react in a timely manner,” Yoell wrote, due to “thin … personnel resources.”  

Brody wrote back: “Thank you for  

the response, but this problem is far  

from solved.” In the week following the arrest, the Express had reports of more missing papers. So did the Planet and The Examiner.  

Stopping the thefts, Brody told Yoell, will take far more than arresting “the punks who are stealing thousands of dollars worth of property and getting paid in pennies”; it will require the recycling businesses to stop buying massive amounts of newspapers whose fresh dates indicate that they have been stolen. To that end, Brody said, “we need the help of law enforcement. A couple of busts on this level might make a lot of difference in stemming this lucrative, illegal practice.”  

In reply, Yoell offered to meet with representatives of the newspapers “in an effort to organize a unified response to this problem,” including assigning an investigator from the Theft Section to work on the newspaper theft cases. A meeting is now planned for the near future. 

One underlying difficulty is ignorance of the law on the part of recyclers, the general public and even some police. The Express’s private investigator spent twenty minutes on the phone convincing the Oakland Police dispatcher that stealing free newspapers is a crime. It became a crime in California last January, when AB 2612 went into effect. The new law prohibits the taking of more than 25 copies of a free newspaper with the intent to recycle for cash, sell or barter the papers, deprive others of the ability to read the paper, or harm a business competitor. 

The law itself is problematic, say local publishers, because it defines the crime as petty theft and hence imposes mild penalties: for first-time offenders, a maximum $250 fine; for repeat offenders, a maximum $250 fine and/or up to ten days in county jail. Petty theft involves goods worth no more than $400. Mike Costello, vice president of circulation at The Examiner, says “there’s a strong argument” that stealing free newspapers involves values greater than $400 and thus “may be grand theft.” Hal Brody agrees, contending that the papers’ worth ought to be calculated in terms of the cost of production, not just the 6 cents a pound that they fetch at recycling businesses. 

Costello and Brody both emphasize the recycling businesses’ crucial role. Costello would like the recyclers to post a notice, printed and provided by the publishers’ coalition, at the entrance to their business. The notice would feature key sections of AB2612, the names of the publications in the newspaper coalition and a statement that the recycling center will phone publishers whenever anyone delivers 25 or more copies of their publication to that recycling center. He also proposes that publishers pay a specified amount for each phone call they receive that includes the vehicle description, license number and VIN number, as well as a description of those selling the newspapers, if the call occurs while the would-be seller is still at the center. 

The only place in Berkeley to recycle newspapers is the city’s Transfer Station, which is run by the Community Conservation Center. According to City of Berkeley Public Information Officer Mary Kay Clunies-Ross, CCC staff check the dates of all newspapers and circulars and do not accept current issues. 

The ultimate stake here is free speech. You “can connect the dots all the way to the Constitution,” says Brody, and “call it a First Amendment problem.” The Express has asked its lawyer to consider raising the issue with the federal government. “The free newspapers are essential to free speech,” says Costello. “They are the future.” 

With the price of newsprint expected to increase as much by 35 percent in the first quarter of 2008, the massive theft of free papers will put that future into jeopardy.

The City Council voted Tuesday to go out anew to the garbage/recycling industry to offer bidding on a contract that would include recycling 25,000 tons of rubbish that now goes into landfills. 

At the meeting, the council also outlined the possible content of a revised Condominium Conver-sion Ordinance, decided that the Landmarks Preservation Ordi-nance would go on the ballot in November 2008, deferred payment of city fees for a developer building condominiums at 1800 San Pablo Ave., questioned the Public Works Department about mistakes made in dredging Aquatic Park and heard presentations from a commission that developed a draft downtown plan. 

Recycle contract 

The council voted 5-3 to send a contract back out to bid that includes both recycling and dumping rubbish into a landfill, with Councilmembers Laurie Capitelli, Betty Olds and Gordon Wozniak voting in opposition and Councilmember Max Anderson absent. 

In an earlier 8-0-1 vote, with councilmember Betty Olds abstaining, the council approved separate contracts with Waste Management and Allied Waste to dispose of city garbage in their landfills. These companies will take up the slack, disposing of the garbage while the contract that includes recycling is being rebid. 

A contract for recycling 25,000 tons of debris was originally awarded to East Stockton Recycling, but drew a host of criticisms from the public and council.  

Councilmember Darryl Moore questioned Peter Holtzclaw, manager of the Division of Solid Waste and Recycling, about the original bid process. The purchasing department used a postcard—mail which Moore said could be overlooked—to send out information alerting potential contractors to the Request for Proposals. 

Holtzclaw responded that the Alameda County Waste Authority, while it didn’t call for reopening the process, suggested that next time they should send out the full RFP.  

Calling the process “seriously flawed,” Councilmember Kriss Worthington said, “Both the Sierra Club and the Teamsters overwhelmingly oppose the contract.” 

Retired Secretary-Treasurer Teamsters Union Local No. 70 Chuck Mack wrote the council, encouraging it to reissue the RFP: “We don’t believe there was proper notice on the original RFP and as a result employers with whom we have collective bargaining agreements did not submit a proposal. Before an action of this type is taken, all parties should have an opportunity to bid and all view points an opportunity to be considered.” 

However, Councilmember Gordon Wozniak asked his colleagues to move ahead with the East Stockton contract. “It will cost us $1 million [recycling is more expensive than dumping in a landfill], but people feel better knowing the garbage doesn’t go to a landfill,” he said. 

Arthur Boone, conservation chair of the Northern Alameda County Group of the Sierra Club said his organization opposed the contract with East Stockton, especially because of the distance trucks would travel to reach the site where they would recycle the garbage. 

Dan Knapp, president of Urban Ore, called on the city to “rearrange the furniture”--do a temporary quick moving around of functions at the transfer station to give recyclers greater access to materials that come in and are reusable or recyclable. Certain materials should be banned from the transfer station and taken directly off trucks, including paper, metal and cardboard, he said.  

A design charrette is planned for January to look at possible quick, low-cost changes to the facility. A thorough remodel would cost more than $15 million; Mary Lou Van Deventer of Urban Ore told the Planet last week. 

Condominium conversion 

The council voted 8-0 on a number of possible revisions to the Condominium Conversion Ordinance, including a streamlined process for conversion, mandating code compliance for the property owner only for visible health and safety issues and possible fee changes. 

Staff will rewrite the ordinance, with possible fee changes, and bring it back to the council next year. 

Councilmember Dona Spring severed the question of reducing fees from the main motion. In a 7-1 vote, with Spring in opposition, the council voted to have staff explore various fee reductions.  

Spring said the 12.5 percent fee, with various exceptions including those for tenants buying the unit in which they live, was reasonable, while property owners, at last week’s condo conversion workshop had said the fee is onerous and prevents people from converting their units. 

Currently, the property owner must bring all defects up to code in the unit to be converted, including work that may have been done without permits. Property owners told the council last week that this caused them to do unnecessary work, such as moving a toilet two inches for strict code compliance.  

Planning Director Dan Marks pointed out that some serious health and safety issues could be out of sight, such as faulty wiring, but Bates underscored that the ordinance should addresses “visible health and safety issues.” 

Aquatic Park 

Even after hearing a report from the public works staff and asking questions, some City Council members said they continued to have questions about the contaminated soil dredged from the Aquatic Park lagoon and about the Nov. 5-7 dredging that was done without proper Regional Water Quality Control Board approvals. 

With Councilmember Gordon Wozniak abstaining, the council voted 7-0, to consider the six-page staff report and accompanying 63-page lab analysis of the dredged spoils. As City Clerk Pamyla Means reminded the council, a two-thirds vote is required to consider material delivered on the day of the council meeting. 

On Thursday, Kamlarz told the Planet that the city accepted responsibility for the problems with the dredging and that council would be asked to more formally accept the report—and possible new expenses—in March, when the dredging plan would have been approved by the water board. 

At the meeting, Coucilmember Darryl Moore asked if the toxics division had analyzed the lab report, and was told it had not. Moore requested a follow-up report by the city’s toxics division. 

Councilmember Gordon Wozniak wanted to know what the delay would cost the city – the project will resume in May, after approvals are in place and the rainy season is finished.  

Deferring Fees 

The council voted unanimously, with Anderson absent, to defer city fees on a 51-unit condominium development at 1800 San Pablo Ave. with the sewer fee paid before any sewers are hooked up. Deferred are $315,588 that includes $99,990 in sewer connection fees. 

The developer Said Adeli “faces losing a considerable investment he has made in predevelopment expenses if he cannot pull a building permit and quickly get under construction,” the staff report said. 

The project is expected to generate $1.1 million in in-lieu fees in lieu of providing inclusionary units. 

Downtown Plan 

A two-hour presentation on the downtown plan was mostly a love-fest with members of the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee talking about the compromises they entered into, after two years of work. For example, some members of the committee talked about accepting in the plan a number of high-rise buildings including two new hotels that would be as high as 20 stories, in exchange for a promise that developer fees would fund more low-income housing downtown. 

However, it because clear that a group of committee members disapproved altogether of the limits on building heights, saying that developers would not build unless they could maximize their profit. 

The Planning Commission will take up the Downtown Plan in February. 

Neighbors of the Becky Temko Tot Lot on Roosevelt Street claimed victory on Thursday after Commissioner Jon Rantzman granted a three-year restraining order against Art Maxwell, a tot lot neighbor accused of harassing park users. 

The hearing was at the Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse in Oakland. 

The restraining order covers not only the 14 parents, grandparents and caregivers granted a temporary restraining order last month, but includes all park users, according to park neighbor Justin Skoble, who attended the hearing. 

The order says that Maxwell cannot be within five yards of people at the park, nor can he play music into the park—he had been putting his boom box up against the park fence, Skoble said. 

If he breaks the rules of the restraining order, he can be cited, Skoble said. 

••• 

Whoever dreamed up the term “pocket park” must have had Becky Temko Tot Park in mind.  

The snug space on Roosevelt Street, a park since 1971, is shoehorned into a long, narrow swath of land, with residences close to the park on the north, south and west. Toward the front of the lot, there is a brightly-painted tot-sized structure of ladders and slides from which children tumble out onto sand; at the back is a grassy area where families can sit and snack on goldfish crackers and juice. 

Ideal for little people and their caregivers, the shouts of children at play and inevitable cries when one bruises a knee are a source of grief for Maxwell, a veteran jazz saxaphone and flute player who, according to his wife Mimi Chin, became disabled two years ago and now needs rest and peace the tot lot does not accord him. 

Neighbors say Maxwell, who has lived next to the tot lot for 15 years, has reacted to the children’s noise by playing loud obscene music, shattering glass bottles against his fence, and threatening children and adults. This behavior began about 18 months ago, they said. 

They have gotten temporary restraining orders against him, and at the end of November filed a criminal complaint. Deputy District Attorney Marty Brown told the Planet Thursday that he is reviewing the case and has asked the Berkeley Police Department to submit more information in order to decide whether or how to charge Maxwell. 

On Monday, the Roosevelt Street neighbors sought help from the City Council, which met behind closed doors to consider how they might address the situation. (At the council session, the body discussed putting together an ordinance to blunt antisocial behavior in parks, but took no specific action.) 

Some 20 adults and five children attended the open portion of the closed meeting, asking the council for help in taking back their neighborhood park. 

Art Maxwell’s wife Mimi Chin also attended and spoke frankly about the situation. “I see a community that is injured, fractured. [The neighbors] are good people,” she said, adding, “Art is a good person, too.”  

Chin went on to explain that her husband had suffered a head injury in the workplace. “He’s a disabled person trying to live in peace and quiet in his own home,” she said. 

A Dec. 17 letter to the council, written on behalf of nearby residents and signed by neighbors Nina Ziskin, Trisha Cruse and John Callaway, says, in part: “We are sympathetic to [Maxwell’s] suffering, but do not think that closing the park to an entire community is an acceptable solution. We are also concerned that his emotional instability may become so severe that he will actually hurt himself or someone else.” 

Hal Reynolds, grandfather of two of the children attending the Monday meeting, described some of the behavior to the council. Maxwell “blasted obscene gangsta rap at the kids,” he said.  

Reynolds called police and made a citizen’s arrest November 28. In an interview with the Planet Wednesday, Reynolds alleged that Maxwell brandished a pipe wrench at him, after Reynolds accused Maxwell of removing a plastic playhouse he had placed in the park. 

Reynolds said Maxwell was given a citation for disturbing the peace, vandalism to property and exhibiting threatening beha-vior. It is now up to the district attorney whether he will charge Maxwell with criminal activity. Several city officials have written the district attorney supporting allegations of Maxwell’s inappropriate behavior, including Mayor Tom Bates, Councilmember Dona Spring and Acting Parks Director William Rogers. 

“There have been 45 reported incidents [involving Maxwell] since the beginning of the year,” Reynolds told the council. “We really need the city to do something.”  

In a letter to District Attorney Thomas Orloff, Spring wrote that Maxwell was likely in need of psychological help, but had refused services offered by the city. She wrote the D.A. that Maxwell had left angry and threatening messages on her answering machine saying, “’I’m about to lose it,’” “‘I am sick of it,’” and “‘I’ll step up the fever pitch.’” 

At the meeting Chin spoke about problems at the park other than the little children—drug dealing, smoking and teen sex. In a phone interview with the Planet Thursday, she underscored these problems, saying police ignore them. 

In a phone interview Wednesday Acting Parks Director Rogers told the Planet his goal was to “insure a safe place for the public to use the park” and that it is important to separate the two kinds of complaints. “Illegal activity in the park is not the same as children playing,” he said.  

Rogers said the city has placed a sign on the gate: “Please be courteous to neighbors; be aware of sound levels while enjoying the park.” The city could also help by building an eight-foot fence, he said. 

The city has attempted to provide mediation services, but neighbors said Maxwell refused to participate. Chin told the Planet that Maxwell didn’t think the mediation would lead to a solution. 

Neighbor Zach Walton, who worked to get the temporary restraining order against Maxwell, spoke to the council, saying Maxwell “doesn’t have a right to harass, especially a right to harass small children.” 

He called on the council to write an ordinance that would prohibit the kind of behavior Maxwell exhibited. 

Michael Jones, another musician who is Maxwell’s friend and observed the park scene when he painted the Maxwell-Chin house, called the Planet to lend support. “He comes out and just wants them to be quiet,” Jones said, arguing that the lot would be better suited to low income housing than a park.  

Jones underscored that Maxwell has a right to enjoy the quiet of his home. “His rights are not being respected,” Jones said.  

Over the last few weeks, a series of takeover-style robberies hitting almost exclusively Asian restaurants around the Bay Area, including one in Berkeley, six in Oakland, two in Albany, one in El Cerrito, one in San Leandro, one in Richmond, and one in Union City, may be connected, police believe.  

In Berkeley, the incident occurred at King Tsin Restaurant, a Chinese restaurant located at 1699 Solano Ave. in North Berkeley, at 7 p.m. on Dec. 10. 

“This is the first time that this has ever happened to us,” said Albert Lou, owner of King Tsin, which has been open for more than 40 years. “I saw two teenagers walking toward the store and I knew right away, when I saw them, that something was wrong. They were carrying guns in their hands. One immediately came over to me and demanded some money. The other went to the customers and asked them to put their money on the table. I immediately gave him the $200 from the register and he took it. They also took a little over $300 from the customers. It was a really shocking experience.”  

Sgt. Mary Kusmiss, a spokeswoman for the Berkeley Police Department, said that police are pursuing leads and are hopeful. 

“It’s surprising that they got away with so much money,” she said.  

Lou said that they have been taking extra security precautions following the event. 

“Right after they left, we, of course, called 9-1-1,” he said. “I then went over to the tables and made sure everyone was okay. Soon after, I held an employee meeting where we discussed how to deal with such an incident if it happened again. I also spoke with the president of the Solano Avenue Association and several merchants about the situation.”  

The suspects are described by police as two black men in their late teens, with dark blue or black jeans or pants and dark black or blue hoodies, wrapped around their face to conceal their identity. 

Kusmiss also mentioned that a similar incident occurred on Aug. 17. 

“In this situation, someone robbed a Chinese restaurant located at 1580 Hopkins St. in a similar way to the Solano incident but with different suspect descriptions,” said Kusmiss. “There were 30 employees present and over $600 was taken.” 

The Berkeley police are advising anybody with any information about the case to contact them at 981-5900.

Purse snatch  

On Tuesday at 6:50 p.m., a 36-year-old woman called in to report that she had been robbed by a man from behind as she was walking east on Oregon Street from Shattuck Avenue after shopping at Walgreens. She reported that two arms came over her shoulders and neck and grabbed her back. The suspect fled with her purse, wallet, driver's license, REI Gift Card, and credit cards. As the suspect escaped, he pulled the woman backwards and knocked her to the sidewalk. No suspects have been identified.  

Jack-in-the-Box robbery  

On Monday at 7:55 p.m., a 31-year-old Berkeley man called in to report that he had been robbed of cash and an identification card. He was walking to the Jack-in-the-Box fast-food outlet on the 2100 block of San Pablo Avenue, when three teenagers surrounded him. One took hold of his arm and the others went through his jacket pockets. After the incident, the three young men casually walked north on San Pablo and one threw a bottle in the direction of the male victim. 

Another purse stolen  

On Monday afternoon, just before 1 p.m., a 69-year-old Berkeley woman called in to report that she had been robbed of her purse, diabetes test kit, two bottles of medication, insulin, cash, and some identification cards. She was walking westbound on Russell Street at Milvia, when she felt somebody pulling on her purse. The man ran eastbound on Russell; the woman chased him on foot. The man hopped on an old 10-speed bicycle propped up against a telephone pole at Adeline Street and Russell and fled westbound on Oregon Street.  

Frat arson 

On Monday morning, between 1:30-2 a.m., the fraternity president of Phi Gamma Delta, located at 2395 Piedmont Ave., called to report a fire in front of the garage. The perpetrator threw a Molotov cocktail at the garage, causing fire damage to the exterior. After extinguishing the fire, the Berkeley Fire Department and the Berkeley Police Department patrol team found shattered glass and the bottleneck of a beverage bottle next to the exterior. They have no suspects.

The chair of the Berkeley Planning Commission offered a scathing critique of one of two major new laboratory buildings planned for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). 

But it wasn’t the Helios Building, the target of an unbroken string of criticism during a public hearing two nights earlier. 

The critique dished out by architect James Samuels Wednesday night targeted the Computational Research and Theory (CRT) building, located next to the lab’s Blackberry Gate. 

“Unacceptable,” was the verdict he pronounced to architect Allison Williams, the building’s designer. 

Calling the 11-story, metal-clad structure “an extremely large building ... that is going to have a large impact on the city,” Samuels said he was concerned that the design wasn’t respectful of its site. 

He said a better design would have produced a design that stepped down the hillside and reoriented the main mass of the building by 90 degrees. 

Williams disagreed, and said the design was driven by the need for a large clear space to house computers. 

The structure will serve as a center for high-speed brute-force computing that will be used, among other things, to conduct research in climate change, energy efficiencies and the biosciences. 

Williams was part of a team dispatched by LBNL to brief the city on the CRT building and the Helios building, a lower-rise structure at the other end of the lab complex that will house the $500 million BP-funded Energy Biosciences Institute and other energy research projects.  

The presentations were made to solicit city comments on the building for inclusion in the environmental impact reports (EIRs) on the projects. 

Bill Collins, a UC Berkeley professor who heads the lab’s Earth Sciences Climate Sciences Department, said LBNL and the university are working to enhance their cooperation with the community. 

One area of cooperation is the “Green Corridor” partnership with local governments, which aims at developing crop-derived transportation fuels and other alternative energy sources, energy efficient technologies and other “green” businesses and industries. 

The 140,000-square foot CRT facility will employee 300, with no additional parking spaces, said Henry Martinez, the building’s project manager. 

The architect said the building would be one story shorter than originally envisioned, the result of earlier community critiques, and would have a mass similar to the Molecular Foundry building, a structure built by the Lab with no environmental impact report. 

Jeff Philliber, the lab’s environmental planner, said three alternative sites had been considered and rejected, while the preferred alternative was a design with a lower profile than the one subsequently slammed by Samuels. 

The lab official said neither building required review under federal environmental law, since the site wasn’t leased by the Department of Energy, a point which had been challenged earlier by critics of both projects. 

Commissioner Gene Poschman sided with Samuels in his design critique, noting, as had the chair, that most of the building’s high-rise portion consisted of offices, and could have been organized differently. 

Poschman also criticized the lab’s plans for a Silver environmental rating. “This is the structure that is supposed to lead the nation in energy efficiency,” he said, while the Silver rating can be garnered with almost no effort. 

Martinez said the lab will be looking for ways to garner a higher rating. 

When it came time for a look at the Helios building, architect Bill Diefenbach made only one mistake, albeit repeatedly, by references to “Lawrence Livermore” rather than Lawrence Berkeley. 

The Helios facility consists of two wings, one to house the Energy Biosciences Institute, the project created with $500 million in funds from BP, the British oil company, and the other to house a variety of energy research projects. 

Some of the questions focused on green roof designs, which will be planted, to blend in with the hillside. Whether the grasses are watered during summer months is still at issue, Diefenbach said. 

“I think it is a very well-designed project and it fits on the hill in a way that is quite beneficial,” Samuels said. 

Poschman agreed. “This is 160,000 square feet and fits in, while the other building is 140,000 square feet and sticks out like a sore thumb.” 

“In fairness to the CRT building, it’s on a much steeper site,” said Samuels. 

The only serious non-architectural critiques came during the public comment session. 

Gianna Ranuzzi faulted the lab on adding new projects to a site that “is a hotbed of contaminants, and it’s also a watershed.” She urged the commissioners to “please vote for no projects or for alternative sites and a public comment  

period.” 

Merilee Mitchell said the lab should keep the computing center at its present location in Oakland, while Amy Beaton said the lab’s monitoring of groundwater contamination “is a sham.” 

Ranuzzi and a UC Berkeley student who identified himself as “anonymous 77” both urged commissioners to extend the public comment period on the CRT building as they had on the Helios project. 

Comment closes on the CRT Jan. 5, while lab director Steven Chu extended the Helios commentary period to Feb. 1. 

The draft EIR and more information on the CRT building may be found at www.lbl.gov/community/crt, and on the Helios building at www.lbl.gov/community/helios

The Berkeley Board of Education announced Wedesday that Bill Huyett, superintendent of the Lodi Unified School District, will replace outgoing superinten-dent Michele Lawrence when she retires Feb. 2.  

News that Huyett was the choice to be the new superintendent for the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) relieved many at Berkeley High School who said they had worried about who the replacement would be after Lawrence announced her resignation in September.  

“I think it’s great,” said Keenan Nelson-Barer, a senior at BHS. “I hope that the new superintendent can listen to the students’ and parents’ needs and respond to them effectively.”  

Some parents had criticized Lawrence for having a top-down approach that had many feeling left out of the process. 

“I hope that the new superintendent will be able to be supportive of the teachers,” said Matt Meyer, Berkeley High AP government and economics teacher. I look forward to working with the new energy. I also hope that we are able to negotiate a good contract between the Berkeley Federation of Teachers and the BUSD.”  

The Berkeley school board hired a consulting group to conduct meetings with Berkeley High School staff, parents and students among other groups in late September.  

Since then, the district has been in the process of choosing a new superintendent. After interviewing the candidates for the final time on Dec. 8, they picked Huyett as the leading choice. Then Tuesday, five members of the school board and a group of 20 community members visited a school site on E. Vine Street in Lodi to assess Huyett in his home district. 

Students at Berkeley High Thursday said they are interested to see how someone from a suburban school district will be able to adjust to a politically heated urban atmosphere like Berkeley.  

“I think that it will be interesting to see how he fits into the district, coming all the way from Lodi,” said BHS senior Emma Bloom.  

Huyett began teaching high school mathematics in 1974 in the Elk Grove school district. After a couple of years he was promoted to middle and high school principal and then became assistant superintendent.  

In 1996, he became the superintendent of the Dixon Unified School District. He spent four years there before moving to the Lodi Unified School District, which is twice the size and has double the budget of Berkeley’s school district. He holds a B.A. in mechanical engineering and an M.A. in mathematics from the University of Virgina.  

According to information provided by BUSD, Huyett took an active role in addressing diversity and inequities of achievement in Lodi, increasing the hiring of underrepresented teachers from 14 percent to 33 percent. He also oversaw a construction campaign that added eight new schools to the district. 

“I think you have to look at what Bill’s done, and his legacy is not hard to identify,” said Lodi Board Trustee Peter Johnson, when interviewed by the Stockton Record. “The most significant thing to me is that he’s always had a policy of open communication. Whether you agree or disagree with the direction he wants to take, he always leaves room for communication.”  

Lodi Board President Ken Davis told the Record: “Bill has done a good job, and we will be sorry to see him go. He made a lot of strides here. When we hired him, we were looking for someone that could help this district grow. We liked that he had a background in engineering and understood financing.” 

On Saturday Nov. 3 La Méditerranée in Berkeley, or “La Med” as it is known to locals, celebrated its 25th anniversary in the Elmwood neighborhood of Berkeley with a private party for its employees and families, friends and special guests that filled the evening with music and circle dancing, food and friendly banter, reminiscent of the kind of upbeat socializing that has been its hallmark for many years.  

On behalf of the City of Berkeley, Mayor Tom Bates presented a proclamation to La Méditerranée in recognition of its 25 years of excellent service to Berkeley providing “a sociable meeting place of great food, good cheer and wonderful ambiance, adding greatly to the friendly environment of the Elmwood neighborhood and providing to Berkeley and the East Bay affordable Mediterranean cuisine of the finest quality as well as excellent catering. In closing he referred to Saturday Nov. 3, 2007 as “La Med’s day.”  

The private celebration was attended by some of La Med’s most loyal patrons, current and former employees, the family of La Med’s owner, Garbis Baghdassarian, along with prominent members of the Bay Area Armenian community. Guests enjoyed a sumptuous buffet of La Med’s most popular specialty dishes including a few Armenian specialties prepared by Baghdasarian’s wife Silva.  

Traditional Middle Eastern music was performed throughout the evening by an ensemble of musicians led by Souren Baronian, who flew out from New York for the occasion. The party continued well into the night as guests trickled in to eat, drink, dance, and to congratulate La Med on 25 years of success.  

Midway through the evening Ara Baghdassarian, Garbis’ son, who is also an employee at La Med, gave a speech in which he outlined the restaurant’s history and the impact it has had on the surrounding community. He also introduced Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates and his wife Assemblywoman Lonnie Hancock and also thanked his uncle Levon Der Bedrossian for starting it all many years ago. Garbis himself delivered a heartfelt speech in which he thanked La Med’s employees and patrons, as well as his family, the city of Berkeley, and the neighborhood of Elmwood for their years of support.  

The La Méditerranée restaurant mini chain was first founded in the Bay Area in 1979 by Levon Der Bedrossian with two restaurants in San Francisco, one on Filmore (1979) and one in Noe Valley (1981), and in 1982 he opened the Berkeley restaurant with Garbis Baghdassarian. The restaurants have won numerous awards including the Best of Citysearch and Best Caterer 2007 award.

When my granddaughter drew my portrait at the age 6, the very first thing she put on the outlined face, before she drew the eyes, nose or a mouth, were the liver spots on my upper cheeks. What a surprise! What impresses her the most on grandma’s face are the brown spots? 

Now another of my granddaughters, who just turned 5, often comments on my yellowed teeth and a darkened front tooth, as well as my wrinkles and stains. 

“You are old”, she says. 

“I love to be old.” I say. 

“Why?” 

“Because I can play with my granddaughters.” 

Aging is shocking when I see my face in a lighted mirror, but there is also a phenomenal joy. It is a relief to see the path of life ahead, definitely shorter, but more clearly after a lifetime of experience. But still many unexpected events keep happening to convince me that Life is a Mystery. 

One of the most significant is a frequent affair with Kami-kakushi, a ancient Japanese word which means ‘god’s hiding’, used in cases like someone suddenly becoming lost in the forest and so on.  

Everytime I look for something and can’t find it where it is supposed to be, I murmur and curse at the divine act of the Hiding god. 

Not only things, this god loves to hide words, particularly proper nouns from our brain. It’s been happening to me for some years now that whenever I need it, I can’t remember it.  

I meet old friends on the street. I know who they are clearly but their names are under Kami-kakushi. So I try hard to keep a conversation without calling them by name. Only after I succeed and proudly say goodbye, the Hiding god gives me back the names it had hidden. 

I hear it’s not only me, but common to people of my age. We have a daily contest, my husband and I, of who is the first to remember a person’s name in our conversation. If it comes to one of us, we both raise our fists and shout, “Yatta, we did it!”  

The Hiding god often makes me feel that I am creating a late blooming, new career as a comedian, under it’s direction.  

For instance, I make a fragrant cup of hoji-cha tea and take a sip. Then I can’t find the cup for the second sip. I walk through the house seeking. Then back on the kitchen counter I find it empty next to an unpored pot full of tea. 

Often I look for a jacket or my glasses to bring with me when going out, getting frustrated and impatient as time is running out, cursing Hiding god, my director, loudly. Then suddenly I discover that I already have them on. 

A few weeks ago, I acted in the best comedy. I was going grocery shopping. I opened the closet in the kitchen to pick up my handmade cotton shopping bags. They are hung on the hook on the right side wall inside the door, and on the left are house cleaning tools. I picked up what I needed. After walking through the house I found myself at the front door holding a broomstick in my hand!! 

I screamed and laughed so loud that my husband came out of a room to join me. We could not stop laughing for a long time. Then came to my mind the saying “Laughter is the best medicine.” I agree! After laughing so hard, I felt a delightful surge of energy.  

So instead of always cursing it, I decided to graciously accept the devine acts of Hiding God. After all, in this time of depressing news flooding in all over, who can give us such an opportunity to laugh out loud? We must be grateful to whoever can do so. 

With my sincere prayer I made a New Year wish list for God’s Hiding.  

• Please hide money from the war addicts in the White House. 

• Please hide guns and weapons from our world.  

• Please hide causes of global warming. 

Only then can we have uproarious laughter, the best medicine for all on the planet.  

A Happy Holidays and a laughing New Year!

You ask what it has been like for the rest of us, safely distant from the quake. ... Like death in the family. You know the feeling—a great emptiness, and somewhere inside you, a tight-coiled spring of sorrow wound beyond its limit, ready to slip its cog and suddenly let go with a whirring wail. 

Nearly a week has passed since it happened, but again last night I awoke in tears. I had been dreaming of how the seemingly endless flow of refugees through here began.  

That first young couple I fearfully watched come over the nearby hill in late afternoon of that awful day could have served as models for a Diego Rivera mural of rural Mexico: rough-sandaled bare feet, he in flour-sack pants, striped poncho, and wide-brimmed straw sombrero, she in long skirt with reboza and a black shawl shading her face and covering her hair, as if on her way to church. On the woman’s lap slept a half-grown piglet; on it she rested her small brown hand protectively. Side by side, the couple jolted along behind a tired gray burro drawing their rude single-axle cart, that creaked with each turn of its hand-hewn solid wood wheels. 

Dazed, the man and woman stared straight before them, their listless eyes focused far off along the toad, on some invisible horror they could not leave behind. 

“Their springs are more than ready to slip their cogs,” I observed to my wife as I left her by my radio and went out to them.  

“Buenas tardes.” 

“Buenas tardes,” they responded dully. 

Their burro stopped, twitched his ears, shivered the skin on his back, and flickered his tail at the flies. 

“I am a short-wave “ham” operator,” I began uncertainly. “The government asks us to report names and addresses of anyone coming from the affected areas, so outside relatives can be notified.” 

“We are from Reales...” 

A village twenty miles away. They must have traveled all day, without provisions. 

“My name is Jose Poblado, and she is my wife Annamaria. We have no relatives outside...We lived on the land of Don Fernando Reales...” 

The settlement took its name from the district’s principal landowner; Poblado must be one of Reales’ tenant farmers. 

.....“I was at work in the field when the earthquake struck, and my wife was watering the burro and pig. Our little son Jose was still asleep indoors....” Poblado gave a heavy sigh. ...“We thought we had the best house on the rancho, sheltered under the overhang of a wide flat rock—like in a cave--that shaded us in summer and protected us from winter winds. But in the quake, the rock split off and crushed our house. Now there you see only tons of broken rock; under it our beloved child is buried, with all we own—except this cart and burro. The father sighed again before he added, “The pig, our boy had made his pet...Him, we will never eat.” 

Seconding her husband’s words, the woman shook her head vehemently, shuddered, hugged the piglet closer and turned blank frightened eyes on me. 

My chest tightened, as if sorrow would stifle me. “Get down and come here,” I said then, almost brutally. 

I reached out to them dumbly, pulled them into my arms. Pig and all, I hugged them close. 

“Cry!” I whispered hoarsely. 

At my command, we all three burst into tears. 

We wept for a long time, while the piglet slipped down to root in our dusty yard. 

As their sobs gradually abated with my own, the stricken father and mother still weakly clung to me. 

“Julia, Julia!” In desperation, I called to my wife. 

Julia had watched, and had warm food ready for us. 

The man and woman devoured the meal swiftly, silently, not once raising their eyes—as if ashamed of their hunger. 

When they were done, my wife and I led them to our bedroom. 

There, even as we were laying aside their outer clothing, they fell asleep in our arms.  

“Poor dears! Like exhausted children. Worn out by grief,” Julia said softly as we laid them side by side on our pillows and covered them. 

Take the time-line, my time line. The present, the unspent-part stretches to the horizon of infinity. But this end is weighted heavily towards nostalgia; sometimes it takes only the flutter of a martin’s winged dance over the marsh to startle my soul into memory; or a snow-burdened pine bough drooping down ward; or a child’s china tea set. Let me tell you.  

••• 

December nights roll in quickly in Michigan’s Christmas season. By five p.m. Christmas Eve in 1924, even the room is dark; all but the startling magic of the Christmas Tree with its candle lights flickering and glowing.  

In the small living room the couch and chairs have been turned from their places on the far wall; their backs now form a barricade against the spirits of the night. In the angle in front of them, room for the wondrous pagan tribute to the rekindling of earth’s light—The Christmas Tree !!  

I know nothing of this symbolism. However, even at four years of age, I know that these days have a special meaning and excitement. I lean into my mother as we sit together in the corner of the overstuffed couch where I feel warm and protected. The candle flames add their heat to the room; their small lights make for mysterious spaces and shadows beyond my vision. Could this have been like what it was before being born ?  

“Stille Nacht...heilige Nacht...einsam wacht... 

“Si-i-lent night....Ho-o-ly night...  

“Holy infant so tender and mild “  

My mother begins to sing the German words, trying to teach me. Perhaps remembering HER Christmas Eve’s with her mother. But tonight in the dusky dark of a Michigan winter’s eve we sing together, curled together .  

I can never sing “Silent Night...” without a catch in my throat ; or even hear it sung without tears starting to form. It’s not the memory of my first Christmas which springs to mind. Nor the image of my mother and myself. I’m a sentimentalist. I’ve imbued the Mother-and-Child as a relat- 

ionship special to all peoples and ages. And every brand new baby born: holy, and tender, and mild.  

••• 

That afternoon I had gone along with my Mom and Dad in their search to find the stores which are still selling the little four inch, twisted Christmas candles as well as boxes of clip on candle holders. It is hard to find the clips and candles these days.  

Only those emigres who perhaps want to recall their childhood days, or re-create their memories; or more probably who scorn the new-fangled electric wires—whoever heard of electric lights on a tree! Only they are still buying the small Christmas candles. We go in and out of several of the neighborhood small novelty stores with aging inventories. I recall the dimness of the narrow ethnic store on eastside Jefferson Ave. The long counter stretches to the back of the store; musky odors; the odd assortments on the shelves behind the man. I cling close to my mom’s skirt Very apprehensive of a new place-in-my-life. I am a little girl.  

That self-same afternoon my dad had wrestled the whispy green balsam tree into the corner  

near the big front window. Is there ever a Xmas tree that stands straight of its own accord? No matter. My father, a research pathologist,with an eye for the exact, was not above tying it straight with a wire attached to the window catch. Somehow I can see the wire stretching out into the nowhere. It glistens in the light.  

In later times and other Decembers, I find myself anchoring, year after year, tieing down a tree that just doesn’t stand straight despite all the sighting and shaking that went on in the tree lot. I guess Dad gave me permission.  

The twisty candles each one in its little cup-like holder soldered onto clips, are carefully placed by Dad on the ends of the branches. Each one far enough apart from the one above to exist in its own space. Each flame flowing up, each a halo of light; the throb of a mystic tale. The weight, ever so slight, still brings the boughs closer downward. At all costs, the candle flames must be kept separate. We sit together watching the glow of the candles . BUT we also watch for the candles that burn down too low.  

“See. Daddy. THAT one.” or “Daddy, the yellow one!”  

Our father then gently puts out the one whose beeswax has melted down dangerously while careful not to dislodge the others still burning brightly.  

The smell of wax and resin and Christmas Tree . And I remember.  

“O Tannenbaum. O Tannenbaum. Wie grunst sind deine blatter ? “ 

“O Christmas tree. O Christmas tree....” 

••• 

That must have been the Christmas when my grandmother Buettner from Chicago was with us. The women are just figures talking and mumuring in the background of the small dining room across the hallway from the living room. In the morning when I open my presents, in the box from my grandmother is a large china tea set: sugar bowl, and pitcher and the rest. The teapot, about nine inches tall, is decorated with a little-girl figure. 

The cups and saucers have been long gone; Grandmother, too; and Mother also. I must have treasured that teapot, even when its handle knocked against a table and fell off. The teapot, with the piece of handle rattling on the inside, had been with me, in a drawer or closet, shelf or box even when I moved to Berkeley in 1983. It’s disappeared now in a lost frenzy of house cleaning. I hadn’t realized until this writing why I had kept it through the years, even without its handle. Now I see fully the connection between that teapot and my grandmother’s love and that first Christmas of memory .  

There is the orange in the toe of the stocking, too.  

After the Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now writer, director, producer Francis Ford Cappola was interested in making his magnum opus. At age 66 he hadn’t made a film in eight years and he said he felt “at the end of the road.” He wasn’t able to finish his dream project Megalopolis and was beginning to feel increasingly frustrated. 

He began exploring philosophical concepts relating to time and consciousness to find a fresh direction. He decided to contact a friend he knew in high school, Wendy Doniger, who currently teaches comparative mythology and Hinduism at the University of Chicago. Doniger suggested he read Mircea Eliade’s novella Youth Without Youth. After reading it, Coppola said subsequently, “I knew I’d found my subject.” 

Coppola’s new film adaptation of Youth Without Youth is, in some ways, a comment on his own life. At the beginning of the story the protagonist Dominic Matei (Tim Roth) is a 70-year-old man who feels his life is over. On the brink of suicide he’s struck by lightning and undergoes a dramatic metamorphose. All his teeth fall out and he grows new ones. His aging reverses and before long he looks like a 30-year-old man. He meets a woman who claims to be a seventh century Hindu saint and goes on a spiritual quest with her to a cave in India. 

The film is set in Nazi-influenced Romania in 1938 and Matei’s doctor Professor Stanciulescu (Bruno Ganz) begins to publish papers on Matei’s astonishing transformation. The Nazis take an interest in him so he has to flee. But before he flees he assumes a false identity at the request of his “double.” 

Matei’s life-long project has been researching the origins of language and the invention of a new language. His intellectual powers increase until he can “read” entire books merely by passing them in front his eyes without opening them. 

Coppola said this about the making of the film: Youth Without Youth was, in a way, like “The Twilight Zone”—an old man becomes young again. He seizes that extra time to continue his research on the origins of language. I wanted to return to personal filmmaking and Eliade’s perspective on regeneration resonated with the place that I was at in my life.” 

Perhaps only Coppola, among today’s top world filmmakers, could have pulled off this outre approach to philosophical questions with such candor and gravitas. And it was due primarily to his advancing age and to his artistic frustrations that the film even got made at all. 

Coppola’s career began with a coming of age film about a young man beginning to make his way in the world: You’re a Big Boy Now (1966). This latest film, if not his last, is indeed a return to personal filmmaking.  

Bush Plans Half-True Memoir—President Bush announces that he is “knee-deep” into writing his memoirs (tentatively titled “Remission Reaccomplished”). “I’ve told Presidential Librarian nominee (Laura) to make sure the book is in both the non-fiction and fiction sections of my presidential library because quite a lot of it is true.”  

Former 49er Great Pans for Eggs—Disgusted with the 49ers quarterbacking, Hall of Famer Joe Montana donates sperm in the hopes of creating a future All-Pro QB for the 49ers. Now he’s seeking a gal with eggs to spare who wants help the downtrodden franchise. “Since we can’t draft a great quarterback, we’ll create one,” said Montana. Ad reads: “If you’re a gal with superior peripheral vision, ability to scramble, and a talent for last second heroics, then get in touch.”  

