Posted Sun., Jan. 27—Not that I miss them, but I haven’t found any Argentine ants in the house this winter. I hesitate to consider this a permanent victory, though. They’re out there somewhere, biding their time. 

Linepithema humile has been called, against stiff competition, one of the world’s worst invasive species. Argentine ants don’t sting or bite, like that scourge of the South the red imported fire ant. What they do is more insidious: they disassemble whole ecosystems. They kill or drive out native ant colonies and eat their way through the local arthropod prey base. (They can handle much larger native ant species; photographs of a half-dozen of them dragging down a huge, as ants go, harvester ant are reminiscent of that Planet Earth footage of a pride of lions tackling an elephant.)  

Ant-eating reptiles like the coast horned lizard can’t stomach them, and horned lizard populations have declined by up to 50 percent in invaded areas. Plants that depend on native ants to transport their seeds are left partnerless. The Argentines use exotic plantings like iceplant as staging areas for colonizing native plant communities. 

Once they arrive in a new locale, Argentine ants form supercolonies containing millions of individual workers. Back home in South America, neighboring colonies live in a constant state of mutual hostility. But that isn’t true in California and other Linepithema beachheads in Mediterranean Europe, Asia, Australia, southern Africa, and the Pacific islands.  

According to research by Andrew Suarez, now at the University of Illinois, there is in effect one great big Argentine ant colony in California that stretches from San Diego to Ukiah. Normally, introducing a worker ant to a foreign colony is a death sentence. But you can drop an Argentine ant from Lompoc into a colony in Milpitas and she’ll receive a sisterly welcome, and be put right to work. 

That’s because she’ll have the correct colony smell. South American colonies are genetically varied, and each one has its distinctive odor which serves as a badge of membership. But the Argentine ants in the great California supercolony, descendants of a small founder population, all smell alike. They haven’t had time to re-evolve the variation. Although genetic bottlenecks are supposed to be a bad thing, reducing a population’s resistance to disease and other stressors, these ants seem to benefit from their genetic uniformity. 

Despite that, you would think that Argentine ant booms would eventually go bust, since eating everything in sight is not a sustainable foraging strategy. They don’t, though. These ants have another trick up their sleeves. 

According to a recent study by David Holway at UC San Diego, who collaborated with Suarez, Argentine ants do start out as generalist predators of other insects. At some point, however, they switch to a high-carb diet of the honeydew that aphids and scale insects excrete. “Honeydew nectar is essentially digested plant sap,” Holway says. “If you’ve ever parked your car under a tree and found your windshield covered with sticky stuff, that’s honeydew from aphids and scales.” Think, for example, of the tulip trees on University Avenue. It’s honeydew that fuels the growth of the supercolonies. 

A mutualist relationship with honeydew producers is not rare among ants. What’s unusual is the change from predation to nectar-sipping. It’s as if a band of human hunter-gatherers moved into a new hunting territory, killed off almost everything edible, then domesticated the last few sheep and became pastoralists. 

Holway and his co-authors tracked a Linepithema invasion in Rice Canyon in southern California, documenting the near-extirpation of native ants as the newcomers moved in; native diversity fell from 23 species to two. They used a technique called stable isotope analysis to determine what the Argentine ants had been eating, and identify when their diet changed. Comparing the ratio of heavy to light nitrogen isotopes allowed the scientists to distinguish carnivores from herbivores (or, in the case of the Argentines, carbovores.) 

So it appears that Argentine ants are flexible enough in their behavior to avoid the consequences of ecological overkill. As long as they have their scales or aphids, they’re in fine shape. 

And things are only going to get better for them. Species with limited ranges and narrow habitat and food requirements may be pushed to extinction by global climate change, but not the Argentine ant. Another recent study, headed by Nuria Roura-Pascual at the University of Girona in Catalonia, suggests that unoccupied areas in East Asia, northeastern North America, and elsewhere will become more suitable for invasion in a warmer world. Linepithema marches on. 

Posted Sat., Jan. 26—When heavy winter rains and cold weather are predicted even that hardiest of homeless people find themselves desperate for shelter.  

Thanks to funding from the city of Berkeley, the generosity of the congregation of St. Marks Episcopal Church—and some luck and community support—there is a haven from the storms.  

If it looks like it will be a bad night, signs reading “GIMME SHELTER” in big red letters are posted at places where homeless people are likely to be, announcing that St. Marks will be open at 7 p.m. for anyone needing a warm, dry bed for the night. The word then quickly goes out via cell phones to the street dwellers in the community. The emergency storm shelter is operated by J.C. Orton of Dorothy Day House. 

For a number of years, shelter for the homeless was provided by a rotating arrangement among several churches with each hosting the shelter for three months at a time. Then in 2002, the city took an interest.  

As J.C. Orton tells it, the city approached Dorothy Day House, which provides meals and other services, and “asked us ‘what do you think of the idea of creating a shelter?' We said ‘interesting but how would it work?’ They said ‘you guys find a venue and we’ll throw some money at it and you provide people and logistics to make it work.’”  

The hardest part of such an enterprise is finding a place for it. There are no facilities dedicated to providing round the clock social services for anyone. Orton approached the various churches that had hosted the shelter part time in the past. All refused except St. Marks, which has the smallest congregation and least resources. And they ask for no compensation for their expenses—the heating bill alone is no small item. 

The shelter is open only on rainy or very cold nights. There is enough funding this year for 66 nights. If J.C. decides to open the shelter he has to put out the announcements by early afternoon. That can call for some tricky decision making. If it looks like it will be stormy and he opens up and the weather turns out to be balmy the night is “wasted.” On the other hand if the weather turns ugly too late in the day to plan on opening, a lot of people will be very miserable.  

The doors are open from 7 to 9 p.m. for people to sign in. Each person is given a pad, a sheet and blanket for the night. J.C. also gives out sleeping bags that people can keep with them. The sheets are collected in the morning and taken to the laundromat. The room is large and radiant heating around the perimeter keeps it comfortably warm. There are usually between 50 and 60 people, four to six times as many men as women, mostly people between 26 and 55 years of age though there is a significant and increasing number of older people over 55. Many are chronically homeless and come to the shelter repeatedly whenever it is open. 

By 9 p.m. most people have settled down, reading, relaxing on their mats or in quiet conversation. For someone who is homeless and has virtually no income surviving from day to day is extraordinarily difficult. Leaving the shelter at 7 a.m. (most shelters put people out at that early hour so the facility can be cleaned up for the daytime users) there is usually an hour wait for a free breakfast—somewhere. During the day, between trudging all over town for lunch or dinner meals which are served at various locations and different times each day, and taking care of personal needs like showers and laundry, there is little opportunity to earn money with occasional jobs or panhandling, let alone save enough to get into housing.  

We talked with Van who has been staying at the shelter frequently for several years. She does odd jobs, recycles, sells Street Spirit newspaper, but she says “even if I get a job today and work 24/7 I would still not have enough money to afford a place.” Coming up with first and last month and security deposit, “I’ll still be on the street for eight months trying to save money” to get into permanent housing. Meantime it’s a great relief to be able to stay out of the rain. 

Juan is 45 years old, he has a disability and, he says, “I have a substance abuse problem ... but I’m making steps, getting help. I’m clean and sober now.” But being on the street makes it much harder. “(It) gives you the perfect excuse to go out there and say the hell with it, nobody else cares. But I do care and J.C. cares about me,” he says. “He cares about people.”  

A distinguished looking, white haired man who won’t give his name, “Call me Center and Shattuck” says “I’m here because it’s raining and I’m homeless” and when the shelter isn’t open “I sleep out on the streets in various places.” He has skills, he has had jobs, but bad luck has dogged him so he hasn’t managed to save enough money to get into an apartment. Like many other homeless people ‘Center and Shattuck’ is worried that the Public Commons for Everyone Initiative Berkeley just passed will bring about more harassment of people who are living on the street.  

On the positive side, asked if he thinks the city is doing better or worse with regard to homelessness, J.C. Orton who has been providing services for Berkeley’s homeless for many years, sees some improvement.  

“I think it’s important to give the city credit for what they are doing. (But) I think it’s important that the city do more,” he says. “Regardless of how much the city does it will never be enough.” 

The perpetual ring of the telephone shatters the otherwise calm interiors of Michele Lawrence’s spacious office in the headquarters of the Berkeley Unified School District at 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way. 

She has exactly five minutes, she says, for an interview. “After that I need to prepare for the last school board meeting of my life.” 

Berkeley’s first Latino superintendent will step down from her role on Feb. 2, handing the job off to Bill Huyett. But—as Lawrence points out time and again during the course of the evening—she will continue to fight for the rights of public education after retiring. 

“As a state we have our priorities in the wrong place,” Lawr-ence told the Planet Wednesday, referring to Gov. Arnold Schwarz-enegger’s proposal to slash K-12 funding by $400 million this year and $4.4 billion in 2008-09. 

“We cannot continue to cut funding out of public education and expect a healthy state, especially when the future rests on the education and training we give our children,” she said. “As a private citizen I will have a little more flexibility to voice my opinion and more free time. I want to write letters and organize campaigns to educate people and create awareness.” 

The walls of Lawrence’s office are bare. 

“I have been packing,” she says. “All my paintings and books are waiting for me at home. Now I just have to mail in my key.” 

Bidding farewell to more than 30 years in public education is not easy, but Lawrence conducted business at usual at the meeting, correcting the smallest errors in the school’s annual budget. 

“It seems surreal,” she finally said in a brief speech to the Berkeley Board of Education while accepting a proclamation naming Feb. 1 as Michele Lawr-ence Day in the district this year. 

“But I am not dying, I am only retiring.” 

Napping tops Lawrence’s list of “to do” things right after retiring, followed by campaigning for Barack Obama (whom she has endorsed) and reading the paper over a morning cup of coffee. 

During her tenure as assistant superintendent and superinten-dent of different school districts, Lawrence said she has sat through 600 board meetings.  

After taking over Berkeley Unified in the midst of a financial crisis in 2001, she spent six years trying to balance the district’s staggering budget. 

“Looking back, there have been some really good things I am proud of,” she said. “Such as bringing stability to the organization and defeating the lawsuit from Pacific Legal Foundation that threatened our integration program.” 

Lawrence was also responsible for creating more student-centered schools with the Ulysses model. 

“I think I brought calm and focus and a clear vision of what’s important for children,” she said. 

Described at times as “unresponsive” and “elusive,” Lawrence has been criticized by various community organizations and union representatives for not closing the student achievement gap, considered by many as the most critical problem in the state right now. 

“I certainly want Bill to continue the development of stronger curriculum and teacher training,” she said, referring to her successor. “The news from the governor makes us have to switch our focus from the classroom to the checkbook, but we have to keep fighting. I want to see the expansion of the pre-schools—I wasn’t able to get that finished. I have confidence in Bill; he’s younger than me, but he’s a seasoned administrator.” 

Huyett, who joins the district on Feb. 4, will also have to deal with the relocation of the district’s headquarters from the seismically unsafe Old City Hall to West Campus, which is scheduled to take place within a year. 

“What I won’t miss about my office is the cold when the radiator doesn’t work, the toilets that don’t flush and the plaster that’s peeling from the walls,” said Lawrence, smiling. 

She said she regrets not being able to oversee the completion of the new classrooms for Berkeley High School. The school was recently placed on the National Register as a Historic District. 

The campus’ historic status and the fact that the district has been sued over the environmental impact report for the South of Bancroft master plan—which proposes to demolish the Old Gym and the warm-water pool housed inside it and build classrooms—poses a big problem for the district. 

“We need that building so that the teachers can get some relief,” she said. “Berkeley is the best and worst of the democratic process, but a truly amazing place.” 

Huyett, 57, admits that some of the issues he faces as the new superintendent will be a challenge. 

“But I look forward to it,” he said. “Berkeley has so much support for public education ... It gets out there and talks about its programs. And that’s what piqued my interest. People that work in this district are passionate.” 

At first glance Huyett might remind you of Mr. Chips, the popular schoolteacher at Brookfield, the fictional boys’ boarding school. However, underneath his cheerful demeanor lies a quiet determination. 

He talks about facilitating programs that will help close the achievement gap, something he has done successfully at Lodi, his former district. 

“But there is a big ‘but’ before it,” he says. “Every school district is different. I have to learn about it before suggesting anything specific. There is an immediacy with looking into the proposed budget cuts but that will not keep me from visiting the classrooms and meeting people.” 

Moving to a district three times smaller than Lodi could also be challenging for Huyett, but he describes it as a plus. 

“Small schools improve student situations,” he said, adding that he had worked in smaller districts such as Dixon, which was half the size of Berkeley. 

“At Lodi, I am really most proud of academic achievement. The API scores have gone up 125 points, distinguished schools have been named and many academic programs such as the pre-engineering and health care are in place.” 

Huyett will perhaps be best remembered in Lodi for building 12 new schools, including a high school. 

As he walked into Lawr-ence’s office before joining her for the board meeting, he spoke about his love for Berkeley. 

“It’s perfect for me,” he said. “I love movies and the theater, and restaurants. When I am not working or at home with my family and my two labs, Cossie (after Cosmopolitan Girl) and Kallie, that’s where I want to be.” 

Photograph by Mark Coplan. 

Superintendent Michele Lawrence presides over her last school board meeting Wednesday. 

The little town of Albany stood up Tuesday night, first to the University of California, and then to the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) and its partner, the U.S. Depart-ment of Agriculture. 

The City Council unanimously condemned UC Berkeley’s decision to cut down some 300 trees on the university-owned Gill Tract property at Marin Avenue and Buchanan Street, claiming that only some of the trees—home to Cooper’s Hawks and monarch butterflies—are diseased. The council authorized its attorney to go to court to block what Mayor Robert Lieber called “wholesale clear cutting,” if a delay in removing the trees—except seriously diseased Mon-terey Pines—could not be negotiated otherwise. 

The university, which says the trees pose a public-safety hazard, plans to begin removing 184 of the pines on Monday. “Campus officials emphasize that the removal has nothing to do with proposed development of campus-owned property nearby,” according to a Jan. 23 article written by Jonathan King in the internal UC publication The Berk-eleyan. 

Residents, including former Mayor Robert Cheasty, told the council they believe the tree removal is directly related to the proposed development. 

Council opposes spray 

Also on Tuesday, the council unanimously passed a strongly worded resolution opposing CDFA plans for aerial spraying to eradicate the light brown apple moth (LBAM). 

The state originally planned to begin spraying in Alameda County in the spring as part of ongoing efforts to eradicate the moth, but Tuesday afternoon, just hours before the council meeting, the CDFA/USDA released a statement saying they will delay the aerial spraying, John Connell, CDFA Plant Health & Pest Prevention Services director, told the council and some 45 people who waited until past 11 p.m. to hear the discussion on the LBAM. 

After the state sprayed in the fall in the Monterey and Santa Cruz areas, hundreds of people reported falling ill. Santa Cruz and Monterey counties filed lawsuits, alleging CDFA failed to perform a required environmental impact report before spraying. The EIR would have included a range of alternatives to the spray and would have considered public comment. 

CDFA says it did not need an EIR because the potential crop damage—to grapes, apples and other fruit—created an emergency situation. 

Connell addressed the decision to delay spraying: “In consultation with the technical working group, an international panel of experts, that panel recommended that CDFA/USDA take a look at other materials that have become available for [the eradication of] the light brown apple moth,” Connell said. “They do remain committed that this moth should be eradicated, and the primary tools to achieve that eradication would be an aerial application” of a product designed to disrupt mating behavior of the moths. New products are being developed and tested in New Zealand, Connell said. The CDFA expects to get the results of New Zealand trials by early April. 

Once they decide which product to use, the CDFA will first go back to the Santa Cruz/Monterey area to continue spraying there, then on to the Bay Area in early August, Connell said. 

The decision about which spray to use will be based on the product’s ability to eradicate the moth, not on health effects to humans, CDFA spokesperson Steve Lyle told the Planet Wednesday. It is the purview of the Environmental Protection Agency to certify the product on the basis of potential health impacts, he said. 

Meanwhile, the state plans to use other methods of eradication. It is evaluating, among other means, traps tied to host plants with pheromone-scents used to confuse males to get them to stop mating—mixed with a small amount of pesticide that would attract, then kill, the male moths, according to the Jan. 22 CDFA/ USDA statement. 

Neither the council nor the public was convinced that aerial spaying with any product should take place. 

“There’s no new information in what was released today,” Nan Wishner, chair of the Albany Integrated Pest Management Task Force, told the council. “The concern is that [the product] is used with aerial spraying.” 

The sprays used in the Santa Cruz area, Checkmate OLF-F and Checkmate LBAM-F, contain a synthetic phero-mone. When sprayed from the air, the pheromones are contained in microcapsules with ingredients some say are potentially harmful, such as formaldehydes. 

Opponents of the spraying say the microcapsules can cause lung damage, while the state says the product is safe. 

Albany resident Ed Fields told the council he objected to the state using a new product: “We will be the subject of the tests—they will try it out on us,” he said. 

The council was unanimous in its opposition to the spray: “Even a few people being hurt is not acceptable,” said Councilmember Farid Javandel. 

While the resolution cannot prevent the state from going ahead with its plans, Mayor Robert Lieber said it was important to take a stand. “We need a grassroots movement to say it’s not OK” to spray for the moth, Lieber told the Planet after the meeting. “We need to start having an effect on other communities.” 

Berkeley Councilmember Dona Spring said she intends to bring a resolution opposing the spraying to the Berkeley City Council at its first February meeting. The state plans to make a presentation to the Berkeley City Council on the LBAM Feb. 26. 

A community meeting on the spray will take place Jan. 30 7:30 p.m. at the Center for Environmental Health, 528 61st St., Oakland.

Berkeley peace activists are gearing up to circulate a petition to place a measure on the November ballot restricting where public and private military recruiters can locate within the city. 

“Most towns regulate adult-oriented businesses—the initiative is modeled on that,” said Sharon Adams, the attorney who wrote the initiative, which is signed by former Councilmembers Carole (Davis) Kennerly and Ying Lee (Kelley) and Code Pink activist PhoeBe Anne Sorgen. 

While Adams said she believes the government has to follow local zoning ordinances, Acting City Attorney Zach Cowan told the Planet that “in general, the city can’t regulate the state, its entities or the federal government.”  

There are times when the government will waive its rights, such as the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s agreement to be regulated by the city’s hazardous waste regulations, Cowan said. 

The city attorney’s office does not weigh in on the legality of citizen-sponsored initiatives, Cowan added. 

Major Wes Hayes, Marine Corps Recruiting Command spokesperson, responded to the Planet by e-mail: “To answer your question; the Marine Corps works closely with the Army Corps of Engineers when determining the locations for recruiting offices all around the country. The ACOE takes all lawful regulations and zoning requirements into account before recommending locations of any Marine Corps Recruiting Office.” 