Prison Hits—(If Barry Bond is convicted) Serving time in San Quentin for perjury and obstruction of justice, Bonds slugs a home run over the wall into San Francisco Bay and demands that the dinger be added to his total. “That ain’t no tainted home run. A wall is a wall.”  

Hell is for Homers—(If Bonds is acquitted) Bonds hits home run, and salutes the Great Down Under instead of pointing to the heavens. “I acknowledged the guy up above for all of those 762 dingers and I got indicted. The fellah down below gets my props now.”  

Britney on Straight and Narrow—Britney Spears, set to drive a celebrity lap at the famed Indianapolis 500 Speedway, says “It sure would be a lot easier if they would get rid of all the turns.”  

Full House—(If Giuliani wins) President-elect surprises nobody by announcing he is separating from current wife (who will be allowed to live at the White House during his term), but promises to have a new spouse in time for his inauguration. Recognizing the hardship imposed on incompatible couples, Giulliani proposes tax credit for divorcees.  

First Man on Hot Seat—(If Clinton wins): President-elect Clinton tells the nation that First Man Bill will “head health care policy commission, immigration task force and maintenance of the doghouse – in case I need to send him there. “He still owes me,” she added.  

Jobs on Job Hunt—The day after the Presidential Election, Apple CEO Steve Jobs declares he is planning a run for the Presidency, promising an “iPhone in every pot, and a pair of jeans and black turtleneck for every citizen.”  

Great Wall of Fun—In an unusual joint partnership, descendants of contractors who built The Great Wall of China and Disney will build the Mexican border wall. “We’re looking for something that will last a long time and can be a great tourist attraction,” said the project director. “We want people to recognize the wall’s entertainment value.” Preliminary plans call for such attractions as “Mr. Toad’s Wild Immigration Ride” on the Mexican side and “It’s a Big Wall After All” on the U.S. side.  

Foreclosure Island—Mounting housing defaults force the creation of a 51st state (formerly Guam). Named the State of Foreclosure (License Plate: Defaulter’s Delight), it is zoned exclusively for mobile homes.

In July of 2002, a then-homeless Dan Hopkins rescued a young pigeon he saw being hit by a car at the intersection of Dwight and Telegraph. Miss Pidgy, as Hopkins named her, had a broken wing, so he carried her in a box during his stay in People’s Park.  

“A lot of people in the park couldn’t understand why I rescued a pigeon,” Hopkins said. “They kept saying stuff like, ‘Pigeons are nothing but flying rats.’” 

Miss Pidgy brought Hopkins luck. A short time later he found the apartment building where he and his wife, Roberta, still live in West Berkeley.  

Pigeons are monogamous, mating for life. Ms. Pidgy is jealous of other females including Roberta! The couple, vegans who do not use or wear animal products, maintain separate apartments so that Ms. Pidgy has plenty of space (in Dan’s apartment) to nest and maintain her egg-laying cycle. 

Secured with a leash, Ms. Pidgy likes to travel Berkeley on the handlebars of Hopkins’ bicycle. She quickly to learned to recognize his regular routes and her home neighborhood. 

Scientists have puzzled for decades over just how birds, especially pigeons, learn and remember routes. Birds have been proven to recognize visual patterns. Pigeons, as well as migrating geese, follow highways and other landmarks on the ground below. 

It now is believed birds also use a mixture of sensory tools including low-frequency sound and smell. Trace amounts of magnetite in their beaks, or the band just above, interact with the earth’s gravitational pull.  

Pigeons’ habits in returning to nest and mate first made the ancients realize they could be selectively bred to produce flying messengers. The first recorded use of a homing pigeon was in 775 B.C. when one was dispatched from the Olympic games to announce victory to the city of Athens. 

In Africa near the equator the sun comes up at the same time and sets at the same time everyday. Our group was staying at a game lodge in Tanzania where the greater part of the Serengeti lies. The Serengeti is a reserve for African animals, made up of grasslands and the rift valley. 

About 3:30 p.m. we started to gather at the lodge for the evening game run before the sun dipped behind the mountains come 6 o’clock. The rule at this game reserve is that the mini-buses must return to the lodge before dark. 

We climbed into the VW mini-buses and were off. Our driver-guide spotted a pride of lions and we headed in that direction. To our great surprise, it was a pride with three young cubs. The adults were all lounging under a tree while the cubs were wrestling and pouncing on one another. We noticed that they were playing with something. On closer inspection with our binoculars we could see they were playing with a zorrie (or flip-flop as you may know them by), as most everyone in this part of the world wears them. Here we were in the middle of nowhere and these cubs were playing with a yellow flip-flop! You have to wonder where it came from.  

Our next stop was at a ravine where our guide had spotted some baboons. We were very excited to see these Anubis baboons, as this was an unusual sighting. All of a sudden, hundreds of them started coming up the ravine toward our position. At this point the guide turned off the engine, and then very quietly said, roll up the windows, do not take pictures, and do not talk.  

We could hear the urgency in his voice. As we sat very still, the baboons kept coming up the ravine, the large males showing their teeth and circling the van, many females with babies on their back were passing nearby. It was probably close to 30 minutes before all the baboons had gone by, and it was getting very dark.  

When they were well out of sight our guide fired up engine and we started back to the lodge. He then told us that he had never seen that many baboons in that large of troop. He thought that there were probably over 600. He told us that those baboons could have ripped our van apart in minutes if they felt threatened and that was why even a click of a camera could have set them off!

Standing on the corner of Center and Shattuck in downtown Berkeley, I peer longingly north, toward the Gourmet Ghetto, wishing I had enough time to get to the Cheeseboard Pizza for a slice or two before class. 

Only one kind of pizza slides in and out of their ovens daily, but day to day the choices are unique: pear and gorgonzola, red cabbage and walnuts, roasted mushrooms with goat cheese, corn with lime and cilantro, roma tomato with lemon zest, roasted eggplant with feta, roasted red peppers and olive tapenade, three-onions with four-cheeses. Roasted potato with Gruyere is my all-time favorite. But truly, I enjoy them all. 

The line for pizza can be long in the evening, reaching well past the main Cheeseboard storefront two doors to the north. As the line inches forward, there's plenty of time to unwind from the day. You can chat with friends, people watch, catch up on reading, or listen to the free live musical performances. 

To the right as you enter, the ingredients of the pizza of the day are written on a large sheet of copper, along with the quote of the day, which is often political, sometimes philosophical, and always provocative. This provides something to ponder as you approach the counter, where you don't have to decide what kind of pizza to order, only how much. If you overhear comments like "Only one kind of pizza? No tomato sauce? No meat?" you know a newbie is about to purchase their first Cheeseboard pizza. 

Behind the counter, tall rolling racks loaded with uncooked pizzas await their turn in the hot ovens. Empty pizza boxes are stacked to the ceiling. To encourage recycling, a quarter is credited for returning a box for a refill. I return mine so often that every few months it's declared too tattered to carry one more pizza home, confiscated and replaced. 

After ordering, you move left to pick up your pizza, passing plates stacked high with giant heads of roasted garlic, inviting you to grab one to spread like butter on your slices. After each pizza is pulled from the oven, its hot crust is painted with olive oil infused with fresh garlic, then garnished with fresh herbs, parmesan cheese and sometimes a squeeze of lemon. Whether you order one slice or a whole pie, you're always awarded with a sample slice for the road. I rarely make it out the front door with my bonus intact. 

When I get in my car the morning after I bring home a Cheeseboard pizza, I savor it again, assaulted by the lingering garlic aroma held captive overnight. What a tasty way to start a new day. 

“There are so many different worlds passing through this spot,” I think, standing on Shattuck Avenue and Center Street in downtown Berkeley in cool twilight. It’s a visual feast, a slightly surreal movie unfolding before my eyes.  

Inside the Washington Mutual Bank, workmen are perched on ladders, dabbing at walls with white paint. Next to the bank is Tully’s Coffee; in front of it, a man in a white T-shirt paces back and forth, frowning, while speaking into a cell phone, as if in the next minute he will have to make a life-altering decision. Inside Tully’s, some student types in neat sweaters are immersed in their own private little universes, gazing intently into the faces of laptop computers.  

Meanwhile, outside, two men are having an animated conversation next to the BART station. Suddenly one of them, wearing a white T-shirt, blue jeans, and a New York Yankees cap turned backwards, begins, banging rhythmically on some newspaper vending machines and rapping in a fast, harsh cadence: “If you’re running with sharks, you better think like them.” He sounds almost professional, but no one pays any attention to him; it’s all just background noise. 

There’s an open manhole with chains around it in front of BART. An older woman walks over, peers down into it. By the BART entrance, a young, light-skinned black woman with blonde streaks in her hair is carrying a rainbow-colored skateboard and quietly asking for spare change. She doesn’t seem to be having much luck, but doesn’t look fazed. A casually dressed man and woman, probably in their early 60s, amble by, nibbling gelato, abstracted expressions on their faces. A middle-aged man in jogging gear trots by.  

Two neatly dressed men hurry past Tully’s, speaking rapidly in some African language. A sad-eyed woman, with the words “Boss, Clean City” on the back of her jacket, sweeps the street with brisk strokes.  

Then a man who looks like a circus performer appears. He’s dressed in a long black coat, feathered black hat, ruffled white shirt. Dreamily he saunters back and forth, carrying a guitar and talking into a cell phone. I’m waiting for him to perform, but he disappears as suddenly as he appeared.  

The image that stays with me the longest is this one: a few wooden benches arranged in rectangular fashion. Several homeless men slumped silently on the benches, packs like small glaciers beside them, their faces drained of any expression. They look as if they’ve been sitting there for days.  

The sights and sounds of Shattuck Avenue, on a mellow September evening, a movie that could go on and on and never get boring.

If the axiom apllies that one must write about what one knows about, then for the Bay Area Rockin’ Solidarity Labor Heritage Chorus it must be “Sing out about what you’ve LEARNED.” 

This 60 member Chorus, formed through the Labor Studies Departments at Laney College and City College Of San Francisco learns about and sings out about Labor Culture at peace rallies, picket lines and other Labor functions, and is one of 6 Labor Chorus from Seattle to Washington DC.  

Though membership in the Chorus changes with the semesters, there’s a constant core of regulars who couldn’t do without the leadership of our Instructor, Pat Wynne. I joined the Chorus in August 2001, just before 9/11.  

I had gone to the Bolshevik Cafe, a May Day celebration at which Bay Area Lefties throws a humorous cabaret making light of all things political. The Chorus sang and passed out leaflets inviting people to enroll in the class and to join the Chorus.  

I determined that if I still had the leafletby the time I needed to enroll, that I woud join, and I did. I certainly found out that this wasn’t what I remembered from High School, almost 40 years ago. I no longer was a Soprano, but an Alto, and we Altos comprise almost half of the entire Chorus.  

Then there’s stretching exercises as well as breathing exercises to prepare for singing. You don’t have to be able to carry a tune or to read music, at first, but it helps. Once we’ve done the warmups, the actual songs are passed out, if they’re not already in a black binder (provided) containing songsheets that are numbered. It is a good idea to bring the binder, a bottle of water, and a tape recorder to record the songs and section’s part. 

The songs themselves are labor standards such as Solidarity Forever, parodies of popular tunes such as Some Subversive Evening, and topical songs by current songwriters such as Pat Humphries’ No Sweat. Quite a few are written by Pat Wynne and her husband Bernard Gilbert.  

All of the more than 300 songs are constantly rehearsed for the many performances that we do. Many of those songs are woven into “Agitproperas,” or narratives with songs in them on imprtant issues of the day. The year 2002 saw “Beans, Bacon and Gravy” about the Great Depression and the Centnnial of Woodu Guthrie’s birth.  

Another Centennial, that of the IWW produced a short but lively one in 2005 We are presently performing our latest Agitpropera “We’re All Immigrants at the Western Workers Labor Heritage Cultural Festival on January 19th. We are of many ages ideologies, and occupations, but qhat we have in common that we love to sing. We have soloists and non soloists that carry parts of a song much better than others. We also have songwriters and writers that write and deliver parts of narratives.  

Still others find “gigs’ for us to sing at, conventions, picket lines, retirement dinners and more. Someone asks Pat, “Can we?” and a list is prepared and songs selected for it. If it is feasible, at least a dozen memberd will show up. In 2006 Pat wanted to raise money for the Highlander Research and Education Center near Knoxville, Tennessee.  

Some of us had never heard of it, but when we found out that Rosa Parks, Dr. King and activist musicians had learned their smarts there, we plunged into the script with enthusiasm, and, with our outstanding friends Vukani Mwethu, the South African Chior under the direction of Andrea Turner, we raised $2,500 for Highlander.  

That done, we raised money for us to pay a visit there. On the Thursday before Labor Day, about 35 singers from both choruses headed out of SFO to Knoxville for Highlander’s 75th Anniversary Celebration It was a huge plot of land with few buildings but a lot of pavillion tents to serve thousands of people with food, music and workshops. For 3 days that place really rocked! It was unforgettable. 

On Labor Day we were invited to sing for the Teamsters at their Union Hall. This was a couple of days after Cal beat the Tennessee Volunteers at the Memorial Stadium. We were picked up at our hotels by the Teamsters, and Pat and I were riding in a car with the Union President.  

“Where ya from?” He asked. “ The San Francisco Bay Area” Pat said “Berkeley” I replied. “Do you have anything to do with those naked people up in those trees?’ “We sang for them” Pat said,.  

Then I explained the issues. “Well if we see any naked people like that we’ll turn ‘em right out of here.” I’m glad we beat their team, ha, ha. As I close this piece I’m proud to say that the Chorus has an important part in preserving labor Rights and Culture If we lose our ground in the Union movement we will lose what it has taken decades to gain.  

I ask the reader to come and join the Chorus for fun and for adventure, because it feels right.  

From “Listen To The Voices” by Melody Knight: 

Singing out for justice  

Singing out for freedom  

Call us if you need us  

We will Join Your fight!  

Every other Saturday, 12:30-4 p.m. Laney College LBST 214 or code L0791, begins 1/26. Call 464-3210

Last night, I dreamed I lost the only love I had ever known. At first, I could not breathe, then I felt my chest burst into flames and I was consumed by an inferno, the flames of jealousy, the flames of insecurity, the flames of suspicion, the fumes depleted my soul of all hope; where my heart had once been was void; a place of desolation. 

The pain was so intense I thought surely I would wither away; I could visualize the one I love slowly slipping perpetually from my world and I was absolutely devastated. I was certain everything I was experiencing was genuine, it felt so real. 

Without faith I could not determine what I was real. I didn't know that the absence of faith merely allowed reflections from my past to invade my reality, it was only an illusion the only thing which was real were my feelings. I had not physically lost anything but without faith I had lost the spiritual connection. 

The time has come when I must step out of my comfort zone; step out on faith and be willing to trust... I have to be willing to trust those whom I love; I hard to believe that they love me, no matter what; just as they say. I know there are no guarantees where love is concerned... 

The realization of my situation allowed me to awaken; though I must admit when I opened my eyes I was still quite shaken. 

I have been condition to assume in love I will always be rejected, to have my heart broken in many pieces had always been expected. 

I had to find the courage to take the venture and risk what I must; I had to finally realize loves just not worth it without TRUST. 

Green sprouted though deep rich earth 

Mothers everywhere gave birth. 

Peace was again at hand 

And the river ran. 

Children played wild and carefree 

‘Neath the leafed-out apple tree 

Heedless of the treaty ban. 

Still the river ran. 

Drying leaves began to fall, 

Geese flew south with mournful call. 

Cold discord crept through the land. 

Yet the river ran. 

Came wan winter ice and snow, 

Friend and brother were now foe. 

Clashing armies took their stand. 

But the river ran.  

Then the darkest longest night, 

Pale moon but a ghostly white, 

By a heedful few a cry was heard, 

A whispered voice, a hopeful word. 

Hope sprang forth from fountainhead 

Fresh air breathed life from the dead. 

Rose bloomed in the snowy land 

And still the river ran.  

The river knows no season, no emotion, just the endless cycle of birth and death. Listen for the whisper of life born anew and feel peace from the river flow.

This story was supposed to have begun on my father’s shoulders and, in a moment, it most certainly will. It was also meant to be longer and about my dad and me, one of many tales I’ve written about my fathers’ and my relationship. Instead, I think it’ll end up being about something different. Anyway, I’ve only a thousand words so here goes.  

When I was five, I sat on those shoulders watching a noisy parade march its way up a major thoroughfare in Berkeley. My dad and I, alongside my brother and mother, stood patiently next to a large ornate clock. The giant timepiece graced the sidewalk outside of a local department store called Hinks like an immense lollipop protruding from the walkway’s edge. If you look for it, it still stands there today. The clock read 7 p.m. on that cool autumn evening; I was dressed warmly in pajamas with feet. I was astride my father’s neck so I could see over and above the other peoples heads: the Berkeley citizens who’d also come out to line the boulevard from storefront to curb to view the evening’s procession run north up Shattuck Avenue.  

The University of California marching band led the way as they trumpeted and tossed about their shiny instruments below fuzzy black shakos that stood atop their heads like bouffant hairdos. In tow, and suited up in full uniform, was the campus football team in whose honor the hoopla was about. As the parade moved along, the boys of fall waved their arms and revved the crowd up over the ruckus of fight songs blaring out in preparation for the next afternoon’s Big Game. In Berkeley, they haven’t had parades of that type in over 40 years. 

Usually when people write stories or talk about Berkeley in the ’60s and ’70s, it involves Mario Savio and the Vietnam War. They also tend to go on and include facts about hippies, Telegraph Avenue, tear gas, the University of California, People’s Park, James Rector, Ronald Reagan, the National Guard, SDS, the SLA, the Weather Underground, as well as painting vivid pictures of the counter-culture, subculture, and drug culture of those times.  

For me, though, growing up in Berkeley during those years, some of my story did involve much of the aforementioned (yes, I threw rocks, was tear-gassed and shot with rubber bullets, but it was an experience much like John Boorman’s personal reflections in Hope and Glory, a film about growing up in London during the blitzkrieg where most of it was just fun and excitement), but throughout those influential times I also frequented places like Iceland skating rink with its scent of damp rubber matting that mixed with the chilly air as the steam and warmth of a can of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup from a vending machine revived me into hitting the ice one more time.  

I grew up watching indescribable sunsets slip into the ocean from perches atop Indian Rock, a landmark of ancient stone that lies at the foot of the Berkeley Hills, where the view frames the bay like a picture. I developed as a young boy by learning about thrills and pain from flying at breakneck speeds on wax paper down the long cement slide of Cordornices Park as I skinned every visible part of my body. I also experienced the lesser excitement of mercilessly riding the Merry-Go-Round in Tilden Park till I’d vomit all the cotton candy and pink popcorn I’d consumed onto the lawn out back. Mine was an innocent, some might say bucolic, existence growing up in Berkeley during that time and for the most part, I loved my childhood magnificently. 

When I was little, my father used to take me fishing out on the Berkeley Pier where the end seemed to go on forever. As we strolled towards its tip and deeper water where the Golden Gate Bridge looked stoically on, we’d eventually end up standing next to each other casting out then settling in; him nursing a small brown bottle of beer and I, fiddling around, incessantly tightening my line or hanging over the rail peering into the water for a hopeful glimpse of something. We were fishing for striped bass, a species that travels in two worlds, the ones of saline and fresh. We never caught many of them, it was usually bullheads and smelt for us, but it didn’t matter; we were outdoors and free on an open bay with the salt air of life in our nostrils. Today, in Berkeley, you can still do most of those things.  

Like that striped bass who swam between two realms, Berkeley for me as I was growing up actually felt like separate worlds also. I was a young white kid from a blue-collar, conservative home coming along in one of the most radical and changing places in the country. Because of those times and my culture at home, I constantly felt like I was trying to fit in, or, possibly just because of who I am I never really felt too connected. There was also the fact that Berkeley itself presented many paradoxes at the time between the juxtaposition of the old guard Republican institutions and the radical upstarts that could leave one feeling a bit disjointed. In any case, you might say I had a confused adolescence, but haven’t we all? 

Originally, one of the themes I wanted to mine when I thought of writing this recollection of growing up in Berkeley in the ’60s and ’70s was how when you live here you’re lulled into a sense of being exquisitely unique.  

Growing up in Berkeley back then, or even now for that matter, the feeling of being different, of being very different permeates much of a Berkeley person’s life as they walk down its streets and pass its fellow citizens on their way to a coffee shop or bakery. Maybe it is its deep and illustrious past, maybe it’s because of the university and all the diverse ideas and people that intertwine and get mixed up like a human recipe for fruitcake, I don’t know. 

“Where are you from?” someone asks. 

“Berkeley,” I answer, just as easily as if I could be saying San Ramon. 

“Oh, Bezerkeley,” they reply with a dumb smirk on their face and a knowing look in their eye that tells me they know nothing at all. 

“Yeah Berkeley,” I answer. “Asshole,” I think. 

I’ve always disliked the moniker that popped up for Berkeley sometime in the mid-’70s. In fact, I detest it so much I promise not to repeat it anymore in this story. Somehow it suggests to me that the people who choose to live in this town have something severely the matter with them. That may be true, but is it really necessary to advertise it? 

Seriously, Berkeley is different, the people in it are different, and the way in which things are done here whether it’s socially, politically, or spiritually usually are very different. Why shouldn’t we feel unique, everyone including the evening news when I was growing up was telling us we were. This feeling of being distinct, special, atypical of the rest of the country can at times feel very intellectually alluring and emotionally appealing. It can also leave you feeling somewhat superior if you let it.  

I guess that’s one of the things that bothers me about Berkeley as well as myself, the egotistical idea that we’re better than someone else, say someone living in Des Moines. 

Don’t get me wrong, I like living here, in fact, I love living here, it’s just sometimes I feel we can take ourselves too seriously in our ideologies. Getting out in the rest of the world has tempered that a bit for me and I understand pretty clearly that what happens in Berkeley probably won’t play in Peoria. 

I’m saying all this because I recently moved back to Berkeley after being away for 20 years. I’d relocated to Richmond, a town only six miles to the north but a far greater distance in its social and psychological aspects. While residing there, I had tried to be a good citizen, learning about its history and contributing to its community; my wife taught and still works in their schools, and it’s a city where I continue to run my small business, but things needed to change and fortune had it that Berkeley and the neighborhood I knew best had me back.  

It’s been suggested more than once that you can’t go home again and for the most part I think that’s essentially true. When moving back here I was careful from a personal standpoint that it was for reasons that were realistic and without any expectations. Too many times in the past I’d made geographical moves based on trying to feel different or thinking that life would change and it didn’t. I could be miserable, or happy, in any environment I’d like to think, but that’s only partially true. 

It’s been a strange sensation to come back. I never went away really, at least not very far away. Everything I continued to do for the most part over the 20 years I lived in Richmond, see friends, shop, eat out for dinner, I did either in Berkeley or Oakland. What leaves me feeling odd is that not only am I back living somewhere that I grew up in as I revisit my past during walks along streets and neighborhoods I frequently haunted, it’s that I’m left with an extreme sense of this is where I really belong. I never knew how much I missed living here until I actually returned. 

I’m not sure what the purpose of my story has been to this point but I do know that I’m way over my allotment of a 1,000 words and that some editor at the Planet will probably cut it, but heck, its been enjoyable to remember and write it. 

And oh, there’s this: that night, after the parade, when we arrived home late to our rented house on Carlotta Street, my parents woke me from the back seat where I lay comfortably wrapped up in a blanket. From far away, like a dream, I heard my brother outside calling for our cat, a grey-striped, tiger-lined fellow named Felix who was the center of my brother’s attention. Abruptly, I heard a blood-curdling scream emit from him as my parents rushed to see what was happening. Out in the middle of the street lay my brother, next to our prone and lifeless cat.  

While my parents stood at the curb watching him grieve in the middle of the road, I stood alongside them not comprehending the situation. It was the first time I had encountered death. As my brother continued to sob uncontrollably in the street while cuddling up against his dead cat, I went and lay down next to him on the cool hard pavement and began to cry right along with him.

Excerpted from Y’all Come Back, Now; Reflections on Reincarnation  

When I was in another life, that life wasn’t even mine. 

It belonged to another fellow, who hogged it all the time.  

He wandered about day and night, in total self- 

obsession,  

Not knowing that Al Durrette’s soul was his most important possession.  

Oh, he thought he had a soul alright, but he thought it was his soul;  

And that later he’d masquerade as me, was the story that he told.  

So, all you past and future me’s, just don’t forget your place:  

You’re here to toil in the pits, so I can finish the race.

The game is supposedly called bridge,  

But the American bridge is in danger of being  

blown up  

by the hissy-fit tantrum of some petulant federation  

under the delusion that it represents anything farther than its pacifier.  

And why, one may ask.  

Simply because the American bridge champions  

had the gall and the nerve  

to act like real Americans  

by expressing their own free opinion  

like an American should.  

But apparently somebody forgot to warn them  

that the USBF underwent a name change.  

It’s now the GWBF.  

And you see,  

under that new (and covert) moniker,  

whenever you become a part of this federation,  

you apparently forfeit all rights  

that were once American givens,  

even to say  

that you did not vote for their “man”  

or bow saying metaphorical salamis and baloney  

to the cowboy boot-clad feet of the idol  

of the GWBF  

on pain of hell and damnation  

and fire and brimstone,  

that just might blow up this bridge after all.

When acacia bloom and quince flowers from its spare stem, 

Akaki Akakievich again feels the frost of St. Petersburg 

nip through his tattered overcoat. “Akaki,” a student writes, 

“was fairly non-existent in the country of Russia,” but here 

he begins the term, and when magnolia blossom, Akaki 

climbs the sour-smelling back steps of Petrovich, the tailor. 

“He shouldn’t have gone to the underground for a coat,” 

says a student, but what can poor Akaki do but stint on meals 

and candles and tip-toe to save on shoes until the day Petrovich 

arrives with his new coat? “Fate,” writes a student, “has it in for him 

to be dull and banal, but the overcoat pulls him to the limelight.” 

Alas, the coat is stolen. Akaki dies. “One must have a goal  

more than a coat,” a student warns, “to have interest in life..” 

And the teacher thinks of Gogol dying, leeches on his nose, 

the last of Dead Souls burned in the stove, Gogol, who first wrote  

of the little man but himself kept a servant, a lout of a serf 

who slept in a cupboard—and so misery hides in misery 

like Russian dolls—but when creeks run and willow shoots 

are red, and small white lanterns appear on manzanita 

in the woods, Akaki’s ghost comes back, and a student  

writes in a journal, “Why is Akaki my brother? Indeed, 

I do taste my life bitter, but I forget it by working intensely. 

I do have a plan I regard as the most extravagant, 

and the happiest, like the overcoat of Akaki.”

My recollection of Prague in winter is the snow falling in big fat flakes outside of my double-paned window so densely that I could barely make out the neon colored lights of the alien tower ahead. The Zizkov TV tower, as it is known to locals, juts up into the sky like a robot arm. The sculptures of black, faceless babies crawling up its silver, tubular shape add to the weirdness of its energy. Whoever commissioned this art piece certainly had a strange sense of humor. Not surprisingly, the artist is also Czech.  

The psychedelic light show began unexpectedly on Thursday and then occurred in sporadic bursts. When the purple glow first cast onto the walls of my tiny closet room, I thought it was a figment of my imagination. Then the colors shifted, from green to red and back again and I stood captivated by the mysterious presence dominating the winter skyline. I tried to explain the lights over the phone to my mother, but she answered me with a tone of concern. “Are you sure that you’re feeling OK? You haven’t been drinking absinthe have you?” Admittedly I had tried it in the months that had passed since I left the United States, but I was as sober as the grey landscape outside and I knew the lights were real.  

Like many occurrences in the Czech Republic, the purpose of Prague’s TV tower and the significance of its night lights is something that I never understood. Despite its eerie intensity, the tower was my guide, helping me to navigate the dark streets of Jiriího z Podìbrad back to my unfriendly apartment. Though sheltered from the rain and snow, I never felt relieved to be home. Riding the rickety, doorless elevator up to the fourth floor, I shuddered as roosting pigeons cast menacing shadows through the windows. Why had I chosen to live illegally in a 9x6 foot room, meant to be used as a closet, on a deflated air mattress? On my meager salary, it was what I could afford and this was part of my ‘authentic’ Czech experience.  

Uninformed and uninhibited, I decided to move my life to the formerly communist Eastern Bloc as part of a TEFL certification program. In a mere 4 weeks, I would be teaching English to Czech adults. Intrigued by Prague’s medieval maze of cobblestoned alleyways with all-night herna bars on every corner, I watched lascivious ex-patriots imbibing Pilsner like it was water. The first weeks of my course were spent this way, our group of Americans, Brits and Australians forming fast friendships as we braved the metro system together. But the party ended after a month or two, and the Westerners returned home to their families and comfortable jobs. I never intended to stay for a year-and-a-half, but living there became my reality. 

The weather turned bitter cold and the city of a thousand spires looked as though Dracula could fly over it at any moment. A layer of black grime covers the winged figures that lurk above the streets. None of Prague’s historical buildings have ever been steam-cleaned. In the winter, darkness settles in at 3:30 in the afternoon and permeates everything down to its core. I couldn’t shake my feelings of depression. To me, the saints on Charles Bridge stood watch like frozen ghosts, their pained expressions conveying a sense of what Prague’s people have endured. The weathered faces of workers jammed in the dirty compartment of the B train with me each morning reflected nothing but apathy and disdain. Their mouths drew downwards at the corners and their pale blue eyes stared vacantly ahead. I had never felt so alone in a crowd.  

Even my friendships with the other Americans appeared superficial to me. Aside from shared drinking experiences, we had nothing in common. It was then when I began to appreciate the genuine nature of my ESL students. The Czech bluntness that I had taken to be so abrasive in the beginning was in actuality refreshingly honest. No one chose to hide their feelings behind fake smiles and sing-song hellos. Though answers to sensitive questions were never sugar coated, my students were always ready to listen to my thoughts.  

Riding the metro to the end of the line and taking the bus into the outskirts of Opatov on the way to Hanna’s house, I passed the high-rise projects, remnants of the Communist era. Sometimes the snow blew in blizzards so fiercely that only the eyes of other riders were visible through a slit of scarf. But at the end of this journey warmth enveloped me every Friday. Hanna welcomed me into her home with hot coffee and a plate of cookies, ready to discuss literature, with her baby boy Vaclav bouncing gleefully in his high chair. This animated and intelligent woman challenged me to back up my opinions on cultural differences and to create lesson plans that I looked forward to teaching.  

Friday nights I would always get a phone call from Petra, my young, party-obsessed Czech coworker. Enamored with a local DJ and very aware of her beauty, Petra caused me to roll my eyes at times, but proved to be the perfect clubbing companion. Dancing next to me she was all smiles and bubbly laughter, whispering secrets in German, our shared foreign language. On clear nights we would sip champagne, watching the lights of Prague Castle dance on the surface of the Vltava and discussing our past relationships.  

Though I feel a wave of relief knowing that my permanent home is here, in Berkeley, California where I indulge in fresh sushi dinners, pedicures and Gordo’s burritos, my nostalgia for Prague creeps in at times. I do not wish to live there again, but I picture Hanna reading to Vaclav in her cozy apartment and Petra putting on makeup and new heels, and I think about how their lives are moving forward.  

Neither woman believes that her country is a dark and depressing place. Any obstacles Hanna and Petra encounter are dealt with pragmatically. It makes me smile to know that Vaclav is walking now, but Petra’s unrequited love for DJ Loutka lives on. The next time I find myself in an emotional rut, I’ll remember that even in dark times there are flashes of color, appearing as unexpectedly as the lights of Zizkov tower.

Although it wasn’t on my One Thousand Things To Do Before I Die list, the rock and roll frenzy, Yemeni style, that I was caught up in, dancing with dozens of Yemeni men and boys, will certainly be among the One Thousand Things I’ve Done That I’ll Never Forget entries when my life-journal is written.  

The occasion was the wedding reception of my friend and across-the-street neighbor, Bashier, who had met his future wife about a year before the marriage, but for the most part, had had no contact with her, for theirs was an arranged marriage. Some of the dancers were his close friends and relatives, who I knew, but most were strangers to me. Yours truly, the wildly dancing, white-haired geezer, was certainly a stranger to them. 

I had no idea of what to expect when I reached the wedding site in Concord, California that hot July 30 in 2006. Although families arrived together, the men entered the huge concrete block building through one door while the women went through another. The women wouldn’t be seen again, I discovered, until after the celebration when they rejoined the men for the ride home.  

Following the men, I entered a large room, furnished with tables and chairs, where scores, if not hundreds, of Arabic men and boys were sitting and milling about. Most were dressed casually, but some wore suits, or sports jackets with open-collared shirts, and a few men wore sports jackets over traditional Yemeni gowns, colorful scarves wrapping their heads. Through an archway was an even more cavernous room, like Costco without the merchandise, with more table-chair setups, glasses and water pitchers on each table, and even more men and boys. On the stage a band was playing. It didn’t take long to realize that although I didn’t understand the lyrics, it was rock and roll music, Yemeni style.  

Although I stuck out like a computer at a typewriter convention, I felt at ease. I’ve known the family for over a dozen years, and have found them and their friends to be kind, friendly, and family- and work-oriented. If they’re not working, they’re with the family, and vice versa. We’re lucky to have them as neighbors, and I was honored to be celebrating Bashier’s wedding with the family’s friends and relatives.  

Bashier later told me the wedding had taken place while we were waiting for it to begin. Just after I’d driven off to the wedding site, a white stretch limo half a block long had appeared to pick up the bride, groom and their respective families. On the way to Concord, in the limo, the couple were married by their fathers. We guests in Concord weren’t there to witness a wedding, we were there to celebrate. By the time Bashier joined us, he was a married man.  

And how he joined us. When he arrived, a boisterous cheer arose, and we all started toward the main door. Bashier entered the room riding on the shoulders of friends and relatives, looking somewhat dazed, but smiling. Slowly, with plenty of cheering and celebrating, he was carried through the rooms to a head table, on a dais against the side wall. Bashier was given the ornate center chair, flanked by three cousins on either side. Men and boys approached Bashier, talked and laughed with him, and more often than not, gave him a hug. The celebration had begun. 

The band started playing again and lots of men, most younger than me, headed for the dance floor and started boogeying. I followed. My feet met the floor, and I gave it my best. Soon others were dancing with me, many trying to figure out my steps. I never have, so they never did. I danced with Bashier’s dad, his brother, and his uncle Mugalli, who wanted me to do a crazy pattern that took so much energy I could only humor him for a bit and then, out of breath, went back to my own style. I danced with assorted cousins, and of course, Bashier himself, who later told me he wasn’t supposed to come down from his “throne,” but, hey, boys just wanna have fun. 

An hour elapsed, and a dinner break was taken. A very American-style buffet was offered: cheeses, cold cuts, rolls, meat and chicken choices, vegetables, fruits, salads and sodas. Nothing exotic, but it sure hit the spot. No liquor. Hundreds of men and boys, no fights, no arguments, no one passed out. This alone made it different from any wedding I’ve attended, save a cousin’s wedding that took place in the Bible Belt.  

After everyone had eaten and visited, the music began again. After another hour of some of the most vigorous dancing I’ve ever done, I had to call it a day. My clothing was soaked, and I had finally run out of energy.  

My favorite wedding: Bashier’s wedding reception.

Hey Mom!— 

I wish you could see or hear me.  

It’s OK but kinda lonely  

here on the other side.  

But it wasn’t for nothing, Mom.  

I made my mark just like you wanted me to.  

Look at it engraved on that beautiful white marble:  

PFC Walter Jones.  

No one looks at it much, but.  

Just the birds sitting and shitting on it.  

Last summer it was so besmirched  

I disappeared again  

Until the winter rains came  

And washed me back into fame.

(You know the old traditional tune ...)  

1. On the first day of Solstice, the Goddess gave to me  

A murrelet in a redwood grove.  

2. On the second day of Solstice, the Goddess gave to me  

Two spotted owls, and a murrelet in a redwood grove.  

3. On the third day of Solstice, the Goddess gave to me  

Three wetlands, two spotted owls, and  

A murrelet in a redwood grove.  

4. On the fourth day of Solstice, the Goddess gave to me  

Four watersheds, three wetlands, two spotted owls, and  

A murrelet in a redwood grove.  

5. On the fifth day of Solstice, the Goddess gave to me 

Five rainforests, four watersheds, three wetlands,  

Two spotted owls, and a murrelet in a redwood grove.  

6. On the sixth day of Solstice, the Goddess gave to me  

Six sea otters sporting . . . (etc.)  

Two spotted owls, and a murrelet in a redwood grove. 

7. On the seventh day of Solstice, the Goddess gave to me  

Seven humpbacks swimming . . . (etc.)  

Two spotted owls, and a murrelet in a redwood grove.  

8. On the eighth day of Solstice, the Goddess gave to me  

Eight condors passing . . . (etc.)  

Two spotted owls, and a murrelet in a redwood grove.  

9. On the ninth day of Solstice, the Goddess gave to me  

Nine pumas prowling . . . (etc.)  

Two spotted owls, and a murrelet in a redwood grove.  

10. On the tenth day of Solstice, the Goddess gave to me  

Ten wolves a-howling . . . (etc.)  

Two spotted owls, and a murrelet in a redwood grove.  

11. On the eleventh day of Solstice, the Goddess gave to me  

Eleven bison roaming . . . (etc.)  

Two spotted owls, and a murrelet in a redwood grove.  

12. On the twelfth day of Solstice, the Goddess gave to me  

Twelve humans caring . . . (etc.)  

Two spotted owls, and a murrelet in a redwood grove.

They say it takes a village to raise a child. Lacking a village, I was fortunate to have, instead, Piedmont Avenue.  

In 1990, after a six-month sojourn in Paris, my husband Armand and I rented a cozy Craftsman house on Monte Vista Avenue, across the street from Piedmont Grocery and a half-block from Piedmont Avenue. I was still clinging to the civilized French daily ritual of visiting the local shops to buy fresh ingredients for dinner. I loved living across the street from a well-stocked independent grocery. It’s true they didn’t have the 365 varieties of cheese I had gotten used to in France, but they did have knowledgeable butchers who could advise me in an old-world style. 

We had everything we could possibly need within walking distance: library, post office, movie theater, yoga studio, drug store, stationery store, bookstore, cafes and plenty of charming restaurants. But it wasn’t until two years later when our daughter, Lila, was born (only a few blocks away, at Kaiser Oakland) that I really appreciated our little neighborhood. 

Since we had no relatives in the Bay Area, the shopkeepers and restaurant owners became like a second family to us. The intimate Japanese restaurant, Kotobuki, around the corner, was Lila’s first dining experience. We used to take her as an infant and place her in her bouncy seat on the large table in a semi-private, curtained-off room. We sat there bleary-eyed, taking turns jiggling her seat and nibbling on grilled eggplant appetizer and sushi. The kind owner, Katherine, would always come to greet us and remark on how much Lila had grown. Later when Lila, too, partook of eggplant and sushi, Katherine invariably made sure to slip her a free dessert of mochi ice cream balls. 

Another “honorary auntie” of Lila’s was Teresa, the stylish owner of the award-winning, yet family-friendly Chinese restaurant a little further down the street, Little Shin Shin. Teresa and Lila enjoyed an entire relationship that I was not privy to. Near the end of the meal, Teresa would usher Lila up to the front counter. She always returned to our table clutching a little bag of treats, jelly beans and fortune cookies. Lila would reciprocate by delivering Valentine cards to Teresa and bringing her tiny “lucky cats” to add to her collection near the cash register. 

The businesses on Piedmont Avenue still remind me of the many eras of Lila’s childhood. The gift store Surprise! was the center of her world during her Beanie Baby period. The donut store was her Shangri-la when rainbow sprinkle donuts became the ultimate temptation. I devised a plan. She could have one donut a week after her Saturday morning gymnastics class at Kids in Motion down the street. Lila started going to Kids in Motion at age two-and-a-half, soon after the owner Laura opened her center, housing a colorful collection of mats, bars, and trampolines. Lila took classes there for many years and celebrated a couple of birthday parties there too. 

The most magical day of the year was the Saturday of the Halloween parade when half a dozen blocks of Piedmont Avenue were closed to traffic. Lila joined the throng of costumed cuties marching down the middle of her beloved street behind the bagpiper and then dashing into her favorite stores for candy treats. 