The impetus for the initiative is that anti-war activists were surprised one day last fall to find a Marine Recruiting Center located smack in the heart of perhaps the most anti-war city in the country. Berkeley has passed several resolutions opposing the war in Iraq and supported the impeachment of the president and vice president for their role in taking the country to war. 

Led by Code Pink, individuals and various groups—including the World Can’t Wait, Grandmothers for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Veterans for Peace, the Middle East Children’s Alliance and more—have been demonstrating for about four months on most weekdays outside the recruiting center at 64 Shattuck Square. 

The city can’t ban recruiters, Adams said. “Prohibition would be a restraint on the First Amendment right of speech.” But she says she believes they can restrict the recruiters to certain areas and create law where a public hearing would be mandated before permitting the recruiters to do their business. 

Entitled “Initiative Petition Establishing Zoning Requirements for Military Recruitment Offices and Private Military Companies,” the measure would prohibit locating a public or private military recruiting office within 600 feet of a residential area, school, library, health clinic or a building used for religious assembly.  

“The Berkeley community has spoken strongly in opposition to U.S. policy of military aggression,” said Lee, a library trustee and activist with the committee supporting Ehren Watada, the first commissioned military officer to refuse deployment to Iraq.  

Keeping youth from being lured into combat “is a health and safety issue,” Lee told the Planet. “We have the right to say no to pornography stores—why can’t we say no to those who promote killing and torture?” she said. 

If the initiative passes, it won’t affect the existing recruiting office. 

On Jan. 30, at noon, pro-war activist Melanie Morgan of KSFO Radio and Medea Benjamin of Code Pink are planning to debate the question of the role of the military in society—the debate will be held outside the recruiting station at 64 Shattuck Square, Adams said.  

Zanne Joi of Code Pink, one of the organizers of the debate, said its purpose is to keep the war “front and center.”  

A frequent protester at the recruiting station, Joi said: “Our hearts are broken every time we’re there, to see people who say we’re fighting for our freedom—we need to educate and inform.” 

In October Morgan organized a counter- demonstration outside the recruiting office, which attracted hundreds of pro-war demonstrators, outnumbering the anti-war protesters. 

Petitioners will need to collect some 2,000 signatures to get the initiative on the Nov. 5 ballot. 

On Tuesday, the City Council will address a resolution from the Peace and Justice Commission: 

• Asking the city attorney to investigate what the city can do with respect to the military recruiting office, given a conflict between the military’s prohibition against recruiting homosexuals and the city’s laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. 

• Asking the city manager to write letters to various U.S. Marine officials, telling them “that the marine recruiting office is not welcome in our city, and if recruiters choose to stay, they do so as uninvited and unwelcome intruders.” 

• Encouraging those groups that “volunteer to impede, passively or actively, by nonviolent means, the work of any military recruiting office located in the city of Berkeley.”

Two weeks after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed slashing K-12 funding as part of his proposed state budget cuts, Berkeley public school officials announced Wednesday that it was time to get on the bus and head for Sacramento. 

Superintendent Michele Lawr-ence warned at the school board meeting Wednesday that if the proposed cuts took place, the district would issue layoff notices to six or seven counselors and some pre-school staff in the Berkeley public schools. 

She added that after-school programs would also be in jeopardy. 

“Because most of K-12 funding comes from the state, our school district will be hurt,” Lawrence said. 

“If we did not have the parcel tax funds we would be doing many more layoffs.” 

A few districts, including Berkeley, get substantial local funding (around $20 million) from the Berkeley Schools Enrichment Program (Measure A) which is almost one-third of the General Fund. 

Calling the situation “troubling,” Berkeley Board of Education President John Selawsky told the Planet that California public schools could not afford further cuts. 

“We are working with so much uncertainty, so much can change,” he said. “We won’t know until the governor releases his May budget. But if the cuts are made, then the Berkeley public schools could lose anything between $2 to $2.5 million. One obvious place would be to freeze hiring, which means everyone is working more.” 

The governor proposes to cut $400 million this year—which Lawrence said would have minimal impact on Berkeley—and $4.4 billion in 2008-09, which meant $700 less for each of the approximately 6.3 million public school students in the state, including Berkeley. 

“At this point it’s not a matter of how we handle it or make the cuts, but how we can stop the action on the part of the governor,” said district spokesperson Mark Coplan, “The message has to be that California education cannot afford a single cut. It’s really ironic because 2008 was supposed to be the year of education reform.” 

County superintendent Sheila Jordan told the Planet that mid-year cuts were unacceptable. 

“We will get ready for layoffs but none of us will run decent schools,” she said. “This unites every district in Alameda County. Even wealthy districts like Pleasonton will be hit. We are really hoping to convince the legislature to stop the cuts.” 

According to a presentation given to the board by Lawrence, the district expects enough resignations and retirements to avoid actual certificated layoffs. 

Compared to most other states, California spends much less on public education. Education Week recently gave the state a D+ for school funding. 

“We have moved from 42 in the nation to 46, below Mississippi,” Lawrence said. “We are spending $2,000 less per student than the national average. Californians need to be very angry about this. It’s morally wrong when we do not invest in the future of our children. The revenue of prisons and correctional facilities continue to grow, so why is the revenue of our public schools lagging behind?” 

According to Lawrence, the proposed cuts are equivalent to: 

• Shutting down every school across the state for one month 

• Laying off 107,000 teachers 

• Cutting more than $20,000 per classroom 

• Eliminating all music, art, and career technical education programs statewide, plus cuts beyond that. 

“Because most music and arts programs are funded by parcel-tax money, we will be able to sustain them,” Lawrence said. 

Cathy Campbell, president of the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, called the proposed cuts devastating. 

“It’s incumbent on all teachers, staff members and administrators to take action to stop these cuts,” she said. “The last time we faced a similar crisis in 2003-04 and 2005-06, Berkeley was part of a statewide effort where we went to Sacramento and rallied. The community needs to come together for this.”

The AC Transit Board of Directors tabled a proposed 25 cent bus fare in-crease Wednesday night to study its implications on ridership, with the issue likely to come back before them before the winter is out. 

With expenses increasing rapidly (district health benefits are reported up over 40 percent, fuel and oil up nearly 50 percent, and pension-fund contributions up 57 percent, all in the past three years) and subsidies from the state in jeopardy if fare revenues don’t increase, transit official directors took their first look this week at four fare-increase proposals. 

If directors had voted to move forward with the fare-increase process, a public hearing on the proposed increase could have taken place as early as April 9th, with directors then voting on final approval. 

However, Ward Two Director Greg Harper (Emeryville, Piedmont, Berkeley) balked at the proposals, saying, “We know from the past that when we raise fares we lose ridership. It takes three years to recover, and then we raise fares again. I’m not going to vote for another fare increase until we grasp what effect it will have on ridership.” Harper asked for detailed information surrounding the last three fare increases, saying that “without that, I feel I’m flying blind on these fare increases.” 

While Board President Chris Peeples (At Large) said he thought the district may need to hire an outside consultant to provide an analysis of the ridership impact of the last three AC Transit fare increases, he called for a tabling of the increase proposals until Harper could get the information from staff and draw up his own analysis. No date was set when the issue would come back before the board. 

Under the proposal recommended by AC Transit staff, adult fares would rise 25 cents from $1.75 to $2 beginning July 1, with the adult monthly pass rising from $70 to $80 and the youth and senior/disability passes rising from $15 to $28. The staff is also proposing raising the basic adult fare 25 cents every four years in a staggered schedule beginning in 2011, with a 10 cent raise that year and a 15 cent raise two years following. 

Other proposals include tying future fare raises to the Consumer Price Index, or offsetting the 25 cent fare increase by providing passengers with automatic, unlimited transfers. The district’s general counsel said that directors had the option of adopting any one of the four proposals, or mixing elements from the different proposals, or coming up with an entirely new fare proposal. 

A memo outlining the four AC Transit proposed fare increase proposals is available at http://www.actransit.org/aboutac/ bod/memos/87caf4.pdf.

Full implementation of AC Transit District’s proposed Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) line ran into a potential chokepoint Wednesday night when dismayed district board members learned that the planned bus-only lanes may not be possible in a 1,000-yard stretch in the heart of Oakland.  

At issue is the 12-lane expressway that currently runs over the 12th Street dam that divides Lake Merritt from the Kaiser Convention Center, separating East Oakland from downtown. 

The problem involves Oakland’s upcoming Measure DD restructuring of the 12-lane expressway, where normal speeds currently go above 40 miles per hour, into a slower, six-lane city road. 

If it’s not resolved, a civil and traffic engineer hired by the City of Oakland said the problem could—in the worst case scenario—cause traffic delays of two minutes or more in that single stretch during peak commute hours when BRT is eventually put in place. 

“That is enough of a delay to destroy the entire purpose of rapid transit,” AC Transit Board Vice President Rebecca Kaplan (At Large) told Oakland officials on Wednesday. “I don’t know where we go from here.” 

As proposed by AC Transit officials, BRT would operate on two dedicated, bus-only lanes carved out of the existing Telegraph Avenue and International Boulevard/E. 14th Street and running from UC Berkeley, through Oakland, and into San Leandro and back. Within those dedicated lanes, special AC Transit buses would be able to run free of auto traffic. 

The proposal has run into potential roadblocks at the two far ends of the system. In San Leandro, city officials have balked at setting up bus-only lanes in the narrow stretch of E. 14th Street that runs through the city’s downtown section, and AC Transit officials have been working with them to carve out an alternate solution acceptable to both sides.  

On Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, a loose coalition of merchants and residents has been actively opposing BRT’s proposed changes for months. Until this week, however, problems had not ap-peared publicly in Oakland. 

Oakland Measure DD Project Mana-ger Joel Peter told transit officials on Wednesday that Oakland project engineers and planners had been working for months to reconcile bus-only lanes over the 12th Street dam with Measure DD’s goals of traffic slowdowns in the area and creation of a park at the west end of Lake Merritt, with no success. 

“Everything we’re doing involves balance,” Peter said, adding that traffic engineering studies showed that if Oakland dedicated one of the three downtown-bound lanes to buses, the resulting backup of cars around the Alameda County Courthouse would eventually reach back to the eastern entrance to the 12th Street exchange, causing the buses to be delayed in entering the exchange, and defeating the whole purpose of the dedicated lanes. 

“How can we ask Berkeley to give dedicated lanes to BRT and not Oakland?” a frustrated Ward 2 Director Greg Harper (Emeryville, Piedmont, Berkeley) told Peter. “All the buses are going to bunch up here. We were told by Oakland that AC Transit was going to be in the loop on these decisions. I don’t know why all of a sudden, when space is available, we can’t get a lane when we’ve been planning for one for seven years.” 

Peter said that Measure DD planners were willing to look at any alternate solutions, and the issue is certain to come up at the end of this week at a regularly-scheduled transportation planning meeting between city and transportation agency officials. The Measure DD Environmental Impact Report is scheduled to be published on Friday of this week or the following Monday, with consideration by the Oakland Planning Commission on Feb. 13. 

Tenants and customers of West Berkeley’s landmark Sawtooth Building have been granted an extra month to use a parking lot they say is critical to their commercial survival. 

Bayer Healthcare had posted signs in December announcing the impending closure of a lot leased by the city on Parker Street across from the building with the jagged roofline. 

John Curl, a building tenant, said meetings with Councilmember Darryl Moore, City Manager Phil Kamlarz and Bayer officials have produced an agreement to keep the lot open till the end of February. 

A longer-term solution may also be within reach, he said, though he didn’t want to say what it might be since negotiations are currently underway between the city and the Bavarian-based multinational. 

Another public meeting under the councilmember’s aegis has been tentatively set for Feb. 18, where more news may be announced, Curl said. 

“It’s really important for us,” he said, adding that tenants who leased performance spaces in the building would be destroyed if they lost access to a nearby parking lot.

“Activism is the elixir of life” was his motto. And Milt Wolff was an icon of activism, as were his fellow veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. He could be seen at demonstrations and political events well into his 80s and even 90s. 

Wolff was sharp tongued and vibrant until the end. He could dominate a conversation, using history and politics to cast his spell. To have lunch with him was  

to take a journey through history. And it wasn’t so much his retelling of Spanish Civil War adventures, but his tales of a time when actions had meaning and taking a stand against injustice was clear-cut. Wolff radiated a sense of purpose that was contagious. He was an active participant in the Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and opposition to American intervention in Latin America. 

To have fought in the Spanish Civil War has become synonymous with idealism, and it was the defining experience of Wolff’s life. He took over the command of the American volunteers when he was 22 years old. The previous commanders had all been killed or wounded. Ernest Hemingway compared Wolff to Abraham Lincoln in stature and praised his military prowess. The two became drinking buddies and friends. 

After the war, Wolff became the commander of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, an organization dedicated to aiding Spanish Civil War refugees and vets, and to continuing the fight against fascism in its many forms. He had a sense of how to get publicity and an uncanny ability to raise money for progressive causes. During its heyday, nearly 1,000 people attended the annual VALB reunions. At one point they raised over $100,000 to send ambulances to Nicaragua to support the Sandinista government against the U.S.-backed Contras. 

Preserving the legacy of the struggle became Wolff’s raison d’être. Given any opportunity, he would talk about the Spanish Civil War and the activism of the Lincoln vets, from making speeches at political meetings to chatting up the person next to him in the supermarket line. 

I remember picking Wolff up at the hospital when he was nearly 80. He had been injured bicycling to a gym at five in the morning. As he was leaving, one of the Kaiser nurses who had attended him walked up and, clenching her fist, chanted, “¡Viva Communista! No pasaran!” A week later Wolff was on his way to Cuba to challenge the U.S. blockade. 

In contrast to his military exploits, Wolff was a self-made intellectual and artist, having dropped out of high school during the Great Depression. He attempted a career as a commercial artist and painter but was blacklisted by the FBI. He wrote two autobiographical novels, “Another Hill” and “Member of the Working Class.” 

On Jan. 14, Milt Wolff died in hospice care. He was 92. “No pep talks,” he warned those who visited him in his final days, some from as far away as Spain. He quickly turned the conversation to who would win the primaries. 

There will be a memorial to Milt Wolff on March 29, the time and place to be announced. For more information on the memorial go to www.MiltWolff.rb68.com. 

On March 30, in San Francisco, there will be an unveiling of a monument to all of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. For more information go to www.alba-valb.org.  

Richard Bermack is the author of “The Front Lines of Social Change: Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.” 

Photograph by Richard Bermack. 

Milt Wolff in September 2007 in El Cerrito.

Robbery ring 

What began as the arrest of a violent burglar at the Doubletree Hotel in the Berkeley Marina ended up as the smashing of a robbery ring which had terrorized Bay Area merchants. 

It took four officers to subdue 39-year-old Robert Andrew Farmer when they confronted him at the Marina hostelry shortly before 4 a.m. on Jan. 4. 

During the struggle, an alleged accomplice jumped out of a closet onto the backs of arresting officers and tried to grab a pistol out of one of the uniformed officers’ holster, reports Berkeley Police spokesperson Sgt. Mary Kusmiss. 

So Jenna Marine Mercure, 35, of Martinez, was also clapped into handcuffs and hauled off to the local lockup. 

There officers learned that Farmer was the subject of a $150,000 warrant resulting from a Pleasant Hill robbery when he had allegedly punched and stomped the head of a jewelry store clerk in the course of a heist, inflicting serious injuries. 

Investigators also realized that Farmer matched the description given by witnesses to a robbery two days earlier at the Red Bird, a jewelry and women’s clothing story near the Claremont Hotel in the 2900 block of Domingo Avenue. 

In that heist, Farmer had allegedly pulled a pistol and ordered a clerk to fill a snakeskin bag with jewelry while his partner went to the back of the store and made off with more jewelry. 

Sgt. Kusmiss said Farmer admitted the jewelry heist to investigators, and more digging led to links to their fences in El Sobrante and Richmond. 

Police recovered more than $150,000 in loot, which Sgt. Kusmiss said was restored to its owners. The investigation also led to the arrests of Farmer’s brother, Patrick Ryan Farmer, 29, who Kusmiss said has also admitted his participation in the robbery spree. 

Bank heists 

Bank robbers struck twice in Berkeley last week, striking once on Monday and again on Friday, both times on Shattuck Avenue. 

“We had six bank robberies for all of 2007, so two in one week is kind of unusual,” said Sgt. Kusmiss. 

The first robber struck at 5:15 p.m. Monday at the Washington Mutual branch at 2150 Shattuck. He approach a teller, presented a note and demanded cash. Loot in hand, he headed back out the front door and was last seen headed southbound on the avenue. 

The second robber, a different felon, walked into the Union Bank of California branch at 2333 Shattuck Ave. at 11:50 a.m. Friday, where he walked up to a teller, quietly informing the teller that he was robbing the place. He held his hand inside his jacket, as though gripping a pistol, said Sgt. Kusmiss. He also fled on foot, but out the bank’s rear door. 

Robbery arrests 

UC Berkeley police arrested two 17-year-olds they have charged with the robbery of a pedestrian Sunday night near the corner of College Avenue and Dwight Way. 

According to campus police, the victim flagged down a passing UCPD patrol car moments before midnight to report the crime, which had been perpetrated by a pair of young men who had rolled up in a white car and threatened to beat him if he didn’t hand over his cell phone and iPod. 

Less than an hour later, campus officers saw a similar car and made a stop. The pair was arrested after an identification by the robbery victim. 

Honda vs. bike 

A Berkeley bicyclist sustained minor injuries early Friday evening when he was struck by a Honda as he turned from The Alameda in North Berkeley. Sgt. Kusmiss said the cyclist, a 26-year-old Berkeley man, hit the passenger side of the car, which had failed to yield the right of way. The bike rider was thrown onto the hood of the car, and sustained abrasions and bruises. The driver, 74, is also a Berkeley resident.

Civil rights in Berkeley has become like the residue of smoke once the smoker has left the room, says Osha Neumann, an attorney who works mostly with homeless and indigent people. 

Along with Melvin Dickson of the original Black Panther Party, Andrea Prichett of CopWatch, Jim Chanin, attorney and member of a Police Review Commission subcommittee and others, Neumann will speak on a panel tomorrow (Saturday) addressing the question of how to bring civil liberties back to Berkeley. 

Sponsored by Berkeley CopWatch and Disabled People Outside, the event will take place noon-2 p.m. at 1730 Oregon St. Participants will have a chance to speak out about their own experiences, Prichett told the Planet. 

Panelists will address various aspects of the loss of civil rights in Berkeley. 

“Police review has completely collapsed,” Neumann said on Wednesday. 

A California court case, coupled with a local lawsuit by the Berkeley Police Officers Association, has resulted in restrictions so severe that public complaint hearings against the police can no longer be held, he said. Behind-closed-door hearings are permitted, but the complaining party cannot be present to hear the police officer's response. 

“We need a reality check on what Berkeley really is,” Prichett told the Planet. One of the issues Prichett said she will raise on Saturday is the case of former police Sgt. Cary Kent, the officer who stole drugs when he was in charge of drug evidence. 