Like the faint pencil marks on a doorframe marking a child’s growth, the stores on Piedmont Avenue became a measure of Lila’s growing independence —once I was willing to let her venture out alone or with a friend. When she was 9 or 10 she started a persistent line of questioning about when I would ever let her go to the market across the street by herself. I stalled and hedged and put her off. Finally, I was ready. One day, I surprised Lila by sending her across the street alone to get me something I needed to finish the dish I was cooking. As she returned, she proudly handed me not only the two onions I had asked her to buy, but also a single rose she had purchased at the market to thank me for finally allowing her to go. 

After 15 years of living near Piedmont Avenue, it was with mixed feelings that we decided to move to Berkeley last year. Not only were we sad to say goodbye to our cozy little house but also to bid farewell to all the shops, people and memories associated with Piedmont Avenue. Ironically, Lila has gotten her first paying job at (where else?) Kids in Motion Gymnastics, leading birthday parties on the weekends. I don’t really mind driving her there, because I can still visit my favorite butchers and get some advice for dinner. 

Christmas time in December is the time to buy gifts for family and friends. It’s the perfect time to spend with family, have a lunch or dinner together, and enjoy your lives. It’s the time to be benevolent and kind. The most important thing for most people these days is buying new stuff: cars, phones, furniture, computers, new technology, clothes, food, etc. We live in society driven by consumerism. It is more important to HAVE than to BE.  

On the contrary, we see so many people living on the streets of our city. In Berkeley there are more than 1000 people living on the streets without a home and that number may be well over 7000 in the whole of Alameda county.  

You can help in different ways: volunteering at shelters, donating clothes and food, and giving your time. To find out about places where you can help, check the yellow pages under housing assistance and shelters. Your action will not be the solution to the problem, but your contribution and positive attitude will bring us closer to a solution. Some of the places help only young people or women. Most people can sleep or rest there, but they have to follow the shelter’s restrictions on length of time they are allowed to stay. The restrictions can be difficult for people who don’t like to be controlled or have their freedom curtailed.  

Mike Sitabo, 44, has lived on the streets since 2004. He said that he is happy living there. “Before, I worked as a machinist for five years. I lost my job because I was using alcohol. Then I became homeless, but I’m happy.” He makes enough money to eat, 20 dollars per day, or 50 when he sells items at the recycling center. “I sleep in the shelter only when it is raining because I don’t want to lose my freedom.”  

Similarly, Michael Harris, 52, has lived on the street for the last three years. He thinks that at Christmas time people are more generous and give more gifts and money. “People are more charitable at that time. They love me! They give me money, clothes, food. They pray with me.” 

Michael said that he was working in San Francisco in a restaurant when he lost his job. He said that he has a medical condition in his heart and he cannot work. “I want to be on the street. I make my own choices and nobody tells me what to do.” He has 2 two daughters, 9 and 10 years old, living in Oakland, and he tries to save all the money he makes for them. “Most people live on the street because they use drugs or alcohol, but I don’t like that. I like to live on the street and I’m saving my money for my daughters.” For Michael, having an apartment could change his life.  

Practicing solidarity and helping people should be something we do all year, not only at Christmas time. We can help in different ways: giving gifts, buying food, being helpful, or even just giving a smile. 

Photograph by Mariana Castilho Rogedo  

Michael Harris, 52, living on the street for the three years, looks forward to Christmas.

In center of a geometric shine 

Regard Orion at meridian 

Caught a moment in iceperfect line. 

Leaded on trees, ice traceries intertwine 

Windshattered radiance and obsidian 

In center of a geometric shine. 

Dreamspinning down darkness, snow is mine. 

I walk on darkness where a river ran 

Caught a moment in iceperfect line. 

Crystals whirling down the night  

confine 

The dreams I breathe here to a tiny span 

In center of a geometric shine. 

This hourglass filled with snow will realign. 

After the longest night, the day began, 

Caught a moment in iceperfect line. 

A shadow on the silence of design 

I watch for someone like a son of man 

In center of a geometric shine 

Caught a moment in iceperfect line.

Studies have shown that the time workers believe they have to themselves really belongs to an authoritarian presence, particularly on weeknights. For no apparent reason the subject will up and leave a movie, a party, even a steamy moment of passion. In 97 percent of the cases the explanation the subjects gave was the same: “I have to work tomorrow.”  

Further, results have concluded that there’s a dramatic increase in cell phone usage during work nights, television-watching, web-surfing and antidepressant drug-ingesting, paralleled by an astounding decrease in learning behavior, and a strange affinity for traffic, collars, ties, high heels, panty hose and pancake makeup, even on stifling hot muggy afternoons. This has led experts to believe that the time a worker can likely claim as his or her own is in fact limited to weekends—though with the arrival of the unofficial six-day work week, even this is in doubt. 

But supposing one does have a “good job” with weekends, holidays, benefits and two weeks of vacation: two days a week your life belongs to you. Two x 52 weeks in a year + 10 days of vacation leave + the 9 official holidays equals 123 days of life per year. Now if one has gone to college and graduates in 4.65 years as per government statistics and works full-time from twenty-two until a retirement age of sixty-six, one can count on a total of 123 x 44 years, or 5,412 days of life during this period.  

In other words, the average “forty-hour week” worker is alive 5,412 days/365 days in a year = 14.82739726 years from the time he or she is waiting for life to begin after graduation up until the time he or she is still waiting for life to begin not long before death. Fourteen years, nine months and a little over 28 days. Let’s round this figure to the 15-year mark, because after all, in spite of statistics, people do get sick and some actually fail to show up at work when that happens. In fact if you can manage to swing 10 sick days a year and two days off instead of one on Thanksgiving and Christmas, you could pull off 16.2739726 years of life. That’s a bonus of over 1.4 years, and if you’re fired this figure increases dramatically.  

There you have it folks: fifteen years of life, 8.25 of which must be subtracted in that 44-year period if you're an average 4.5 hour-a-day TV-watcher, according to Nielsen. So really, six and three quarters years of life—provided you can ignore work e-mail—21 spent in purgatory waiting for this life and 29 years of indentured servitude to enrich those who've hardly worked at all. 

So just don't do it is all. Join a union, organize a general strike for a 36-hour or less work week, engage in anti-work. Anti-work at something you love, something that will better our collective lives and bring down a system of primarily unnecessary, even harmful work—like business speculating; real estate, energy and health care gouging; writing or disseminating government propaganda or designing nasty widgets for the sole purpose of blowing them and cuddly little children up. Stop the machine and turn on the dream, that’s the real work to be done in a society such as ours.

Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? This year the precious lives of Molly Ivins, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley and Judith Pomarlen Vladeck ended. Likewise, those of many other strong women who struggled in diverse ways in behalf of the status of women and girls. And within the present decade we have lost Shirley Chisholm, Amanda Cross, Andrea Dworkin, Margaret Ekpo, Betty Friedan, Martha Wright Griffiths, Carolyn Gold Heilbrun, Dorothy Coade Hewett, Patsy Takemoto Mink, Susan Moller Okin, Estelle Ramey, Ann Richards, Margaret Sloan-Hunter, Susan Sontag, Dorothy Stratton, Wendy Wasserstein, and Monique Wittig—to name just a few.  

It was Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress, who said, “The law cannot do the major part of the job of winning equality for women. Women must do it for themselves. They must become revolutionaries.” Nigerian women’s rights activist and social mobilizer Margaret Ekpo’s awareness of growing movements for civil rights for women around the world prodded her into demanding the same for the women in her country. Martha Wright Griffiths was the first woman to serve on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and the person most responsible for inclusion in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 of the prohibition of sex discrimination under Title VII. American academic and feminist author Carolyn Gold Heilbrun found it necessary to write her mystery novels using a pen name. “Terrible news. The great Grace Paley, feminist, activist, and until today one of our best living short story writers, has died,” wrote a blogger. Patsy Takemoto Mink’s persistence secured passage of Title IX, assuring equal treatment for women in America’s classrooms as well as on its playing fields. New Zealander Susan Moller Okin contended that the family perpetuates gender inequalities throughout all of society, because children acquire their values and ideas in the family’s sexist setting and then grow up to enact these ideas as adults. In Silences, Tillie Olsen’s analysis of authors’ silent periods in literature included the problems working-class women have in finding time to concentrate on their art. Georgetown University endocrinologist Estelle R. Ramey challenged the assertion of a Democratic National Committee official that women were unfit for the presidency or for handling emergencies because of their ‘raging storms of monthly hormonal imbalances.’ Following her own bone fractures, Ann Richards taught and advocated a healthier lifestyle for women at risk of osteoporosis. Margaret Sloan-Hunter, feminist, civil rights advocate and former editor of Ms. Magazine, founded the National Black Feminist Organization. Labor lawyer and civil rights advocate Judith Pomarlen Vladeck helped set new legal precedents against sex and age discrimination. When she represented a professor who had been denied tenure, Pace University’s lawyers branded the plaintiff a troublemaker who devoted too much time to challenging the system, but the Court of Appeals agreed with Vladeck: “Those who fight for rights are often perceived as troublesome, but the law does not require people to be supine.” Playwright Wendy Wasserstein appreciated critical acclaim for her humor, but described her work as “a political act”, wherein sassy dialogue and farcical situations mask truths about intelligent, independent women living in a world still ingrained with traditional roles and expectations. French author and feminist theorist Monique Wittig was particularly interested in overcoming gender. Her novel, Les Guérillères (1969), was a landmark in lesbian feminism. Yes indeed, For auld lang syne, my dear, for auld lang syne, we’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet, for auld lang syne. 

“Wanna Buy Some Crissmass Cards?” 

During their marriage, Stella and Judge Johnson resided in a large residence, almost a mansion. She was fat and foolish, well reputed as a good Christian lady who played the church organ for services. He was a lush who left middle-aged, childless, pampered and naïve Stella penniless when he died early.  

As the judge’s wife, Stella had been a society matron, but her life had changed radically. Strong women come in varied sizes and shapes. When we first met, in 1935, I was nine years old. Stella dressed in black. Her home had been taken over by the HOLC—the Home Owners Loan Corporation—a Depression-era agency that attempted to recoup defaulted properties. She was allowed to live and give piano lessons in what had been her front parlor and to share the first floor bathroom. Running water and hot plates were installed in the other rooms, which were being rented out, and Stella was transitioning into rooming house manager slash piano teacher. One of her pupils was an only child for whom she was a modified Madame Sousatzka.  

Many of the Johnsons’ expensive furnishings were stored in the carriage house at the rear of the property. As time passed and the roomers wore things out, she would dip into its contents. The school principals referred new teachers to Stella. Her big news, relayed by my mother, was about the new high school multi-purpose faculty member—dean of girls cum trig-onometry teacher cum junior high school principal. Miss C and “her friend” were moving into rooms on Stella’s second floor. They were former missionaries to India, where the friend contracted an incurable eye disease, and they had been returned to the United States, sans income. Middle-aged Miss C always wore a dark-colored matronly dress. We spoke once, when I was in seventh grade. Summoned to the Office because of my numerous absences, I shed a few tears, and she doled out exactly one tissue from inside her desk drawer. I could tell she regretted having started the whole thing.  

For eight years, I took fifty-cent piano lessons from Stella. It was in her vestibule that I took refuge when an old geezer chased me through the streets, in her bathroom that I weighed myself and wondered how she got on the scale and into the bathtub, from her music stand that I snitched candies. It was from generous Stella that I got one of my nickels to go to the movies during school. I just walked in one sunny afternoon when I was supposedly in sixth grade class and asked for it without explanation, and she smiled and handed it over. One night a week she put on her hat and played the organ for choir practice, and occasionally she would unfold a rickety card table on which we played Canfield and Pik Up Stix. Later in the evening she made genuine cocoa, tiptoeing about in order not to disturb the roomers.  

Over the years, gullible Stella enthused about screwball projects advertised as guaranteed at-home income-producers: growing mushrooms in the basement, holding embroideries sales, selling Christmas greeting cards to her students’ parents and the roomers. She shared the name of the Christmas cards company with me, and I did well going door-to-door with my samples, oblivious of the several weirdos into whose dwellings I foolishly stepped.  

By the time I was a high school senior I didn’t see Stella regularly, although she and my mother still chatted. I received one graduation gift—a silver bracelet wrapped in a new handkerchief from Stella. Her arthritic knee worsened, and she latched on to a young surgeon. Ever optimistic, she was sure he was going to make everything right, but the operation accomplished just the opposite. With no family, she became destitute and immobile and was incarcerated in Pilgrim State Hospital. Years later, my mother shared with me a letter from Stella, who wrote that she was able to return to the community. She entreated my mother to be her sponsor. Recently, I contacted the Hospital administration inquiring about Stella: she had, of course, never gotten out of Pilgrim State. 

Adapted from The Sticking Place; A Memoir.

For this Christmas 

I don’t want anything 

made of something 

not real. 

In the spirit 

of ol’ Saint Nick, 

wouldn’t it be nice 

to just sit around 

with family and friends 

and Grandma at our table.  

She’d go on about the past 

when the blinding snows fell hard 

talk about the blizzard 

on the day that I was born. 

Mothers, brothers, 

children, wives, 

sitting round a fire 

on a chilly winters eve – 

we’ll warm our inner spirits 

in the glow of all convened. 

As the seasons welcome raindrops  

stream down our window panes, 

let’s fill our thirsting souls 

for another coming year. 

So this Christmas 

let it be genuine—authentic, 

one that’s twined 

with things that matter, 

as we cherish what we have 

while we comfort those without.

On a Tuesday morning in the usual tranquil Tilden Park, we Senior Strollers were surprised by several unusual phenomena: 

On the boardwalk going toward Jewel Lake we noticed that the regular dry boards were sopping wet, and because it hadn’t rained, why all the water? Then as we reached the shaded areas, our feet started to slide and crunch over particles of ice that had formed on the boards there. As it became warmer, the sun was melting the ice, making the walking surface of the boards extremely wet. 

Then at Jewel Lake, which at first looked placid and calm, the wind became furious, blowing down leaves and dust and made the water in the lake look like a large sheet of ice was being blown across the top surface of the lake, bringing with it thousands of leaves, with the tides left lapping at the shore. We sat for a while to watch the wind change the lake into numerous textures, and the sun came out again, making diamond sparkles in the water.  

Now on the Upper Packrat trail coming back from the lake, we were noticing, still, mushrooms poking up through leaves, on old tree stumps, hidden in the roots of some trees. In one spot a whole small village of brown mushrooms looking exactly like the ones perhaps that grow where hobbits or fairies live. Then one hillside covered with a scattering of large white mushrooms. 

The thing is, we always notice wonderful things of nature like these when we walk in the park every Tuesday at 9:30 a.m., weather permitting. It’s not only good exercise for the body, but the added benefits keep our hearts warm too! If you have a mind to join us we can be reached at either 524-9992 or 215-7672.

An essay by playwright Alan Bennett, telling about how he declined a knighthood and other honors, prompted me to think on my past for a moment, so I’ve borrowed the title above. In that essay, he says that he grew up taught to shun this sort of attention, had stopped trusting authority, and was not a “joiner,” or one who cared to be a part of such ranks. I identified with his words because although I have had a few minor acknowledgements I never felt fully recognized by them. My reasons, I thought, were probably a lot like his. He wrote, though, that the greatest honor he had ever been given “had nothing to do with the Honours List and thus evaded the strictures of [his] recusatory temperament and all [his] misgivings about authority”: namely, being given a Trusteeship in the National Gallery, a position that gave him permission to visit the gallery outside of their open hours for the rest of his life.  

I tried to think of any time that I felt a great honor being given to me. I was able to think of only one, but I remembered it immediately. It was one day when I was a young man, in a doctor’s office. I was about to go cycling back to my apartment in West Hollywood after my appointment. Back then, I always wanted to be thought of as one of the athletic young gay men known to be seen everywhere in that city. So I was dressed in stylish black biking tights, and though they covered my whole legs, I did feel a little bare since they were snug, elastic and thin. Still they, along with my hair style and regular trips to the gym, were meant to get me attention.  

In the waiting room after my appointment, I sat down to fill out a form that the doctor had given me. Also waiting in the room were a mother and her two boys, probably about age 7 and 10. I said “Hi” to them and felt a little self-conscious about what I was wearing, trying to “look the stud” in front of these family-type people. But I knew I was going to be on my way soon and after hearing the two boys’ names, Ari the older and Jaren the younger, I sat down to my form right about when the mom went into the doctor. The boys waited behind. 

The waiting room had books and toys, so the boys didn’t really lack diversions. But they oddly made sure to show me the toys they were playing with and generally include me in what they were doing. It was not long before Jaren asked if I would read something to them from the kids’ magazine he showed me. Ari, too, stood waiting my answer. I had to finish my form, was eager to be on my way, but I do like kids and so I said, “Well, guys, I’ve gotta finish filling this out. When I’m done, I’ll be happy to.” 

I had expected a mild complaint, or even a little disappointment, but it was as if a switch had been flipped on their motors. ZIP!—the two of them didn’t waste one word or one second finding something else to do.  

When I finished the form, I was prepared to read the story to them. “Okay,” I asked, “Where’s the magazine?” Jaren brought it over and, to my surprise, both he and Ari very promptly knelt on either side of my chair. Together, they opened the magazine and held it open in front of me, each holding one side of it. Then Jaren began reading it aloud—to me.  

He read in the slow, deliberate speech of a boy who was still learning how to read. I was too startled by their gesture to think or say anything. A little ways into reading I saw Jaren’s small hand stretch and begin to reach tentatively toward me, as if he were comfortable enough that he was going to let it rest on my knee.  

I felt awkward, being dressed as I was, but I also felt a trembling sense inside—of being honored. I had been given of their time not because of my looks, because I was wearing the most fashionable bikewear, or anything else about my appearance. Even if I appeared gay it  

didn’t matter to them. They felt trusting enough of me and were happy with the fact that I could just give them my attention. Their kindness made me feel at a loss, in ways I didn’t recognize then and haven’t known since.  

I’d like to say that my heart almost broke when their mom came out and brought them into the office to join her, but I can’t remember much more. I’m sure I must have left shaky for having been, in a small way, coveted by two very sweet little boys. Since I feel it now, I know that I must have left that office feeling honored and elevated, feeling that I could arise taller from my chair and more of a man because of their gestures of trust and affection.  

When my grandchild asked where I would be when I died, this poem was my reply. 

You, stars, and the firefly's tail, 

all are specks of primordial dust, 

primordial flints in the hearts of stones, 

primordial fog in cosmic dawns. 

If I return to life in the stars, 

find comfort in the breath of trees, 

see my tears flowing in the rain, 

that will be my immortality, 

only a change of residence.

Planet Publisher Mike O'Malley and Arts Editor Anne Wagley help to shear a sheep. Photograph by Elizabeth Paxton

Poets ...  

be on your duty ...  

Step up to the stage,  

Not to shine under a spotlight of the sun ...  

Creating a heroic story of domination  

Not to abuse words... to persuade  

invade ... and defend our actions 

Not to utter words ... to deceive 

to lie ... and threaten others.  

But ... 

Poets ... be on your duty.  

Step up to the stage. 

To honor the sacred space lit by the sun  

Carrying that light for liberation  

Use words ... to inspire,  

Invite and ignite your actions  

Utter words ... to give and receive  

Others, and enlighten. 

Poets ...  

Step up to the stage  

To step back 

To create a stage  

For others  

To speak 

Others to imagine. 

Be on the stage 

Become the gentle  

Moonlight  

Shining on the shadows  

Created by the sun. 

Artists ...  

Poets... 

Step ... up 

Do I have a song to sing? 

Do I have a voice? 

Do I have a word to wing? 

Do I have a choice? 

Yes, I have my song to sing. 

Yes, I have my voice.  

Yes, I have my word to wing 

and my word—my word—is choice. 

Do you each have a song to sing? 

Do you each have a voice? 

Do you each have a word to wing? 

Do you each have a choice? 

Yes, you each have your song to sing. 

Yes, you each have your voice.  

Yes, you each have your word to wing 

and your word—your word—is your choice. 

Do we all have our songs to sing? 

Do we all have our voices? 

Do we all have our words to wing? 

Do we all have our choices? 

Yes, we all have our songs to sing. 

Yes, we all have our voices.  

Yes, we all have our words to wing. 

and when we wing them. 

the whole world rejoices! 

Yes, when we wing them, 

the whole world rejoices! 

George Lakoff, linguistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and Mark Johnson, professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon, collaborated to produce Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (Basic Books, 1999), but oh what a tangled web of words they wove in the process—and one of them a renowned linguist by trade, at that. Beginning with the first sentences of the book, readers should fasten their seatbelts tightly because they’re in for a bumpy read. 

Sentence four of their book proclaims the previous three sentences to be “major findings of cognitive science.” Apparently the authors share a curiously anthropomorphic view of science. The reality is that cognitive science, and any other science for that matter, is inherently incapable of finding anything. Science is a method. It does not think or find. It is obvious the authors phrased this sentence in a blatant attempt to convince readers that their point of view is the indisputable, authoritative objective truth decreed by Science, when in fact this is not the case at all. By their own admission later in the book, not all cognitive scientists agree with their so called “findings”. 

As regards these “findings”, where is it cognitive science was supposed to have found them? Were they under a rock, alongside a road, or where exactly? The ideas presented are not findings at all, but are theories invented by the authors. The contention that they are findings contradicts the authors’ position regarding the concept of reason—that the traditional view of reason as a pre-existing indepen-dent phenomena is incorrect. In their view reason “arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experience” (p. 4). In other words, reason is an invention rather than a discovery.  

After emphatically making this point, how can the authors possibly justify that their theories are “findings” and “empirical discoveries”? In effect Lakoff and Johnson are saying that reason is an invention and not a finding, except those reasons presented by themselves are findings and not inventions.. These are really subjective theories conceived by the authors and deceptively presented as objective and disembodied facts cloaked in a misleading veil of objective science. 

Much of Lakoff’s and Johnson’s ideas are in reaction to the philosophy of Rene Descartes, who died in 1650. His flesh has since decomposed, but his philosophy has not. Philosophy does not really inhere in flesh the same way as do blood vessels, which is why philosophy is not found in anatomy textbooks. Lakoff and Johnson are self-described philosophical materialists, or physicalists as they prefer to say, but they are not thorough going materialists who believe all of reality to be composed only of matter. They are dualistic materialists who admit the existence of non-material phenomena, such as pho-nemes, verbs and metaphors, to use their examples (p. 109). Philosophy and mind also fit in this category. In their view these aspects of reality do indeed exist, but only in that their existence is derived from matter, i.e. the brain.. Thus, mind does exist but it cannot, as Descartes maintained, survive bodily death and become disembodied because mind is, in their view, entirely dependent on matter.  

Whether or not their view is accurate, it just is not the case that philosophy exists only in the flesh or the body. I myself have a shelf full of disembodied philosophy in my bookcase, where it remains if I am at home or not. The authors may argue that when they use the phrase “philosophy in the flesh” they do not literally mean that philosophy is in the flesh, but why then do they not frame their phrase metaphorically rather than literally? Metaphor works best when it is unequivocally clear that metaphor is what is intended, as in stating “it is as if philosophy is in the flesh.” The phrase “philosophy in the flesh” is in the form of a literal statement, implying that philosophy is actually in the flesh. To protest that they are speaking only metaphorically is to say they do not really mean what they say, but if it is the case that they are not really serious about the claim of the title of their book then what do they really mean? Philosophy may be a meaty subject, but it is much more than skin deep. If one could slice into flesh and come upon philosophy this would really be both a finding and an empirical discovery, but search as one may philosophy cannot be gotten at in this way. The reason is that philosophy is simply a different kind of thing than flesh. Philosophy is a non-material phenomenon, and flesh is material. 

It is fine and well to debate the origins of things that exist, but in the end all that can be said is that which exists does indeed exist. Philosophy, reason and minds exist just as material objects exist, regardless of their genesis. Beyond that, theories abound. Maybe god created the continuously evolving universe. Maybe there is no god and the universe and everything in it just accidentally came about. There are many such maybes. Most people have speculative beliefs of some sort on these intellectually unresolvable issues. Lakoff and Johnson have now revealed their beliefs, but have presented them as facts. Philosophy certainly is an invention, but no one seriously disputes that it is not. It was not found in the way that trees and rocks were found. Philosophy was and continues to be thought up by people, and certainly every known philosopher did indeed have a body. This seems so obvious. Is this really all the authors decided to write a 583-page book about? One might wonder also if Lakoff and Johnson believe philosophy is supposed to be in the flesh of frogs and dogs and such?

Halfway down the long line moving toward her she noticed a man. It had to be him. He had salt and pepper hair now like her. His eyes were hidden behind glasses. OK, they were both now wearing high refractive index lenses, not like the windshields of old, but still there were those layers separating their eyes.  

She did not want to be caught staring and returned to signing a book. Not like thirty years ago when their noses brushed and their eyes locked. Those were young eyes, innocent eyes—hers kohl-rimmed, almond shaped—his owl-like, hungry. But that was so long ago. 

With a smile she handed over the book to the blond woman in front of her. One more stop on her book tour. It was his city, the city where the pavement was as hot as a tandoori oven, the state of at least three American Presidents. The image of that final car drive to the airport on that overcast day thirty years ago came to her. His black Honda Accord with the cracked windshield, his staring straight ahead, her attempts at conversation. The next woman shyly placed a book on her table. She scolded herself to remain in control and went back to signing books mechanically, smiling by stretching her jaw muscles. “Yes, to whom should I address this?” Happy reading, best wishes, Enjoy—she traded off among a few stock phrases.  

She handed yet another book again and saw he was now only two away. Her blouse was getting damp. She wondered whether she had done the right thing wearing that multi-stone bracelet, the one with the peacock green, rosebud pink and watery blue stones. Their drives along the ocean, his hand on her knee, his playfully doling real pennies for her thoughts, licking McDonald dot ice creams or holding hands at a fancy Persian restaurant—every detail was engraved in her memory. 

He placed the book in front of her and said, “Hello there.” She felt his eyes on her multi-stone bracelet. She looked for and found his wedding ring, wondered if he had children, how old they were. She took a breath, bit her lower lip. “Whom should I make it out to?” she said in as nonchalant a voice as she could muster. She hoped he did not notice the sweat from her palm on the pen. He did not answer. She looked up, adjusted her bracelet which had slipped up from her wrist. The line was long. The publisher would want her PR to be efficient, not to linger. She signed, “Thank you for Parallel Lives.” It was not one of the stock phrases. She had forgotten to add “buying.” The verb had disappeared before the title.  

He collected the book and started on his way. She greeted the next person but from the corner of her eye she noticed that he turned back once halfway to the bookstore exit. Did she detect a sadness in his eyes or was she just imagining it? The $5 bracelet bought so long ago in this city would circle her wrist for the last time that day. 

The long lean branches of the weeping willow dangled low over the little oval pond in our backyard. Faded red bricks fringed the concrete pond and the narrow bridge that crossed it. The bridge sloped up ever so slightly, then down to the other side of the pond. It was an unnecessary bridge. I could have walked around the pond had I wished to pry through the tangled branches of the drooping trees and unruly plants that surrounded it. But I never ventured around the pond during those years when I was six, seven, and eight years old. I always sat in my favorite place, the middle of the bridge. 

I could be alone there, not like in my bedroom, which I shared with my older sister Gwen and younger brother Jack. Our bunk beds and Jack’s bed left barely enough space to move between them. It was pleasant enough inside, but I loved sitting alone on the bridge over the pond, watching tiny creatures dart about between stringy dark green plants. It was cool in the shade where flashes of sunlight filtered through the trees became glistening jewels on the water. On most days it was so quiet that only the hum of an occasional bee or the buzz of a fly interrupted my peaceful reverie. Once in a while the rhythmic chomp-scrape of a hoe sliced through the silence. I recognized it at once as the old man who lived behind us working in his garden.  

In the harsh South Dakota winters, the pond froze over with ice as hard as the concrete surrounding it. Though I spent little time out there, occasionally I tramped through the snowdrifts to check the thickness of the ice, taking tentative steps on it to see if it was solid. I would never have thought to try to skate there even when the ice was thick enough to hold my weight. The pond was so small that one short glide would have taken me from one side to the other. It was nothing like the lake where Gwen and I skated.  

We shared a pair of hand-me-down white leather shoe skates, a great improvement over the clip-on metal runners of earlier winters. Although I am two and a half years younger than Gwen, we wore the same size shoes then when I was seven and eight, the years before I surpassed her in height and shoe size. We took turns waiting for each other in the warming house, a little shack at the edge of the lake. A huge pot-bellied stove in the center radiated heat out to the benches surrounding it. When it was my turn to wear the skates, I clomped outside down the wooden ramp to the lake, where the frigid air bit my face and seared my lungs as I skated along on the lumpy surface around the edges of the lake until I felt frozen or decided to give Gwen a turn. Even though sharing the skates meant I had to skate alone, I felt safe and protected, knowing that Gwen waited for me.  

At home she preferred being inside and never went to our pond behind the garage. Jack didn’t venture out there either, so I thought of the pond as my private place. In the summer I’d push aside the drooping willows and step out from my cool haven into our victory garden. The blazing sun blinded me for a moment, and the heat scorched my fair skin as I moved through the tall corn stalks toward the other vegetables: string beans, potatoes, peas, lettuce, carrots, green onions and finally, tomatoes. I twisted a few shiny ripe tomatoes from the vines, dusting them off as I walked back to my sanctuary. Sitting in the middle of the bridge, I savored them, the warm red juice dripping down my chin. 

Some days I took a large empty mayonnaise jar and a little Pyrex dish filled with uncooked dry grains of Cream of Wheat to the bridge. Earlier I had washed the Miracle Whip label from the jar and carried it to the basement, even though I hated the daddy-long-legs that crept around down there. Using my father’s hammer and a large nail I punched holes into the lid of the jar, holes that were evenly spaced in a circle around the edge of the lid, with larger ones in the center.  

At the pond I scooped the jar full of murky water, though in the jar it looked almost clear. I filled it again and again until I had captured four or five tadpoles. I wanted ones that still looked like chubby gray minnows; their legs only a faint protrusion beneath the skin. Eventually, satisfied with my catch, I plucked a few strands of slimy green plants from the pond, adding them to the jar. Then I pinched some Cream of Wheat from the dish and sprinkled it into the jar, watching it float on the surface, as the tadpoles explored their tiny new home. I scattered the rest of the grainy Cream of Wheat over the pond, fearing it didn’t hold enough food to help the tadpoles grow into frogs.  

I soon became the tadpole expert at school, telling everyone about the wonderful process of metamorphosis that changed the tadpoles, also called polliwogs, into frogs. I collected them to take to special friends, thrilled to be able to share my pets. 

The pond, and especially the little bridge, remained my favorite place for several years until we moved to a different house. Now, over sixty years later, I have a tiny private space in our home. Quite the opposite of the little pond, though it is about the same size, it is filled with furniture and equipment. I call it my office because I work there, but it’s also a playroom for my grandchildren and me. In a small clear space amidst the furniture, we play on the floor with Tinker Toys, Hot wheels, Tonka trucks, an ancient Fisher Price Circus train, and other treasures left from my sons’ early years. 

The main thing is compared with other areas in our home the room is mine. My favorite colors dominate: reds, orange, and pink. Photos of my family and a few of my paintings line the walls. It is cheerful and cool, even on hot days. I can look out the single window through the oak tree, past telephone poles and electric lines, at the hills filled with pink and white cherry blossoms in spring. In the fall I see all the colors of the season: delicate pale yellows, deep dark golden oranges, vibrant reds and more. As much as I enjoy my room, it will never match the natural environment of the little pond, and I may never feel the sense of peaceful solitude and timelessness that enchanted me in my earliest favorite place. 

And there is nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong at all. But only in the discovery of an autonomous and benevolent republic of an artful creation. Through your own rigorous stirring and folding in a bowl of uncertainty, intellectual, emotional, spiritual and even its physical effort. It takes a lot of individual will to smooth out the roughness, “kneadless” pieces of grains. Pounded to perfection, and though it were whole kernels (thought processes), to rise up! Make yourself sit on your butt day in and day out to make this substance to be enjoyed. 

Unfolding in a world bowl of uncertainty: the finished product. No matter how rough the road was to get there. 

Wandering imagination; up to a perfect loaf. 

Painting by Cherrie Williams.

I 

In one of Graham Greene’s novels his protagonist is alone in a hotel room obsessively pursuing and squashing bugs... 

Once upon a recent time your friend in West Berkeley found a spider trapped in a large plastic bowl in his bathroom... The spider was not able to negotiate the smooth walls of the bowl. Your friend occasionally placed a drop or two of water or a smaller insect in the bowl... Finally he decided to give the spider a choice. He fastened a few inches of dental floss to a chopstick, laid the chopstick across the top of the bowl so that the floss hung to the bottom of the bowl. The spider very quickly clambered up the floss, crossed the chopstick to freedom, and disappeared triumphant. 

Your friend freed the spider, therefore he is. 

(In the next installment the spider comes back, dragging a page from Kafka’s The Castle, and another from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamozov, searching for the plastic bowl and muttering something about “freedom.” Stay tuned.) 

II 

I’m just an eye sitting on a rock. 

It’s not easy 

Sharing my vision 

With people who have two eyes  

And two feet, 

Who work and suffer. 

It’s lonely being an eye on a rock. 

III 

I am an explosion. 

I go through the void of the years 

Cooling, 

Sizzling through the black holes, 

The loves, 

Cooling. 

Ah. it is good to cool off,  

When you are nothing but an explosion. 

IV 

Growing Old Gracefully? 

Then, they wanted to catch a whiff 

of my aura, 

And now? 

Bask in the chill nearness of  

decomposing? 

Maybe not so many  

As wanted to catch a whiff of my aura, 

Sexual chemistry, 

Intellect, spirit, potency, genital magic. 

V 

Truth In The Desert 

I’m a clump of desert shrubs. 

Being truthful is my game, 

Sitting without moving, 

Serving silently the truth. 

Can’t I have a burst of lying? 

A bloom of flame and gone? 

Can’t I scream a bit of fakery 

And dash across the sand? 

Can’t I open legs in passion? 

Or fasten lips to a sweet cactus 

Under my shadow? 

Or must I always be a clump, 

A truthful clump? 

So pale, so tough, so enduring, 

With my sources hidden deep 

Deep deep below the poker faced 

Expanses of sand, 

Prickly humming sand, 

Rictus smiling sun. 

The flood waters rising in Bihar and Bangladesh threaten 

‘Enter if you dare’ 

The Brahmaputra River is furious 

The farmers’ food grains destroyed 

Corpses floating, epidemics spreading 

No scented Japanese cotton kerchiefs here 

to keep away the stench, no lipstick to dab the edges of 

Unleashed dogs bark brokenheartedly 

“Bitch,” I think, not of the dogs but of that life 

While I watch the BBC world news on TV 

The only channel which covers the Third World floods for 

more than a passing line between Paris Hilton’s pranks  

and Iraq, Iraq and more Iraq and Barry Bonds 

756th Home Run 

I dream of visiting Mount Kailash—Shiva’s abode 

with my father, dipping in the turquoise truth 

of Lake Mansarovar 

But all around on TV I only see the turquoise green fear  

engulf the famished villagers 

Scrambling for higher ground 

“Time goes to Timbuktu”  

my thatha told me when I was four before I knew about death 

He told me that my other grandfather had gone 

to Timbuktu for a very long time 

But how can these parents be shielded  

When parasites have bloated their children’s bellies 

Hollowed their babies’ eyes before they die? 

My mother died, I suffered a stroke 

I felt my sanity forsake me 

For some time my ability to think and feel deserted me 

And sometimes my husband rants for no reason 

But then I see these people on TV 

and my life seems like a Five Star Fiesta in comparison 

Do I still have a right to complain? 

In school I learned the lines “It was love that made us 

and love that saved us” 

But no one can bring the dead back to life  

But couldn’t one less mother in Bihar see her daughter die? 

Can’t help arrive to move to higher ground? 

It was May Day in Paris, and Mark and I were among the throngs of Parisians promenading throughout the city on this most festive day. We were standing by the Arc de Triomphe when a young man approached us.  

“Would you mind taking our picture?” he asked, indicating a slender young woman at his side. We were happy to oblige, and then asked if he would take our picture as well. (I still have it sitting on my dresser in my bedroom: there we are, the two of us smiling broadly, looking like a couple of middle-aged hippies). 

We then exchanged introductions. They were Peter and Karma, from Cambridge, Mass. This was their first trip to Paris, they told us, and they were overwhelmed by the beauty of the city. Mark and I explained that we had been close friends in college in New York many years before, that we had lost touch with each over for over 25 years, and that, through a mutual friend, we had recently discovered each other’s whereabouts.  

I was now living in California, and Mark in Paris. He had invited me to visit, and we were reveling in our renewed friendship. 

Peter and Karma were intrigued by our story, and before we parted, Peter handed me his card. “If you’re ever in the Boston area,” he said, “let us know.”  

••• 

After a thrilling two-week stay in France I returned to my normal life at home. Mark and I continued to write, and the glow of Paris remained for a long, long time.  

Several months later I was invited to a cousin’s wedding on the east coast and decided to add a few days of sightseeing in Boston as well. I recalled Peter’s invitation, and wrote him of my plans. I was pleased to find a message from him when I arrived at my hotel, and when I returned his call, we made a date to have lunch in Cambridge the following day. “How’s Karma?” I asked. “I’ll tell you when I see you,” he replied. 

As I made my way to his apartment, I suddenly realized that it was just down the street from the hospital where my college boyfriend, Don, was now Chief of the Psychiatry Department. I hadn’t seen him in years, but since I was now so close I couldn’t resist the urge to try to contact him. 

Peter greeted me warmly when I arrived, and I had barely crossed his threshold when I told him my story. Not unaware that it was a gross breach of etiquette, I asked if he’d mind if I tried to call Don. He was gracious in replying, “Of course not.”  

My heart raced as I dialed the hospital’s number. I was put through to his line, and then, “Dr. Leonard,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “Hi, Don, it’s Esther.” His response was immediate. “Well, how are you and what are you doing in Boston?” We went through the mechanics of catching up with each other, and then he checked his schedule. He had a half hour free before his next appointment, he said, and we could see each other briefly if I’d like. We would meet as we walked towards each other down Mt. Auburn Street. 

Peter seemed amused at this turn of events, but gave me his blessing. We would have lunch when I got back. 

I headed down the street in a state of high excitement, and Don soon came into view. We both remarked at how little we had changed in appearance. He had always had a sharp mind and a quick wit, and that hadn’t changed either. We kept up a repartee of clever banter as we walked back to the hospital together. He showed me his office, we took pictures of each other, and then it was time for his appointment. I felt good at having seen him again, however briefly, after all that time, as I walked back to Peter’s apartment.  

Once we finally settled down for lunch, Peter told me about Karma. He seemed distressed as he related that she had gone home to Iowa for Christmas, but had called him from there and said she wasn’t coming back to Cambridge. He was stunned because he hadn’t suspected any problems between them. She had offered him no explanation for her decision and he was still bewildered and hurt about her leaving. Although he and I were virtual strangers to each other, he seemed eager to share his feelings with me.  

••• 

Ten years passed. Mark and I remained in contact, but I had no further contact with either Peter or Don. However, one day, quite unexpectedly, the story picked up once again.  

I had recently moved to Albany, and had gone to my local bank to make a deposit. When it was my turn to be waited on I casually glanced at the teller’s name plate. It said “Karma.” I looked at her face; she was blonde and slight.  

“Have you ever been to Paris?” I blurted out impulsively. “Yes,” she replied hesitatingly. I did some quick arithmetic. “Was it about ten years ago?” “Yes,” she replied again.  

“Do you remember our meeting at the Arc de Triomphe? I was with my friend Mark and you were with Peter.” She conceded that she did, but I got the feeling that, contrary to my own feeling of excitement at this coincidence, she was feeling uncomfortable about my questioning, and I left shortly.  

I nonetheless looked forward to seeing her again the next time I had banking to do and learning what had happened all those years before. But she never returned to my branch, and I never saw her again. And the mystery remains. 

I have often pondered the strange thread of circumstance that had briefly created connections in our lives over such a wide span of time and place. Was it perhaps karma? 

The former San Pablo Florist and Nursery at 1806 San Pablo Ave.—a key piece of pre-World War II Japanese history and one of the last standing links to Berkeley’s hidden Japantown—was reduced to rubble early Saturday to make way for condos in West Berkeley, although property owner Syed Adeli had told the Planet on Dec. 7 that demolition wouldn’t occur for two months. Tonight he’s expecting the City Council to defer $315,588 in fees so that he can start construction before his building permit expires on Friday. Photograph by Richard Brenneman.

Bill Huyett, superintendent of the Lodi Unified School District, has emerged as the leading candidate for the new superintendent of the Berkeley Unified School District. 