One of the key reasons to hold the panel Saturday is to remind the community of this issue, which will be before the City Council for the first time at its meeting Tuesday, Prichett said. 

Kent was convicted in April 2006 on three felony charges: grand theft, possession of heroin and possession of methamphetamine, and served a one-year detention in his home in Contra Costa County. Prichett is a member of the city’s Police Review Commission subcommittee that investigated the Kent issue and has made recommendations to the City Council, which the council will consider Tuesday. 

Prichett said she will speak at the forum Saturday about the need for the city to do further investigation. 

The subcommittee and a unanimous Police Review Commission is recommending, among other proposals, that the council ask the city manager to further investigate 286 envelopes containing drug evidence that had been tampered with, and to ask the chief to consider reassigning all officers currently assigned to the drug evidence room who had worked with Kent in the drug evidence room during the time he was stealing drugs.

Lawyers challenging UC Berkeley’s plans for a gym next to Memorial Stadium must produce expert evidence to back their claim that the two buildings are really one. 

That was the ruling Wednesday by Alameda County Superior Court Judge Barbara J. Miller, upholding a directive she issued in December. 

Attorneys for the City of Berkeley and neighborhood and environmental groups challenging the university’s plans had contested the order, which had been supported by the university’s lawyers. 

The litigation before the Hayward judge addresses the question of whether or not UC Regents acted legally when they adopted the environmental impact report for a range of stadium-area projects and approved funding for one of the projects, the Student Athlete High Performance Center (SAHPC). 

Challenging the regents are Stephan Volker, representing the California Oak Foundation and City Councilmember Dona Spring, Michael Lozeau for the Panoramic Hill Association, and Sacramento attorney Harriet Steiner for the City of Berkeley. 

“We’re confident that the further evidence we will present in response to Judge Miller’s order will show that the SAHPC “is both an alteration of and an addition to California Memorial Stadium,” Volker said. 

Lozeau agreed. 

The issue is critical, because if Judge Miller finds the high-tech gym and office complex is a part of the stadium, then it would trigger cost limits imposed on additions and alterations to buildings within 50 feet of active earthquake faults. 

The stadium itself sits directly over the Hayward Fault, deemed the Bay Area’s most threatening fissure by federal geologists, and the Alquist-Priolo Act limits additions and alterations to half the value of the existing building. 

Just what the stadium’s value might be is another question altogether, with the university arguing for replacement value of a new stadium built to current building codes, while opponents say that current resale value should be the proper figure. 

Judge Miller’s order sets a deadline of Feb. 22 for submission of the experts’ declarations, with responses due by March 3 and oral arguments set for March 7. 

A final ruling on the issue should come within 30 days. 

“We welcome the opportunity to provide the court with this evidence,” said Dan Mogulof, executive director of UC Berkeley’s Office of Public Affairs. 

“We are confident that engineering experts will confirm that in no way, shape or form is the Student Athlete High Performance Center an addition or alteration to California Memorial Stadium.” 

Only Mogulof was willing to name an expert who would be presenting a statement. Among UC’s offering will be a declaration from Vice Chancellor Ed Denton. 

Denton had fought the delay caused by the court action, stating that a year’s delay would cost $8 million to $10 million.  

Asked about the additional delay caused by Miller’s decision to take more evidence after both sides had rested their cases, Mogulof said that “as frustrated as we are by the additional delay, we feel the benefits of providing the judge with additional evidence will far outweigh the costs.” 

Meanwhile, in the grove of oaks and other trees which would fall to make way for the gym, a band of tree-sitters continues their vigil high in the branches in protest of the university’s plans. The tree-sit is now well into its fourteenth month, despite its encirclement by a ring of two fences erected by the university.

Presenting the draft Downtown Plan to Berkeley’s Planning Commission Wednesday night, DAPAC Chair Will Travis declared that the commission could tinker with the proposal’s fabric only “at your peril.” 

“If you pull at one loose thread, the whole thing will fall apart,” he warned. 

And with that—and with the backing of Mayor Tom Bates—the chair of the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee gave a brisk yank on the proposal’s most delicate strand. 

Travis, who chaired the 21-member citizen panel through 50 meetings and two years of deliberations, urged commissioners to commission an economic study to see if the adopted development standards of the plan’s land-use chapter would generate funds to develop the social, transportation and open space amenities urged by the other chapters. 

He told commissioners he had made the recommendation after consulting with the mayor. 

An 11-10 DAPAC majority had specifically rejected commissioning a study, a rebuff targeted at repeated submissions by DAPAC staff planner Matt Taecker to consider a series of 16-story “point towers” to accommodate more housing in the city center. 

In the final land-use element adopted by DAPAC on an 11-1-8 vote, building heights would be restricted to 85 feet in most areas of downtown, with the exception of four structures at 100 feet, four more at 120 and two high-rise hotels which could rise 100 feet higher. 

A committee minority, which included Planning Commission Chair James Samuels, objected to the limits, warning that restrictions on height and building mass could kill development, along with their much-needed fees. 

The battle over building heights and massing—dubbed floor-to-area-ratio (FAR)—generated ongoing debates within the committee, with concessions coming mainly from those who favored smaller buildings. 

“The downtown is a wonderful place to have growth,” Travis told commissioners, arguing that growth, like toothpaste, has to come out somewhere if the squeeze is on. 

The squeeze facing the commission comes from three sources: 

• The Association of Bay Area Governments, which sets housing quotas each jurisdiction must allow to be built, though not requiring their actual construction; 

• UC Berkeley, which must receive and approve a completed plan by May, 2009, or it will start cutting back payments to the city under a court-approved settlement, and 

• The environmental review process, which will be taking place at the same time both the commission and City Council are contemplating implementation language and any changes they want to make to the plan.  

When Commissioner David Stoloff told Travis that the plan’s implementation provisions “probably need some incentives” for developers, the DAPAC chair responded that “nobody’s breaking down our doors” at the moment to build anything. 

While both Travis and City Planning and Development Director Dan Marks hailed the committee’s “remarkable” efforts, both disagreed with the panel’s decisions to adopt height and mass limitations without a study of economic feasibility. 

Marks told commissioners that they need to decide soon if they want a study, because there’s no funding budgeted for an analysis, and he would have to go to the City Council to seek the cash to pay consultants. 

Samuels asked if a commission resolution was needed to spark the study, and Marks agreed, adding that “DAPAC had a lot of goodies they expect ... and there’s a point at which they don’t get any goodies” if there’s no development. 

“When we presented the plan to the City Council, one of the councilmembers said he wanted to make sure the plan contained a poison pill,” Samuels said. “I interpreted that to mean that if building height” prevented development, “that was a poison pill.” 

Marks acknowledged that “some people don’t think we would get objective information,” prompting a vigorous nodding of Patti Dacey’s head. She was one of three planning commissioners who voted in favor of the plan’s height limits, along with Helen Burke and Gene Poschman. 

Moments later, after declaring that “experts can find whatever you want them to find,” Dacey quipped, “What about Paul Krugman?”  

Stoloff said he thought the plans FAR numbers “should be expanded a bit ... we need to have the square footage to generate the fees or we can’t have the amenities the plan calls for.” 

Limiting height forces the unit costs of housing higher, and the plan’s limitations, he said, would leave the downtown affordable only to the very wealthy and cost the city needed affordable housing. 

Poschman said he worried that the rush to complete an environmental impact report (EIR) on the plan even before the details were adopted was “a case of the tail wagging the dog.” 

He said he was also concerned that the planning staff proposal for the commission didn’t call for any public hearings and faulted “the lack of input from stakeholders.” 

“I don’t want to see this thing get end-loaded ... where we rush this thing to the council without having considered all if it,” he said, adding that he also wanted the commission to make its position clear on the point-tower issue. 

Burke and Dacey also urged public hearings, and Jennifer McDougall, the UC Berkeley planner assigned to downtown planning issues, said she would like to see any hearing conducted while students are in the city and not during the summer. 

According to Taecker’s current schedule, Oakland-based EIR consultants Lamphier-Gregory Associates will launch the draft EIR process in the near future, as staff begins work on an alternative that would be considered at the same level as the DAPAC proposal. 

Staff will also be preparing implementation language that can be written into the plan itself as well as a measure that can be added simultaneously or immediately afterwards to the city’s Zoning Ordinance. 

The draft EIR will be ready in September, with the final EIR completed by January 2009 and adopted with the plan itself in May 2009. 

The final plan must also pass muster with UC Berkeley, under terms of the settlement agreement that ended the city’s lawsuit challenging its growth plans.

West Berkeley zoning changes and a dramatic public challenge rounded out a Wednesday night Planning Commission schedule otherwise dominated by the Downtown Area Plan. 

At issue is what city staff calls “increased flexibility” that they say would ease the way for new projects in West Berkeley linked to research at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). 

But the proposal has raised concerns among West Berkeley’s artisan community, who fear that what may be in store is a virtual demolition-in-place of the existing West Berkeley Plan. 

Dave Fogarty of the city’s Economic Development Department said changes in zoning rules had become more crucial because of “the technology transfers that occur here” resulting from research at the university and LBNL. 

Because of that, he said, it is less important that traditional manufacturing activities continue in the city’s only industrial and manufacturing zones. 

But the loss of industrial jobs and their replacement by high-tech workers alarmed Bernard Marszalek of Inkworks and Rick Auerbach, who serves as the staff of WEBAIC, West Berkeley Artisans and Industrial Companies. 

Auerbach said the area’s current industries boast a workforce that is 65 to 70 percent African American, Latino and Asian, and the transition to high-tech jobs would offer jobs mainly to “highly educated white people.” 

“It’s flabbergasting, really,” he said. 

Auerbach said he was concerned that the commission’s mandate amounted to a virtual redrafting of the current plan, but Planning and Development Director Dan Marks said that the changes “would fit within the context of the [plan’s] goals and objectives.” 

Allan Gatzke, the planner assigned to the project, said the proposals would evolve over the course of five additional meetings, beginning with a tour of the area and meetings with businesses and community members that will also be open to the public. 

The tour will encompass six areas deemed suitable for major development projects: the Marchant Building, Macauly Foundry, American Soils, Peerless Lighting, Flint Ink and Fantasy Building sites. 

The impetus for the commission’s look at West Berkeley was a June 13, 2006, recommendation from City Councilmembers Linda Maio and Laurie Capitelli. 

That direction called for zoning changes “to allow for more rational use of space and enhance the ability of arts/crafts to locate in West Berkeley.” 

City staff reported that developers have pulled out of attractive projects because of the complex rules for development, and Fogarty said that traditional manufacturing jobs have declined in the area as part of a national trend. 

Because of high housing costs, he said, very few blue-collar workers employed in the area can afford to live in the city. 

But Auerbach and Marszalek bristled at his suggestion that West Berkeley may not need manufacturing. 

A more suitable model might be Bayer, the German company which operates a $100 million facility in West Berkeley that yields an annual production of chemical congeners that can be held in one hand. 

Fogarty said companies like Bayer posed as much a threat of raised rents for WEBAIC members as an expansion of commercial and retail business—a contention immediately challenged by Commissioner Gene Poschman, who asked for hard data to support the claim. 

“I don’t think Bayer raised the rent on adjoining property by a nickel,” he said. 

Helen Burke said she wanted the commission to offer a way for stakeholders to participate in discussion of proposed changes, and at greater length than the three minutes usually allotted during the public comment period. 

Drama, challenge 

The meeting had kicked off with a dramatic challenge to the commission from Berkeley attorney Christopher Lien, who demanded to know if the City Council’s representative was present. 

Meeting bemused gazes from commissioners and staff, he then cited city code Section 3.28.040.  

That provision, the second paragraph of city ordinance setting up the Planning Commission, provides that the council “appoint one of its members to act as a liaison representative” to the commission, “to attend the meetings of said commission,” advise council colleagues about the reasons for commission actions, and on the request of any commissioner, to advise the commission of council policies and decisions that bear on items under consideration by commissioners. 

“I don’t see this representative from the City Council here,” said Lien. 

“They don’t come in every time,” said commission secretary Jordan Harrison. 

“Was this ignored last week?” Lien asked. “Was it ignored the week before?” 

Receiving no response, he added, “This apparently has been ignored for a long period of time.” 

And a look through the Daily Planet’s archives shows no instance in recent years when the council has dispatched a member to regularly attend commission meetings. 

Lien had another bone to pick with commissioners as well: Enforcement of Meas-ure L, the 1986 ballot measure requiring the city to acquire and open parkland at the rate of two acres for every thousand residents in each census tract. 

When Commissioner Susan Wengraf told Lien his remarks were better directed to the council, the attorney responded, “And you have a right to demand that your city council liaison be here.” 

He concluded with a threat to take every commission decision to a public referendum unless the commission complied with the ordinances. 

Measure L, he said, was designation by voters as a high priority measure, and thus stands second only to the City Charter as a legal obligation of municipal government.

The Berkeley Board of Education on Wednesday approved the appointment of Dan Lee to the Merit Commission. 

The board had interviewed both Lee and former merit commissioner Roy Doolan on Dec. 19. They voted 4-1, with board president John Selawsky abstaining, to appoint Lee. 

Doolan, whose three-year term came to an end on Dec. 1, told the Planet before his interview that the school board might not reappoint him because he took an independent position on budget allocations, one out of step with the board’s wishes. 

He received a letter from the board in August notifying him that they were opening up the application process and that he could apply for the position if he wanted to.  

District superintendent Michele Lawr-ence, in an interview with the Planet in December, described Doolan’s concern as premature. 

Doolan, currently in New Zealand, could not be reached for comment after the vote. 

“The board has the right to choose its own appointees on the committee,” said school board president John Selawsky. “The board just felt that a change of scenery might help. We have been arguing about the real duties and functions for a long time. One of the main things is whether the Merit Commission can allocate a budget by itself.” 

Comprised of three members—one appointed by the Board of Education, one appointed by the collective bargaining units and the third approved and appointed by both—the commission deals with issues of personnel management. 

According to Doolan and Commission Chair Margaret Rowland, who was chosen by both bodies acting jointly, the disagreement between the commission and the school board arose from the commission’s budget allocations beginning in late February. 

Doolan had wanted to pay 100 percent of the director of the classified personnel’s salary from the commission’s budget, which had been the case about two years ago, but Lawrence had pushed for paying 80 percent of the salary out of the district budget, a move Doolan said limited the commission’s power. 

Lawrence contended that the shift had been suggested to cut back on money in all the departments in the district when it was in financial trouble. 

The County Board of Education approved the Merit Commission’s 100 percent budget allocation to pay the director’s salary in July. It will be effective until June 30, 2008. 

Doolan said he received a letter from the board in June which stated that he was not representing the interests of the school board. 

“I want to assure my fellow board members that you do represent our views and that you will convey this position at the Merit Commission meetings,” wrote former board president and board member Joaquin Rivera. 

Rowland wrote back saying that the commission’s independent status was outlined in the Education Code. 

“There has been no response to the letter we sent to the board and it’s become evident that there was some misunderstanding about the role of the board and the role of the commission,” Rowland told the Planet Wednesday. “My chief concern is that the autonomy of the Merit Commission be maintained. If the Merit Commission and the board hold a common meeting once a year, as happens in other districts, it would create better understanding.” 

Lee, a former nutrition services director for the Berkeley district and for the Hayward school district, is a graduate of Berkeley High School and UC Davis. His children attended Berkeley public schools. 

“I think it’s very important the way employees are treated in the district,” he told the Planet Thursday. “The training of employees so that they can go up in the ranks has always interested me. I am familiar with the education code and I totally agree with the idea of an independent Merit Commission.”

Posted Thurs., Jan. 24—Full implementation of AC Transit District’s proposed Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) line ran into a potential chokepoint Wednesday night when dismayed district board members learned that the planned bus-only lanes may not be possible in a 1,000-yard stretch in the heart of Oakland.  

At issue is the 12-lane expressway that currently runs over the 12th Street dam that divides Lake Merritt from the Kaiser Convention Center, separating East Oakland from downtown. 

The problem involves Oakland’s upcoming Measure DD restructuring of the 12-lane expressway, where normal speeds currently go above 40 miles per hour into a slower, six-lane city road. 

If it’s not resolved, a civil and traffic engineer hired by the City of Oakland said the problem could—in the worst case scenario—cause traffic delays of two minutes or more in that single stretch during peak commute hours when BRT is eventually put in place. 

“That is enough of a delay to destroy the entire purpose of rapid transit,” AC Transit Board Vice President Rebecca Kaplan (At Large) told Oakland officials on Wednesday. “I don’t know where we go from here.” 

As proposed by AC Transit officials, BRT would operate on two dedicated, bus-only lanes carved out of the existing Telegraph Avenue and International Boulevard/E. 14th Street and running from UC Berkeley, through Oakland, and into San Leandro. Within those dedicated lanes, special AC Transit buses would be able to run free of auto traffic. 

The proposal has run into potential roadblocks at the two far ends of the system. In San Leandro, city officials have balked at setting up bus-only lanes in the narrow stretch of E. 14th Street that runs through the city’s downtown section, and AC Transit officials have been working with them to carve out an alternate solution acceptable to both sides.  

On Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, a loose coalition of merchants and residents has been actively opposing BRT’s proposed changes for months. Until this week, however, problems had not appeared publicly in Oakland. 

Oakland Measure DD Project Manager Joel Peter told transit officials on Wednesday that Oakland project engineers and planners had been working for months to reconcile bus-only lanes over the 12th Street dam with Measure DD’s goals of traffic slowdowns in the area and creation of a park at the west end of Lake Merritt, with no success. 

“Everything we’re doing involves balance,” Peter said, adding that traffic engineering studies showed that if Oakland dedicated one of the three downtown-bound lanes to buses, the resulting backup of cars around the Alameda County Courthouse would eventually reach back to the eastern entrance to the 12th Street exchange, causing the buses to be delayed in entering the exchange, and defeating the whole purpose of the dedicated lanes. 

“How can we ask Berkeley to give dedicated lanes to BRT and not Oakland?” a frustrated Ward 2 Director Greg Harper (Emeryville, Piedmont, Berkeley) told Peter. “All the buses are going to bunch up here. We were told by Oakland that AC Transit was going to be in the loop on these decisions. I don’t know why all of a sudden, when space is available, we can’t get a lane when we’ve been planning for one for seven years.” 

Peter said that Measure DD planners were willing to look at any alternate solutions, and the issue is certain to come up at the end of this week at a regularly-scheduled transportation planning meeting between city and transportation agency officials. The Measure DD Environmental Impact Report is scheduled to be published on Friday of this week or the following Monday, with consideration by the Oakland Planning Commission on Feb. 13. 

Posted Wed., Jan. 23—The little town of Albany stood up Tuesday night, first to the University of California and then to the California Food and Drug Administration and the CFDA partner, the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 

The City Council condemned the UC Berkeley’s decision to cut down some 300 trees on the university-owned Gill Tract property at Marin and San Pablo avenues, claiming that only some of the trees are damaged. The council authorized its attorney to go to court to block what some community members called “clear cutting” if a delay in removing the trees—except for seriously diseased Monterey Pines—cannot otherwise be negotiated.  