Although Huyett, Lodi Unified superintendent for seven years, declined comment about the selection when reached by the Planet Monday, his name began to surface when Berkeley district e-mails announced a special board meeting for 10 a.m. today (Tuesday) at 1305 E. Vine St. in Lodi. The site visit by the Berkeley school board, part of the superintendent finalist selection process, must be noticed as a meeting by law. 

According to district officials, the Berkeley school board and 20 community members were invited to the site visit to speak to community members in Lodi about Huyett. The Berkeley Board of Education will also meet with the Lodi Unified Board of Trustees today (Tuesday) to check references, a key part of Berkeley’s hiring process. 

“The site visit is the concluding factor,” said BUSD spokesperson Mark Coplan. “The board will announce their selection at another special meeting Wednesday.” 

The district embarked on a superintendent search process with the help of consultants Leadership Associates after superintendent Michele Lawrence announced her retirement effective Feb. 1. 

The board narrowed down a list of candidates last month and interviewed the finalists on Dec. 8 and 9. 

Some union leaders and community groups have criticized the process, calling it closed and secretive. 

Cathy Campbell, president of the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, said that she had decided not to participate in the site visit. 

“Any kind of involvement at this point is superficial,” she told the Planet Monday. “It’s an effort to justify a really closed process. While a number of community, parent and labor organizations were interviewed about the qualities the board should be looking for in a new superintendent, there was no involvement by parents, teachers, students or community members.” 

Andy McCombs, director of BOCA, said his agency had not been invited to participate in the site visit. 

“We testified at one of the community meetings but nobody listened to us,” he said. “I still haven’t got copies of the report from that meeting. I am not sure if anybody has.” 

John Selawsky, appointed president of the Berkeley school board last week, did not return calls for comment by press time. 

Catherine Bruno, the district’s PTA Council president, said that she had been impressed with the selection process. “It involved different community members and highlighted the importance of racial equity and closing the achievement gap,” she said. 

Established in 1967, Lodi Unified is twice the size of the Berkeley Unified School District and serves the cities of Lodi, North Stockton, and the communities of Acampo, Clements, Lockeford, Victor, and Woodbridge in the Central Valley of Northern California. 

“It’s very rural and very widespread,” Coplan said. “I understand the board is very happy with the selection.” 

Lodi, which has a student enrollment of 29,800 K-12, consists of 49 school sites, including 33 elementary, seven middle, four comprehensive high schools, and two continuation high schools.  

The district’s racial breakdown is roughly 39 percent Caucasian, 30 percent Hispanic, 23 percent Asian and 7 percent African-American.  

Lodi Unified’s primary languages spoken by students include Spanish, Hmong, Urdu, Cambodian and Vietnamese.  

The district has obtained over $100 million in state bond funds for the construction and renovation of school facilities over the last 12 years. 

In writing his January 2006 mission statement about improving student performance, Huyett quoted from Star Trek, admitting it was one of his favorite lines. 

“Do you remember it?” he asked the community in his statement. “To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” 

“Talkin’ trash” will take on new meaning at today’s (Tuesday) City Council meeting when contracts for hauling rubbish from the city’s Second Street Solid Waste Transfer Station will be considered.  

The discussion won’t be limited to which company can get the job done for less. In the era of global warming, the question council is likely to address is how to recycle and reuse as much of the waste as possible.  

Currently, the city contracts with Republic Services to haul away two-thirds of its approximately 150,000 tons of garbage each year to a dump in Livermore.  

Of the 50,000 tons that don’t go to Livermore, half are organics and composted by the city’s contractor, Grover Landscape, and about 22,500 tons are recycled through the city’s curbside program.  

Urban Ore scavenges about 800 tons of reusable material and city staff picks up about 1,500 tons of recyclables that include mattresses, computer monitors and televisions. 

But since the city’s goal is to recycle much more of its trash, and because the five-year contract with Republic will terminate Dec. 31, the city wanted to contract with a company that would recycle or reuse more of the trash. 

City staff is proposing a 2.5 year contract with East Stockton Recycling—the only respondent to its request for proposals—to haul away from the transfer station 50,000 tons of trash annually, half of which would be recycled and half of which would be deposited in the East Stockton dump. This would increase the percentage of the city’s recycled trash from 33 percent to 50 percent 

Mary Lou Van Deventer, co-founder of Urban Ore, has been monitoring the contract through its discussions in the Solid Waste Commission. 

Urban Ore resells used goods at its facility on Murray and Sixth streets recycled from individuals, businesses and scavenged from the transfer station. According to Van Deventer, who spoke to the Planet Friday, the company would like to participate in making much more of the trash available for reuse and recycling. And they prefer that the material is not trucked for long distances.  

Urban Ore can live with the proposed city contract to East Stockton, however, if the council approves some conditions that would modify it, she said. The conditions should specify that the contract would be for one year, subject to a 1.5-year renewal, rather than for 2.5 years, she suggested.  

Another condition that Van Deventer proposed was that within the 25,000 tons that the company is contracted to recycle, East Stockton should not be allowed to count any tonnage burned for fuel. And the company should not be allowed to count as recycling any waste—concrete, wood chips, or other—ground up and spread over a dump to cover it, she said. 

What Van Deventer said she would really like to see is a complete remodeling of the facility, with the ability to do all the sorting of recyclable items at the transfer station itself. The city will be sending out a Request for Quotations in February to begin the formal process of exploring such a remodel, which Van Deventer estimated would cost $15-$30 million. 

Immediately, she said, the city should hold a design charrette aimed at interim remodeling of the transfer station so that more reusable and recyclable items can be separated on-site from trash that goes to the dump. 

“There’s not much of a capital cost” to the interim remodeling, Van Deventer said, noting that more materials, especially construction and demolition materials and cardboard could be “intercepted,” that is, taken directly off the trucks coming to the transfer station. 

And “we want to expand scavenging on the floor” of the transfer station, she said. 

Peter Holtzclaw, manager of the solid waste and recycling division, said such a charrette could be held as early as January. “I’m open for [Urban Ore] doing more here,” Holtzclaw told the Planet, during a walk-through of the facility on Friday. “I just don’t think they can do 25,000 tons more.” 

Holtzclaw added, “On-the-floor coordination with Urban Ore can happen today.” 

How the remodeling will be done is a question of worker safety, Holtzclaw said. “I don’t want Urban Ore crawling on that pile,” he said, pointing to the mountain of waste materials, with some obvious recyclables such as wood poking out from otherwise unidentifiable scraps. “That’s a big safety issue.” 

But Van Deventer called the safety issue a “red herring.”  

“They have very low workers’ compensation costs,” she said. 

The overall cost for services in Stockton would be 4 percent more than current costs. The city may ask for a rate increase in the future, according to the staff report. 

A second contract would go to Waste Management for 5.5 years to dispose of 24,000 tons of trash in its Altamont landfill in Livermore. And a third contract is proposed for Allied for 26,000 tons to be deposited in its Keller Canyon landfill in Pittsburg. 

Photograph by Judith Scherr. 

Reusable and recyclable materials are embedded within mounds of trash at the city’s Solid Waste Transfer Station. More of these materials will be recycled under a new city contract. Plans are afoot to further increase the tonnage of materials saved at the transfer station.

Councilmember Darryl Moore wants to get to the bottom of the surprise dredging of an Aquatic Park lagoon in early November. 

Why were there no work plans submitted for the dredging? Were the excavated spoils toxic, and how should they be disposed of? Why was the parks director told nothing about the dredging?  

Moore plans to ask these and other questions at tonight’s (Tuesday) City Council meeting. 

Also on the agenda tonight will be a request from the city manager to have staff look into giving the manager the ability to approve $50,000 contracts without council oversight, the election date for the Landmarks Preservation Ordinance and more. 

While a Condominium Conversion Ordinance was to be on the agenda, Planning Director Dan Marks told the Planet it will not be written until council gives the Planning Department adequate direction to prepare it. 

Aquatic Park dredging 

The city contracted with W.R Forde Associates of Richmond to dredge a lagoon at Aquatic Park, which included clearing sediment within a 50-foot radius of the tide tubes—the pipes that exchange water between the Bay and the lagoon—and the Strawberry Storm Drain outflow into the lagoon.  

However, the city failed to get permits to do the work, which, according to park users, could endanger waterfowl in the area. “Engineering did not inform the regulatory agencies, the staff in the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Department, nor the public works director,” says a staff report submitted to the City Council Nov. 27. 

The report explains the need to clean the tubes periodically to ensure their proper functioning.  

A report from Analytical Sciences of Petaluma, also dated Nov. 27, written for W.R. Forde Associates and obtained by the Planet through a Public Information Act request, addressed the concern that the spoils may be toxic. The total lead results “are considered to be elevated above typical soil background levels, but are below typical commercial site public health goals,” says the report signed by Mark A. Vsalentini, laboratory director.  

Reached for comment on the degree of danger of the spoils’ toxicity, Toxics Manager Nabil Al Hadithy told the Planet Monday that he had received neither a copy of the original report on the toxicity, nor the city manager’s Dec. 12 memo to the council on the question. 

(The Analytical Sciences report refers, not to Aquatic Park, but to the “Oakland Estuary project,” which W.R. Forde Associates confirmed was a mistake—the report actually referred to Aquatic Park.)  

While Councilmember Moore had wanted the report discussed Nov. 27, he told the Planet that he acquiesced to the public works director who wanted to give the council an updated report Dec. 18. By 4 p.m. Monday, no updated report had been released. 

Who called the special session? 

Yesterday evening, the City Council was slated to hold a special closed session to consider whether to ask a judge to remove Rent Stabilization Board Member Chris Kavanagh from office. Kavanagh faces seven felony charges related to his service on the rent board while allegedly living in Oakland. Kavanagh says he is innocent of the charges. 

The Brown Act, the state’s open meeting law, states that a “special meeting may be called at any time by the presiding officer of the legislative body of a local agency, or by a majority of the members of the legislative body, by delivering written notice to each member of the legislative body and to each local newspaper of general circulation and radio or television station requesting notice in writing.” 

The meeting, however, was initiated neither by the mayor nor by five members of the City Council. According to Cisco DeVries, the mayor’s chief of staff, with whom the Planet spoke on Friday, the mayor did not call the meeting. In fact, DeVries said the mayor was trying to adjust his calendar so that he could attend. 

And five councilmembers would have to meet in open session to call a special meeting, which they did not. 

City Clerk Pamyla Means told the Planet Monday that, while the mayor did sign off on the meeting after the fact, City Manager Phil Kamlarz had initiated it. The Daily Planet was not informed of the meeting through the City Clerk’s office. 

Downtown discussion 

In a council workshop, from 5-7 p.m. today before the regular meeting, the council will discuss the future of the city’s downtown. This has been debated extensively in the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee, which has met several dozen times.  

It will be up to the council to make final decisions on the plan. An issue that is likely to be controversial is the allowable heights of buildings, including two hotels, which could be built as high as 225 feet or about 19 stories. 

Other considerations will be whether Center Street between Shattuck and Oxford streets should be closed and made into a pedestrian plaza, whether to create a downtown historic district and whether to dedicate two lanes of traffic to bus rapid transit.

While the proposed new zoning standards for West Berkeley are officially dubbed “relaxed,” that adjective didn’t necessarily apply to area business owners and developers addressing the Planning Commission Wednesday night. 

Funded by the city’s Economic Development Department, Principal Planner Allan Gatzke has developed a proposal for easing developments and leases in the city’s only industrial region. 

Gatzke’s proposal included allowing the Zoning Adjustments Board to grant developers who agree to provide for community benefits: 

• Two new “Master Use Permits,” with one for sites larger than one to two acres, which would streamline the application process. 

• More flexible application of city development standards and protected and permitted uses to parcels where developers grant benefits, including parcel size, setbacks, building height and parking. 

• More discretion in uses allowed on manufacturing sites, but not including residential uses. 

• Increased flexibility for development projects on properties that are either disconnected or in two different zoning districts. 

Gatzke’s proposal listed six possible sites for large project Master Use Permits: the landmarked Flint Ink site, Peerless Lighting (already the subject of a proposed large-scale project by owner Doug Herst); the long-vacant McCauley Foundry, the Marchant Building (which is on a site that includes Berkeley, Emeryville and Oakland) and the former site of American Soil Products. 

Mixed reception 

“For six or seven years my partner and I have been ragging on Mayor Bates over the Byzantine way” the West Berkeley Plan is administered, said Don Yost of Norheim and Yost. 

Rick Auerbach and John Curl of West Berkeley Artisans & Industrial Companies (WEBAIC) asked about the fate of proposals they had submitted to city Planning and Development Director Dan Marks through City Councilmembers Linda Maio and Laurie Capitelli in June 2006. 

“We went through this process, and we went to the City Council, and then it fell into a black hole,” said Curl. 

Yost had been one of the authors of those proposals, which the councilmembers had asked to be submitted to the Planning Commission. 

Responding to a question from commissioner Susan Wengraf, Acting Land Use Planning Manager Deborah Sanderson said the proposals had been sidelined because other concerns had received higher priorities. 

With the new push for changes in West Berkeley, Sanderson said, she will consider the earlier proposals “as we consider these other things.” 

The “other things” were contained in Gatzke’s 36-slide PowerPoint presentation, which focused on the notion of preserving uses enshrined in the existing plan—especially existing residential neighborhoods, manufacturing and workspace for artists—by granting economic incentives to owners and developers though “greater flexibility in the application of development standards.” 

ZAB member Jesse Arreguin, speaking from the audience, said a key question was “flexibility for who?” 

For John Norheim, Yost’s partner in West Berkeley’s leading real estate firm, the solution wasn’t simply flexibility. “The plan needs to be reworked in its entirety,” he said. “It’s an absolute quagmire.” 

Yost likened the “eloquent” proposals before the commission to “treating cancer of the hand with a manicure.” 

Staff weighs in 

Michael Caplan, the city’s economic development director, said he had been troubled by stories he’d frequently heard from Norheim and Yost about the difficulties businesses faced when trying to get permits to operate in West Berkeley. 

“Our relationship with the planning department gets strained” because of snafus over implementing provisions of the existing plan. “The process runs up against entrepreneurial goals,” he said. 

Any measures to “unlock some of the value of the land in West Berkeley” would have to offer developers incentives in return for preserving the district’s existing artists and artisans, Caplan said. As it is, he added, there are “acres and acres of long-term non-performing real estate.” 

WEBAIC has waged an ongoing effort to keep retail out of the area, except along the east/west Ashby/University/Gilman corridors and along San Pablo Avenue, the district’s eastern border. 

But Dave Fogarty, who works in Caplan’s department, said that some forms of retail might be appropriate for the area, citing the case of Internet marketing companies. 

Those business, like Amazon.com, create more truck traffic than typical retailers, and “ship out of warehouses, not stores.” 

Caplan said that while critics implied the intent of the plan was to destroy manufacturing, “much of the space is taken up by mini-storage warehouses.”  

“I do not know why we pretend everything is healthy in West Berkeley when this type of enterprise has been able to thrive in West Berkeley where auto dealers belong,” he said 

A recent push by Caplan’s department, backed by Mayor Tom Bates, has already produced a partial rezoning of West Berkeley—adopted by the commission and by the City Council—to allow car dealerships to locate closer to the freeway, based on the pleas of local dealers who say manufacturers need them “freeway close.” 

For John Curl, the fault is not with the plan, but with the Zoning Ordinance, which he called “a big mess.” 

He urged commissioners not to change the plan until they had convened a small committee of stakeholders to work with city staff.  

“We need a process where the community can work with the staff, you and the council so we don’t have to constantly go through these street fights,” Curl said. 

One such fight flared over the car dealership rezoning, leading to the exclusion of the southernmost area proposed by city staff—which would have included the sites of both Urban Ore, the city’s leading recycling business, and Ashby Lumber, a leading retailer. 

Urban Ore co-founder Mary Lou Van Deventer said she worried about the impact of changes on West Berkeley’s recycling business, a key element in the city’s plans to reduce Berkeley’s waste output to zero. 

While many recycling businesses want to locate in Berkeley but already aren’t able to find suitable sites, “flexibility would make it unaffordable to recyclers,” she said. 

“We are one of the biggest operators of our kind in the country, and I am so tired of fighting for our survival,” Van Deventer said. 

Mixed review 

Commissioners gave the proposals a mixed review. 

While David Stoloff said he needed to see more data, he also said he didn’t think the idea of workshops offered a workable solution. 

Helen Burke said she wanted to see stakeholders involved, and wanted the staff to come up with proposals for community involvement in developing changes to the plan—though she said a review of both the plan and zoning ordinances were in order after 14 years. 

Harry Pollack said that coming up with changes will take time, but “hopefully it won’t take too long.” The commission should take the issues raised and focus on improving the ordinance “within the context of the functions of the plan.” 

Planning and Development Director Dan Marks told commissioners, “The underlying strategy is ‘giving to get.’ In exchange for flexibility in zoning, the city needs to get something of value.” 

While the current plan has kept West Berkeley land values down and preserved some uses, he said, “over time, the market tends to have its way. Our concern is to get permanent or long-term protections for uses we want in Berkeley.” 

Commissioner Susan Wengraf said, “It would be very helpful to lay out a chart of what we would give and what we would get.” 

Marks said one possible gain might cover a gap in the existing plan, which affords some protections for space used by artists while failing to provide for its affordability. 

“The issue is to make things long-term that work,” he said. “It starts with the Planning Commission telling us what tradeoffs they want.” 

“Whatever process we come up with, I urge you to have a formal community involvement ... and not a top-down process,” said commissioner Patti Dacey. 

Commissioners will be working on the proposal in the coming months. 

The city staff proposal is available online at http://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/planning/landuse/West%20Berkeley%20Flexibility/default.htm. 

Photograph by Richard Brenneman 

The 5.5-acre Peerless Lighting plant site at 2246 Fifth St. is one of six sites the city planning department is considering for new permits that would allow developers “flexibility” to stretch the limits of the West Berkeley Plan in exchange for providing benefits to the community.

When geologists across the country observe the 140th anniversary of the 1868 Hayward earthquake next year on Oct. 21, they will have more than speeches and slideshows on their mind. 

Seismologists at the American Geological Union’s meeting at the Moscone Center in San Francisco last week warned that the average interval between the past five earthquakes on the Hayward Fault was 140 years. 

“The 1868 earthquake was the first great ‘San Francisco earthquake,’ and one of the most destructive earthquakes in the nation’s history,” said Arthur Rodgers, a seismologist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). 

“However it has always been eclipsed by the great 1906 quake. It’s important to know that if an earthquake of the same scale happens today on the Hayward Fault, its aftereffects will be devastating.” 

Rodgers, along with Xiao-Bi Xie from the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at UC Santa Cruz and Anders Petersson from LLNL performed simulations of the 1995 Kobe earthquake on the Hayward Fault using reported finite rupture models from large strike-slip earthquakes under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy at Livermore lab. 

“We wanted to calculate what the ground motions will be on a large earthquake on the Hayward Fault,” Rodgers said. “The results showed large damaging ground motion levels near the asperities along the fault. Very strong ground motions are predicted in the sedimentary basins, particularly the Evergreen, Cupertino, San Leandro, Livermore basins and San Pablo Bay. Moderate damage will also occur in Berkeley and Oakland.” 

The 1868 earthquake—which took place at 7:53 a.m. with a magnitude of 7 on the Hayward Fault—stands as the country’s 12th deadliest quake. 

The last of a decade-long sequence of earthquakes in the Bay Area, the Hayward Earthquake left 30 people dead and brought about an extensive loss of property. 

According to a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) report, the damage was most severe in Hayward and the nearby towns of Alameda County. A town of about 500 residents back then, Hayward had almost every building either damaged or extensively wrecked.  

San Leandro—with a population then of about 400—saw the second floor of the Alameda County courthouse collapse and other buildings destroyed. 

Oakland, then a town of about 12,000 with predominantly wood frame buildings, sustained far less damage than either Hayward or San Leandro. 

San Francisco, which was then the largest U.S. city on the West Coast with a population of 150,000, suffered damages to the Custom House and several other structures built on landfill reclaimed from the former Yerba Buena Cove (modern day Financial District). 

The USGS report states that very little information is available on the 1868 earthquake because of a lack of funding from the state and the non-existence of seismographs during that time. 

“The 1868 Hayward earthquake and more recent analogs such as the 1995 Kobe earthquake are stark reminders of the awesome energy waiting to be released from below the east side of the San Francisco Bay along the Hayward Fault,” said Tom Brocher, a seismologist with the USGS and one of the authors of the study, “The M7 Oct. 21, 1868 Hayward Earthquake, Northern California—140 Years Later.” 

“The population at risk from a Hayward Fault earthquake is now 100 times larger than in 1868,” Brocher said. “The infrastructure in the San Francisco Bay Area has been tested only by the relatively remote 1989 magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake ... We are not saying that an earthquake is going to happen next year but if it does, we are not going to have any warnings. We have to prepare now. Whatever we have during the quake, we will have the same during the next three days.” 

To help attract public attention to future hazards, the 1868 Hayward Earthquake Alliance (www.1868alliance.org) was formed.  

Consisting of public and private sector agencies and corporations, the alliance has planned a series of activities including public forums, conferences and commemorative events leading up to the 140th anniversary. 

Labeled “a tectonic time-bomb” by USGS geologist David Schwartz, the Hayward Fault is the single most urbanized earthquake fault in the country. 

The USGS report warns that “hundreds of homes are built directly on its trace and mass transit corridors, major freeways and many roadways cross it in scores of locations.” 

According to a September 2007 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report, more than 1.5 million Bay Area employees with a combined income of $100 billion working near the fault would experience strong tremors from a modern recurrence of the 1868 quake. 

“We are trying to get people to do the right thing,” Brocher said. “An earthquake of this size is larger than most cities can handle. Cities will require help from the state government who in turn will require help from the federal government. The more people can take care of themselves, the faster they can recover. Ninety-nine percent of us are going to be fine after the earthquake, but we need to have supplies and first aid training.” 

USGS is working on a scientific website which will illustrate the cause and effect of the 1868 earthquake drawing on scientific and historic information. 

With the help of software from Google Earth, viewers will be able to see modeled shaking of the earthquake, relocations of historic photographs, reconstruction of damaged buildings as 3D models and other scientific data. 

The Berkeley Zoning Adjustments Board on Thursday postponed discussing the Alta Bates Medical Center parking violations until April . 

Wendy Cosin, the city’s deputy planning director, told board members that the hospital had exceeded the regulations for neighborhood parking specified in their use permit three times in a row but had implemented mitigations which could resolve the problem. 

Alta Bates neighbors told the Planet that they did not voice their grievances at the meeting because it was meant to familiarize the board with the staff report. 

Cosin said that the annual traffic survey conducted by Alta Bates in January would give the zoning department and Alta Bates officials a chance to review the results and report them back to the board in April. 

“With each of the exceedences, Alta Bates has done something,” she said. 

“They have implemented valet parking, placed flyers on the cars so that employees know that they can’t park in the neighborhood and even worked with the police department to increase parking enforcement ... They are also considering putting parking meters in the area.” 

Last January, neighbors denounced what they said was an effort by the hospital to influence the results of the parking and traffic survey by reducing the number of employees parking in the neighborhood on the days of the survey. 

A zoning permit from the city requires Alta Bates to do a parking and traffic survey every January to monitor whether the hospital maintains the parking limit allowed by the permit. 

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. 

The hospital is required to have its use permit reexamined by ZAB, if they exceed parking limitations the third year. 

Residents of Regent, Prince and Dana Streets—which are close to the medical center—continue to complain about what they perceive as the negligence of Parking Enforcement Officers (PEO) and the hospital staff. 

According to Bateman Mall neighbor Peter Shelton, enforcement officers often refrain from ticketing or chalking a car that is illegally parked in the neighborhood. 

“This is the kind of thing we observe that makes us believe that some PEOs are not doing their jobs,” he wrote in an e-mail to Cosin. 

“I understand there may be other forces at work that we are unaware of, but this is so obvious and so blatant, it’s just depressing.” 

Frank Chordas, another neighbor, said that he had observed a nurse parked in the space directly in front of his house rinse the blue chalk mark off her tire with a bottle of water. 

“I saw no attempt by the hospital employees to hide what they were doing,” he said.

King Swim Center regulars now have the option of doing laps at the Downtown Berkeley YMCA while their pool gets a facelift over winter. 

Protests against the City of Berkeley’s hastily announced closure of the King pool, the last working pool in the city, forced Mayor Tom Bates’ office to negotiate a temporary agreement with the YMCA last week to allow King swimmers free access to any of the YMCA’s pools from Dec. 26 to Jan. 11. 

However, complaints did not subside. 

“It’s the chlorine,” said King pool user Iain Boal. “I get a strong allergic reaction when swimming indoors, perhaps from the chlorinated atmosphere … Many of us open-air public pool swimmers are also members of the private YMCA. For various reasons the indoor pool is a poor substitute, and for myself, no substitute at all. A basement pool is no match for the healthful pleasure of open air swimming. It is like closing Yosemite and offering the Emeryville climbing wall as a substitute.” 

Other users were livid that the city had sold $64 30-day passes up to the day before the hand-written announcement of the closure was posted near the King pool. 

In an e-mail to the city’s swimming community Thursday, Bates apologized for the inconvenience. 

“Closure for maintenance and repair at any time of the year will have an unavoidable impact,” his letter said. “Based on pool usage data, staff believes that closure during this time frame will cause the least amount of disruption in overall programming. It is unfortunate that staff was not able to offer the YMCA as an alternative while posting the original notice, however, we believe that the new arrangement successfully addresses the concern.” 

Topping the list of repairs is a four-day chlorine shock to clean mold and bacteria off the main and dive pool, locker room upgrades and recalibrating the pool’s chemical automation system. 

Although users said they welcome the work, they want the city to reconsider the closure or to keep one of the city’s three public pools open for use while the work is done. 

“I think many people do go away on vacation, so it is true that this would be the least disruptive time to close down,” said pool user Gael Alcock in an e-mail to the Planet. “I would have liked them to do the maintenance while the other pools are open.” 

The Willard and West Campus pools are currently closed for maintenance, funded by a $200,000 bond measure approved by Berkeley residents in 2006. Deputy City Manager Lisa Caronna told the Planet in October that the pools were almost 60 years old and suffered from pipe leaks, decaying concrete and faulty pumps. 

Access to the YMCA will be limited to swimmers carrying a Premium Monthly Pass, a Premium Ten Swim card or a Premium Senior, Youth and Disabled Monthly Pass. Lap swim will be available for adults only. 

In an e-mail to the City Council, Scott Ferris, the city’s recreation and youth services manager, said that the city’s monthly passes would be extended until Jan. 28. 

“Obviously the city management is scrambling to undo an arbitrary and sudden decision which was a breach of trust to the community,” Boal said. “It is especially galling given that the city offers its employees subsidized or free membership in the YMCA.” 

A lot of swimmers said that either the excessive chlorine or the expensive parking would prevent them from using the substitute pool. 

“Some of us will swim in the outdoor Temescal pool,” Alcock said. “It’s not too expensive—$3 for normal and $2 for senior swim.” 

Swimmers said they were still angry about the removal of a swimmers’ petition protesting the pool closure from the King facility and the appearance of a notice informing swimmers that “public postings must be cleared by the main office.” 

“Why is the mayor silent about this?” Boal asked. “This is a prima facie case of intimidation, and an unconstitutional infringement of our rights of free speech and assembly for the redress of grievances. It is also a pathetic comment on the state of public life in the home of Mario Savio—contempt for democratic process and fear of the slightest response from the community that they are employed to serve.” 

Berkeley planning commissioners take up LBNL building plans and West Berkeley housing questions when they gather for their final meeting of 2007 Wednesday night. 

Officials from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are looking for officials’ comments on their plans for two major projects, one of which—the Helios Building—will house the labs funded by the $500 million biofuel research grant from BP (formerly British Petroleum). 

The second structure, the Computational Research and Theory facility, will house high-speed computers and research projects. 

The commission will comment as part of the official environmental review of the two projects. A public hearing on the Helios Building was held Monday night, and a similar hearing on the CRT facility was held a week earlier. 

Critics of the projects have asked for additional hearings and a month’s extension on the review because the hearings were scheduled over the holiday season. 

Commissioners will also receive another round of staff reports on West Berkeley, in which the city’s Economic Development Department is asking for more flexible rules as a way to increase revenues for the city. 

Wednesday night’s presentation will focus on the state density bonus law and the city’s own inclusionary housing ordinance. 

Both regulations allow developers to build projects larger than those otherwise allowed by zoning laws in exchange for providing affordable housing for low-income tenants. 

The so-called bonus ordinances and their impacts on the city have been the source of considerable friction from neighborhood activists confronted with larger-than-expected projects allowed because developers have included the affordable units. 

The commission had already started looking at the impact of the laws on the city, but Wednesday night’s session focuses specifically on their potential effects on West Berkeley. 

The meeting begins at 7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 

Once again, a two-day nurses’ strike at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center turned into a five-day affair, with a three-day lockout added by corporate parent Sutter Health. 

The walkout/lockout was scheduled to end at 7 a.m. today (Tuesday) at the 13 Sutter hospitals affected by the job action. 

The California Nurses Association (CNA), which represents registered nurses, called the walkout after talks with Sacramento-based Sutter reached an impasse. 

The strike followed on the heels of another two-day walkout in October, which Sutter similarly extended with a three-day lockout after recruiting nurses from agencies that specialize in striker replacements. 

“Things are great,” said Carolyn Kemp, spokesperson for Sutter’s three Alta Bates Summit Medical Center facilities in Berkeley and Oakland, Monday afternoon. 

Kemp said about 62 percent of their regular nursing staff has been crossing the picket lines—a figure disputed by CNA spokesperson Liz Jacobs. 

“We had about 95 percent participation last time, and this time we think it’s about the same or better,” Jacobs said. 

Negotiations between the union and the hospital chain have been under way since early spring, and both sides are saying that an impasse has been reached. 

Jacobs said the key issues for nurses are patient care, retirement benefits and their own health insurance. 

The company wants to cut back the range of available health plans for members and require worker contributions to the plan, she said. 

“We believe in a single payer system for everyone, like Medicare,” Jacobs said. “In Medicare, administrative costs run about 3 percent, versus 30 percent for private systems.” 

In a written statement, Kemp said the hospitals are offering free coverage for nurses and their families. 

While the company is offering an 18 percent pay hike over four years, “CNA has not even provided a wage offer” nor responded to the Sutter offer, Kemp said. 

The day before Thursday’s walkout, Sutter filed an unfair labor practices allegation with the National Labor Relations Board charging that the union had refused to hand over information to the company about its contracts with other hospitals. 

Kemp said Alta Bates Summit brought in 470 nurses to cover staffing at its three local facilities, down from 570 during the October walkout. 

At all three hospitals, about 196 of the 316 staff RNs needed to cover the facilities reported to work on the first day of the strike. 

Jacobs said the central question for the union has always been patient care, as demonstrated in its actions against Kaiser and Catholic Healthcare West. 

When it comes to environmental issues like global warming, America and China behave like a couple in a bad marriage, playing the blame game. But to tackle the problem of global warming, neither country can go it alone. 

UC Berkeley held a recent “marriage counseling” conference titled: “China’s Environment: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?” It brought scientists, environmentalists, journalists and venture capitalists from both sides together to come up with solutions. 

China’s air, water, energy, urban and rural spaces were discussed, as well as how its population is affected by environment-related diseases. Although it’s a cliché that “the color of water in Chinese rivers is somewhere between dark grey and black,” the fact that China adds two coal-based power plants per week is astonishing. Kirk Smith, professor of global environmental health at UC Berkeley, concludes that “the cleanest cities in China are about the same as the dirtiest American city.” 

China’s environmental problems, which don’t always stay within its own borders, are terrifying to the world, especially because China has America as its role model. 

Copies of a story that ran in the January/February 2008 issue of Mother Jones magazine were circulated at the Berkeley conference. With a cover photo of a Chinese boy wearing a Nike jacket in the sunset-colored Forbidden City, as black industrial smoke wafts in the background, the story asks, “Can the world survive China’s rush to emulate the American way of life?” 

The likely answer is no. 

America apparently is not a good role model to follow. Seventy percent of the Chinese now rely on bicycles as their major means of transportation. If the Chinese one day decide to copy the classic American lifestyle—in which cars account for 90 percent of the means of transportation—then by the year 2030, China will have twice the number of cars as the rest of the world. Breathing will become a hard task to perform. 

But the Chinese seem ready to pay for the environmental damage they are causing. Research conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) shows that half the Chinese people surveyed approve of the implementation of an energy-efficiency tax, compared to 20 percent of U.S. and German residents, and 17 percent in Britain. 

Max Auffhammer, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley’s Agriculture and Resource Economics department, says that the United States has “failed to find a way to get a global agreement,” adding that the Kyoto Protocol is seen as “weak and inefficient.” 

“We (Americans) may not provide solutions, but we can provide tools,” said Mark Henderson, who teaches in the public policy program at Mills College in Oakland. 

Architects designing community projects in China assert that they don’t aspire to have the likes of an affluent Orange County there; their plans are more eco-friendly. Harrison Fraker, dean of the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley, had people on the edge of their seats when he unveiled his proposal for an eco-site in the Chinese city of Qingdao in Shandong province on the Pacific coast. The proposal has already been approved by the city. 

“The ‘eco-block’ is resource self-sufficient,” said Fraker. In his design, the water, energy and waste could be 100 percent recycled within the community. Located in the windy coastal city of Qingdao, whose climate resembles that of the San Francisco Bay Area, half of the energy resources of the community will come from wind, 40 percent from the sun, and the other 10 percent from its own waste. 

Fraker hopes to break the division between “concrete cities” and “green countryside” and mix them up in his eco-community, where residents can grow their own food. 

But China’s environmental problems are far more complicated than just scientific issues. 

Jim Yardley, the New York Times’ Beijing correspondent whose coverage on China’s environmental issues last year won him a Pulitzer Prize, said China is trying to do it all—economic development, urbanization and a whole lot more at the same time. 

From a global viewpoint, Yardley altered the question of “Who is responsible?” to “Who is responsible for what?” He pointed out that figuring out responsibility comes down to the issue of trust. He said he’s interested to see how the most powerful and the most populous nations in the world “come together” to solve their environmental problems. 

The people of both countries, Yardley noted, deserve to breathe clean air. 

Jun Wang is a reporter and Chinese media monitor for New America Media.

U.S. militarism has to be considered under three headings. First, the U.S. military is the largest single consumer of fossil fuel in the world. Second, the U.S. economy, the largest national consumer of fossil fuel in the world, has shown that its primary mode of maintaining a supply of fossil fuel for itself is through military action (assault, intervention, occupation of other oil-producing nations). Third, the U.S. military operates in the interest of a corporate economy, of which it (the military) is the foremost sector in the U.S.  

U.S. military control of the global economy has shifted political definitions to the point where, at both the national and international levels, the corporations have become the primary citizenry, relegating humans to a second-class citizenship where their existence as humans has been reduced toward a structural and political irrelevance. Ultimately, as the largest user of fossil fuel in the world, the U.S. military must increase both itself and its petroleum use in order to guarantee that it will have increased access to fossil fuel for itself and the corporations in whose interests its own are interwoven.  

The received wisdom of the ecology movement is that we should all use less energy. Since real humans are the only ones who can take a political, moral, ethical, and social interest, and put that interest into action, to keep the planet inhabitable, we have to have priorities for ourselves that are in accord with the real situation we face, and not content ourselves with small measures. While the other cycles of greenhouse generation (the melting permafrost and the melting icecaps) may suggest that we are at or close to a point of no return, both result from unbalanced human use of earthly resources. This consideration renders the cycle of military use of fossil fuel the primary cycle involved in bringing us to this threshold. It is not ancillary or secondary to the other two. It has to be our primary focus.  

Let me put this in politico-economic perspective.  

The U.S. military is the single greatest user of petroleum, according to Sohbet Karbuz, writing in the Energy Bulletin for March 12, 2006. The military is the single largest consumer of petroleum in the U.S. It uses roughly 100 million barrels a year, for its aircraft, ships, ground vehicles and facilities. But this is its former peacetime base rate of usage. Usage increased considerably with its assaults on Afghanistan and Iraq. But even without that, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is the largest oil-consuming government body in the U.S. and in the world. The U.S. military is the biggest purchaser of oil in the world. Its peacetime consumption is comparable to the energy consumption of Greece. A hundred million barrels of petroleum is enough fuel for 1,000 cars to drive around the world 4,620 times, or 7.6 million cars to drive 15,000 miles each year. Jet fuel constitutes nearly 70 percent of the DoD’s petroleum use.  

Yet, percentage-wise, these figures seem to diminish in stature. Total U.S. consumption of petroleum in 1997 was 18.6 million barrels per day, according to the Department of Energy (DOE). The DOE breaks it down this way. Transportation: 13 mb/d; industry: 4mb/d; buildings: 1.2 mb/d; utilities: 0.34 mb/d. And petroleum only accounted for 67 percent of energy consumption, with coal accounting for 22 percent.  

Military consumption of patroleum is thus around a half a percent of this total. For 2004, military fuel consumption increased 27 percent over average peacetime military usage. The Army burned 40 million gallons of fuel in three weeks of combat in Iraq, or almost two million gallons per day, an amount equivalent to the gasoline consumed by all Allied armies combined during the four years of World War I.  

In other words, war is the factor that renders the military a self-generating cyclic producer of global warming. Wars add untold and inestimable damage to the ecology on all levels, while fulfilling their major function of producing mass murder. War is the essential logic of a military machine and of an ethic and a politics of militarism. Its fundamental purpose is to guarantee access to resources, and in particular petroleum, for its constituency. Its constituency is the U.S. economy, and U.S. industry. As the largest single consumer of petroleum in the world, its role is to guarantee the continued consumption of petroleum by the U.S. economy, the largest national consumer of petroleum in the world.  

In addition, the military has become a major industrial factor in the U.S. itself as part of a greater economic cycle. This is a result of an ancillary economic process, the movement of runaway shops and of whole industries relocating to lower-wage areas. Some industries moved south, others to Latin America, others to Asia or wherever on the globe they could be more exploitative. The U.S. government, from the Reagan administration on, has provided subsidies to major industries to move to low-wage areas, and produced agreements in many countries for establshing export production zones—that is, zones in which production is only for export; they add little to the local host economies, and create international assembly lines whose only coherence is the multi-national corporate structure that controls it. The effect of this process has been to gut the industrial base of the U.S. economy.  

The subsidiary internal effect was that the military, the one industry that could not run away because it was strategic, gained economic hegemony by default. The U.S. economy fell into the hands of the military-industrial complex.  

This brings us to the third dimension of militarist self-generation as a global warming factor. In the face of runaway industries, the U.S. economy has become dominated by military production. The military is now connected and conjoined to roughly 50 percent of all economic activity in the U.S. This doesn’t mean that 50 percent of all production is military production; it means that 50 percent of all economic activity is associated with the military, either in the production of military hardware, the running of bases, or ancillary industries whose major customer is the military, and who thus owe their existence and functions to that major customer. Military appropriations by Congress may be 25 percent of the budget, but there are ripple and multiplier effects that expand the economic involvement of the military to far beyond that 25 percent.  

Here is how corporate control of the economy, a history of militarism, and corporate globalization all come together. The U.S. military is what facilitated the acquisition of exploitation rights in other countries by U.S. corporations, leaving the U.S. economy essentially a military-oriented economy. That is, militarism has engendered a military economy. Second, it fosters a situation in which a transnational corporate structure becomes the predominant political force in the world; and the citizens of that structure, the corporations themselves, have no ethical concerns toward the planet nor toward life. Its ethics are governed by the maintenance of its stock value on the stock markets of the world. Thus, resource exploitation is its food; and resource consumption is its metabolism. Militarism is the way corporations maintain their access to their food supply—the planet.  

Because the military economy is by nature a monopoly, owing to government control, security clearances, national security considerations, etc., all military industries fall into a culture of corruption that is far beyond that of ordinary industries. This corruption is a cultural phenomenon that makes health and longevity an ancillary concern. In the interests of that corruption, beyond profit or stock price levels, the military drives the political processes and thinking of this society to ideologically ignore or deny the problem of global warming. The profit picture is important, of course, and it leads the oil and coal interests to buy prostituted scientists to help them promulgate that denial. But the real opposition to recognition of global warming is more immediately the corruption that exudes from the miltiary and its militarism.  

In order to seriously address the problem, the movements (ecology, environmentalist, anti-consumption, alternataive energy) will have to be anti-militarist. The military is key to the cycle of self-generation of global warming at the human (initiatory) end of the spectrum of factors. The military may not be the worst offender in producing greenhouse gases in the pragmatic sense, but it is the worst offender as an entity and an ideology in the world. It has to be seen as lying at the heart of the offense itself.  

It is not possible for the environmental movement to take a step toward preserving the environment unless two things are brought to an end, the existence of the US military machine and the existence of the corporate structure. 

In sum, this means that the primary focus for the ecology, environmentalist, green, and conservationist movements has to be anti-militarist, anti-war, and for the revocation of the personhood of corporations. Militarism is the concrete manifestation of corporate despoliation of the planet. And corporate despoliation of the planet is the material effect of corporate control of major political entities called nation-states, through which it effects its despoliation. The central factor that gave corporations control of nation-states was their elevation to the level of personhood. We cannot save the planet without constituting a massive anti-militarist movement that overflows all national boundaries, brings politics back to the human level, and focuses itself on the U.S. military machine and the U.S. war machine. 

References as source material:  

Michael T. Klare, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Petroleum Dependency (New York : Metropolitan Books, 2004). Michael Taylor, and Nigel Thrift, The Multinational Corporations and the Restructing of the World Economy (London: Croom Helm, 1986). Aleksandr V. Buzuev, The Transnational Corporations and Militarism (Moscow, Progress Publ., 1985). Joseph Nye, Bound to Lead (New York: Basic Books, 1990).

As we get closer to election time, and I’m beginning to get more literature, photos, and slogans, I’m pondering what should I keep, display or throw in the garbage (recycle). Nowadays people express their beliefs, passions and identity on T-shirts, bumper stickers, and even tattoos! But I still like to look at what’s on people’s mantels.  

In the 1960s, whenever I went to the homes of friends and relatives, it seemed as if they all had the same two pictures on their mantel: John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. And this was before they were assassinated. These were all predominately black homes; I understood MLK, but it didn’t dawn on me until much later the significance of why so many people would display a picture of JFK.  

I know everyone doesn’t have a mantel over a fireplace (ours was a shelf over a wall heater), but most people I know have a place where they display important photos, religious icons and memorabilia. Some people have photos on the walls, stuff on book shelves and today’s most popular shrine—refrigerator magnets holding down pictures of their current loved ones. But there’s a big difference between being on the mantel and being on the fridge! 

When I go to someone’s home, I’m always drawn to check out their mantels and memorabilia. I think they display their stuff for themselves, but also for others to get a snapshot of who they are and what’s meaningful to them. And so Asians have Asian pictures; black people have their pictures, Hispanics, white folks and so on have theirs. As much as we strive for an inclusive society most of our mantels are segregated. 

Times have changed, and instead of picture of presidents on people’s mantels I’ve seen concert tickets, empty beer cans from important events, and lots of sea shells. In Berkeley I do see pictures of the Dalai Lama, Tibetan prayer cloths, and Pace Bene flags, but never an American flag. I must admit that the only thing on my mantel that’s not family is a Jimi Hendrix action figure. Our mantels kind of represent our individual voting booth, in the privacy of our homes, and what we are most willing to share with others that is important to us, outside of our underwear drawer! I’m still struggling with what or who I can put on my mantel to show others that I’m with it! Hillary Clinton? Barack Obama? Barbara Lee? I’m not sure, so I created a checklist. 

Mantel checklist: 

• Local politicians? I must admit that in a past election I had Kriss Worthington, Linda Maio and both Tom Bates and Shirley Dean signs on my lawn at the same time (OK, so I like to win!). But could any of them make my mantel? Linda send me a picture! 

• Is your mantel diverse? Do you have at least one person from the following sub-groups—Asian, African American, Caucasian, Hispanic. 

• Are your candles unlit? Having unlit candles on your mantel, still unwrapped, is the same as having a cream- colored velvet living room couch with clear plastic covering. 

• Is your mantel green? You figure it out! 

• Is anyone on it alive? If not it’s a shrine. 

I realize now the significance of those two pictures on everyone’s mantel in the past—MLK and JFK. MLK represented the future: our buy-in and belief in the dream of America that he so eloquently described. JFK represented the present at that time: our trust that the American system of laws and justice finally was ours too, and he would make sure we got a fair break. It’s sad and ironic that they both got shot in this America, by Americans! I’ve never seen a picture of George W. Bush or Al Sharpton on anyone’s mantel. What’s that got to say about our present and our future!  

Winston Burton is a Berkeley resident. 

The current issue is one that readers will either love or hate. Much of it has been written by readers themselves, and not everyone thinks that’s a good idea. 

A local wag who shall be nameless here suggested that the role of professional journalism is to keep the news out of the papers, and while that’s a bit too cynical, it’s true that a lot of people who write to us and for us know a lot more about what’s going on than you’ll ever see reported in the pages of rigidly conventional corporate publications. And it’s also the case that many traditional and valid writing forms—short stories, poetry, personal essays—used to be aired in newsprint publications, and now they’re seldom seen anywhere. These annual extra-large holiday issues are our attempt to balance the scale a bit.  

This issue and the next one, the Year in Review issue, will each be on the stands for a full week so that we can take a break ourselves for Christmas and New Year’s eves. There will NOT be new papers in the boxes or on the Internet on the next two Tuesdays. 

Some of those who have contributed to our year-end issues are famous, widely published authors, and others might never have had their work published anywhere else. We value all their voices. One of today’s contributions is a paean celebrating the Berkeley Community Chorus, and that’s a good metaphor for what we’re hoping to accomplish here. The BCC doesn’t have auditions: anyone is welcome to come and try to sing, yet the result is almost always awe-inspiring. That’s what we’re hoping to achieve here. 

Of course it wouldn’t be Christmas without a few Scrooges and Grinches, and they’re here too. We’re always amused by the people who write in and complain bitterly about the public access the Planet provides even as they’re enjoying it themselves. And the sweet voices usually drown out the sour notes. We hope that most of our readers find the result pleasing. 

First, let’s stipulate that the Planet was delighted to get the lively and well-written commentary about the virtues of some of our distinctive local businesses from Deborah Badhia of the Downtown Berkeley Association which ran in our last issue. We’ve patronized many of them ourselves over the years, and we have a healthy appreciation even for some we’ve had no occasion to try. (I don’t usually need to buy electric guitars, but I appreciate Fatdog at Subway because of his community participation.) 

Next, let’s agree that we understand the statistics cited, and agree with most of them. Keeping sales tax revenues in town seems especially pertinent, although there are problems with that goal which we’ll take up later. We know that some of the revenues of locally owned businesses are re-circulated locally. 

But. It is profoundly disheartening to see, on the very day that we’ve contributed our editorial pages for free to boost local businesses, huge ads in the San Francisco paper for both Solano Avenue and the Elmwood shopping areas, including ads from quite a number of “local” businesses which have told our sales people that they can’t afford to advertise in the Planet. Some of our loyal advertisers were represented too, of course, and we have no complaint with businesses like theirs which can afford to look for customers outside the Planet’s circulation area as well as inside it.  

Lawrence J. Peter once advised “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise.” We happen to believe that shopping locally has to be supported by advertising locally or it’s probably not going to happen. All of our readers are surely tired of hearing this by now. 

Why do we bring this up? Well, it’s shopping season, no matter how much some of our readers may decry it. Shopping will be done, like it or not, and insofar as one shops, where one shops is relevant. In years past we’ve featured alternatives which are still good: the flea market, the crafts fair at the Saturday farmers’ market (check out the abalone shell earrings!), fair trade merchants, used books.  

Several of these venues are endangered species these days. Developers covet the Ashby BART parking lot where the flea market is held. (Flea markets in Santa Cruz and San Jose have already been snatched away by developers.) Fair trade stores are threatened by rising rents. Booksellers of all kinds are held hostage by Internet commerce.  

The relentless gentrifiers are now going after San Pablo Avenue, where used (I mean “recycled”) merchandise was formerly abundant. Even the St. Vincent de Paul store near the corner of University has been forced out. Soon it will be all market-rate condominiums whose owners will drive to Emeryville to shop. (No, Virginia, studies show that most of them will NOT take the bus.) 

The downtown area planning committee chair, professional planner Will Travis, was quoted in the San Francisco paper on Monday as saying “Berkeley’s downtown plan has resulted in a wonderful, vibrant, mixed-use community. It’s called Emeryville.” With friends like that, downtown Berkeley doesn’t need enemies. Of course, he might not actually have said that, since there were a number of obvious mistakes in the same story.  

One stunning group of compounded errors:  

“The plan also coincides with huge private investment downtown, totaling tens of millions of dollars over the past few years. Berkeley City College, Berkeley Repertory Theater, Freight and Salvage nightclub and the Shattuck Hotel are a few downtown businesses that have recently undergone extensive expansions and refurbishing.” 

Berkeley City College, of course, is not a private business at all, but is part of the tax-supported Peralta community college district. Berkeley Repertory Theater is not actually a private business either, though it sometimes seems to be run like one. It’s a non-profit which was gifted with $4 million of city-backed financing, which has now cost the city about $10 million when interest payments are included in the tally. The planners’ pitch then was that public arts investment would revive downtown, but it doesn’t seem to have worked. 

Freight and Salvage is another arts non-profit. It hasn’t even made it downtown yet, but is now trying to raise the money to get there, from mostly public sources. The Shattuck Hotel is indeed privately owned, but its expansion is planned for the future and its refurbishing isn’t finished. 

Even the movie theaters which were the basis for many of the plans to make Berkeley an arts destinations have gone the way of theaters everywhere. Those in neighborhoods and downtowns failed first, but now even the mall megaplexes are going under, pushed out by easy and cheap access to movies at home.  

Retail in downtowns is a similar story. The major for-profit businesses which have failed downtown in the last decade are the same mall chains courted by the city staff planners who were Travis’s predecessors as Emeryville-envyers: Ross For Less, Eddie Bauer, Gateway Computers, Barnes and Noble and the like. Mall chains do better in malls, supported by acres of free parking, but both downtowns and malls are being challenged by on-line sales. That’s not only in Berkeley, that’s everywhere. Check out BloomingtonAlternative.com on the web, or the dozens of other small town papers now trying to survive online, if you think it’s different elsewhere. 

And now let’s get back to the theory that local spending is good because it brings retail sales tax dollars into city coffers. I used to say that myself, but five years of close observation of what the City of Berkeley does with our money is starting to change my mind. It has become abundantly clear that more dollars for Berkeley don’t mean more services for residents. What more tax money means is just higher pay for already well-paid top-level public employees, even as our public pools are closed and our parking rates are raised.  

The added parking fees are supposed to pay for a few measly public bathrooms which ought to be provided from the general fund anyway. And don’t expect to see them any time soon, if at all.  

If you’re looking for a non-cynical shopping suggestion and don’t want to contribute to local sales taxes, there’s one I can wholeheartedly advance. Buy the delicious homemade cakes and pies from Arthur Davis at the Farmers’ Market. He doesn’t make them himself (Mrs. Davis does) and he doesn’t live in Berkeley (their farm is in Santa Rosa), but the Davises provide honest value for your money, and buying from them helps at least one family farm stay afloat. As Martha Stewart used to say, that’s a Very Good Thing. 

JAPANESE AMERICAN HISTORY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thank you for covering the loss of a significant historic structure in Berkeley “Effort to Save Historic Japanese Florist Can’t Prevent Demolition.” Japanese American history is hidden in most places because of the radical disruption caused by World war II incarceration. Few were able to reclaim their businesses or homes, so our public memory of this piece of history has been erased. 

The research that uncovered the social history of San Pablo Florist and Nursery was not undertaken by me as an individual, but as part of the Preserving California’s Japantowns project. This statewide effort was initiated by the California Japanese American Community Leadership Council, with generous support from the California Civil Liberties Public Education program. Their leadership has allowed us to document hundreds of historic sites that can reclaim an important chapter in our state’s history. 

The San Pablo Nursery’s unfortunate demolition has alerted city staff to the importance of consulting the Preserving California’s Japantowns research before issuing future demolition permits. We look forward to working with the city and local advocates to ensure that this rich part of Berkeley’s heritage is not lost. 

Donna Graves 

Director, Preserving California’s  

Japantowns 

• 

RADICAL PRESERVATIONISM 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Despite my familiarity with the Planet’s radical preservationist bent, I was still floored by the cloying inanity of the Dec. 14 article on the site of the long-gone Japanese florist. People, please: Just because a building has history does not make it a historic landmark. Until someone started digging through records, no one knew about or was terribly interested in the past uses of this building. With the exception of a few hysterical historians and the Planet’s most reliably rabid readers, the few who find out about this aren’t likely to be terribly interested either. Why? Because it’s dizzyingly insignificant. Can you imagine if we preserved every squat, little building where some person of some particular community lived or had a business? Instead of my apartment, or your house, or your darling child’s elementary school playground, we’d have decrepit plots of land bearing plaques reading things like: 

“This half-charred, stuccoed-over Victorian, once occupied by a Western European family, is now a beautifully remodeled storage space.” 

“This historic pile of cow manure is exquisitely preserved in situ, conjuring rapturous memories of Berkeley’s agrarian past.” 

When it comes to historic preservation, you have to draw the line somewhere. It is an extreme disservice to Berkeley and its citizens that the Landmarks Preservation Commission and its adoring fans have helped set that bar so low. You can barely scrape yesterday’s gum off the sidewalk before someone tries to landmark it. Yes, I exaggerate, but there is a crying-wolf quality to the preservationist paroxysms of the Daily Planet, BAHA, and the like. Every time someone tries to preserve some utterly unremarkable building, the meanings of historic and landmark get further corrupted. If landmarks are used as a weapon to block housing, people will forget that a landmark is meant to be widely valued and cherished, rather than resented. Some day, a building of true beauty and importance may actually be threatened. Let’s hope Berkeley’s remaining good-will towards landmarks has not by then been completely squandered. 

Eric Panzer 

• 

JUST STAY HOME 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Today the Daily Planet reports that the owner of the newly demolished Japanese florist shop on San Pablo had illegally installed auto lifts and other equipment, and is now “expecting” a $300,000-plus deferment on fees so he can start building condos before his permit expires on Friday.  

Seems I remember $300,000 was the amount the UC Theater needed for seismic upgrades that would have kept them open. The UC Theater was an entertainment hub that we would often walk to from our neighborhood near Ashby BART, outflowing to cafes and restaurants in the area before and after shows. I remember many nights when the vast and comfy UC would be full, or nearly so for rare movies, talks, and political events . . . too bad.  

There used to be a theater called the Fine Arts, struggled over for months, now replaced by the “Fine Arts” building that, oops, doesn’t have a theater in it. Gaia Books was going to move into the Gaia building, hence the name. Oh, they went out of business and no longer exist. I fondly recall a grilled-cheese sandwich emporium called Edy’s, that, I think, turned into Eddie’s, that is now, well, moved on.  

Somebody got a variance and promised to support these keystone local businesses.  

I also recall a parking lot, and another parking lot, dug under and developed into huge buildings. I remember a couple of extra parking spaces at Shattuck Square that have been bumped out and replaced by dismal concrete tree planters.  

Developers develop, politicians trip over each other to grab the shiny keys dangled before them. Citizens of Berkeley check the local freebox for a good book, and just stay home.  

Laurie Miller 

• 

DOWNTOWN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In Glen Kohler’s Dec. 18 opinion piece, “Don’t Blame Economic Woes on Street Dwellers,” he claims that “in 1999 people went out every night to restaurants and theaters in Berkeley and Oakland. By 2001 the streets were empty after six and the tide has ebbed even lower since.” It’s true that the dot-com boom, which peaked around 1999, meant a windfall for the restaurant business, but after the circa-2001 crash business simply returned to normal levels. I regularly go to the Shattuck Cinemas on Monday and Tuesday evenings, the slowest nights of the week for movie theaters, and often see good crowds—for example, last week, for the reissue of Diva. The Berkeley Rep regularly sells out. Good, moderately-priced restaurants such as Angeline’s and Cha-Ya commonly have waits of half an hour or more. Even after 9 p.m., when most restaurants have closed, it can be hard to find a free table at Jupiter, Beckett’s, or Triple Rock. If Kohler thinks the streets are empty after 6, he’s just not looking on the right streets. 

Kohler also repeats the common but dubious presumption that the “Public Commons For Everyone Initiative” is aimed primarily at the homeless population. Neils Tangherlini, a paramedic captain for the San Francisco Fire Department and creator of that city’s Homeless Outreach and Medical Emergency Team, has spent the past ten years on that city’s streets trying to help those he calls “chronic inebriants.” He told the Chronicle last week that many of them have a full-time place to live, and that “on some level we aren’t talking about a homeless problem, it is a loitering problem.” 

Robert Lauriston 

• 

CALL FOR ENTRIES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In addition to your “Annual Holiday Reader Contribution Issue,” I think you should consider an annual awards edition. 

How about a “Black Helicopter” prize for the best conspiracy theory? You could have an amateur division, and of course, a professional division for the Daily Planet editorial staff and columnists (hard to top Richard Brenneman’s 2007 article suggesting a CIA link to the tragic family murder-suicide in Tilden Park). 

How about a “Five Ws (and one H) Rule of Journalism” prize for the news story most deficient in reporting: Who? What? Where? When? Why? And how? How about an award for the most silly, inconsistent or illogical performance by an elected city official? Obviously need multiple subcategories for this one. 

And several categories for 2007 letters to the editor: 1) most letters published, 2) highest total word count, 3) most rambling and incoherent, 4) most repetitive, 5) most ill-informed, and 6) most mean-spirited personal attack on another reader. 

Richard Lyon 

• 

YET ANOTHER DEVELOPER GIVEAWAY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Apparently, Berkeley is well-known to developers for its generous giveaways and subsidies that help guarantee their profits/lifestyles while simultaneously eroding the Berkeley budget and the income/lifestyle of the honest taxpayers who pay for this nonessential nonsense. Patrick Kennedy made millions on the Gaia Building because of free zoning bonuses, the downtown hotel developer is now crying poor and seeking a $15-30 million tax subsidy to guarantee his returns, and, on a smaller scale the wealthy developer of 1800 San Pablo Ave., Said Adeli, on Dec. 18, was granted a deferral (and maybe eventually forgiveness?) of $315,000 immediately owed to the City for permits, sewer fees, etc. I’m sure that Mr. Adeli is quite grateful to Councilmembers Maio and Capitelli for initiating, and to all City Council members (yes, the vote was unanimous) for accommodating his desperate need. 

I have nothing against Mr. Adeli nor, for that matter, decent small-scale condominium projects that pay their own way. Who can blame Adeli for simply asking for what is so readily available in our town? I am however, opposed to subsidies and favors that distort the market, guarantee profits, and confuse honest cost accounting. For this I hold our mayor and City Council responsible. Yes, Mr. Adeli may have conferred with neighbors and produced a relatively acceptable project, but why should this necessary approach entitle him to special dispensations? To me, it is a lot like the enormous farm subsidies paid to ultra wealthy farmers, for no sane reason other than that they have influence and can garner money to help elect people. 

Personally, I would like to defer all my property taxes, sales taxes, utility user taxes, refuse charges, and sewer fees until I die and have them paid by my estate. I would also like my children to have a guaranteed inheritance, so, consequently, some or all of such debts to the city may have to be forgiven. Can someone on our City Council please arrange this for me? 

Barbara Gilbert 

• 

EDUCATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The strife for a “new educational model” based on the numbers cited in “A 2020 Vision for Berkeley Education” (Commentary, Dec. 11) can only result in a model that strives to do better on tests, rather than to provide better education.  

Our school system may need an overhaul, but let’s decide what we need to happen in our classrooms by watching what goes on inside classrooms rather than watching where some numbers go.  

Brian Lipson  

• 

MICRO-MANAGING DOWNTOWN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Does anybody else think it’s just a little strange for Berkeley Economic Director Michael Caplan to say the loss of Ross Department store is “an opportunity to upgrade the tenant mix downtown”? Has Mr. Caplan been to downtown Berkeley lately and seen all the empty storefronts? If any of his “dream tenants” wanted to locate in downtown Berkeley they already have lots of choices before Ross departs! 

While I am not necessarily opposed to the future plans in the works for Shattuck Avenue why completely kill it in the interim? The idealistic future he and others envision for downtown may or may not ever happen. Even if things do fall into place exactly as planned it will take a very long time. In the mean time let’s not let Shattuck Avenue become even more of a ghost town and support the businesses brave enough to stay there. 

Richard Crowl 

• 

BUS RAPID TRANSIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am generally skeptical about political promises, and I am particularly skeptical about Doug Buckwald’s latest letter, where he promises that, in a debate about Bus Rapid Transit, he would not indulge in his usual habits of reading “poetry” and calling for shows of hands from the audience, and that instead he would stick to the facts. 

His letter itself gives me reason to be skeptical. In an earlier letter, he wrote that AC Transit is not planning to replace parking lost to BRT. I responded that AC is planning to more than replace any parking lost to BRT; I added that, since Buckwald as always calling for a debate based on the facts, he should contact AC Transit and learn the facts about replacement parking. Yet Buckwald’s latest letter just repeats his histrionic call for a debate once again, and it completely ignores this factual question about parking. 

So, this latest letter gives me one more reason to believe that Buckwald is not capable of having a debate based on the facts. 

Charles Siegel 

• 

DARFUR 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

If you were to find out that you were a victim of identity theft and the person withdrew all of your savings, you would most certainly express outrage over it. Or, if your iPhone with pictures of your girlfriend were stolen, you would be devastated. Why is it that we care for these losses, but not shed a tear for the 500,000 or so innocent lives of women, children, and men lost in Darfur? 

Some or most people do not know where Darfur is located on a map. Some have never heard of Omar al-Bashir. Why is that? Why is it that so much coverage time is devoted to Britney Spears getting pregnant or Lindsay Lohan getting drunk again? The only serious coverage of the world comes when the topic is on the Iraq war or the Iranian “threat” from its nuclear program. 

A couple of thousands miles away, there is a government in place that is not taking care of their fellow citizens. Instead, they are getting raped, tortured, robbed, murdered, or being chased off to refugee camps. More than two million people have been driven from their homes. 

After the Holocaust and World War II in 1945, nations promised “never again.” That phrase should take off the word “never” because it has happened and is happening again and again just like how it happened to Cambodia and Rwanda. The century has barely started and we already have our first genocide which is in Darfur. 

In this era of rapid globalization and inter-connection between nations and states, we cannot sit back idly and watch these atrocities happen. We cannot forget the suffering of the innocent people in Darfur or around the world for that matter. 

Letters should be written to our local representatives and senators. We need to address the important issues around the world instead of focusing on some celebrity. It is never to late to act but failure to act now will cost lives. 

Reza Rezvani 

Albany 

• 

CRISIS AT THE SAWTOOTH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

We’ve got a sudden crisis down at the Sawtooth/Kawneer building at Eighth and Dwight, the largest arts and crafts building in the city, housing over 50 studios, including performance spaces and a disabled center. We are a cultural resource to the entire city of Berkeley, serving thousands of people. We’ve suddenly been notified that we’re losing the city parking lot across the street on Dec. 28. 

This will be a disaster for the building and for the entire surrounding neighborhood. The parking lot, with 27 spaces, is a community resource for adjoining blocks as well. This will literally shut down many of the studios in our building, and destroy our vibrant creative community.  

The lot is owned by Bayer, but was leased to the city for many years as part of the long-term agreement. The lease has run out and Bayer has suddenly put up a sign that they are taking it back and cars will be towed. Less than two weeks notice. At the holidays. 

Five years ago the city negotiated a five-year extension on the lot. At that time the owner of the Sawtooth/Kawneer building offered to buy the lot and retain it as community parking. A group of other local businesses also offered to buy the lot for parking. But Bayer refused to sell, and said at that time that they would be taking it back. The city told us that they recognized the importance of the lot for the neighborhood, and they would try to renegotiate it with Bayer before the end of the lease. Back then it was too early to put it on our calendars. It was of course on Bayer’s calendar. 

The city manager needs to intervene. The importance of this lot for the neighborhood cannot be over estimated. It’s cutting off our water, destroying a vital piece of our habitat. 

Please help us bring this to the public’s attention. We are asking everyone to phone and e-mail the mayor, the city manager, District 2 Councilmember Moore, and the entire City Council. Notify your friends. A list of contact numbers is below. 

Mayor Bates, in his campaign brochure for the last election promised to “Expand the arts, crafts, and environmental business in West Berkeley by supporting new efforts to provide permanent arts space and create a hub for innovative and environmental businesses.” Tom, this is where the rubber meets the road. 

Sawtooth Building Emergency Parking Committee 

Clover Catskill (Wildcat Dance Studio) 

John Curl (Heartwood Cooperative Woodshop) 

• 

...TO THE SHORES OF TRIPOLI 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Steve Martinot’s “Militarism and Global Warming” analysis in the last issue brings a welcome clarity to the often-obscured dilemma of the USA’s deindustrialization except for military-related industries. In particular, he points to the brutal irony of the U.S. Armed Forces being the world’s greatest consumer of oil-based fuels in order to control the global sources of petroleum for both itself and its industrial/informational sponsors. This relationship seems mimicked by smaller, fuel-poor but mineral-rich states –such as Chile and South Africa– complete with F-16 purchases and growing disparities of wealth. 

Steve calls for the environmental movement to focus on the destructive cycle of a voracious and unethical corporate hegemony using “our” massive military machine to capture and police “their food supply—the planet.” To this I would add the phenomenon of the Pentagon’s massive “professionalization” (in lieu of conscription) and the extraordinary political impact of hundreds of thousands being reliant on military careers. 

After a brief surge in employing non-citizens as front-line troops, the DoD chose the path of using Reservists and National Guards to supplement its policing ranks. This policy has effectively made the military a major employer in the country’s small towns, especially given its urban recruiting difficulties (witness our town’s very own Marines office). 

When we address this military-industrial complex, of which generals such as Smedley Butler and Dwight Eisenhower warned us long ago, we must also find the ethics (which we agree are missing in the multinationals’ “personhoods”) to think about what will happen with the millions of white-, blue-, pink-, and khaki-collared people who are dependent on our “Oil Tac Squad” for their identities, ideologies, lifestyles, and lives. 

Jeff Jordan 

• 

HOW BEST TO FIGHT CRIME? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Based on the contract extension to Securitas Security Services placed on the Dec. 11 City Council consent calendar (Item 21), the City of Berkeley feels that private security guards can be used effectively in conjunction with Berkeley Police officers to combat crime in our community. 

City staff’s analysis seems to be that paying for 4.5 full-time (FTE) security guards to protect the Marina, the Corporation Yard and the Solid Waste Center is a better choice than paying for 1.5 additional BPD officers at the same total price. 

This is not something new. The basic contract with Securitas has been in place for some time and policing the Marina was added to the contract July 18, 2006 when it became clear that BPD needed the officer assigned to Marina patrol for other crime fighting duties in the city. Securitas was hired to provide 56 hours a week of coverage replacing the 40 hours a week BPD had been providing at an annual savings of over $63,000. After a year and a half of operation, staff seems to say the change to private security guards is working satisfactorily. 

Here’s what the July 2006 adopted resolution had to say about what the security guards would be doing and how the interaction with BPD would take place: 

“Replacing the officer with a private security guard will provide the necessary security to prevent, deter and detect vandalism, theft and safety-related incidents that occur in the Marina. The Berkeley Police Department will support security guard staff as needed, and respond to reports of criminal activity.” 

When looking at an hour for hour comparison, Securitas costs the city $31.60/hour while a BPD officer costs $96.15/hour based on the $200,000 per year figure that is currently being put forth as the cost of additional police officers. It would be possible to hire three security guards for the same cost as hiring one additional BPD officer. 

Here’s a question that should be addressed when the city considers how best to fight crime in the neighborhoods. Assuming that additional city funding for crime prevention will be forthcoming, would people be safer if we had 120 hours per week of coverage by a security guard team backed up by existing BPD officers or by 40 hours per week of one additional BPD officer? The cost would be virtually the same for either choice. Would the outcome be different depending on the choice? 

Vincent Casalaina 

• 

ARLENE SAGAN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

She is without question one of Berkeley’s great treasures. I might go so far as to say its shining star. For her involvement in numerous community music activities she’s been proclaimed by the City of Berkeley a “local legacy” and “cultural icon.” I’m referring to Arlene Sagan, director of the Berkeley Community Chorus and Orchestra, a position she’s held since l988. 

Last Sunday afternoon, on a gray, dismal day, the beautiful St. Joseph the Worker church was transformed into a Viennese-type Concert Hall, thanks to the magnificent program presented by this tiny dynamo. The church was packed, as always, with people lined up along the wall and sitting on the floor, evidence of the popularity of these glorious concerts. 

After a few announcements (sad news of the death of two musicians) Arlene stepped up to the podium, lifted her baton and opened the program with Verdi’s thrilling “Va Pensiero” from “Nabucco.” Next came a Vivaldi Concerto for Bassoon, performed by soloist, Cynthia Hanson. This brought thunderous applause from an audience perhaps not too familiar with the bassoon. Frank Chang, guest conductor, then led the orchestra in Rossini’s Overture to “L’Italiana in Algeri", another rousing number. The major work of the evening was Giacomo Puccini’s seldom heard “Messa di Gloria", beautifully sung by the huge chorus and featuring soloists Kevin Courtemanche (tenor) and Todd Donovan (baritone). The program concluded with chorus members coming down from the altar to the aisles to join the audience in singing once again Verdi’s “Va, Pensiero.” Inspired by that powerful, intense piece of music, all of us were suddenly Metropolitan opera singers! 

Leaving the church, my friends and I agreed that Berkeley is indeed fortunate to be uplifted and entertained with these superb programs. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to Arlene and Toby Steward, chorus manager. I urge all those people who have attended BCCO concerts over the years to lend their support by sending donations to this splendid organization. 

Dorothy Snodgrass 

• 

TERRORISM PREVENTION ACT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act” would revive a shameful period in America’s past, the McCarthy Era, during which anyone critical of the administration then in power was in danger of being arrested as a communist. How much more of our democracy will we let Bush destroy before he leaves office? 

Allen Kanner 

I speak here not about Planet Earth, though god knows we need to protect it from the Strangeloves in Washington who don’t mind pulmonary disease from truck exhausts and lost shorelines from rising sea levels. I’m referring to the Berkeley Daily Planet because democracy in the United States requires something that is provided by papers like the Planet.  

I love our Daily Planet because it represents something fundamental in American democracy, fundamentals I have yet to hear in any broadcast or national news organization.  

Unlike any other industrialized democracy, the United States leaves to local communities basic powers that other industrial democracies leave to their national governments: education of our children, how our land will be used, sales taxes, where and how our highways will be built, and decisions on the community systems for water supply, sewage, fire and police departments.  

In other major countries these are national bureaucracies. In the United States, these are decided by local boards, locally elected. Do you want to know if last night your child’s middle school decided it will cut music and art to save money? Don’t wait to hear it on ABC “Good Morning America” or the CBS or CNN “Newsroom.”  

It’s a cliche that citizens need news but most serious people who pay attention to it think in terms of the New York Times, CNN and the PBS News Hour. Those and a smattering of other network broadcasts are useful for national, international or cultural news and enrichment. But they don’t produce what the Planet does.  

Our paper’s publisher, editor, reporters and essayists are more like the miracle of the bigtime comic strip’s Clark Kent of the funny paper’s Daily Planet who keeps saving his city from the Bad Guys.  

I don’t think it is too heroic to say that The Berkeley Daily Planet is a real life version of Clark Kent’s comic strip Planet, except that Clark Kent saves his city from the Bad Guys who look like crooks or demons from outer space. The Berkeley Daily Planet (even if it’s not out every day) is an example of what saves one democracy right here, at home.  

Becky O’Malley, the executive editor and her husband, Michael, the publisher, not only seem to have beaten the jinx that killed other Berkeley newspapers in the last 30 years. National chains of “local papers” have also tried it with big backup money but their titles were usually oxymorons. They tried to look like “local” papers but they were really national corporations trying to add to their national circulation unconnected with the fate of Berkeley. 

Similarly, national TV and radio networks are full of self-congratulations for their clever accumulation of media power. Rupert Murdoch stalks the Earth in his ambition to dominate the globe. The New York Times is an admirable paper whose national edition is good for major events in the Bay Area. For those with strong stomachs there are Murdoch’s Fox commentators who, if they ever mention Berkeley it’s a reference to a city of commie kooks.  

I love our local Planet because it is close to unique in being truly local. If you’re lucky, you may find a little local news from a lonely one-man tiny local radio news program, operating out of a storefront with egg crates for sound protection. Berkeley gets some Berkeley news in the Bay Guardian and from KPFA, depending who’s in charge in the continuing warfare in that otherwise valuable FM outlet.  

Is a new highway going through your back lawn? Don’t waste your time on the Wall Street Journal or Newsweek. If you’re lucky, you will have a local paper reporting your city’s news. 

And what about locally owned and operated independent stores? Your neighborhood dry cleaner can’t afford and doesn’t want an ad on CNBC. CNBC goes to Montana, Texas, South Carolina and Oklahoma. His or her customers usually live within a mile of the establishment. The local shoe repair guy doesn’t have Fort Worth cowboys coming to Berkeley for new heels—our local heel-and-sole customers are in the same city as his store. The same goes for the local folk who open their own spaghetti joint, or bakery, flower shop, or fruit and vegetable stand. If they advertise at all beyond a sign in the window it’s in the strictly local newspaper. 

For example, the Elmwood-Claremont folk have a love-hate relationship with the local landmark, the Claremont Hotel, and periodically some new international corporation buys the hotel and plans new local roads, an addition of condos and multi-level garages in the neighborhood.  

If it gets serious, as it has more than once, it may be hashed out in an afternoon meeting at Oakland City Hall, where a lot of people from Stonewall Road and environs, most in sweaters and sports-team jackets, some with babies in arms, go to the Oakland Zoning Board meeting, and argue it out with the hotel’s black-suited, black-shoed, black-socked team of lawyers. It becomes a civics-book demonstration of local democracy. Opponents sit near each other, and gossip and argue during breaks, and opponents who speak start their time at the microphone talking about how much they like the hotel, celebrate birthdays in the big dining room, use it to put up their visiting grandmothers, but hate the new plans that transform the open space it represents. You find no mention in the national media.  

If the hearing had been national and sessions held in Washington, it would have cost millions. It would be Section III, 4c,, paragraph S-22 of House Buildings and Grounds subcommittee agenda, and a group of $500-an-hour lobbyists who never saw the Claremont would have it at the bottom of their priority list.  

So let us not forget that many of our most important family and home problems, from schooling to sewers, are local, and that is not an arcane footnote in a civics book. It’s whether we really have a voice in some of the most central issues in the quality of our family life.  

That’s why I love the Daily Planet. I’m glad that a few other Bay Area local papers, like the Bay Guardian, deal now and then with Berkeley, though usually it’s news of some oddball event.  

So when you vote, if you don’t read local and nationally oriented propositions carefully, your kid’s school may eliminate calculus so they can win George Bush’s lottery money for high grades, and you may wake up to discover that your garden is going to be a freeway down ramp. 

Ben H. Bagdikian, former dean of the UC Berkeley School of Journalism and former editor of the Washington Post, is the author of The New Media Monopoly.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was signed into law in 2001 by President George Bush, backed by both Democrats and Republicans. The backbone of the program, allegedly designed to hold schools accountable for academic failure, is standardized state testing for students and educators. Rather than improve public education, however, there is now ample evidence that NCLB testing is part of a systematic effort to privatize diverse urban public schools in the United States. The objectives of privatization have been threefold: first, to divert taxpayer money from the public sector to the corporate sector; second, to capture part of the market, which would otherwise be receiving free education; and third, to drive out middle class accountability, leaving behind a disposable population that won’t have a voice about the inappropriate use of their tax dollars, nor the bleak outlook on their futures. 

“As a for-profit venture, public education represents a market worth over $600 billion,” notes Dr. Henry A. Giroux, in Z Magazine. 

“The emergence of HMOs and hospital management companies created enormous opportunities for investors. We believe the same pattern will occur in education,” observes Mary Tanner, managing director of Lehman Brothers. 

“Bush’s proposal for national standardized testing is helping to pave the way for these EMO’s,” says Project Censored in their annual collection of most censored stories. “While the aptly named Educational Management Organizations are being promoted as the new answer to impoverished school districts and dilapidated classrooms, the real emphasis is on investment returns rather than student welfare and educational development.” 

For over a century, norm-referenced test results have been misinterpreted in the United States to support racist campaigns. IQ tests were used as an argument against integration of schools, the passage of the Civil Rights Law of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 1969, Arthur Jensen used his so-called “findings”—that average African-American IQs were significantly lower than those of Euro-American or white children—to attack educational programs which benefit the poor, like Head Start. 

An influential study by Elizabeth Peal and Wallace Lambert in 1962 found that the higher the subjects’ economic status, the higher scores would be on norm-referenced tests. Similarly, higher achievement scores on the NCLB tests have been predicted according to zip codes, used by economists to sort by economic status. 

Randy L. Hoover and Kathy L. Shook note that a study of 593 Ohio School Districts show the district’s high stakes tests “to correlate with Social Economic Status to such a high degree as to virtually mask any and all actual academic achievement claimed to be measured by these tests.” 

They observe that students were “visible victims of sorting by socio-economic status… by high stakes tests that fail to meet recognized, scientific standards of test validity.” 

Now, the standardized tests that are part of the NCLB campaign are being used to lend legitimacy to policies that lead to a cheap, uneducated labor pool and increased profits in the private sector. The effect of NCLB has been to dismantle public education by funneling public tax dollars directly to corporations through penalties, private tutoring companies, and vouchers. Once more, the populations paying for this policy are students of color and the poor, since the poorest schools with limited resources comprised primarily of such students perform the worst on the tests. The schools are then reconstituted by the school district, outsourced to private companies like Edison, or a portion of their federal funding is diverted to “parental choice” tutoring programs. According to Ben Clarke in a Corpwatch.org article entitled “Leaving Children Behind,” public school money was thus diverted to the company Educate, which runs the Sylvan Learning Centers, whose revenues, Clarke states, “grew from $180 to $250 million in the past three years [2001–04] and whose profits shot up 250 percent last year.” And, writes Clarke, since the introduction of NCLB, sales of printed materials related to standardized tests nearly tripled to $592 million, money that was drained from the public schools, since Bush provided no funding for the increased costs. 

False Reports of NCLB Success 

A 2006 study by Harvard University Civil Rights Project found that the successes reported by NCLB proponents “simply do not show up on an independent national test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the ‘nation’s report card.’” 

A comparison of public high-school graduation rates over the course of the implementation of NCLB seems to confirm that the policy is actually damaging students of color. The public high school graduation rate for African Americans and Latinos nationwide has sunk from 56 percent and 54 percent respectively in 1998—before NCLB policies took their toll—to about 50 percent in 2005, according to a March 2005 report by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. The authors, Dan Losen and Johanna Wald, point out that “because of misleading and inaccurate reporting of dropout and graduation rates, the public remains unaware of this educational and civil rights crisis.”  

In California, looking at the inverse—or dropout rates—according to statistics provided by the California Department of Education and published by Ed-Data, from 2000 to 2005, the four-year dropout rate for California went from 11.1 percent to 12.7 percent, with dropout rates for African Americans increasing nearly four percentage points from 18.1 percent to 21.8 percent. Latino dropout rates also increased from 15.3 percent to 16.6 percent during that same period. 

Middle Class Flee to Private Schools 

The dismantling of the public schools is forcing those who can afford to pay for private schools to give up their right to free, equal education. Driving the entitled middle class out of the public schools furthers yet another goal of privatization, namely that of decreasing accountability, reports Dr. Giroux. 

Dr. Giroux points out, that while an increasing number of students of color may not graduate under NCLB, their failing public schools are more than willing to provide them with “the appropriate attitudes for future work in low-skilled, low-paying jobs.”12 Pat Wechsler reported in Business Week that thanks to partnerships with businesses, such as McDonald’s, in under-funded schools, students “learned how a McDonald’s works, and how to apply and interview for a job at McDonald’s.” 

It is no coincidence that one of the largest contributors to President Bush’s drive to institute vouchers, tuition tax credits, and charter schools is the Walton family—founder of Wal-Mart—who has dedicated at least $250 million to such efforts over the past six years, according to USA Today. Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in the United States, with more than one million workers. Wal-Mart’s wages and benefits are significantly below retail industry standards, according to a report entitled, “The Hidden Cost of Wal-Mart Jobs,” by Dr. Arindrajit Dube, Ph.D. and Ken Jacobs. According to Anthony Bianco, who wrote a 2006 biography of the man, Walton “preferred uneducated workers.” Such workers are unlikely to question low pay, or unionize. 

School failure is a product of “the political, economic, and social dynamics of poverty, joblessness, sexism, race and class discrimination, unequal funding, or a diminished tax base,” summarizes Dr. Giroux.  