The university said it plans to begin cutting down the trees as early as Jan. 26. 

And the council passed a strongly worded resolution opposing CDFA plans for aerial spraying to eradicate the light brown apple moth (LBAM). 

The state had planned to begin spraying Alameda County in the spring in its ongoing efforts to eradicate the LBAM. But Tuesday afternoon, just hours before the council meeting, the CDFA/USDA released their decision to delay the aerial spraying, according to John Connell, CDFA Plant Health & Pest Prevention Services director, who told the council and some 45 people who waited until past 11 p.m. to hear the discussion on the moth. 

After the state sprayed in the fall in the Monterey and Santa Cruz areas, hundreds of people reported feeling ill. Santa Cruz and Monterey counties filed lawsuits, alleging CDFA failed to perform an environmental impact report before spraying. The EIR would have included a range of alternatives to the spray and would have considered public comment. 

“In consultation with the technical working group, an international panel of experts, that panel recommended that CDFA/USDA take a look at other materials that have become available for the [eradication of] the light brown apple moth,” Connell said. “They do remain committed that this moth should be eradicated, and the primary tools to achieve that eradication would be an aerial application” of a product designed to disrupt mating behavior of the moths. 

A new product is being developed and tested in New Zealand, however, Connell said, noting that the CDFA expects to get the results of New Zealand trials of the product by early April. 

Once they decide which product to use, the CDFA will first go back to the Santa Cruz/Monterey area to continue spraying there, then on to the Bay Area, Connell said.  

Meanwhile, the state plans to use other methods of eradication. They are evaluating, among other means, traps tied to host plants with pheromone mixed with a small amount of pesticide that would attract then kill the male moths, according to a Jan. 22 CDFA/USDA press statement. 

Neither the council nor the public was convinced that aerial spaying using the newer product should take place. 

“There’s no information in what was released today,” Nan Wishner, chair of the Albany Integrated Pest Management Task Force, told the council. "The concern is that [the product] is used with aerial spraying.” 

The spray used in the Santa Cruz area, Checkmate OLF-F and Checkmate LBAM-F, contains a synthetic pheromone, scents designed to confuse male moths to keep them from mating. When sprayed from the air, the pheromones are contained in microcapsules with ingredients some say are potentially harmful, such as formaldehydes.  

Opponents of the spraying say the microcapsules can cause lung damage, while the state says the product is safe. 

Albany resident Ed Fields objected to the state use of the new product: “We will be the subject of the tests—they will try it out on us,” he said.  

The council was unanimous in its opposition to the spray: “Even a few people being hurt is not acceptable,” said Councilmember Farid Javandel. 

While the resolution cannot prevent the state from going ahead with its plans, Mayor Robert Lieber said it was important to take a stand. “We need a grassroots movement to say it’s not OK” to spray for the moth, Lieber told the Planet after the meeting. “We need to start having an effect on other communities.” 

The state will make a presentation to the Berkeley City Council on the LBAM Feb. 26.  

A community meeting on the spray will take place Jan. 30 7:30 p.m. at the Center for Environmental Health, 528 61st St., Oakland. 

Berkeley’s official design review panel gave a scathing review to developer Ali Kashani’s five-story condo complex planned for a corner of one of the city’s busiest intersections. 

The building’s 96 condos above a ground floor of retail and parking will be built on a stretch of San Pablo Avenue from Ashby Avenue south to Carrison Street on the site of a recently demolished Shell gasoline station. 

“This is not the model for Berkeley in any sense of the word,” said Design Review Committee Chair David Snippen. “You’ll have to make it look more like Berkeley than Emeryville.” 

The E-word—Emeryville—immediately became the dominant meme in describing the plans designed by architect Jill Williams of Oakland’s KTYG Group as she and Kashani sat in the front row, taking notes. 

The 183,000-square-foot building includes 96 condo apartments, with eight studio units, 50 one-bedroom units and 38 with two bedrooms and 12,600 square feet of ground floor commercial space. 

Each condo will have a single parking space, with an additional 25 spaces allotted for the retail users. Entrance to the parking spaces will be on Carrison Street to the south, one of the major concerns raised by neighbors. 

Residential parking will be in a single underground level. 

Thursday night’s presentation was an informal preview for the committee, an option which allows a developer to look for input without the threat of formal action. 

Kashani came to the meeting armed with a sense of humor. “In the last four years, I left the non-profit sector and went over to the dark side,” he said as he began his presentation. 

After closing escrow on the property early last year, he said, he began mapping studies in April and held the first meetings with project neighbors in July. 

Kashani’s partner in the project is Rawson, Blum & Leon, a San Francisco development firm, represented by Vice President for Acquisitions David S. Greensfelder, the former real estate manager for Longs Drugs. 

The San Francisco firm owns commercial properties on the West Coast and in Louisiana. 

Kashani said they had consciously decided not to maximize the development: to build up to the full scale allowed by law. “There is 280 percent more open space than is required,” he said, and 33 percent more parking for retail customers than city standards mandate. He had also included 15 foot ceilings for the retail spaces, he said. 

The project also includes 15 units reserved for low-income buyers, Kashani said, which entitled him to add a fifth floor to the building. 

Architect Williams said her plans will meet the requirement for the most basic of the four levels of certification under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System. 

Helen Jones, a project neighbor, told the committee she had two basic concerns. “I just worried about it being so huge,” and because of the additional traffic it would generate in conjunction with the nearby new Berkeley Bowl outlet now under construction. 

“When I first started hearing about this project, they asked us what we’d like to see,” said Alan Bretz. While some suggested “a small organic produce stand, it has exploded into this.” 

Eric Stark, a Carrison Street neighbor, said the frontage on his street “looks like a cinder wall.” He said he was also worried about traffic, since his children play on the residential street. He also dropped the E-word. 

“I’m just appalled by the lack of imagination in every new building going up in Berkeley,” said Michael Larrick, adding that architectural detail had been replaced by the application of different colors of paint to stucco. 

Of the project itself, he said, “It’s cheap, it’s easy to construct ... it’s a box with no adornment.” Instead, designers should look to the nearby Heinz Building, a city landmark, to seek details to pick up in the new design. 

“I want some consideration for the safety of my kids and for our neighborhood,” said Phillip Mason, another Carrison Street resident. ”We have a good street. We don’t need this.” 

The it came time for committee members to weigh in again. 

“My first response is that it’s big,” said Burton Edwards. “My second, third and last responses are that it’s big.” 

While the project “is much bigger and more massive than I would approve, it may be out of our hands because of the density bonus.” 

That said, “There are some hideous units in the middle of this building,” with the condos looking onto the courtyard on the first and second residential floors topping his list. 

Edwards said he also wanted to see more variety in the street frontage along San Pablo, a point taken up by Snippen, who also described the project as “an awfully big building.” He too wanted to see more articulation along the street frontage. 

Snippen said he also wondered why many of the units “are really tiny, especially the interior courtyard units.” 

The project, he said “is not the model for Berkeley in any sense of the word.” 

Sarah Shumer said she wanted to see the building set back along Carrison, because otherwise the structure “would block sense of front yards along the street.” 

Carrie Olson said she wanted to see the street frontage massing broken up, and offered some advice for the neighbors, citing other neighborhoods which had battled projects along San Pablo. “Other neighborhoods have done through this,” she said, “so you have brothers out there.” 

“And sisters,” quipped Kashani. “Don’t forget Marie Bowman.” 

Bowman had battled with the developer over another project, the five-story Sacramento Senior Homes building at Sacramento and Blake streets. 

Olson also said she didn’t understand which Kashani’s project called for a 58-foot height. 

“There is a new code that allows it,” he said. 

“That is a building code,” not a zoning ordinance, Edwards cautioned. 

“This is a very big volume,” said Rob Ludlow. “It is overbearing on the neighborhood.” 

While he like the retail space, Ludlow said there was a lack of continuity between the proposal’s upper and low levels. He also cautioned Kashani that while traffic flow itself was up to the city’s transportation commission and staff, the impact of car lights and traffic noise did fall within the design review committee’s ambit. 

Kashani’s only response to the critique was to say that he was shocked by the critique of the courtyard units, which he thought had been nicely designed. 

It’s now up to the developer and his architect to decide how to respond to the critique before coming back more formally in search of permits and official design approval.

Berkeley Design Review Committee members gave a qualified thumbs up Thursday night to plans for a controversial and long-delayed condominium project on University Avenue. 

Zoning Adjustments Board members had approved the project at 1698 University Ave. nearly three years ago, but the project had fallen into limbo. 

Then Pinole real estate broker Brian Baniqued bought the property, obtained new financing, submitted new designs and sought approval of a modification of the original use permit. 

Known informally as the Tune-Up Masters project because of the auto maintenance business that once occupied the site, the building plans had sparked heated debate at ZAB before they approved it in April 2005. 

After an unsuccessful appeal by neighbors to the City Council was defeated three months later, the project fell into development limbo. 

Beyond the objections of neighbors who worried about the building’s impact on homes on Addison Street to the rear of the site, ZAB members were concerned at learning the city had differing affordable housing requirements for condo projects and apartment buildings. 

Ownership projects were required to set aside 10 percent of units for buyers making 120 percent of the area median income, while apartment builders are required to set aside twice as many. 

In return for providing the affordable units, developers are entitled to density bonuses, allowing them to increase the size of their projects above the maximums that would otherwise apply under city zoning regulations—though just how much has been a bone of contention between city planning staff and some of the citizen commissioners and city councilmembers. 