NCLB Requirments Lower Quality of Education 

An illustration of class and race discrimination leading to school failure is the use of McGraw-Hill’s Open Court program by schools afraid of NCLB penalties, even though the phonics program has been proven to damage students. According to a study by Margaret Moustafa and Robert E. Land at California State University in Los Angeles, “schools using Open Court are significantly more likely to be in the bottom quartile of the SAT 9 [state] assessment than comparable schools using non-scripted programs.” 

The president’s educational program mandates any district wishing to qualify for government funding to implement “approved” reading curricula. It is not surprising that McGraw-Hill’s Open Court has a majority of these contracts, given the fact that the McGraw-Hill and Bush family connections go back three generations, notes Stephen Metcalf in the Nation: “The McGraws are old Bush friends, dating back to the 1930s, when Joseph and Permelia Pryor Reed began to establish Jupiter Island, a barrier island off the coast of Florida, as a haven for the Northeast wealthy.” 

Similarly, Neil Bush, George W.’s brother, also used his political influence to solicit contributions for his educational software company, Ignite. “In February 2004, the Houston school board unanimously agreed to accept $115,000 in charitable donations from businesses and individuals who insisted the money be spent on Ignite. The deal raised conflict of interest concerns,” reported Cynthia Leonor Garza in the Houston Chronicle. More recently, former first lady Barbara Bush donated to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, with specific instructions that the money be spent on Ignite. 

Perhaps a more apt name for Bush’s NCLB is, No Corporation Left Behind, particularly if that corporation has strong ties to the Bush family—though we must be careful not to confuse the Bush “dynasty” with a long-term, systemic illness. Ronald Bailey, a former fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, and Chicano Scholar Guillermo Flores have identified these deliberate historic campaigns to exclude people of color from the political and educational system as a product of “internal colonialism.” 

“Internal colonialism,” they write, “is nothing more than the domestic face of world imperialism.... The use of racial minorities brought surpluses to white society that contributed to the growth of monopoly capitalism.” In other words, cheap labor and raw materials led to huge profits for monopolistic firms, which today have become supra-national corporations. These larger forces are the real source of legislation like NCLB. Educators and activists who want real change must recognize and address this fundamental reality if they are serious about winning equal access to education for all. 

Margot Pepper is a Mexican-born writer published frequently in journals such as Utne Reader, Monthly Review, Z-net, Counterpunch, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. You can find links at www.margotpepper.com.

ROSS AND OTHER STORES 

LEAVING BERKELEY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Of course Ross and the Shoe Pavilion are leaving downtown Berkeley—shoppers need places to park! I’ve had to give up several times when I attempted to shop downtown. I can’t carry bedding or boxes of shoes long distances to my car or onto a bus. I drive to where I can park and shop. No parking or difficult and expensive parking downtown means no shopping.  

Diane Straus 

• 

POLICE RESOURCES WASTED 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Law enforcement agencies are having trouble finding recruits who can meet a required zero tolerance for drug use. That is for illicit drugs, not alcohol and tobacco, which cause more deaths annually than all illegal substances combined. 

We should welcome the common sense approach being initiated by California cities where there are unfilled law enforcement jobs. Zero tolerance is not a realistic standard, and never has been, at any level of society, whether it’s in a public high school or police academy. 

If police and criminal justice resources were focused on serious crimes, the shortage of police officers would be less critical and police officers’ jobs would be less difficult…and less dangerous. Too much of our police effort is wasted on expensive drug busts chasing non-violent offenders.  

The raids being conducted by the Drug Enforcement Administration (the notorious “Feds”), in cooperation with local police, on harmless marijuana dispensaries smacks of terrorism. 

Our nation spends an estimated eight billion dollars on marijuana enforcement annually while arresting over 800,000 of our fellow citizens, 89 percent of whom for simple possession alone (FBI Uniform Report). 

Where are our public officials and our representatives in Congress? Our politicians? Are they afraid of alienating the powerful interests who benefit from the status quo? 

John Wagers  

Oakland  

• 

HOW TIMES HAVE CHANGED? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

While reading the old Berkeley Daily Gazette recently, I was amazed at one of the front page stories for March 18, 1926. The Berkeley Planning Commission was discussing height limits for buildings since the 12-story Chamber of Commerce Building (now the Wells Fargo Building, northwest corner Center and Shattuck) had recently been constructed.  

One speaker at the meeting brought a before and after photo showing what downtown Berkeley would look like with rows of 12-story buildings along Shattuck Avenue. Surprisingly, the speaker was UC President William W. Campbell who argued that Berkeley owed some consideration to UC, while making it clear that UC had no intention of interfering in Berkeley’s zoning matters. Dr. Campbell also pointed to European cities that he claimed had successfully controlled building heights. In a follow-up letter, Dr. Campbell argued that the founders of the UC campus had selected Berkeley, in part, because of the spectacular views! He felt that it would be unfair to obstruct campus views with so many skyscrapers. 

A few years later Dr. Campbell was replaced by UC Comptroller Robert Gordon Sproul, who would take a huge 1926 voter-approved bond to fund a 30-year building spree, interrupted only by a depression and war. Sproul would never have shown up at a Berkeley Planning Commission meeting. 

Jerry Sulliger 

• 

THE SURGE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I would like to briefly comment on Sue Pflederer’s Dec. 14 letter to the editor about “The Surge.” As I remember, the surge was supposed to improve security so that Iraq could find a political solution for its internal conflicts. Quoting President Bush: “Victory in Iraq will bring something new in the Arab world—a functioning democracy that polices its territory, upholds the rule of law, respects fundamental human liberties and answers to its people.” That’s not today’s Iraq. Iraq is no closer to a functioning government or to a reconciliation among its various religious groups as when the surge began. In fact, a September 2007 BBC, ABC News, and NHK poll of 2,000 Iraqis found that about 70 percent believed that the surge “hampered conditions for political dialogue, reconstruction and economic development” and that nearly 60 percent see attacks on U.S.-led forces as justified. And U.S. officials have admitted that the recent decrease in violence has much to do with the decision by Muqtada al-Sadr to temporarily stand down his militia, the Sunni groups reigning in al Qaeda, and Iran using its influence to curb the violence by some Shiite militias. 

Of course, I don’t want to be accused of confusing anyone with facts. I will just finish with a quote from a past master of propaganda: “Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” (Hermann Goering, Nazi leader, at the Nuremberg Trials, April 18, 1946.) See any similarities? 

Ralph E. Stone 

San Francisco 

• 

BUS RAPID TRANSIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I don’t think they should shut down any lanes on Telegraph. It is already hard to maneuver from my house in North Berkeley to the medical offices in South Berkeley. 

I think that BART is the answer to north-south transportation in Alameda County. The AC Transit Buses should loop to the BART stations. The reason why more people don’t take BART for local transportation is that it is too expensive. They should lower the fares on BART. 

From the looks of things, it appears that AC Transit is competing with BART. Why do they have buses going over the Bay Bridge when BART is much more efficient? 

Aren’t all the mayors and other politicians de facto members of BART’s board? Why don’t they push for more cooperation? Or is this a situation like the firemen on the trains that switched to diesel? AC Transit people just don’t want to be eliminated. 

Bill Weiss 

• 

BRT DEBATE TERMS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I promise not to recite any poetry or call for any shows of hands at the BRT debate. I appreciate that Charles Siegel let me know what the real problem was—all along, I thought it was just their reluctance to allow an honest public discussion of the facts about BRT. Now that that’s been cleared up, can we set a date for the event? I think sometime in early February would work well. 

Doug Buckwald 

• 

FLOWER SHOP DEMOLITION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Where in the world did Riya Bhattacharjee get information regarding the story “Effort to Save Historic Japanese Florist Can’t Prevent Demolition” (Dec. 14)? Specifically the assertion that “For many of the Berkeley residents who frequented the Auto California showroom at 1806 San Pablo Ave. until it closed recently, the building meant just one thing—a car wash run by an amicable Middle Eastern family.” First, developer Syed Adeli is anything but amicable as neighbors of the property can testify. Second, Auto California has not “recently closed.” This junk yard has been an eyesore since before the auto repair shop closed at least four years ago. When Mr. Adeli opened the repair shop several years ago he violated city code by installing repair lifts and other equipment without proper permits. The property was overgrown with weeds and has been frequented by the homeless and drug dealers. Neighbors have had to repeatedly nag Mr. Adeli to clean-up the property. 

About the only item that’s accurate in the story is that Mr. Adeli is asking the city to defer his permit fees of $315,588. The deferral would be secured by a deed of trust on another property owned by Mr. Adeli. Mr. Adeli is not a poor man trying to salvage his financial livelihood. He owns several properties, including his own home, that can be used as collateral with outside financial institutions in order to secure the permit fees. The City of Berkeley should not be in the business of granting loans to developers. 

When writers report such inaccuracies as Riya Bhattacharjee has for this story, it damages the credibility of the Daily Planet. Stop making things up and report the news. 

Dennis Markham 

• 

DOGS OF DUMB DAD RESCUED BY BERKELEY POLICE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

One New Year’s Eve, we had a dog food emergency. I rushed down to Animal Farm. Coming out, suspect (violation of Stupidity to Animals) realized that his canines were locked in the vehicle with the engine running. The wife didn’t answer the phone. We never cleaned. Any vacuuming was done in a frantic spree. 

I flagged down a police car. Two officers tried opening my door. No go. Officers, this is my address. Here is my license (no, not a license for the monkeys). Take it so that my wife will give you car keys. 

At home, the police knocked and noticed. No answer, only the sound of binge vacuuming. Overhead lights and siren were used. Vacuuming silenced. Police flashed my license. Wife scared sh—less. “My husband expired during the dog food mission?” Keys to dogmobile taken into evidence then driven back to me. Our doggies journeyed into the New Year with full bellies. 

Why this confession? I promised to thank the officers by a letter to the Police Department. I never did. Their helpfulness happened 20 years ago. I’ve lost their names. Is it too late to make amends? Sorry I didn’t keep my word. My puppies have passed on, but your gentleness and humor reflected the spirit of our animal companions. Thank you, officers. 

Gatto Louie 

• 

FRIENDS OF THE BERKELEY PUBLIC LIBRARY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Hey, all you retiring baby boomers who aren’t moving out to the soporific boondocks, who still love the lively, urban environs of Berkeley, who want to give back to the community, who aren’t afraid of Telegraph Avenue and who want to jazz up their lives with new friends, we’ve got something for you! 

The Friends of the Berkeley Public Library is seeking members and volunteers to help operate its two thriving stores that sell used books. We are a non-profit group that for over 10 years has collected and sold books that have been donated to us from private libraries and individuals. Up to $100,000 is made each year and given directly to the Berkeley Public Library. Uses of the moneys have included the Summer Reading Program, Adult Literacy, Earphone English, the Noon Music Series (the Baguette Quartette!), the acquisition of special collections and the support of our library staffs’ continuing education with free college scholarships. 

Volunteers are needed at our two stores; a one-person space at the Central Library and the main store in the Sather Gate Mall. The one-person store is like a BART station newspaper stand with just enough room to turn around once in a while. But the locale can’t be beat. Central is a jumping place and the store has the best view of a parade of visitors. Everyone you have ever known throughout your decades in Berkeley will inevitably journey into Central and find you. Even those you’ve forgotten or avoided will show up and old remembrances will be brought up, as everyone goes to the Library. This is the store for those who hoped that everyone they once knew through schools, work or living had not left town. 

On the other hand, our main Bookstore is in the bustling Telegraph Avenue shopping district and is one of its great, hidden treasures. It is near the elevators of the Sather Gate Mall and Parking Garage that is located below Telegraph between Durant and Channing. It may be one of the City’s largest used bookstores and it is stuffed with books. When you see it, you might despair of its crowded ambiance. However, we are hoping to double our size soon and expand into an adjacent space. We will then be directly on the Mall thoroughfare with much better visibility, light and air. 

Our members serve as the sellers, deliverers, sorters, pricers, shelvers and promoters of the thousands of generously donated books. If you’ve ever wanted to help run a little bookshop, make lots of money for the community, enjoy the company of like-minded bibliophiles, browse through a trove of books, and place on your resume-merchant book seller, this is the group for you. You’ll be handling Civil War journals, first editions of poetry, fabulous art portfolios, music scores and other never know what will turn-ups at our doorstep. There’s an added benefit of re-experiencing first-hand, this time as a sort of merchant, the indescribable Telegraph Avenue scene!  

The Friends is one of those little-known Berkeley organizations that quietly perform essential community work. We are entirely non-political, busy worker bees, not affiliated with other Library groups such as the Trustees or the Foundation. For those of you who love the Library and want to work directly for its betterment, please consider joining our good company. Contact the Sather Gate Bookstore at 841-5604 (Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.).  

Jim Novosel  

• 

BOSTON LEGAL ASSESSES  

THE DAMAGE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Two topics have been prominent in recent issues of the Planet: The cost of the Iraq war and the state of American education. On Tuesday evening, Dec. 11, seeking an hour of mindless entertainment, I tuned the TV to Boston Legal on ABC, a show that is reliably silly and sometimes fun. To my surprise the writers had addressed those two topics in language that may deserve repeating. In the first of two fictional legal actions, a man who had lost his business to a predicted flood sued the National Guard for failure to protect him, since they were deployed in Iraq. As part of his argument, his attorney said: 

“Let’s just consider what the $450 dollars we’ve spent in Iraq could buy us: Free health insurance for every uninsured family ($124 billion). Converting every single car to run on ethanol ($68 billion). Primary education for every child on the planet ($30 billion). Ending hunger in America ($7 billion).” 

In the second case, an honors high school student sent to study abroad for a year had found herself disgraced by the inferiority of her education compared to that of her European counterparts. On her return, she protested by shredding a copy of the national assessment test and scattering the confetti in the school office, for which she was expelled. In suing to be readmitted, she argued in part: 

“Did you know there’s a study that found one third of young adults in the United States can’t tell you which way northwest is? Less than 40 percent of high school seniors can read proficiently. The data on these tests in so fudged—in Mississippi, for example, the national test showed that only 18 percent of kids can read proficiently, so what did they do? They made a special Mississippi test that showed that 89 percent were proficient, and presto—they avoid sanctions from No Child Left Behind.” 

Can there be hope for prime time network TV? 

Jerry Landis 

• 

CIGARETTE SMOKE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I wonder why we still allow cigarette sales near student housing areas or near bus stops or on the sidewalks. If smokers have the right to inhale all kinds of stuff what about the rights of those who don’t have any such need? What about those who want to be miles away from smokers and their smoke? I have difficulty in finding smoke-free bus stops as I travel to work each day. I do see signs on the benches which read: No Smoking — 20 feet. But why allow any smoking close to bus stops? We non-smokers don’t need second hand smoke; the environment is already polluted from hundreds of cars, trucks and buses emitting carbon monoxide. 

Let smokers go to smoking clubs if they wish. The rest of us would like to stay as healthy as possible. 

Romila Khanna 

Albany 

• 

FATAL FLAW IN THE  

THERMODYNAMIC ARGUMENT AGAINST ETHANOL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have seen television newscasts that show self-proclaimed experts behind a desk with papers and computers in the backdrop; these apparent experts proclaim that according to physics—specifically according to thermodynamics—you have to expend more energy in the production of ethanol than you get back.  

This is a compelling argument. After all, isn’t it so that you can’t get energy out of nowhere? Isn’t it so that the energy you get out of a point must be equal to the energy that goes in?  

Before thermodynamics, many experimenters attempted to invent “perpetual motion” devices. For example, what about connecting a motor up to a generator that supplies the motor with electricity? Wouldn’t that keep running indefinitely as it supplies itself? Except for the fact of heat loss, it might work. Additionally, thermodynamics tells us that the amount of energy we get out of something has to be equal to the amount we put in, minus losses due to imperfect efficiency of the thing. The imperfect efficiency of something means that some of the energy expended takes the form of heat produced. When ball bearings rub against each other, there is some resistance that causes slight drag on the motion of the bearing and produces heat. In the windings of a motor, there exists resistance in the copper, again that produces heat as the current flows through the wire.  

Why, (despite the thermodynamic argument of these pseudo professors) can the amount of energy we get in the form of ethanol be more than the amount of energy expended by the farm and production equipment?  

The answer is: our sun radiates light energy into the leaves of cornstalks that makes them grow and produces energy molecules (sugar, fat, etc). The sugar in the corn is then fermented to produce ethanol. The sun is the actual supply of energy when you grow corn to produce ethanol to supply our automobiles.  

It is still possible to expend more than a gallon of gas to produce a gallon of ethanol, however. This is the case if the corn is grown in an extremely inefficient and power hungry manner. In this case, more gasoline energy is consumed farming the corn than the energy our sun puts into the system. In this case, ways must be found to make the process more efficient. Either that, or get the ethanol from another, less power hungry source.  

Jack Bragen 

Martinez 

• 

YMCA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Every day, hundreds of kids from Berkeley High School go to the Young Men’s Christian Association (the YMCA) facilities on Allston Way, less than a block away from the school campus. They don’t go there because it’s a Christian-men only association (which it’s not), but because it has a great swimming pool, workout facilities, racquetball court, steam room, sauna. You name it, it has it. I personally enjoy this place a lot and consider it a great asset to the community. 

However, I would like to explain some of the frustrations that many of my peers and I have with this place. The YMCA closes too early. They won’t allow you in after a certain time. I understand that they don’t have insurance for us after 8 p.m. on weekdays, but we need to change this policy. If you open up a YMCA right near a major high school, you need to cater to them. I feel that the real reason they don’t allow in teens after specific hours is that certain people want a time slot to go to the Y where they don’t have to look at and share the facilities with “mindless hooligans.” It’s ageism and many of us don’t appreciate it.  

Another issue is the guest system. Up until a year or two ago, adults AND teens were allowed to bring guests into the YMCA. Adults have/had a certain number of guests they can/could bring, and guests of teens had to pay $5 for a visit. It was great. Teens who didn’t have a Y membership could still check out the facilities. Now the management has decided that teens can’t bring any guests in at all. 

I would like to encourage everybody to call up David Chong, director of facilities at the Berkeley YMCA at 848-9622 x 230 and tell him that you want to see more of a dialogue regarding teen hours and discuss ways to receive insurance for kids after 8 p.m. In addition, tell him that you want teens to be allowed to bring guests into the Y. 

With your help, we can make the Berkeley YMCA a more kid-friendly place. Thank you for listening. 

Rio Bauce 

• 

DARFUR 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Senators Boxer and Feinstein have once again demonstrated their commitment to California constituents and to genocide-afflicted civilians in Darfur. Last week, both senators voted for the Sudan Accountability and Divestment Act (SADA), which authorizes and protects states and asset managers that divest from foreign companies whose business relationship with Sudan helps fuel the Darfur genocide. This piece of legislation is especially crucial for us Californians, since both our state and our UC system have recently divested from businesses working with the genocidal regime in Sudan. All that’s left now is to convince the Bush administration of SADA’s importance—a difficult feat that will require the determination of all our elected officials, including Senators Boxer and Feinstein, and Representative Lee. 

Charlotte Hill 

• 

DOING DAMAGE CONTROL FOR KPFA MANAGEMENT? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In a Dec. 11 letter by KPFA Concerned Listeners (CL) Mary and Jon Fromer, Warren Mar, Susan McDonough, PhoeBe Sorgen, John VanEyck, Sherry Gendelman and Conn Hallinan complain that a challenge to the certification of the recent board elections by candidate Steve Zeltzer is wrong and damaging to KPFA. 

The statement is factually wrong on many counts. 

1. The petition to the National Election Supervisor (NES) Casey Peters has 25 people including members of all three independent slates. Targeting one of the signers is a personal attack not only against Zeltzer but all the “losing” candidates. 

2. The challenge calls for the (NES) to remedy the violation of bylaws and election rules include using foundation resources for partisan intervention in the election most openly by Pacifica Counsel Dan Siegel and programmer Larry Bensky. 

3. The (NES) is blamed for being partisan however CL candidates were unfairly supported by the management. Radio carts were not played in a fair manner and only after the election was nearly over and the web site prevented links from going out by the Voices For Justice slate. Management has also thwarted the efforts of the unpaid staff organization UPSO to participate in staff elections. 

4. NES actions to remedy these violations were taken but ignored in part by KPFA management. Obstruction of NES rulings by CL management supporters is itself an election violation and puts the election in jeopardy. 

5. Signers charge Peoples Radio (PR) ballot statements are “personal attacks” but providing written facts about the record of CL supporters maybe uncomfortable but is essential information for an informed electorate. 

6. The election did not have “record listener turnout.” It dropped 500 votes from the last election. 

7. Concerned Listeners want the election “certified rather than going to the expense of another election, which has cost the station $70,000 of the listeners’ money,” yet the same Gendelman and CL/programmer supporter Brian Edwards-Tiekert have threatened to sue Pacifica unless the election is certified. (Letter from attorney Pyle, former colleague of Dan Siegel and president of N.CA NLG.) 

Doing damage control for management by CL in this election seems to be more important than “saving money” at KPFA/Pacifica. The election mess and lawsuit threat maybe one reason, Nicole Sawaya, Pacifica ED has recently quit after only weeks on the job. This interim management/CL nexus at KPFA/Pacifica have created an untenable situation even for people they consider their own. 

Bob English, Steve Zeltzer, Linda Hewitt, Mara Rivera, Maxine Doogan, Joseph Wanzala, Carl Bryant, Stan Woods 

EDITOR’S NOTE: In an upcoming issue, the Daily Planet will run one commentary each from Concerned Listeners and People’s Radio on the Local Station Board election. Each side will then be given space to respond to the other in a subsequent issue. Until then, the Planet will print no further letters on the topic. 

• 

A VISITOR’S STORY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

On Sunday evening, Oct. 28, I attended the annual dinner of the Ecumenical Peace Institute at Redwood Gardens in North Berkeley. Although I moved a year-and-a-half ago to Santa Cruz from the East Bay, where I’d lived for 11 years, I went up to Berkeley primarily to attend the dinner and see a long-time friend, Dr. Joseph Gerson, who is program secretary for the American Friends Service Committee’s New England Region, where I served as regional director in the late 1970s and hired Joe to do Middle East educational work. 

Upon coming out of the dining room, I made the rather complicated crossings of upper Derby street and the street it turns into at the northern barrier, accompanied by a helpful gentleman whose wife awaited him in a wheelchair. As we reached the corner where my car was parked, he turned back, and I headed onto the handicap ramp, leaning on my cane. But it really wasn’t a ramp—there was a curb of about one-and-one half inches, and I stumbled as my foot caught the curb. Down I went—Splat!—with my face and left knee hitting the sidewalk really hard. My nose immediately started running blood, and I could feel blood on my forehead and coming from my lip. A driver who had been waiting at the light for me to cross turned the corner and parked. He ran back to me with wads of tissues or napkins, and said, “I’m a doctor, I’ll call 911,” which he proceeded to do, then waited with me until a fire truck came. The crew gave me more tissues and asked the usual questions about name, did I know where I was, etc. They were joined by a kindly policeman, who comforted me until a red ambulance came and took me to Alta Bates Emergency Room—the crew handling me carefully and caringly and asking me more questions. 

At the hospital, I was surprised to see a completely re-built, re-furbished emergency room and waiting room. When I took my husband there some years ago, those rooms were freezing cold, and dingy. He told the staff immediately that he had malaria (being form Africa, he’d had it many times and knew the symptoms well). Nevertheless, they did a number of tests and four hours later, called and woke up a specialist, who told them that of course, with those symptoms, he had malaria. 

This time, the staff were immediately attentive—they put warm blankets on me, examined my wounds, and did a CAT scan to make certain my brain was not bleeding and that I had no cracks in my skull. The gave me pain medication and mopped up the blood, stitched my upper lip on the inside and stuck a blob of glue on the outside. They took my Medicare and insurance information, and gave me a written report, instructions and prescriptions. The released me in the care of my daughter, who got out of bed to come and pick me up. 

I cannot give enough thanks to everyone involved, from the doctor who called the ambulance and staved off my fright, to the firemen, policeman, and ambulance crew, and then the hospital staff—from Dr. Jonathan Vlahos to the nurses Elmo and Laurel and others, everyone was competent, solicitous and kind. I am now finally shedding all the black, blue, purple, red and yellow face colorings and two very black eyes. (I have told people, “No , it isn’t left-over Halloween face paint, and nobody beat me up!”) 

Residents of Berkeley are fortunate to have such efficient, well-trained, kindly public servants and medical personnel. And thanks too, to Alta Bates, which seems to have gotten its act together since my husband was there, and provides first class treatment. I offer my appreciation to all those nice folks who helped me so much when I needed it. 

Marjorie Swann Edwin 

Santa Cruz 

• 

HILLARY CLINTON 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I like Hillary Clinton. But a recent poll suggests she would lose in head-to-head matchups with any of the five leading GOP presidential candidates. Why is this?  

Hillary’s unfavorable rating, nationally, continues holding steady at 47 percent. Not only does she lose in matchups with Republican White House hopefuls, she would probably drag the whole Democratic ticket down. 

And there are tens of millions of evangelicals and fundamentalists who actively and compassionately despise Hillary Clinton (this from a group of religionists who proclaim Jesus, Lord of Love, as their leader. 

What can democratic leaders be thinking, considering Hillary a viable and winning presidential candidate? 

Ron Lowe  

Grass Valley

On tonight’s City Council agenda is a very interesting request from Councilmembers Maio and Capitelli to “defer” permit fees. It is Item 36 on the agenda and I encourage all to read it. 

The subject property is a 51-unit condo box to be built by Mr. Said Adeli, who claims he can’t afford to pay the building permit fees. So he has asked for the deferral of $315,588 ($99,990 of which are sewer connection fees) which will supposedly be paid to the city when he completes the project. The Maio/Capitelli letter makes it look like a loan, but unless the terms are revealed, this means little—City of Berkeley loans to developers are often subordinated or forgivable. 

The letter mentions that fees for sewer connections “are not normally deferred per BMC” (Berkeley Municipal code). Chapter 19.62 of the BMC actually says that the city manager can, “defer the payment until a later date, of any permit fees, except for new connection sewer fees, for any housing project in which at least twenty-five percent of its units are low and/or moderate income housing….”  

The applicant isn’t bothering to provide any of that pesky low income housing, but that’s another story. Suffice it to say that the maneuver used to skirt the terms of BMC Chapter 19.62 for fee deferrals would be setting an unwholesome precedent. 

Mr. Adeli seems very confident that he’s going to get his illegal fee “deferral” even though the City Council won’t vote on the matter until tonight. He is quoted in the Dec. 14 Planet as saying: “We got all the permits from the city. . .” (except, of course, the ones he doesn’t plan to pay for). Furthermore, on Saturday, he demolished the charming building at the site, a pre-war Japanese florist shop that should have been preserved. 

Who has promised Mr. Adeli that he’ll get his illegal “deferral”? And why? The mortgage industry is imploding, and the condo market tanking, both at a stunning pace. Breaking ground on a whole slew of new condos at this site, just as 34 units (2700 San Pablo) are about to land on a stalled sales market—is our City Council so out of touch as to believe that this is really a good idea? 

A condo project that doesn’t have enough money to pay its bills is very likely to fail. Then we might not get the “deferred” fees after all. And we Berkeley taxpayers will be paying for a shiny new sewer hook-up for a failed project, while the sewers of the rest of town continue to crumble. It’s your tax dollars (and the Bates regime) at work!  

Gale Garcia is a Berkeley resident. 

Last month I watched as boxes and bags of food came into Berkeley Food and Housing Project generously donated by our supporters. I watched as those items went out as quickly as they came in as they left with our graduates who have moved into housing, but are still forced to manage their lives on the edge economically. 

We are deeply appreciative of this community. A community that understands many thoughtful actions does make a difference in the lives of people so poor, that a daily free meal at Berkeley Food and Housing Project will mean having enough money to pay the rent—as opposed to being homeless again. We are relieved when we receive donations of new or clean coats and blankets every winter so that people do not freeze on our streets. We are grateful that we are able to help the women and children who move out of our shelter with the kitchen and furniture basics to start up a new household and life. We have experience creating solutions in the myriad and tragic lives of our clients: These solutions are life-changing and transformative. 

We were in shock when we received funding cuts in the summer of 2007. We did not really believe that Berkeley could hack away at such vital services as food for the poor and homeless. At first, in a spirit of cooperation we tried to make due and manage as we always do with what little we have. As do most non-profit agencies, we struggle on too little money, tighten already tight belts and work longer and harder to accommodate policy decisions made without input from real live clients—or even from the programs that serve the community as a whole. We are determined to advocate for our clients and the vital services that they need. To fight these and all future cuts which will have the unintended consequence of unraveling the already threadbare “safety net” of services?  

In 2010 Berkeley Food and Housing Project will be celebrating 40 years of providing essential community services on a shoe string budget; a miracle of under-funded yet comprehensive and model programs for homeless men, women and children. Thus we know from experience that emergency services are both vital and effective—both in the short and long term—to support permanent housing efforts, and to improve the quality of life in our community. 

And where are we headed in the future? The country as a whole may experience a recession, as the dollar is devalued, houses foreclose weekly, and a family in the Bay Area needs $70,000 a year just for the basics of food, healthcare, clothing and shelter. We all need to stand up to protect what little services there are for those making $12,000 and less! We thank you, the community, for standing up to support the reinstatement of funds for our Quarter Meal. We had an amazing turn out at City Council which resulted in a partial funding reinstatement for this year. But the battle continues. What about the rest of the funds? What about the funds for all food and emergency services for next year and beyond? 

Time for a change: 2008 is an election year and you can vote in more ways than one. As a community we need to draw the line at cutting food and shelter; the absolute basics for human survival. We also need to raise our voices on behalf of the people on our streets who suffer from multiple disabilities and have difficulty being heard—they are further isolated because of their illness and lack of housing. 

We at BFHP need your help in three specific ways:  

1. Please send a donation to continue our vital work.  

2. Write letters, make phone calls and visit your local elected officials asking them to reinstate the rest of the funding for the Quarter Meal, and demand that they protect all emergency food and shelter programs in the future. As of today, both our food and shelter programs are in danger of being permanently reduced and then eliminated.  

3. If we are to provide the level of service our most chronically homeless clients require, demand that your elected officials increase our funding so that we can expand our services to the poor and hungry. 

Terrie Light is executive director of the Berkeley Food and Housing Project. She can be contacted at tlight@bfhp.org or 649-4965 x307. Donations can be made online at www.bfhp.org, or sent to BFHP, 2140 Dwight Way, Berkeley CA., 94704. 

I can understand why Oakland’s elected officials would want to be seen as team players in the Bay Area Green Corridor grand scheme. After all, Oakland was not even included in the biosciences industry Bay Area life sciences strategic planning several years back, yet when it was time to lobby for the stem cell institute to be located in the Bay Area, the same industry lobby wasted no time obtaining letters from Oakland City Council members endorsing the project and offering up land in Oakland. Earlier this year, an outside consulting firm, linked to the same industry lobby, referred to Oakland as a “hole-in-a-donut” when it comes to promoting technological innovation. 

The same industry lobby is now pushing the bio-fuels agenda. But Oakland should not be fooled by the massive infusion of greenbacks that British Petroleum is using to green-wash its genetically-engineered agri-fuel crops bio-fuels agenda. There’s nothing green in propagating genetically-engineered switchgrass all over the planet, the British Petroleum and the U.S. Department of Energy’s national labs’ vision for replacing fossil fuel oil. The people of Oakland will not benefit from this, economically, except for a handful of venture capitalists, university faculty scientists, and patent attorneys. The unemployed and underemployed, who their elected officials should focus on if they really want to reduce poverty and crime, will not benefit from this green corridor hype. No reduction in carbon emissions and asthma in West Oakland will occur from this scientific research scheme. Even the World Bank has cast doubts on this technology in its recent agriculture-focused world development report. The United Nations has asked for a five-year moratorium on bio-fuels. Germany’s Tinplant Biotechnik sold its switchgrass germplasm collection to British Petroleum-backed Mendel Biotechnology (one of the chief players in the University of California’s deal with British Petroleum) after it conducted field tests of GM-switchgrass in Southern Germany. The United Kingdom, British Petroleum’s homeland, will not grow this; the European Union will not support this; Australia will not pollute its continent with this; and Oakland should not support this technology-based “green” imperial strategy. It will not lead to sustainability on the planet. 

British Petroleum has informed the U.S. government that bio-refineries will need to be located within 30 miles of where the genetically-engineered agri-fuel crops will be grown. The company is banking on convincing poor farmers in the developing countries, especially in Africa, that this ‘economic development plan’ will lift them out of poverty. Former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, is reported to have stated that Africa should be converted to a bio-fuels production zone. This would be the same old cheap labor, export-led exploitation scheme. Richard Branson’s, owner of Virgin Airlines, interview in the New Yorker magazine early this year revealed his neo-colonial survival-of-the-richest bias in the global oil depletion scenario. The West is running scared and scrambling for solutions on the backs of the poor.  

The truth of the matter is that the United States Armed Forces is a big consumer of oil. One wonders how much oil was consumed in invading Iraq, in order to control the flow of Middle East oil. This seems a hole-in-the-head strategy if greening the planet was a priority. Of course, the big oil companies, including British Petroleum, have been war-profiteers from this failed strategy. Under the British Petroleum-backed-Amyris-influenced and British Petroleum-led Proprietary Component of the flawed University of California deal, may flow some designer bugs that may be used in bio-warfare, since genetic re-engineering of organisms using systems biology is what Amyris brings to the research, but don’t expect alternative fuel anytime soon from this deal. This is not an ecological systems biology approach. And the Mendel folks are looking to add value to their switchgrass germplasm collection they purchased from Tinplant; the latter collected germplasm from various countries while it was a public nursery collective and subsequently privatized the collection prior to the sale. What better place than the largest university patent machinery than the University of California? Patent license and royalty fees are part of the proposed bio-fuels economic development model.  

But a similar patent license plan failed in the U.S. cotton belt when Monsanto tried it with Bt-cotton, and it will surely fail in the developing countries. It may succeed in China, so that’s where the research should be tried; not here with scientists imported from China. Patent license fees was the same bait that the same industry lobby used with the State of California to push through the stem cell proposition, then the same University of California switched its tune after the public bond funding was approved, claiming its patent ownership privileges under the Bayh-Dole Act.  

Oakland may be viewed as the hole-in-the-donut, but, hopefully, the people of Oakland have their morals, integrity, and priorities intact. Its current Mayor played a major part in the move to end apartheid in South Africa. Its U.S. Congresswoman was a sole voice opposing the Iraq invasion. Its elected city officials should not buy into a “green” pyramid scheme that may end up like the dot.com bust and exploit poor people. It should not bet on the British Petroleum greenback horse. 

Nazreen Kadir is a scholar in science and public policy at the Western Institute of Social Research.

Last Tuesday at midnight the temperature outside fell to near-freezing as I left my heated apartment in search of a restaurant open at that hour. The trip began as an adventure; bundled in scarf and gloves to ride a bicycle in the bracing air. But all sense of adventure died as I wheeled past the dark, silent figures sitting and lying on Telegraph Avenue, mute and stoic in the penetrating cold. These are the people that Thomas Lord (in a Dec. 11 Daily Planet commentary) and Tom Bates, et. al., want us to see as “potentially dangerous.” 

Potentially dangerous—the same phony excuse Bush and Co. uses to kill and torture and spy. The privileged class brooks no delay when facts and circumstances fail to justify their fear and prejudice. The real circumstance confronting Berkeley and other cities is the rapidly deteriorating economy. People of means know this well and are taking early steps to avoid any necessity of sharing their wealth. 

Like Thomas Lord, who has observed Berkeley for 20 years, I have lived here over 30 years. Unlike that uncharitable observer I know the people we both are writing about—he from his perch ‘above’ them; myself from their midst. In the last two and a half years of living on Southside I walk by and talk with people who live outside at all hours of the day and night. The greatest real danger I can see is to themselves, posed by their precarious circumstances. 

Lord takes issue with Becky O’Malley’s search for parallels in anti-social behaviors in “posh” districts and the Avenue. If the editor of the Daily Planet has not been sufficiently clear or convincing, let me share two instances of vehicular assault by well dressed drivers in late model Volvos that happened to me, once on Rose Street at Shattuck and again on Shattuck between Vine and Rose. Each time I was crossing the street with difficulty after a serious injury when an inhabitant of North Berkeley went into a potentially lethal tizzy because my stupid body was impeding their immediate desire to procede. In 30 years no one on Telegraph Avenue has driven a car right at me or done anything else as potentially dangerous as those two beautiful people. 

At the end of his convoluted, vaguely-defined assertions about “turf” Lord admits: “There is no evil mastermind, just lots of people trying to survive in the moment.” Yet, knowing this, Lord—and the minority who have pushed this disgusting law upon us despite the community’s outrage—is determined to make these lives harder than they already are, perhaps impossibly so. How narrowly self-interested! The Public Commons For Everyone Initiative is the life-style sociopathy of the must-have-mores, got up as social conscience. 

When I arrived in Berkeley this was a unique center of culture and commerce. Much of the visible culture, born of the social revolution of the ’60s and ’70s, taught us to make common cause and share our talents and resources. The commerce included products, services, and entertainment not available in surrounding communities. People flocked to Berkeley from Hayward, Oakland, Walnut Creek, Marin, and San Francisco. 

As other communities—indeed, the nation—began to imitate what they found here, there was less reason for people from surrounding areas to come to Berkeley (other than to get a parking ticket!). All the while real estate speculation has imposed a toll of ever-increasing rents on rental homes and businesses. The “dot bomb” collapse in Silicon Valley, followed by natural gas racketeers, aided and abetted by Washington, (and the subsequent recall of Gov. Gray Davis before he could sue FERC to make restitution of California’s lost nine billion in phony gas charges), followed by the fictitious threat of terrorism in 2000, administered the coupe de grace to our local economy. In 1999 people went out every night to restaurants and theaters in Berkeley and Oakland. By 2001 the streets were empty after six and the tide has ebbed even lower since. 

The ill health of businesses in Berkeley is not caused by people who live outside, though the calumnies that damage our economy surely force poor people to become homeless. The horrific Commons law in Berkeley expresses the middle class fear of their hunger and desperation—fear of the raven’s sharp beak. 

Glen Kohler is a Berkeley resident.

If your holiday shopping this season finds you in a bookstore, take a moment and do me a favor.  

Ask for the section on presidential history, and go take a peek. I’ll hazard a guess you’ll find literally hundreds of works of presidential history, from the scholarly tomes with hundreds of footnotes to the downright still works on presidential pets.  

Now, take a moment and imagine it’s 2033, and you’re looking for a nice downloadable e-book history of the Clinton or Bush presidency.  

What you find is truly disappointing: they look and feel like history, but sit down and read one for a moment, and the experience is wholly unsatisfying. Where is the background, the context provided by all of those once-classified memos detailing the West Wing intrigue that makes history truly come to life? Instead, we get the learned best guesses of the nation’s finest historians working without their tools: the primary documents that make history, well, history.  

Sounds like a nightmare, eh? It’s reality, for the moment, and it will rob us of our nation’s historical record unless We The People wake up and do something about it.  

A bit of history we do know: In November 2001, just as the National Archives was preparing to release a small portion of the records of the Reagan administration, President George W. Bush issued Executive Order 13233. The order gives former presidents and their assignees the right to prevent the release of presidential papers—forever. It also allows a sitting president to block the release of a former president’s records, even after that former president has signaled his approval. It requires that those who challenge the action of either a former president or the sitting president seek redress in court.  

Historians, most of Congress and Americans who know that our history begets our future, howled in protest, and our elected representatives slowly but surely swung into action. The House passed The Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2007 (HR 1255/SB 886) by a veto-proof margin (333-93) with 104 Republicans breaking ranks with the administration.  

The bill would nullify the Bush executive order and re-establish procedures to ensure the timely release of presidential records that the Presidential Records Act was designed to ensure. The bill also has broad bipartisan support in the Senate, and cleared the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee by voice vote earlier this year.  

We were well on our way to reclaiming our history, when on Sept. 24, Senator Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) objected to floor consideration of HR 1255/SB 886 under unanimous consent, holding up a vote on the bill. Despite repeated requests from a host of historical, news media and open government organizations, Senator Bunning has refused to state the reasons for his opposition to the bill. Recently, the White House reiterated its threat to veto the bill should it pass Congress.  

For the second time this year, a lone senator has acted in the least democratic way possible to commit an act of legislative hostage taking. You may recall Sen. Kyl’s secret hold on meaningful reforms to the federal Freedom of Information Act. Sen. Kyl, to his credit, ultimately chose to voice his objections and work to address them. No such luck with Sen. Bunning, who prefers his lawmaking be done in silence. The World’s Greatest Deliberative Body is neither great nor terribly deliberative in this instance. 

When the history of this sad spectacle is written, it will note that the Presidential Records Act gutted by the president and aided and abetted by the callous silence of Sen. Bunning comes with a rather remarkable history of its own.  

It’s worth remembering that the Presidential Records Act of 1978 emerged from the tattered remnants of the Nixon presidency, in direct reaction to another presidential power grab. It’s a remarkably straightforward piece of legislation: Under the law, the U.S. government asserts complete “ownership, possession, and control” of all presidential and vice-presidential records. Upon conclusion of the president’s term in office, the National Archivist is required to assume custody of the records, and to make them available to the public when permissible under the PRA. Access to the records can be denied after the end of the 12-year embargo only if a former or incumbent president claims an exemption based on a “constitutionally based” executive privilege or continuing national security concern.  

It’s simple, really: the Bush administration wants to write its own history. Future presidents, Republican or Democrat, will find that sort of control downright intoxicating. If this executive order is not overturned by Congress it will allow any president, their heirs, and—for the first time—the vice president and heirs, to deny the American people access to the full historical record of all future administrations.  

And that is guaranteed to produce some tired pickings at your local bookstore in the near future.  

Charles N. Davis, a member of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Freedom of Information Committee, serves as the executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

I look at my bath, see the fungus that’s growing 

While my wife Jill gently weeps. 

It’s just a rehab that I keep on foregoing, 

Still my wife Jill gently weeps. 

I don’t know why nobody told me 

How to avoid this mess. 

I’m so upset, won’t someone hold me? 

These memories I’ll suppress. 

I look at the floor and I notice it’s moving 

While my wife Jill gently weeps. 

The subfloor and tile I’ll soon be removing, 

Still my wife Jill gently weeps 

(with apologies to George) 

I don’t dislike the pest control folks, but it’s important to remember that they have a specific mandate (to find and replace the parts of your house that have been damaged by wood-destroying organisms), some incentives that you might want to keep in mind (including making money) and little or no focus on design. 

This does not make these folks dishonest or irresponsible, although, as in all trades, the quality of the help ranges. 

The issue I want to focus on, to invoke a somewhat hackneyed term, is that of holism. The problem with pest inspections and bathrooms is that inspectors tend to view the built environment as something diseased. This is similar to the problem of the patient being viewed as a disease rather than as a person who might benefit from some medical advise or assistance. 

I’ve seen hundreds of baths over the years that were slated for a set of specific repairs as a part of the mandate laid out by a pest report. While each of the items might have been valid from a technical perspective, the formation of a plan of action based on the report alone is probably a bad idea. 

Considering the house or just the bath as a whole often gets missed in this process and it’s a good idea to step back and consider how the money and effort might be best spent. Let me give you a couple of examples. 

The floors of baths are often called-out for repair in pest reports. This is usually the result of water that had been weeping through poorly installed substrates in the floor and the ensuing damage created by watering fungi that were lying around waiting for someone to feed them. 

A bath may have a shower surround that’s been identified for replacement as well and the finished work based upon a pest report is very likely to end up looking much like the same bath with some new “neutral colored,” “contactor’s choice” (terms often found in pest reports referring to something inoffensive or plain) ceramic tile on the floor and around the shower. 

In many of these cases, the damage identified by the pest company could easily have been addressed during a more substantial and productive bath rehab, one that might have included aesthetic and physical improvements culminating in a much more desirable space, both personally and financially. 

A partial bath remodel is usually nothing more than a missed opportunity. If you remove more than about 1/6 of the wall material, you will probably end up spending more time and money patching those areas than if you were simply drywalling the whole room. It’s hard to patch well and it’s easy to get joints to look good when you do them all at the same time. Also, drywall is almost free, it’s so cheap. It’s all about the labor, and baths are all about multiple services hidden in the walls and floors that are only accessible when everything is exposed. 

If a shower surround of tile is removed and replaced and the house is more than, say 50 years old, it makes almost no sense not to replace the plumbing hidden in the walls at the same time. Just think how awful you’d feel removing nearly new tile to fix the plumbing you were looking at just a short while ago. If you do all the plumbing while the room is gutted, it’s much easier.  

It’s also much cheaper. And so it goes with wiring, lighting and heating (You mean you put heating in the bathroom! Oh my, but doesn’t that lead to SIN?) and all the other goodies that can make for a great bathroom. 

By the way, this can all happen in a very small space. A tiny bathroom can have a heated floor, a skylight (solar tube skylights are cheap and provide amazing amounts of light), and all the other bells and whistles, but if you just do what’s on the pest report, you won’t get all those goodies. You might at best get a few and you’ll probably pay a large percentage of what the full Monty costs.  

This isn’t because pest control folks overcharge. They’re like any contractor. Some are high. Some are low. The reason has to do with economies of scale. Because so many of the good things one wants in the bath involve access to the wall and floor interior (and ceilings), everything gets a lot cheaper when the walls are all gone.  

The plumbing cost of adding another fixture when the plumber is already there isn’t twice as much. It’s always cheaper when you can do an extra thing while you’re already there. It’s the same trip to the jobsite, the same trip to the store and it might even be more soldered joints while the torch is in your hand. 

The same is true of wiring. Adding a vent fan, some extra lights, a floor heating pad, a towel heating rack, an electric wall heater or an extra GFCI outlet (the ones that can’t shock you) gets much cheaper when you’re already there pulling wires in your wide open space. 

I’m not suggesting that you want all those things but I would strongly recommend a vent fan and at least one heat source for every bath.  

Baths suffer in several ways from the steam of showers. Steam penetrates grout, gets behind paint, moistens the paper of drywall and feeds fungi living behind these surfaces. It also grows fungi on painted surfaces and makes for an unwholesome environment and more cleaning (who likes extra cleaning?). A vent fan can also provide a clear mirror when you moistly emerge ready to greet your spendid countenance. 

The heat thing is a self-made argument for those who demand it. Some of us hate getting out of the shower on a cold winter morning, and a warm room (especially a warm floor) is either darned nice or simply essential. Heat is easy to add during a full remodel and rarely done during your typical pest clearance. 

Also, most baths are too dim for my liking. It’s really nice to have plenty of light in the bath to check for imperfections (who’s imperfect!?) or simply to get those remaining hairs just so. Again, it’s easy to have a sealed lamp over the shower, ceiling lights in the main space and a vanity lamp added when wiring the room. Also, these need not be enormous expenses. Lamps and fairly inexpensive, wire is dirt cheap and junction boxes are nearly free. It’s all about labor and when the walls are open the labor is much cheaper. 

Lastly, let me suggest that most of what I see on pest reports regarding baths tends to be less critical than many of the issues that houses present. Most fungal infestations in baths including rotting floors and loose tile in the shower can wait for at least a few months if not a few years. Fire hazards should take precedence. Earthquake preparation too. If holding off for a while is what’s needed to find the extra funds to do it wonderfully and not just palliatively, it’s much the wiser in terms of your satisfaction and in terms of long-term investment. 

Most fungal infestation advances at something less than a break-neck pace and the advantages of a better bath greatly outweigh the advantages of removing the decay immediately. 

In the short term, get a caulk gun and a tube of Sikaflex caulk, a bag of grout and a can of paint. Keep all the joints in the bath sealed. The edge of the floor, especially at the tub, the joint where tub meets tile (or any other kind of surround) and the gaps around shower fixtures. This will SLOW the advance of decay while the money finds its way to you (here boy). 

Whether you choose to do the work with a pest control company or a general contractor (and only a pest company can issue a clearance of pest damage), you’ll be glad you waited. 

One of the more common plants to be handed about as décor and, say, hostess gifts is the poinsettia. It’s a Christmas cliché, and it’s been around long enough that some people have found it necessary to call it names and dismiss it. Others have bred it into some fairly weird forms: dappled, ruffled, wrinkled, ivory, pink. I myself like all but the pink, because who needs more pink? But de gustibus non est disputandum.  

It is possible to kill them. The first Yule tree Joe and I had together—ah, memories!—was a dead poinsettia stick with a single ornament, a porcelain cockroach with glided legs that we bought at the KPFA Craft Fair back when it was less of an expensive expedition. I don’t think we killed the plant ourselves but I don’t remember where it came from. 

Poinsettias are euphorbs, as you can demonstrate by breaking a leaf or stem: white latex sap will drool out. Don’t mess with it; it’s an irritant, though not so toxic as is widely believed. The “flowers” are really showy bracts—leaves—and those cute buds in the center are the functioning blooms.  

Water them only when the top of the soil is dry, and at least poke holes in that foil wrapping and put the plant in a saucer for drainage. Near but not right in a sunny window is a good spot, though you can put them anywhere for a day or two, strictly for aesthetics.  

There’s a complicated dance involving fertilizers and closets or tarps that you can do if you want one to rebloom next year. Theoretically they won’t set blooms unless they have long periods of complete darkness; commercial growers use greenhouses darkened daily with black tents.  

I’ve seen individual plants defy this, though, and poinsettias in general will do just fine outdoors for years here, given a bit of shelter from wind and some decent drainage. A mound of soil close to the south side of the house seems to work. They tend to get spindly, so an prune annually to some low nodes. See how much it grows the first year and allow for more.  

Poinsettias are prone to a host of bacterial and fungal diseases in moist conditions, though, and we have those here. If your gift should die, console yourself that you gave it a chance, which is more than most get. This strikes me as a plant one might rent instead of buy, in a rational economy, rather like hiring a Santa for the office party instead of keeping some bearded guy on the payroll all year. Compost the remains in a hot pile or put them in the green bin so whatever killed them doesn’t spread. 

If it survives, it’s showing you the spot to plant next year’s poinsettia. If you’re a sucker like some people I could mention, you might find yourself taking in the neighbors’ discards too. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. 

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Daily Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Daily Planet.

This weekend, against my better judgment, I will be doing a couple of Audubon Society Christmas Bird Counts, one in Marin County, the other in Solano. (The Christmas Bird Count arose as a humane alternative to the traditional Christmas Side Hunt, whose object was to shoot every bird you saw. The data compiled by this annual exercise in citizen science has become a mother lode for ornithologists studying trends in North American bird populations.) 

What I’ll find is hard to predict, birds being such mobile creatures. But if I’m out there in anything more clement than a blinding rainstorm, it’s a cinch that I’ll see ruby-crowned kinglets—probably lots of ruby-crowned kinglets, based on early scouting reports. This time of year they’re all over the California lowlands. I’ve seen them in the Lady Banks rose outside my kitchen window, in street trees, in an isolated patch of shrubbery at the El Cerrito Plaza shopping center. 

Only male kinglets have the ruby crown, and you won’t see it unless the bird is in a heightened state of emotion. Normally it’s concealed under his greenish head feathers. When a male is confronting a territorial rival, though, or sometimes just feeling 

testy, there’s a laser-like flash of scarlet. 

Otherwise, this is not a showy bird: mostly greenish, with an off-white ring around the eye and two white bars on the folded wing. 

It looks a whole lot like another small greenish songbird, the Hutton’s vireo. In the summer, when the kinglets are elsewhere that’s not a problem for birders. But in December I’ve seen both species foraging in the same tree.  

There are various ways of telling them apart: kinglets are faster and twitchier, flick their wings more, have finer bills and a black bar behind the second white wing bar. If you get a really good look, the colors of the legs and feet are diagnostic. Hutton’s vireos have blue-gray legs; ruby-crowned kinglets have black legs and yellow feet. And if the bird says “che-dit,” it’s a kinglet. 

The two aren’t closely related. Genetic studies place the vireos somewhere near the crows, and the kinglets with a huge complex of thrushes and warbler-like birds. Formerly considered part of the Old World warbler family, the five species of kinglets are now in their own family, the Regulidae. (The only other North American member, the golden-crowned kinglet, has a snazzy orange-black-and-white head pattern.) But some scientists think the ruby-crown is more like the Eurasian leaf warblers than the other kinglets. Taxonomy is a moving target. 

We know ruby-crowned kinglets only as winter visitors. They nest in California, but not along the coast. As a breeding species, the ruby-crown is a mountain bird, ranging from the Siskiyous and Trinities down through the Sierra to the Transverse Ranges. That population appears to winter in Mexico; coastal-wintering birds come down from farther north. 

That means we’re unlikely to be treated to the male kinglet’s vocal performance. I’ve only heard a ruby-crown sing once, on the Kaibab Plateau north of the Grand Canyon. It was a loud, exuberant performance and I had no idea what it was. It came as a considerable surprise when I tracked the sound through the trees and realized that the source was a kinglet. Arthur Cleveland Bent had it right: “The remarkable part of the song is the great volume of sound that issues from the tiny throat…, much greater than would seem possible from such a small bird.” 

Sierran ruby-crowns usually nest about 4000 feet, sometimes as high as 10,000. They prefer semi-open conifer forests, sometimes forest edges. The typical nest is a deep cup suspended from an evergreen branch, well concealed among twigs. Construction materials in one nest included thistledown, aspen catkins, moss, lichen, grouse and mallard feathers, fibers from insect cocoons, and porcupine hairs. The clutch may be as large as twelve eggs, a high number for a small songbird. But unlike lowland-nesting birds, there’s no second brood—this is the parents’ only shot. Little is known about nest predation, although kinglets seem to be rarely victimized by parasitic cowbirds. 

On both nesting and wintering grounds, kinglets specialize in gleaning insects from buds and foliage, favoring the outer tips of higher branches. The birds occasionally hover as they work their way through the trees. In addition to small insects and arachnids, kinglets may consume elderberries and poison oak berries. They’re frequent members of mixed winter foraging flocks, along with titmice, nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, and warblers, although they never function as flock leaders. 

I will admit there have been times when I have gotten sick and tired of tallying ruby-crowned kinglets. I have in fact worked with a count partner who threatened not to record any more of them. Still, they’re lively little guys, good company in the wet winter woods whether you’re counting them or not. And there’s always the possible reward of that red flash. 

Joe Eaton’s “Wild Neighbors” column appears every other Tuesday in the Berkeley Daily Planet, alternating with Ron Sullivan’s “Green Neighbors” column on East Bay trees. 

Photograph by Ron Sullivan. 

A ruby-crowned kinglet of undetermined gender. 

FRIDAY, DEC. 21 

THEATER 

“Amahl and the Night Visitors” at 7:30 p.m. at the Arlington Community Church, 52 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Tickets at the door are $12-$15.  

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.  

Berkeley Rep “After the Quake” at the Trust Stage, 2025 Addison St., through Dec. 21. Tickets are $33-$69. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

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 $20-$30. 841-6500.  

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.  

Kids Take the Stage “Footloose” at 7 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $8-$15. 527-1138.  

“A Christmas Carol” with Martin Harris at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant. Tickets are $10-$15. 848-7800. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

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 

Oakland Ballet “Nutcracker” at 10:30 a.m. and 8 p.m. at Oakland Paramount Theater, 2025 Broadway, Oakland. Tickets are $15-$50. www.ticketmaster.com 

The Women’s Antique Vocal Ensemble “From the Rising of the Sun” Music for the Christmas season at 8 p.m. at Lake Merritt United Methodist Church, 1330 Lakeshore Ave. Tickets are $5-$15. www.wavewomen.org  

Farallon Brass Ensemble at 7 p.m. at St. Paul‘s Episcopal Church, 114 Montecito Ave., Oakland. Tickets rae $12-$15, free for children under 15. 332-9975. 

Holiday Caroling with Terrence Kelly & Ellen Hoffman at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Albany Artists Collective featuring The Matresses and Cody Green in a benefit for the Albany Music Fund at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10-$15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Mario “Weary Boys” Matteoli at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

In Harmony’s Way “Mid-Winter Sing” at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Lalin St. Juste and Connie Lim at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Starry Plough Bluegrass Session with Jacob Groopman, Ben Bernstein, Erik Yates and others at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Charlie Hunter at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $20-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Machina Sol at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

SATURDAY, DEC. 22 

CHILDREN  

“Wintertime at Little Farm” a puppet show for the whole family at 11 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

“Stuart Little” 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. 

THEATER 

Kids Take the Stage “Footloose” at 2 and 7 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $8-$15. 527-1138. www.kidstakethestage.com  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

West Coast Live with Michael Chabon, Will Durst at 10 a.m. at Freight and Salvage. Tickets are $13-$18. 415-664-9500. www.WCL.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“From the Darkness...Solace” a Winter Solstice Concert at 6 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Donation $10-$20. 228-3207. 

Mark Morris Dance Group “The Hard Nut” 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 

Oakland Ballet “Nutcracker” at 2 and 8 p.m. at Oakland Paramount Theater, 2025 Broadway, Oakland. Tickets are $15-$50. www.ticketmaster.com 

Nicolas Bearde Holiday Blues Fest at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ.  

Hot Hot Hot Caribbean Nights with Winston Soso and David Reid Caribbean band at 9:05 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12-$15. 525-5054.  

Michael Grandi at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Holiday Revue, bluegrass and acoustic with Lauries Lewis, host, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50-$16.50. 548-1761.  

Bayonics, The Unsmokables at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $9. 841-2082.  

Mitch Marcus Trio at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

SUNDAY, DEC. 23 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Thomas Lynch performs the Truman Capote classic, “A Christmas Memory” at 3 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Tickets sliding scale $10-$30. 665-5565. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Oakland Ballet “Nutcracker” at 2 p.m. at Oakland Paramount Theater, 2025 Broadway, Oakland. Tickets are $15-$50. www.ticketmaster.com 

Redwing at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Trumpet Supergroup Holiday Concert with Dave Scott, Mark Inouye, Mario Guarneri, Mike Olmos, and Erik Jekabson at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15. 845-5373.  

MONDAY, DEC. 24 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Musica ha Disconnesso traditional Italian music, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 26 

CHILDREN 

The Blue Fairy Storyteller “Tales of a Winter Wonderland” for ages 3-7 at 3:30 p.m. at the Claremont Branch of the Berkeley Public Library, 2940 Benvenue Ave. 981-6280. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik and Three Blind Mice, at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082  

Will Durst’s Big Fat Year End Kiss Off Comedy Show XV at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $18-$20. 925-798-1300. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Tee Fee Swamp Boogie at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun/zydeco dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $7. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Kurt Ribak Trio at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Spanish Harlem Orchestra at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $26-$30. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, DEC. 27 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Duece Eclipse, Cataracs, Jack Sprat and others at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Ideal Vine, banjo music with Evie Ladin, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

5 Cent Coffee, Freddy Parish, Winter Fall at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

FRIDAY, DEC. 28 

CHILDREN 

“Habari Gani?/What’s the News?” Kwanzaa stories with April Armstrong for ages 5 and up at 3 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6223. 

THEATER 

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 $20-$30. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Wild Music: Sounds and Songs of Life Percussion discussion with Ken Bergman at noon and 1:30 p.m. at Lawrence Hall of Science, Centennial Drive. Cost is $8-$10. 642-5132. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Mack Rucks Group at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Moodswing Orchestra at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Swing dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $11-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

David Grisman Bluegrass Experience at 5 and 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $30.50-$31.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Ali Weiss and Cris Kelly & Manda Bryn at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Musiciens sans Frontiéres, Talons of Peace at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Albino, heavy afro-beat, at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $10. 548-1159.  

Space Heater at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

SATURDAY, DEC. 29 

CHILDREN  

Folksongs with Chris Molla for ages 3-7 at 10:30 a.m. at Berkeley Public Library, West Branch, 1125 University Ave. 981-6270. 

Music with Melita and Friends at 11 a.m. at Studio Grow, 1235 Tenth St. Cost is $7. 526-9888. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Otro Mundo at 9:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Lady Bianca Blues at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

The Zydeco Flames at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun/Zydeco dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

James Brown Tribute at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $7-$15. 548-1159. www.shattuckdownlow.com 

Jenny Kerr and Kenny Schick at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

The Bobs, a cappella, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $20.50-$21.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

The Unreal Band, Lucky Dog at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Justin Hellman Quartet at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

SUNDAY, DEC. 30 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Mon’s Music Trio, featuring Si Perkoff, at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Evie Ladin at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Creation at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Lyrics Born at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $35. 548-1159.  

Dani Torres, flamenco,, at 5 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198. 

MONDAY, DEC. 31 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Bobi Cespedes Quartet at 8 and 10 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Reservations recommended. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Balkan Bash with Édessa, Brass enazeri, Joe Finn at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $20. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Jesus Diaz’s The Cuban Connection at 9:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $25-$27. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Montana Slim at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Medicine Ball Band featuring Pee Wee Ellis and Lady Bianca at 8:30 p.m. at Plymouth Church 424 Monte Vista, at Oakland Ave. Cost is $24-$30. 444-2115. 

High Country, Dix Bruce & Jim Nunelly at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $26.50-$27.50. 548-1761 www.freightandsalvage.org 

What It Is at 9 p.m. at Jupiter. Cost is $10. 843-8277. 

Flamenco Fiesta at 5:30 and 8:30 p.m. at Cafe de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck Ave. Tickets are $55-$85. 287-8700.  

Spanish Harlem Orchestra at 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $100. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

As Advent draws to a close, the holiday events in the Bay Area roll on, unabated, with something nearly every day for the believer, the enthusiast, the festive, the funseeker—as well as the Grinch and the Scrooge. 

Speaking of Scrooge, stage productions of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (and a comic spinoff) are still playing: at Oakland School for the Arts through Saturday; ACT’s adaptation by Carey Perloff running through Sunday; and Sonoma County Rep, up in Sebastopol, doing Jonathan Moscone’s version. 

At the S.F. Playhouse off Union Square, loopy and cynical Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge, directed by Joy Carlin, starring Joan Mankin, adds a little salutary bile to heart-warmth as Christopher Durang’s play hauls up Dickens’ creatures into the New World Order. 

The Nutcracker is very much alive and well since Oakland Ballet was reborn as Oakland Ballet Company under the continued guidance of Ronn Guidi. His version, the oldest in the area, runs at the  

glorious Paramount through a Christmas Eve matinee.  

S.F. Ballet’s four-year-old Helgi Tomas-son version goes on at the Opera House through Dec. 30. Alameda Civic Ballet performs in the island’s Kofman Audi- 

torium through Sunday at 2 p.m.  

Ballet San Jose, with Dennis Nahat’s choreography, is on at the San Jose Center. S.F.’s Smuin Ballet presents the late dancemaster’s Christmas Ballet pieces at Yerba Buena Center. 

And Mark Morris’ popular riff on Tchaikovsky-E. T. A. Hofmann classic, The Hard Nut, is at Zellerbach. 

Other stage shows include that chestnut Miracle on 34th St. at the Lafayette Town Hall Theatre through the 29th, as well as those with an unusual spin on tradition: Theatreworks in Palo Alto has reset Twelfth Night in Haight-Ashbury in the Summer of Love, with Ron Campbell’s expert clowning; Dan Hiatt has a tour-de-force solo show of Frank Capra’s beloved movie with Jimmy Stewart, This Wonderful Life, for the stage; Faye Carol is featured in Lorraine Hansberry Theatre’s annual gospel musical Black Nativity in downtown San Francisco, and a new interpretation of the Xmas pantomime Cinderella is offered by the African-American Shakespeare Co. at the Zeum in the Moscone Center—the last two running into Kwaanza, through Dec. 30.  

Holiday circus and sideshow treats for the whole family include Cirque de Soleil’s Kooza at San Francisco’s AT&T Park; Habitat at Dance Mission Theater—and at The Marsh, also in San Francisco’s Mission district, Magic Holiday, two magicians and a juggler—all running past Christmas. 

Also at The Marsh, an alternative holiday show for families: Siddhartha, The Bright Path, Marsh Youth Theater’s tale of the young Buddha, with music and dance. Not particularly holiday-themed, but another family treat: Really Rosie, Maurice Sendak’s charming kids’ musical “play-within-a-play” at San Francisco’s New Conservatory. 

For more alternative stage shows: David Sedaris’ monologues The Santaland Diaries & Christmas Greetings are ongoing at San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre; Impact has their special and loopy Money and Run white trash-meets-mafia-meets-mad scientist manger scene at La Val’s, Berkeley, through Saturday; and there are those two contemporarily nascent traditions: Nuncrackers, the Nunsense Xmas musical, at Willows Cabaret in Martinez, and A Tuna Christmas, set in the third smallest Texas town, at San Jose Stage. 

Musical events feature extravaganzas like Jeffrey Thomas conducting the American Bach Soloists in Handel’s Messiah—and Constantine Kitsopolous leading the San Francisco Symphony with The Wizard of Oz on the silver screen at Davies, tonight and Sat. Also tonight, the Women’s Antique Vocal Ensemble sings Byrd, Buxtehude, Biebl and others in the Lake Merritt Methodist Church at 8 p.m. The Golden Bough acoustic trio presents A Celtic Christmas at 8 p.m. in San Francisco’s Old First (Presbyterian) Church. Cafe Du Nord on Market has A Bluegrass Christamas.  

Anna’s JazzIsland in Berkeley has Holiday Caroling with Terrance Kelly and Ellen Hoffman. For a different message musicale to a different crowd, House of Voodoo presents the Saints of Ruin and DJs downstairs at Club Hide on SF’s Folsom St. for Deathmas Ball. For “neo-burlesque” humor, song and dance, there’s the Hubba Hubba Revue Holiday Spectacular, also on Folsom at the DNA Lounge from 9 p.m. Ongoing is the Christmas Crap-Array with the Lesbian/Gay Chorus at San Francisco’s Exit in the Tenderloin, as is one of the last Plush Room shows: drag star Jackie Beal in her annual Give ‘Til It Hurts. 

Saturday is Fiesta Navidad, celebrating La Posada, 8 p.m. at San Francisco’s Davies Hall, with Navidad “Navi” Cano and his Mariachi Los Camperos (who backed up Linda Ronstadt on her Grammy-winning “Canciones de Mi Padre”).  

At Oakland’s Chapel of the Chimes, “From the Darkness, Solace,” a solistice celebration on three candlelit stages. Soulmaster Nicholas Bearde sings jazz, blues and holiday music at Anna’s Jazz Island, while Freight and Salvage holds their Holiday Revue, and Ashkenaz goes Caribbean with Soca king Winston Soso and steel drummers. Also, Oakland’s hip-hop duo do their Blackalicious Holiday Affair at the Fillmore. A Very Merry Disco Christmas is at the Castro Theatre from 7:30 p.m. 

Meanwhile, “carolers” with boomboxes who meet in SF’s Dolores Park at 7 p.m. will be given tapes of Phil Kline’s “shimmering, symphonic ambient score of bells and chimes” to snake through the Mission with (last year saw over 1,000 revelers) in Unsilent Night. And the Kinsey Sicks collide comedy, a cappella and drag at San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre in “Oy Vey In A Manger.”  

Sunday has the Trumpet Supergroup Holiday Concert at Berkeley’s Jazzschool, A Chanticleer Christmas at San Francisco’s St. Ignatius Church and the SF Girls Chorus “Silver Bells, Golden Voices” at Davies—as well as the Classical Christmas Special 2007 at Herbst with ballet, opera, youth musicians, gymnastics ... and former Mayor Willie Brown.  

At Annie’s Social Club on Folsom: Nightmare Before X-Mas, with a karaoke contest hosted by Ghoulina and Brett. 

Down to the wire: Xmas Eve features two great gospel shows: LindaTillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir (including Nicholas Bearde, among other local luminaries) at Yoshi’s-Oakland, and the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Ensemble at Slim’s in San Francisco. At the Castro Theatre: the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus with the Lesbian/Gay Chorus, “Home for the Holidays.” At the DNA “A Chaos Christmas Carol” with Chicken John and Friends. A Cuban Christmas Eve at SF’s Biscuits & Blues. SF’s Argus Lounge advertises “Lonely X-Mas w/Visa V; Open Until We Close.” 

On Xmas Day itself: A Yiddish Folk Fest at Berkeley’s Congregation Netivot Shalom with the KlezCalifornia Allstar Band. The Fabulous Bud E. Love’s Holiday Trio Lounge Show at SF’s Red Devil. A free family day at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, with storytellers, singers and dancers.  

Oakland’s Stork Club , after their Sat. Xmas Party, announces a chance for some holiday sharing: “Club Closed for Remodeling: Come Help Paint!” And ongoing at the New Asia Restaurant in San Francisco Chinatown: “Kung Pao Kosher Comedy,” with Esther Paik Goodhart, “the Asian Tammy Faye Bakker,” Palestinean-American comedian Dean Obeidallah—and stand-up legend Shelley Berman.

There must be a gazillion DVDs released every month, and most of it is just filler, nothing worthy of adding to a serious or even semi-serious film collection. But 2007 saw a number of significant releases as well, though they may not get much display space at your local big box retailer. Below are just a handful of the best DVD releases of the year. 

Killer of Sheep 

One of the best theatrical releases of the year is also one of the best DVD releases of the year. Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep languished in relative obscurity for decades, primarily due to the expense required to clear the rights to the songs used in the film. Milestone Films finally got the job done and gave the film a proper release, 30 years after its completion, and the result was a revelation. Burnett’s film is a powerful portrait of black urban life in post-Civil Rights Movement America, a stark, personal movie that imports the aesthetic of the Italian neo-realists of the 1950s to 1970s Los Angeles. 

Milestone’s DVD edition not only contains the seminal Killer of Sheep, but a slightly more recent Burnett film, My Brother’s Wedding, included here in both its original 1983 release version and in a new director’s cut. Extras include a commentary track on Killer of Sheep by Burnett and Lincoln Center Film Society Program Director Richard Peña and a few of Burnett’s critically acclaimed short films, including a new five-minute film, Quiet as Kept, looking at life in post-Katrina New Orleans.  

$39.95. Milestone Films. www.milestonefilms.com. 

I Am Cuba 

Milestone is also responsible for perhaps the most lavish and unique DVD package of the year in the form of Mikhail Kalatozov’s long-forgotten cinematic poem of the Cuban Revolution, I Am Cuba. This is quite simply an extraordinary film, and Milestone’s three-disc set does it justice. Not only does the set come packed in a cigar box, but it includes a wealth of extras, including two fascinating documentaries, one about the film itself and one on the career of Kalatozov. For a complete review, see the Daily Planet’s Dec. 7 edition. 

$44.95. Milestone Films. www.milestonefilms.com. 

Eclipse 

Earlier this year, Criterion, one of the premiere producers of special edition DVDs, launched a new line of discs. The Eclipse collection provided a way for the company to spotlight overlooked films that otherwise might not ever see the light of day on DVD. The company only puts out a few titles per month in its line of special editions, each featuring painstakingly beautiful transfers of classic and significant films. However this arduous production process limits output, leaving many worthy films on the shelf. Thus the Eclipse series allows the company to release bare-bones editions—at least by Criterion standards—of films deserving of preservation.  

The sets are not cheap, but the price is reasonable considering the quality and rarity of the films they contain, as well as the transfers that Criterion has undertaken. Each is an attractively packaged several-disc set, and though the discs don’t contain any extra feature, they do include thoughtful liner notes that place the films and their makers in historical context.  

Previous releases include a collection of five early films by Ingmar Bergman; a set of seven documentaries by Louis Malle; five later works by revered Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu; two films by 1930s French director Raymond Bernard; the first few films made by Samuel Fuller; and Carlos Saura’s Flamenco Trilogy. Due for release in the near feature are a collection of five post-war films by Akira Kurosawa and a set of four musicals by Ernst Lubitsch. 

Prices range from $35 to $65. Criterion Collection. www.criterion.com. 

POV 20th Anniversary Collection 

PBS celebrated the 20th anniversary of its critically acclaimed POV documentary series this year by releasing a limited edition DVD set containing 15 great films. This beautifully designed special edition is packaged like an album, with three discs to a page and accompanying notes for each.  

The films run the gamut from one of its earliest presentations, American Tongues, examining the diversity and the English language as spoken in various dialects throughout the country, to powerful topical films about civil rights, and other social and environmental issues.  

Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 1994. The film follows the career of the artist/architect from her first major project, the Vietnam War Memorial, through many other works, tracking the evolution of a woman who transformed America’s notion of what a memorial could and should be.  

Taking on the Kennedys follows the Rhode Island congressional campaign of underdog Republican Kevin Vigilante as the optimistic, stay-positive candidate is ultimately forced to sacrifice his principals in order to engage in battle with his moneyed, mud-slinging rival Patrick Kennedy, son of Ted Kennedy.  

These are just two examples. There’s more than 20 hours worth of great documentary filmmaking in this impressive collection. The price may be a bit steep, but proceeds benefit both POV and American Documentary, the non-profit organization that presents the long-running series. 

$249.95. PBS. www.pbs.org/pov. 

Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Granada Television Series 

There have been many film versions of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes over the decades, and fans of the master detective are quick to defend their favorites. Basil Rathbone is still considered by many to be the quintessential Holmes. However, Rathbone never had the pleasure of filming any of the original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Those films were all written specifically for the screen.  

In the 1980s and ’90s, England’s Granada Television undertook the daunting task of faithfully adapting the original short stories and novels with a brand new Holmes. Jeremy Brett proved more than up to the challenge, creating a version that is to this day in its complexity, its faithfulness, its breadth and dynamism, the definitive celluloid incarnation of the character.  

MPI Home Video has released the shows on DVD over the years individually and as box sets, one for each series of the show and one for the five feature-length films. Now the company has released the entire oeuvre in an excellent 12-disc box set. Though Brett and company fell short of their goal of adapting all 56 of the Sherlock short stories and all four of the novels, they achieved something quite remarkable. Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Granada Television Series—41 shows in all—is not just a compendium of television shows, but the best, most ambitious translation of Doyle’s works for the screen. 

And though the adaptations remain loyal to the original tales, these are indeed adaptations. Doyle’s stories, told in the first person by his sidekick Dr. Watson, are not entirely cinematic. Most of the action and dialogue revolves around Holmes, with Watson most often playing the role of astonished observer. The Granada series takes much-needed liberties with this arrangement, transferring key dialogue to Watson to keep the stories moving on the screen, creating more give and take and indeed a more friendly and collegial partnership between the two men.  

Watson, played in the first series by David Burke and later by Edward Hardwicke, is a much more substantive character than the structure of the original tales allowed him to be. It’s not that Doyle disregarded him, it’s just that the first-person format cast him as narrator rather than as an equal protagonist.  

Brett plays every facet of the Holmes character: his shifting moods which take him from haughtiness, arrogance and condescension to warmth, compassion, sensitivity and kindness; his eccentricity and stubbornness and his depression and drug addiction. This is Sherlock in all his complexity, a genius tormented by a life that is too mundane for his extraordinary mind.  

The price of the set may be high, but this is an excellent body of work that easily lends itself to repeated viewings. For even when the solution is known, there is still the tremendous charisma and charm of Jeremy Brett and the compassion, humanity and devotion of Watson in the form of Burke and Hardwicke. 

$229.98. MPI Home Video. www.mpihomevideo.com. 

Nosferatu 

F.W. Murnau’s gothic horror masterpiece Nosferatu has been available in any number of DVD editions over the years, in varying degrees of quality. It is probably one of the most widely seen silent films among modern audiences.  

Kino’s new edition of the film far surpasses every previous release. It’s like seeing the film for the first time. Celluloid deteriorates over the years, and surviving prints of Nosferatu have been marred by an unsteady, high-contrast image and the loss or fading of the picture’s many color tints. But the restoration work in this new version is excellent: The image quality is vastly improved, and the original tints have been recreated, making this the most accurate version to date.  

But perhaps the most noteworthy attribute of this two-disc set is the score. For decades the original score for the film has been lost. Many of the scores that accompanied previous DVD editions of the film have been good. But Kino’s previous release contained two synthesizer scores — interesting and effective at times, but more appropriate as alternatives to a more period-appropriate orchestral or Wurlitzer score. Now the film finally gets the proper treatment, as Berndt Heller has finally tracked down the Hans Erdmann’s original score from 1922 and recorded it with the Saarbrücken Radio Symphony.  

Finally a resurrection worthy of Count Orlock.  

$29.95. Kino International. www.kino.com. 

She 

Also from Kino is a new two-disc edition of a rarely seen genre classic, Merian Cooper’s 1935 production of She, directed by Irving Pichel. It’s a strange film, a curious little thriller of three people in search of a flame that grants immortality. Starring Randolph Scott, Helen Gahagan, Helen Back and the great character actor Nigel Bruce, the film is certainly dated in its approach and a bit slow in its pacing, but is nevertheless and intriguing glimpse at fantasy filmmaking in the early sound era.  

The DVD edition is presented by famed animation and special effects guru Ray Harryhausen. It was one of his favorite films, and this edition has the bonus of presenting the movie both in its original black and white and in a new digitally colorized version, the process overseen by Harryhausen himself. Whatever your perceptions and memories of the clumsy colorization processes of the past, prepare to have them shattered. The subtlety and depth of this new version is surprisingly convincing, providing a whole different way to experience the film.  

Many directors preferred black and white, of course, and to colorize their films may not seem respectful in the least. But Harryhausen knew many of the people involved in She and other low-budget films of the era, and knew that they would have preferred to make these films in color given the money. Harryhausen also believes that many viewers these days simply refuse to watch anything in black and white, and thus colorization is the only way to get them to take a look at the great films of the past. But what’s crucial here is that the color version is provided as a complement to the black and white version, not as a replacement. 

$24.95. Kino International. www.kino.com. 

Battleship Potemkin 

Kino released another classic silent film this year that may prove to be a definitive edition. Battleship Potemkin is one of the most influential films ever made. Director Sergei Eisenstein’s editing techniques, known as montage, were richly displayed in this dramatization of an event from the Russian Revolution. The famous Odessa Steps sequence has inspired countless filmmakers over the ensuing decades.  

With this release, Kino signaled that perhaps it was on its way to becoming a bit more sophisticated in its packaging and design. Here the company sticks to original artwork from the film’s original release, lending greater dignity to the release. The set includes a 42-minute documentary on the restoration of the film.  

$29.95. Kino International. www.kino.com. 

The Jazz Singer 

Warner Bros. released a deluxe box set of the film that put the company on the map back in 1927. The Jazz Singer wasn’t the first sound picture, but it’s the one that sparked the shift to the new technology.  

This three-disc set includes a wealth of extras, including dozens of Vitaphone shorts of Vaudeville acts from the era, and an excellent documentary covering the evolution of synchronized sound technology, its effect on motion pictures and the end of the silent era. It may not be great film, but it’s a hugely important one, and Warner Bros. has given it its due with this release. 

$39.95. Warner Bros. 

I look at my bath, see the fungus that’s growing 

While my wife Jill gently weeps. 

It’s just a rehab that I keep on foregoing, 

Still my wife Jill gently weeps. 

I don’t know why nobody told me 

How to avoid this mess. 

I’m so upset, won’t someone hold me? 

These memories I’ll suppress. 

I look at the floor and I notice it’s moving 

While my wife Jill gently weeps. 

The subfloor and tile I’ll soon be removing, 

Still my wife Jill gently weeps 

(with apologies to George) 

I don’t dislike the pest control folks, but it’s important to remember that they have a specific mandate (to find and replace the parts of your house that have been damaged by wood-destroying organisms), some incentives that you might want to keep in mind (including making money) and little or no focus on design. 

This does not make these folks dishonest or irresponsible, although, as in all trades, the quality of the help ranges. 

The issue I want to focus on, to invoke a somewhat hackneyed term, is that of holism. The problem with pest inspections and bathrooms is that inspectors tend to view the built environment as something diseased. This is similar to the problem of the patient being viewed as a disease rather than as a person who might benefit from some medical advise or assistance. 

I’ve seen hundreds of baths over the years that were slated for a set of specific repairs as a part of the mandate laid out by a pest report. While each of the items might have been valid from a technical perspective, the formation of a plan of action based on the report alone is probably a bad idea. 

Considering the house or just the bath as a whole often gets missed in this process and it’s a good idea to step back and consider how the money and effort might be best spent. Let me give you a couple of examples. 

The floors of baths are often called-out for repair in pest reports. This is usually the result of water that had been weeping through poorly installed substrates in the floor and the ensuing damage created by watering fungi that were lying around waiting for someone to feed them. 

A bath may have a shower surround that’s been identified for replacement as well and the finished work based upon a pest report is very likely to end up looking much like the same bath with some new “neutral colored,” “contactor’s choice” (terms often found in pest reports referring to something inoffensive or plain) ceramic tile on the floor and around the shower. 

In many of these cases, the damage identified by the pest company could easily have been addressed during a more substantial and productive bath rehab, one that might have included aesthetic and physical improvements culminating in a much more desirable space, both personally and financially. 

A partial bath remodel is usually nothing more than a missed opportunity. If you remove more than about 1/6 of the wall material, you will probably end up spending more time and money patching those areas than if you were simply drywalling the whole room. It’s hard to patch well and it’s easy to get joints to look good when you do them all at the same time. Also, drywall is almost free, it’s so cheap. It’s all about the labor, and baths are all about multiple services hidden in the walls and floors that are only accessible when everything is exposed. 

If a shower surround of tile is removed and replaced and the house is more than, say 50 years old, it makes almost no sense not to replace the plumbing hidden in the walls at the same time. Just think how awful you’d feel removing nearly new tile to fix the plumbing you were looking at just a short while ago. If you do all the plumbing while the room is gutted, it’s much easier.  

It’s also much cheaper. And so it goes with wiring, lighting and heating (You mean you put heating in the bathroom! Oh my, but doesn’t that lead to SIN?) and all the other goodies that can make for a great bathroom. 

By the way, this can all happen in a very small space. A tiny bathroom can have a heated floor, a skylight (solar tube skylights are cheap and provide amazing amounts of light), and all the other bells and whistles, but if you just do what’s on the pest report, you won’t get all those goodies. You might at best get a few and you’ll probably pay a large percentage of what the full Monty costs.  

This isn’t because pest control folks overcharge. They’re like any contractor. Some are high. Some are low. The reason has to do with economies of scale. Because so many of the good things one wants in the bath involve access to the wall and floor interior (and ceilings), everything gets a lot cheaper when the walls are all gone.  

The plumbing cost of adding another fixture when the plumber is already there isn’t twice as much. It’s always cheaper when you can do an extra thing while you’re already there. It’s the same trip to the jobsite, the same trip to the store and it might even be more soldered joints while the torch is in your hand. 

The same is true of wiring. Adding a vent fan, some extra lights, a floor heating pad, a towel heating rack, an electric wall heater or an extra GFCI outlet (the ones that can’t shock you) gets much cheaper when you’re already there pulling wires in your wide open space. 

I’m not suggesting that you want all those things but I would strongly recommend a vent fan and at least one heat source for every bath.  

Baths suffer in several ways from the steam of showers. Steam penetrates grout, gets behind paint, moistens the paper of drywall and feeds fungi living behind these surfaces. It also grows fungi on painted surfaces and makes for an unwholesome environment and more cleaning (who likes extra cleaning?). A vent fan can also provide a clear mirror when you moistly emerge ready to greet your spendid countenance. 

The heat thing is a self-made argument for those who demand it. Some of us hate getting out of the shower on a cold winter morning, and a warm room (especially a warm floor) is either darned nice or simply essential. Heat is easy to add during a full remodel and rarely done during your typical pest clearance. 

Also, most baths are too dim for my liking. It’s really nice to have plenty of light in the bath to check for imperfections (who’s imperfect!?) or simply to get those remaining hairs just so. Again, it’s easy to have a sealed lamp over the shower, ceiling lights in the main space and a vanity lamp added when wiring the room. Also, these need not be enormous expenses. Lamps and fairly inexpensive, wire is dirt cheap and junction boxes are nearly free. It’s all about labor and when the walls are open the labor is much cheaper. 

Lastly, let me suggest that most of what I see on pest reports regarding baths tends to be less critical than many of the issues that houses present. Most fungal infestations in baths including rotting floors and loose tile in the shower can wait for at least a few months if not a few years. Fire hazards should take precedence. Earthquake preparation too. If holding off for a while is what’s needed to find the extra funds to do it wonderfully and not just palliatively, it’s much the wiser in terms of your satisfaction and in terms of long-term investment. 

Most fungal infestation advances at something less than a break-neck pace and the advantages of a better bath greatly outweigh the advantages of removing the decay immediately. 

In the short term, get a caulk gun and a tube of Sikaflex caulk, a bag of grout and a can of paint. Keep all the joints in the bath sealed. The edge of the floor, especially at the tub, the joint where tub meets tile (or any other kind of surround) and the gaps around shower fixtures. This will SLOW the advance of decay while the money finds its way to you (here boy). 

Whether you choose to do the work with a pest control company or a general contractor (and only a pest company can issue a clearance of pest damage), you’ll be glad you waited. 

One of the more common plants to be handed about as décor and, say, hostess gifts is the poinsettia. It’s a Christmas cliché, and it’s been around long enough that some people have found it necessary to call it names and dismiss it. Others have bred it into some fairly weird forms: dappled, ruffled, wrinkled, ivory, pink. I myself like all but the pink, because who needs more pink? But de gustibus non est disputandum.  

It is possible to kill them. The first Yule tree Joe and I had together—ah, memories!—was a dead poinsettia stick with a single ornament, a porcelain cockroach with glided legs that we bought at the KPFA Craft Fair back when it was less of an expensive expedition. I don’t think we killed the plant ourselves but I don’t remember where it came from. 

Poinsettias are euphorbs, as you can demonstrate by breaking a leaf or stem: white latex sap will drool out. Don’t mess with it; it’s an irritant, though not so toxic as is widely believed. The “flowers” are really showy bracts—leaves—and those cute buds in the center are the functioning blooms.  

Water them only when the top of the soil is dry, and at least poke holes in that foil wrapping and put the plant in a saucer for drainage. Near but not right in a sunny window is a good spot, though you can put them anywhere for a day or two, strictly for aesthetics.  

There’s a complicated dance involving fertilizers and closets or tarps that you can do if you want one to rebloom next year. Theoretically they won’t set blooms unless they have long periods of complete darkness; commercial growers use greenhouses darkened daily with black tents.  

I’ve seen individual plants defy this, though, and poinsettias in general will do just fine outdoors for years here, given a bit of shelter from wind and some decent drainage. A mound of soil close to the south side of the house seems to work. They tend to get spindly, so an prune annually to some low nodes. See how much it grows the first year and allow for more.  

Poinsettias are prone to a host of bacterial and fungal diseases in moist conditions, though, and we have those here. If your gift should die, console yourself that you gave it a chance, which is more than most get. This strikes me as a plant one might rent instead of buy, in a rational economy, rather like hiring a Santa for the office party instead of keeping some bearded guy on the payroll all year. Compost the remains in a hot pile or put them in the green bin so whatever killed them doesn’t spread. 

If it survives, it’s showing you the spot to plant next year’s poinsettia. If you’re a sucker like some people I could mention, you might find yourself taking in the neighbors’ discards too. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. 

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Daily Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Daily Planet.

FRIDAY, DEC. 21 

Iraq Moratorium Vigil to Protest the War from 2 to 4 p.m. at the corners of University and Acton. Sponsored by the Streawberry Creek Lodge Tenants Assoc and the Berkeley-East Bay Gray Panthers. 548-9696. 

Winter Solstice Labyrinth Walk by Candlelight from 6 to 8 p.m. at Willard Middle School, Telegraph Ave. between Derby and Stuart. Free. Everyone welcome. Wheelchair accessible. Rain cancels. 526-7377. 

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. 

“Women’s Hormone Balance” Covering PMS, infertiltiy and menopause at 6:30 p.m. at The Redwood Clinic, 3021 Telegraph Ave. Reservations required. 849-1176. 

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310. 

SATURDAY, DEC. 22 

Nature Theater Sing-Along “Wintertime at Little Farm” a puppet show for the whole family at 11 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Working with Wool Watch the spinning wheel turn wool into yarn, try a drop spindle and make a felt ornament to take home at 1:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Family Workshop: Winter Ornaments from 1 to 4 p.m. at Mocha, Museum of Children’s Art, 528 9th St., Oakland. Cost is $7. 465-8770.  

Winter Solstice Gathering at the Interim Solar Calendar, Cesar Chavez Park, Berkeley Marina, from 4:15 to 5:15 p.m. Alan Gould, Lawrence Hall of Science, will lead a mini-workshop on the seasons. Dress warmly. www.solarcalendar.org 

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 High Crew 40th Anniversary Celebration from 8 a.m. to noon at the Jack London Aquatic Center. All alumni welcome. www.berkeleyhighcrew.org  

Sunset Walk in El Cerrito Meet the end of Rydin St. at 3:30 p.m. for an hour walk along the bay, on paved trail at Pt. Isabel. Bring binoculars and bird book to help identify hundreds of shore birds. Rain cancels. 234-8949. 

Plant Native Seedlings in partnership with East Bay Regional Park District from 9 a.m. to noon at Martin Luther King, Jr. Regional Shoreline, Oakland. 452-9261, ext. 119. www.savesfbay.org 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

SUNDAY, DEC. 23 

Golden Gate Audubon Society Bike Trip in Arrowhead Marsh Meet at 9:30 a.m. at the Fruitvale BART. Bicycle helmet required. Bring lunch and dress in layers. 547-1233. 

Berkeley Hiking Club Hike on Mt. Tamalpais Meet at 9 a.m. at Berkeley Way and Shattuck for an 8 mile, moderately paced hike. Bring lunch and liquids. Heavy rain cancels. 649-9787. 

Toddler Nature Walk We’ll splash in puddles and poke in holes. Especially for 2-3 year oldsat 10:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

A Seasonal Family Celebration Come make greeting cards and simple gifts from 2 to 3:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Materials fee is $5-$7. 525-2233. 

Family Workshop: Candy Cottages from 1 to 4 p.m. at Mocha, Museum of Children’s Art, 528 9th St., Oakland. Cost is $7. 465-8770.  

“Mrs Santa Claus” In person and on film at 1 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar St. 841-4824. 

Grandmothers at the Oaks Solstice Celebration at 2 p.m. at Piedmont Way Memorial Oak Grove. Please bring food and water, instruments and songs of peace, joy, and hope, and small gifts to share. 

MONDAY, DEC. 24 

Teen Book Club meets to discuss favorite tearjerkers at 4 p.m. at Claremont Branch Library, 2940 Benvenue at Ashby. 981-6121. 

Cancer Prevention and Survival Cooking Class on Planning Healthy Meals at 8:30 a.m. at Jefferson Elementary, 2035 40th Ave., Oakland. To register call 595-6445. 

Juggling for Peace Learn juggling and plate spinning at 11:30 a.m. in front of the Marine Recruiting Station, Shattuck Square. 524-2776. 

Simplicity Forum meets at 6:30 p.m. at the Claremont Branch of the Berkeley Public Library, 2940 Benvenue Ave. jcecil@chw.edu  

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Club meets at 6:45 p.m. at Spud’s Pizza. 3290 Adeline. namaste@avatar.freetoasthost.info  

TUESDAY, DEC. 25 

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. 

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 26 

Golden Gate Audubon Society Walk at Lake Merritt and Lakeside Park Meet at 9:30 a.m. at the large spherical cage near the Nature Center at Perkins and Bellevue to see the winter birdlife at the lake. 834-1066. 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. Heavy rain cancels. 548-9840. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Sing for Peace at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www. 

geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, DEC. 27 

Wild Music: Sounds and Songs of Life An interative exhibit with Make Your Own Musical Instrument from noon to 2 p.m. at Lawrence Hall of Science, Centennial Drive. Cost is $8-$10. 642-5132. 

FRIDAY, DEC. 28 

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310. 

SATURDAY, DEC. 29 

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. 

Monarch Butterfly Walk Take a short walk to view clusters of monarchs, learn about their life cycle and migration. At 10:30, 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. at Mulford-Marina Branch Library, 13699 Aurora Drive, San Leandro. 577-6085. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

SUNDAY, DEC. 30 

Reptile Rendezvous Learn about the reptiles that call Tilden Park home at 1:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Family Workshop: New Year’s Party Make noisemakers and party hats from 1 to 4 p.m. at Mocha, Museum of Children’s Art, 528 9th St., Oakland. Cost is $7. 465-8770.  

“Leopard Shark Feeding Frenzy” Feed our resident leopard sharks and learn more about them and our other aquatic inhabitants at 2 p.m. at Hayward Shoreline Interpretive Center, 4901 Breakwater Ave., Hayward. 670-7270. www.haywardrec.org 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

Tibetan Buddhism with Olivia Hurd on “Buddhist Stories of Compassionate Wisdom” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 809-1000 www.nyingmainstitute.com 

TUESDAY, DEC. 18 

CHILDREN 

Arlington Children’s Choir Holiday Concert, suitable for ages 3 and up, at 7 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. 524-3043. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Tell on on Tuesdays Storytelling at 7:30 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Cost is $8-$12 sliding scale. www.juiamorgan.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Tom Rigney & Flambeau at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054.  

Singers’ Open Mic with Ellen Hoffman at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ.  

The Christmas Jug Band at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761.  

Brian Wood Ensemble at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave.. 548-5198.  

African Roots of Jazz, with E.W. Wainwright & Friends at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Jazzschool Tuesdays at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 19 

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 

“A Christmas Carol” read by Martin Harris as Charles Dickens at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik and Three Blind Mice, at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Oakland City Center Holiday Concert with West African Highlife Band at noon at 12th and Broadway, Oakland.  

Berkeley Akademie Ensemble Debut performance under direction of Kent Nagano and Stuart Canin at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley. Tickets are $60. 841-2800. www.berkeleysymphony.org 

Fiveplay at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Balkan Folkdance at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $7. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Ben Graves Quartet at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Charlie Hunter at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $20-$24. 238-9200.  

THURSDAY, DEC. 20 

CHILDREN 

Music with Bonnie Lockhart for ages 3 to 7 at 7 p.m. at North Berkeley Public Library, 1170 The Alameda. 981-6250. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now” Guided tour at 12:15 and 5:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. 

Patrick O’Kiersey “Selected Paintings and Drawings” Artist talk at 7 p.m. at the Craft & Cultural Arts Gallery, Atrium, State of California Office Bldg. 1515 Clay St., Oakland. 622-8190. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Lutsinga Musical Ensemble at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Greenbridge, Celtic trio, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Anna Estrada & Her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Triskela at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Matthew Charles Heulitt Project, The Japonize Elephants at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Dietsnakes at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

FRIDAY, DEC. 21 

THEATER 

“Amahl and the Night Visitors” at 7:30 p.m. at the Arlington Community Church, 52 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Tickets at the door are $12-$15.  

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.  

Berkeley Rep “After the Quake” at the Trust Stage, 2025 Addison St., through Dec. 21. Tickets are $33-$69. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

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 $20-$30. 841-6500.  

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.  

Kids Take the Stage “Footloose” at 7 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $8-$15. 527-1138.  

“A Christmas Carol” with Martin Harris at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant. Tickets are $10-$15. 848-7800. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

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 

Oakland Ballet “Nutcracker” at 10:30 a.m. and 8 p.m. at Oakland Paramount Theater, 2025 Broadway, Oakland. Tickets are $15-$50. www.ticketmaster.com 

The Women’s Antique Vocal Ensemble “From the Rising of the Sun” Music for the Christmas season at 8 p.m. at Lake Merritt United Methodist Church, 1330 Lakeshore Ave. Tickets are $5-$15. www.wavewomen.org  

Holiday Caroling with Terrence Kelly & Ellen Hoffman at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Albany Artists Collective featuring The Matresses and Cody Green in a benefit for the Albany Music Fund at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10-$15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Mario “Weary Boys” Matteoli at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

In Harmony’s Way “Mid-Winter Sing” at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Lalin St. Juste and Connie Lim at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Starry Plough Bluegrass Session with Jacob Groopman, Ben Bernstein, Erik Yates and others at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Charlie Hunter at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $20-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Machina Sol at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

SATURDAY, DEC. 22 

CHILDREN  

“Wintertime at Little Farm” a puppet show for the whole family at 11 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

“Stuart Little” 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. 

THEATER 

Kids Take the Stage “Footloose” at 2 and 7 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $8-$15. 527-1138. www.kidstakethestage.com  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

West Coast Live with Michael Chabon, Will Durst at 10 a.m. at Freight and Salvage. Tickets are $13-$18. 415-664-9500. www.WCL.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“From the Darkness...Solace” a Winter Solstice Concert at 6 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Donation $10-$20. 228-3207. 

Mark Morris Dance Group “The Hard Nut” 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 

Oakland Ballet “Nutcracker” at 2 and 8 p.m. at Oakland Paramount Theater, 2025 Broadway, Oakland. Tickets are $15-$50. www.ticketmaster.com 

Nicolas Bearde Holiday Blues Fest at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Hot Hot Hot Caribbean Nights with Winston Soso and David Reid Caribbean band at 9:05 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12-$15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Michael Grandi at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Holiday Revue, bluegrass and acoustic with Lauries Lewis, host, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50-$16.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Bayonics, The Unsmokables at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $9. 841-2082.  

Mitch Marcus Trio at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

SUNDAY, DEC. 23 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Thomas Lynch performs the Truman Capote classic, “A Christmas Memory” at 3 p.m. at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Tickets sliding scale $10-$30. 665-5565. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Oakland Ballet “Nutcracker” at 2 p.m. at Oakland Paramount Theater, 2025 Broadway, Oakland. Tickets are $15-$50. www.ticketmaster.com 

Redwing at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Trumpet Supergroup Holiday Concert with Dave Scott, Mark Inouye, Mario Guarneri, Mike Olmos, and Erik Jekabson at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15. 845-5373.  

MONDAY, DEC. 24 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Musica ha Disconnesso traditional Italian music, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Obie winner Adam Bock’s new play, The Shaker Chair, at Ashby Stage in a joint production of the Shotgun Players with Encore Theatre Co., opens with one woman sitting on the title piece, expostulating with another woman, who’s curled up in another kind of chair crying over a book.  

The first woman goes on about Shakers, and their admirable work ethic, which is why their chair isn’t so great for sitting. A third enters the stark, light-filled room and takes the other two to task—the first for “being asleep,” the second for crying and doing nothing about it. 

All of this is fleshed out with witty, skewed dialogue, sometimes overlapping or simultaneous, with occasional silences, awkward and otherwise.  

The lines and repeated words and phrases that are batted back and forth like a shuttlecock don’t always directly refer to the matter (or matters) at hand, so by inference, the audience is in on the conversation, a little like a latecomer or eavesdropper. 

This continues throughout the play, though pretty quickly the story’s clear, clearer than the humorously tangled conversations it’s inferred from: Marion (a sometimes ebullient, sometimes diffident Frances Lee McCain) is putting up her sister Dolly (Nancy Shelby), who is upset with her husband, Frank (Will Marchetti). Marion’s old friend Jean (Scarlett Hepworth) is an environmental activist, endeavoring to involve Marion (or at least her car) in a nighttime raid on a nearby farm that’s spilling sewage. Meanwhile, Jean tries to coach—or boss—Dolly about men, romance and what’s passé about it all. Dolly doesn’t appreciate it. 

The gradually accruing plot works itself out through offhanded, even loopy dialogue as the various characters express themselves. A pair of watchcap-bonneted co-conspirators (Andrew Calabrese and Marissa Keltie) show up with Marion and Jean, back from a night’s mischief on the farm.  

Frank shows up at Marion’s to reel Dolly back in, and later to contend with Marion, all the while gushing about her lawn. There’s a lot of goofy reasoning and trick explanations. It finally does end up with some change—or resolution—but only through personal tragedy, while the rest apparently slips back to normal. 

The comic dialogue is Bock’s strong suit, and all cast members (as directed by Tracy Ward)are well up to their marks, displaying excellent timing and characterization. Word for Word’s Nancy Shelby is particularly adept at presenting a character who could appear as just a flakey ditz, making her laughable yet sympathetic, a real part of the ensemble of various types and their self-stated concerns. She’s also good at the pauses, the silences which offset the loopiness with a kind of existential eloquence. 

Of the two other sides of the triangle, as it were, McCain takes the lead with much gusto, tempered with a stern, sometimes sorrowful reflectiveness, while Hepworth is appropriately severe, brusque even, yet surprisingly soft around the edges whenever the edges are showing.  

The design of the interior of Marion’s severe country house (James Faerron’s set), which provides the stage for this little agon—or passion—is fine on all levels, the lighting (Heather Basarab) indirect by day and night, and the sounds (Sara Huddleston) veer from crickets to claxon alarms, bucolic to industrial, adding texture to the sense of light and darkness on this stark palette. 

(Shotgun’s productions continue to explore what’s becoming something of a house style in look and feel, a pleasing, ongoing trend.) 

The difficulty with the play is that not enough is really worked through, except the humorous banality and occasional indirection of the dialogue. The plot’s pretty pat, though it does go from screwball sitcom of a very professional order, through a quick upsurge of melodrama, into a kind of morality play denouement. The torquing or melding of forms is at least as old as Euripides’ Alcestis, but here it doesn’t run interference for—or cover—a somewhat bland plot which processes the story, like the factory farm Jean’s protesting. more than shape it as it moves through slightly hackneyed complications and resolution. 

There is, by the way, an uncredited pig in the cast; even the playwright seemed hesitant about mentioning it, but word got around before opening. “Bratty” (short for Bratwurst, the diminuative monicker apparently pinned on diplomatically by Shotgun artistic director Pat Dooley, who took the boar in), in a porcine cameo, appropriately hogs the stage for a moment, not once uttering a clever line. 

THE SHAKER CHAIR 

8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and 5 p.m. Sunday through Jan. 27 at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. $20-$30. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org. 

Photograph: Frances Lee McCain in The Shaker Chair. 

Berkeley Akademie Ensemble, Berkeley Symphony’s new program jointly directed by conductor Kent Nagano and violinist Stuart Canin to present music in “a multifaceted structure,” a tradition of Akademies which “trace their origin all the way back to what one might call the democratization of music,” will perform their debut concert 8 p.m. Wednesday at the First Congregational Church with renditions of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 2 and 3, Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue and Richard Strauss’ “Metamorphosen.”  

The Berkeley Symphony musicians will be joined by six string players, guest artists from the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, in a first-time partnership. 

“The Akademies were founded to share music with the community at large ... around the time of Beethoven,” said Nagano. “[It] had primarily been reserved for the aristocracy ... They had an enormous following ... very much music of the times and for people of the times. That was the spirit in which we wanted to launch the Akademie here in Berkeley.” 

Some pieces on the Akademie program will be performed as chamber music, some led by concertmaster Canin, others conducted by Nagano.  

“The hope is to try to blur those lines,” Nagano said, “so that what we share with the audience is simply music making. The template we are using is really very close to those original concerts presented by Peter von Winter 200 years ago.” 

With a first season emphasis on detailed string ensembles, the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 features three groups of three string instruments each, with support from a basso continou group; Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue—meant originally as a finale for one of his later string quartets—is performed by string orchestra; and Strauss’ “Metamorphosen” is subtitled “A Study for 23 Solo Strings.” 

An early sketch of Strauss’ piece was titled “Mourning for Munich,” written the day the Munich Court Theater was bombed in 1943. 

The Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, which will conclude the debut concert, will feature Canin, violin; Emma Moon, flute; Laura Griffiths, oboe and DavidWashburn, piccolo trumpet.  

The Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, from which the six guest string players come, was founded in 1974, drawing its musicians from top conservatory students in Germany, Switzerland and Austria.  

“Germany’s great youth orchestra,” Nagano called them, “which represents tomorrow’s talent, already performing at a high professional level today.” 

Nagano—who as general music director of the Bavarian State Opera presides over von Winter’s Akademie concert tradition since 1811, one of the oldest—will continue as co-artistic director of Berkeley Akademie with his departure as Berkeley Symphony’s music director following the 2008-09 season.  

Canin, his co-director, has served as concert master of the San Francisco Symphony and the New Century Chamber Orchestra, which he co-founded as a conductorless orchestra. In 2001, Nagano appointed him concertmaster of the Los Angeles Opera, a position he continues to hold. 

BERKELEY AKADEMIE ENSEMBLE 

8 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 19 at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, Durant Avene and Dana Street. $60. 

841-2800. www.berkeleysymphony.org.

Everyone who knew Sidney Howard (1891-1939) testified to his exuberant vitality. Barrett Clark said he had an “irrepressible youthfulness, a tremendous enthusiasm for life.” He was admired for his generosity to other writers, and his own plays were described as “among the best ever written in America.” He was one of the first important Broadway playwrights to go to Hollywood. 

English 106 

Born in Oakland, Sidney Howard came to Berkeley as a student in 1911. His undergraduate poems and stories appeared in Occident, and he wrote two pageants which were performed on campus. He also took Leonard Bacon’s English 106, probably the first seminar in creative writing ever offered at Cal. Under Bacon’s guidance he wrote a blank verse tragedy which used the Black Death at Avignon as a background for the love story of Petrarch and Laura. After considerable revision the tragedy became a pageant, The Sons of Spain, and was produced in 1914 by The Forest Theater Society at Carmel. The scene was changed from Avignon to Monterey; Laura and Petrarch became mission Indians, Tiga and Raphael, protected by Fr. Serra from the lecherous Gov. Fages. The pageant’s success spurred Howard’s desire to become a playwright. 

World War I 

But in June, 1916, he put aside thoughts of Broadway and joined an American volunteer ambulance unit with the British army in Greece. Later he served on the Western Front and became a pilot in the French air force, transferring to the U.S. Army in 1917. 

Initially he loved flying. “It’s sport,” he wrote to his sister, Jean McDuffie, “and, by God, it’s poetry.” But he soon learned differently. Once, after he was shot down and managed somehow to land safely, he found his co-pilot dead in the seat behind him. Elizabeth Sergeant left us a glimpse of him on active service in 1918: “Moving heavily instead of with his usual light ease ... he cannot eat in the restaurants he visited with his dead friends. It seems that he does nothing but look up [their] families—or write to them.” 

Howard received two citations for gallantry in action and a Silver Star. After the armistice he returned to Berkeley to pick up the threads of his life, worked as a journalist in New York, and resumed writing plays. For the next 15 years he wrote nothing about the war. 

Broadway 

Swords, Howard’s first Broadway play, was a melodrama in verse. It opened in September 1921, and closed in October. He set it in Italy, “during the struggle between the Popes and the Emperors, a little after the height of the Crusades, a little before the revival of learning.” Femmina, the protagonist, is “an altogether human empress, devoted to her servants, none too scrupulous, temperamental, exacting, very feminine, wholly glorious.” She is the first of many strong female characters in Howard’s work. 

Femmina’s story seems an odd subject for a soldier home from the wars, but a natural one for a student of Leonard Bacon’s. Howard dismissed its failure, saying it was “instructive;” he never again wrote verse for the stage. What redeemed Swords for him was its star, Clare Eames, a tall, slender actress with a regal presence. She became famous for playing fearless modern women as well as historical figures like Femmina. (In 1923 she played Queen Elizabeth in Mary Pickford’s Dorothy Vernon of Hadden Hall.) “The real purpose of the play,” Howard said, “was to marry us.” They were “gloriously happy” for several years. 

His next play, S.S. Tenacity, opened in January 1922, and ran twice as long as Swords. A comedy about two young Frenchmen waiting for a ship to take them to Canada, it tells how one meets a girl and decides to stay at home, while the other sails away. The setting is contemporary and the behavior of the characters, simple and direct. From then on Howard wrote as a realist. 

‘They Knew What They Wanted’ 

In 1920 playwrights who respected Victorian conventions still dominated the American stage. Their work was swept away so completely by the rebellious younger generation—Howard, O’Neill, Barry and others—that their plays have almost totally disappeared. The only one still performed is David Belasco’s Madame Butterfly—in Puccini’s operatic version. A few others survive on DVD as “picturized” silent movies, like The Squaw Man and D. W. Griffith’s amazing Way Down East. 

In their plays, as one Victorian wrote, “The wife who has once taken the step from purity to impurity can never reinstate herself in the world of art this side of the grave.” Sidney Howard demolished this dogma in his first mature work, They Knew What They Wanted. Within hours of her marriage, the heroine commits adultery and emerges at play’s end not only alive, but with her marriage intact. Material the Victorians could only handle as tragedy, he treats as comedy. 

The Knew What They Wanted is based on a story Howard found in Dante. He made it “a treatise on the obsessions which make the world go round. The woman’s obsession for security—the man’s for a dynasty.” Brooks Atkinson described the play as a “romantic and savory story of love and magnanimity in a California vineyard.” And, Atkinson added, Howard “presented with warmth and sympathy some of the best characters he ever created.” This rich comedy ran for over a year, was filmed three times and returned to Broadway in the 1950s as a musical, The Most Happy Fella. 

Hollywood 

When his marriage to Clare Eames ended in 1928, Howard returned to Berkeley, residing for two years at his sister’s home on Roble Road in the Claremont area. He endured a period of despondency and said his heart had gone out of writing for the stage. By an unforeseen chance, this made him available for Hollywood just as movies began to talk. In April, 1929, he signed a contract with Samuel Goldwyn, who promised to make him a millionaire, and he became the best paid screenwriter of the 1930s. 

For the rest of his life Howard alternated between writing films in Hollywood, plays in New York, and living on his farm in Massachusetts. He made a happy marriage with Polly Damrosch in 1931, and arranged his life so that he could spend large amounts of time at home with her and their children. 

Howard’s screenplays for Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith and Dodsworth won Academy Awards. Dodsworth also became Howard’s biggest Broadway hit. While they were collaborating on a screenplay for Lewis’s anti-fascist It Can’t Happen Here, they received a request from the Reich Theater Chamber in Berlin for permission to produce Dodsworth, provided they supplied “evidence of Aryan descent.” They replied, “Who knows what ancestors we may have had in the last few hundred years? We really are as ignorant of them as even Hitler is of his. In answering please use our proper legal names: Sidney Howrowitz, and Sinclair Levy.” 

Howard’s only work explicitly on World War I, an adaptation of Humphrey Cobb’s Paths of Glory, failed on Broadway in 1935. A ghastly tale of suffering and injustice, he dramatized it cinematically in scenes so harsh that they alienated the audience. S. H. White believes the play’s energy came from Howard’s own military experience. Urging that the novel be filmed, Howard wrote, “It seems to me that our motion picture industry must feel something of a sacred obligation to make the picture.” Least his motives be misunderstood, he added, “I am not involved in the picture rights for this book.” 

‘GWTW’ 

In the winter of 1936 Howard wrote the screenplay for a widely loved, widely reviled and wildly romantic novel of the Old South, Gone With the Wind. In the preliminary treatment he wrote, “For screen purposes it is, I think, well to think of the book as Scarlett’s story, and of Scarlett herself as a character whose actions are consistently motivated by what she conceives to be the tragedy of an unrealized love.” In five months he reduced the densely printed 1,000-page novel to a typewritten script of only 240 pages. His choices as to what to omit, what to keep, and how to present the material had a decisive impact on the film. For example, he decided (echoing, perhaps, Paths of Glory) to give GWTW the sobriety of its unflinching look at the horrors of war. 

David O. Selznick, the film’s producer, tinkered with the script compulsively, ultimately hiring 10 other writers to revise it. Some softened the story, removing such astringencies as the sight of masses of wounded soldiers, while others suggested strange changes in the plot line. (F. Scott Fitzgerald’s contribution consisted mostly of restoring Howard’s and Margaret Mitchell’s original words, and justifying them to the anxious producer. Ben Hecht helped to shorten the script.) In a moment of self-indulgence after GWTW was completed, Selznick claimed to have written it all himself, but later decided Howard should get credit for the script. According to Andrew Sinclair, who edited and published Howard’s original screenplay, a comparison of Howard’s original text and the actual film, shows that GWTW is 85 percent Howard’s work. 

Sidney Howard’s life came to a sudden, shocking end in August, 1939, when he died in an accident. GWTW had its premiere in Atlanta four months later. At the February 1940, Academy Awards, Sinclair Lewis presented Howard’s posthumous Academy Award for the GWTW screenplay. 

This weekend, against my better judgment, I will be doing a couple of Audubon Society Christmas Bird Counts, one in Marin County, the other in Solano. (The Christmas Bird Count arose as a humane alternative to the traditional Christmas Side Hunt, whose object was to shoot every bird you saw. The data compiled by this annual exercise in citizen science has become a mother lode for ornithologists studying trends in North American bird populations.) 

What I’ll find is hard to predict, birds being such mobile creatures. But if I’m out there in anything more clement than a blinding rainstorm, it’s a cinch that I’ll see ruby-crowned kinglets—probably lots of ruby-crowned kinglets, based on early scouting reports. This time of year they’re all over the California lowlands. I’ve seen them in the Lady Banks rose outside my kitchen window, in street trees, in an isolated patch of shrubbery at the El Cerrito Plaza shopping center. 

Only male kinglets have the ruby crown, and you won’t see it unless the bird is in a heightened state of emotion. Normally it’s concealed under his greenish head feathers. When a male is confronting a territorial rival, though, or sometimes just feeling 

testy, there’s a laser-like flash of scarlet. 

Otherwise, this is not a showy bird: mostly greenish, with an off-white ring around the eye and two white bars on the folded wing. 

It looks a whole lot like another small greenish songbird, the Hutton’s vireo. In the summer, when the kinglets are elsewhere that’s not a problem for birders. But in December I’ve seen both species foraging in the same tree.  

There are various ways of telling them apart: kinglets are faster and twitchier, flick their wings more, have finer bills and a black bar behind the second white wing bar. If you get a really good look, the colors of the legs and feet are diagnostic. Hutton’s vireos have blue-gray legs; ruby-crowned kinglets have black legs and yellow feet. And if the bird says “che-dit,” it’s a kinglet. 

The two aren’t closely related. Genetic studies place the vireos somewhere near the crows, and the kinglets with a huge complex of thrushes and warbler-like birds. Formerly considered part of the Old World warbler family, the five species of kinglets are now in their own family, the Regulidae. (The only other North American member, the golden-crowned kinglet, has a snazzy orange-black-and-white head pattern.) But some scientists think the ruby-crown is more like the Eurasian leaf warblers than the other kinglets. Taxonomy is a moving target. 

We know ruby-crowned kinglets only as winter visitors. They nest in California, but not along the coast. As a breeding species, the ruby-crown is a mountain bird, ranging from the Siskiyous and Trinities down through the Sierra to the Transverse Ranges. That population appears to winter in Mexico; coastal-wintering birds come down from farther north. 

That means we’re unlikely to be treated to the male kinglet’s vocal performance. I’ve only heard a ruby-crown sing once, on the Kaibab Plateau north of the Grand Canyon. It was a loud, exuberant performance and I had no idea what it was. It came as a considerable surprise when I tracked the sound through the trees and realized that the source was a kinglet. Arthur Cleveland Bent had it right: “The remarkable part of the song is the great volume of sound that issues from the tiny throat…, much greater than would seem possible from such a small bird.” 

Sierran ruby-crowns usually nest about 4000 feet, sometimes as high as 10,000. They prefer semi-open conifer forests, sometimes forest edges. The typical nest is a deep cup suspended from an evergreen branch, well concealed among twigs. Construction materials in one nest included thistledown, aspen catkins, moss, lichen, grouse and mallard feathers, fibers from insect cocoons, and porcupine hairs. The clutch may be as large as twelve eggs, a high number for a small songbird. But unlike lowland-nesting birds, there’s no second brood—this is the parents’ only shot. Little is known about nest predation, although kinglets seem to be rarely victimized by parasitic cowbirds. 

On both nesting and wintering grounds, kinglets specialize in gleaning insects from buds and foliage, favoring the outer tips of higher branches. The birds occasionally hover as they work their way through the trees. In addition to small insects and arachnids, kinglets may consume elderberries and poison oak berries. They’re frequent members of mixed winter foraging flocks, along with titmice, nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, and warblers, although they never function as flock leaders. 

I will admit there have been times when I have gotten sick and tired of tallying ruby-crowned kinglets. I have in fact worked with a count partner who threatened not to record any more of them. Still, they’re lively little guys, good company in the wet winter woods whether you’re counting them or not. And there’s always the possible reward of that red flash. 

Joe Eaton’s “Wild Neighbors” column appears every other Tuesday in the Berkeley Daily Planet, alternating with Ron Sullivan’s “Green Neighbors” column on East Bay trees. 

Photograph by Ron Sullivan. 

A ruby-crowned kinglet of undetermined gender. 

TUESDAY, DEC. 18 

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 Martin Luther King, Arrowhead Marsh. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233. 

Cancer Prevention and Survival Cooking Class on Planning Healthy Meals at 8:30 a.m. at Fruitvale Elementary School, 3200 Boston Ave., Oakland. To register call 595-6445. 

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. 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. . 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 19 

War and Peace Book Group meets to discuss “Saturday” by Ian McEwan at 7 p.m. at Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 16. 

Cancer Prevention and Survival Cooking Class on Planning Healthy Meals at 8:30 a.m. at Cesar Chavez, 2825 international Blvd., 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. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. Heavy rain cancels. 548-9840. 

Eay Does It Board of Directors Meeting at 6:30 p.m. at 1636 Univestiy Ave. 845-5513. www.easyland.org 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at at 6:30 p.m. at the Berkeley BART station. www.geocities.com/ 

vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, DEC. 20 

Winter Solstice Celebration Bring stories, poetry and music to share, and join a short walk to learn the solstice’s cultural history, at 4 p.m. at the Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. For ages 6 and up. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 1-888-EBPARKS. 

FRIDAY, DEC. 21 

Iraq Moratorium Vigil to Protest the War from 2 to 4 p.m. at the corners of University and Acton. Sponsored by the Streawberry Creek Lodge Tenants Assoc and the Berkeley-East Bay Gray Panthers. 548-9696. 

Winter Solstice Labyrinth Walk by Candlelight from 6 to 8 p.m. at Willard Middle School, Telegraph Ave. between Derby and Stuart. Free. Everyone welcome. Wheelchair accessible. Rain cancels. 526-7377. 

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. 

“Women’s Hormone Balance” Covering PMS, infertiltiy and menopause at 6:30 p.m. at The Redwood Clinic, 3021 Telegraph Ave. Reservations required. 849-1176. 

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310. 

SATURDAY, DEC. 22 

Nature Theater Sing-Along “Wintertime at Little Farm” a puppet show for the whole family at 11 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Working with Wool Watch the spinning wheel turn wool into yarn, try a drop spindle and make a felt ornament to take home at 1:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Family Workshop: Winter Ornaments from 1 to 4 p.m. at Mocha, Museum of Children’s Art, 528 9th St., Oakland. Cost is $7. 465-8770.  

Winter Solstice Gathering at the Interim Solar Calendar, Cesar Chavez Park, Berkeley Marina, from 4:15 to 5:15 p.m. Alan Gould, Lawrence Hall of Science, will lead a mini-workshop on the seasons. Dress warmly. www.solarcalendar.org 

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 High Crew 40th Anniversary Celebration from 8 a.m. to noon at the Jack London Aquatic Center. All alumni welcome. www.berkeleyhighcrew.org  

Sunset Walk in El Cerrito Meet the end of Rydin St. at 3:30 p.m. for an hour walk along the bay, on paved trail at Pt. Isabel. Bring binoculars and bird book to help identify hundreds of shore birds. Rain cancels. 234-8949. 

Plant Native Seedlings in partnership with East Bay Regional Park District from 9 a.m. to noon at Martin Luther King, Jr. Regional Shoreline, Oakland. 452-9261, ext. 119. www.savesfbay.org 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

SUNDAY, DEC. 23 

Golden Gate Audubon Society Bike Trip in Arrowhead Marsh Meet at 9:30 a.m. at the Fruitvale BART. Bicycle helmet required. Bring lunch and dress in layers. 547-1233. 

Berkeley Hiking Club Hike on Mt. Tamalpais Meet at 9 a.m. at Berkeley Way and Shattuck for an 8 mile, moderately paced hike. Bring lunch and liquids. Heavy rain cancels. 649-9787. 

Toddler Nature Walk We’ll splash in puddles and poke in holes. Especially for 2-3 year oldsat 10:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

A Seasonal Family Celebration Come make greeting cards and simple gifts from 2 to 3:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Materials fee is $5-$7. 525-2233. 

Family Workshop: Candy Cottages from 1 to 4 p.m. at Mocha, Museum of Children’s Art, 528 9th St., Oakland. Cost is $7. 465-8770.  

“Mrs Santa Claus” In person and on film at 1 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar St. 841-4824. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

MONDAY, DEC. 24 

Teen Book Club meets to discuss favorite tearjerkers at 4 p.m. at Claremont Branch Library, 2940 Benvenue at Ashby. 981-6121. 

Cancer Prevention and Survival Cooking Class on Planning Healthy Meals at 8:30 a.m. at Jefferson Elementary, 2035 40th Ave., Oakland. To register call 595-6445. 

Juggling for Peace Learn juggling and plate spinning at 11:30 a.m. in front of the Marine Recruiting Station, Shattuck Square. 524-2776. 

Simplicity Forum meets at 6:30 p.m. at the Claremont Branch of the Berkeley Public Library, 2940 Benvenue Ave. jcecil@chw.edu  

World of Plants Tours Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $5. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Club meets at 6:45 p.m. at Spud’s Pizza. 3290 Adeline. namaste@avatar.freetoasthost.info  

CITY MEETINGS 

City Council meets Tues., Dec. 18, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers. 981-6900.  

Human Welfare and Community Action Commission meets Wed., Dec. 19, at 7 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5427.  

Design Review Committee meets Thurs., Dec. 20, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7415.  

The Shoe Pavilion in downtown Berkeley “isn’t going anywhere,” said Jill Seiler, operations manager for the Shoe Pavilion. The Daily Planet incorrectly reported that the store is closing in a story on Tuesday.