Concerned, ZAB created a density bonus subcommittee to study the issue and formulate policy recommendations, and the City Council later added members from the Planning and Housing Advisory commissions. 

When the subcommittee’s mandate was ended, the matter was handed on to the Planning Commission, which is currently pondering the issue. 

Meanwhile, Pacific Bay Investments, the original developers, sold the property and its already approved development rights to Baniqued. 

The new owner hired Berkeley architect KwanLam Wong to modify the project, in part to address neighborhood noise and privacy concerns. 

“This is a really, really big building for our neighborhood,” said Robin Kibby, an Addison Street resident who had fought the project three years earlier. 

Kibby said she was happy that a roof deck had been pushed back and plantings added to meet privacy concerns, but she was still concerned about traffic and a design she described as “industrial.” 

While committee members said they were concerned about several design issues, Baniqued said that if their concerns threatened to prolong the project, he would simply move forward under the existing permit. 

With his funding commitment about to expire, Baniqued said, he had no other option. 

The committee will still have one more chance to make small modifications—color scheme was one issue—after he takes the project to ZAB for approval of the new permit. 

Fantasy kids 

Wareham Developers partner Chris Barlow gave the committee a preliminary look at the newest tenant of one his firm’s newest acquisitions, the Fantasy Building at 10th and Parker streets in West Berkeley. 

Pixar Studios, the Emeryville filmmaker specializing in digital animation features, has leased 9,960 square feet of ground floor space for a child care center. 

The plans Barlow and landscape architect Cesar Lau showed the committee focused on the additional 7,500 square feet of the current parking lot of the south of the building which Pixar has leased for a playground. 

“This is a fine use of the site,” said committee chair David Snippen. 

The playground will be divided into two sections, one for older children and one for toddlers. All plantings will be either harmless or edible, and most of the surfaces will be water permeable. 

The one concern shared by committee members was the fence design, which all agreed was too plain. 

Instead, members urged, Pixar should come up with something as imaginative as their cinematic creations. 

After his presentation, Barlow told a reporter that Wareham had been very successful in keeping the tenants who had leased their offices and students from film producer Saul Zaentz when he owned the structure. 

“We’ve retained 85 percent of the tenants, and we are very pleased with what’s been going on. And we are committed to maintaining a world-class media center,” he said. 

Among Wareham tenants are Zaentz himself and some of the producer’s partners, he said.  

1819 Fifth St. 

Committee members were much less enamored of architect Tim Rempel’s plans to expand the vacant one-story brick warehouse building at 1819 Fifth St. into a project with nine live/work units, three commercial units and 10 light industrial units. 

It wasn’t that they didn’t like the design—the consensus was that he had designed an admirable project. The problem was, they said, that it wasn’t well configured for the place where he wants to build it. 

Rempel told the committee he’d “been on the verge of abandoning the project a number of times.”  

And judging from their comments before the committee on Thursday, that wouldn’t displease many of his neighbors. 

Rempel’s plans have drawn fire from neighbors before, and he was forced into a long-running battle with neighbors and Landmarks Preservation Commissioners over his designs for two buildings in the 2100 block of Sixth Street. 

While committee members said they generally liked the design, most said they felt that the massive front it presented on Fifth Street overpowered the neighborhood. 

“ ‘If this was a new building in a different context, I would very much like the design,” said Rob Ludlow. “But there are issues because of where it is and how it relates to the buildings around it.” 

“”I like your designs in general,” said Burton Edwards. “But I’m not sure I like this particular design in this particular place.” 

Carrie Olson called the design “massive on the street frontage for this area” and overbearing for the neighborhood. 

“Looming,” declared Sara Shumer. “It’s out of context for the community in this area.” 

It was Chair David Snippen who first suggested reorienting the mass of the structure from the street frontage to the interior of the lot, a notion which seemed to find favor with most of his committee colleagues. 

Neighbors wanted to preserve the brick facing of the existing building, another notion the committee favored over Rempel’s proposal to cover the bricks with a layer of gunite (sprayed concrete). 

“It’s a real sterile building that has no character that matches the street. It wouldn’t fit at all,” said neighbor John Fordice. 

Joyce Robertson, who lives behind the building in a landmarked home on Sixth Street, said the structure would block her view of the bay, and said the project is “out of scale with anything around it.” 

Robert Brady, who lives just across from the site on Fifth Street, said he has a problem with the size of the project, and was disappointed that Rempel hadn’t reduce the building’s scale after hearing complaints from neighbors. 

John Emberton, a self-described “lizard farmer” and owner of the East Bay Vivarium, which is located immediately to the south of the project, said the building would render the entrance to his business invisible from the street. He also said the 22 parking spaces planned for the project are “grossly inadequate.” 

Emberton said he was also concerned that the tool and die business which had operated for decades on the site may have contaminated the soil with oil, solvents and metal shavings. 

In the end, the committee voted to continue their evaluation to see how Rempel had accommodated their criticisms. 

And, as Olson reminded him, he still needs to clear his plans with the Landmarks Preservation Commission because the site is adjacent to the Delaware Street Historic District.

While Albany is preparing to take an aggressive stand in opposition to aerial spaying intended to eradicate the light brown apple moth—epiphyas postvitattana—Berkeley has adopted a wait-and-see attitude. 

“We don’t really have enough information,” said Dr. Linda Rudolph, the city’s public health officer. The city will know more after state officials make their presentation to the City Council, rescheduled from Jan. 15 to Feb. 26. 

The state will make a presentation at the Albany City Council meeting tonight (Tuesday). Also on the Albany agenda is a resolution by Mayor Robert Lieber, opposing aerial spraying of the moth. The meeting begins at 8 p.m. at 1000 San Pablo Ave. 

Albany is taking a proactive stance. “We don’t want to wait and have only two weeks advance notice of the spraying,” said Nan Wishner, chair of the Albany Integrated Pest Management Task Force.  

The state had originally planned to spray in the Berkeley area beginning in March, though Steve Lyle, spokesperson for the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), said the state has not determined if or when it will spray in Alameda County. 

In a phone interview Friday, Lyle called the invasion of the moth, a native of Australia, a “significant national threat.” Total eradication is necessary because of the moth’s ability to spread quickly, dining on a variety of some 2,000 host plants, Lyle told the Planet in a phone interview Friday. It could spread to 80 percent of the country, he said. 

The state conducted aerial spraying in Santa Cruz and Monterey counties in the fall. A public outcry followed, with hundreds of people complaining to the CDFA that the spraying had made them ill. Symptoms included asthma attacks, bronchial irritation, coughing, skin rashes, nausea and more. 

Lyle, however, said he had stood with the California Secretary of Agriculture A.G. Kawamura beneath the planes as they sprayed and neither suffered adverse effects. 

The process as Lyle described it, is an aerial spraying of synthetic pheromones, which are scents designed to confuse the male moths to keep them from mating.  

When sprayed from the air, the pheromones are contained in microcapsules with other inert ingredients. 

“You can breathe them in and they disintegrate in the lungs,” said Albany Mayor Lieber, a registered nurse. “It’s a public health issue.” 

Paul Schramski of Sacramento-based Pesticide Watch told the Planet Friday that the concern is not with the pheromones themselves, as long as they are used in traps on the ground. In fact, he said he supports their use as part of an integrated pest management process, where the least amount of harmful substances are used.  

The problem is that when the pheromones are delivered through aerial spraying, potentially harmful ingredients including formaldehydes and isocynates are used. 

The inert ingredients “have not been proved safe or effective,” Schramski said. 

“The pesticide mixture is packaged in minute plastic capsules that are inhaled by anyone exposed to the spray,” wrote Wishner in a January 2008 report, “Aerial Pesticide Spraying the East Bay for the LBAM.” 

Speaking to the Planet Friday, Wishner said the state is able to go directly to spraying, rather than using other means such as cleaning up debris by trees and bringing in natural predators and parasites. The CDFA declared a “state of emergency,” which means it does not have to do an Environmental Impact Report, which would show the need for spraying and allow for the public to comment on the issue. 

The city and county of Santa Cruz, among others, are suing the CDFA for failing to do an EIR. The suit is pending. 

“There has been no reported quantifiable damage done by the LBAM in Santa Cruz County,” wrote Daniel Harder, executive director of the Arboretum of UC Santa Cruz, in his expert testimony as part of the Santa Cruz lawsuit. “In other areas of the globe, such as New Zealand, the only real threat LBAM presents is the imposition caused by export regulations for products like apples,” he wrote. 

Lyle, however, said the infestation has the potential of seriously harming California’s grape crop. 

The Albany resolution says, in part, that “aerial and other blanket pesticide applications have repeatedly been shown in the past to upset natural ecosystem balance in unpredictable and often catastrophic ways and … have repeatedly been shown in the past to cause unintended, unpredictable and often serious human health effects.”  

It calls on the state CDFA to protect the health and welfare of the residents of Alameda County and to conduct a long-term study of the health and environmental effects of the aerial sprayings that took place in Monterey and Santa Cruz counties. 

The resolution also “supports the introduction and passage of state legislation requiring explicit consent of affected residents before any aerial spraying program can be implemented.” 

A community meeting on the aerial spraying question will be held Jan. 30, 7:30 p.m. at the Center for Environmental Health, 528 61st St., Oakland.  

Oakland teachers fired the first shot in the upcoming Oakland Unified School District contract negotiations, with more than 100 representatives braving chilly afternoon temperatures last Thursday to present their contract proposals at a press conference in front of Castlemont High School in East Oakland. 

Among the proposals are a reduction in class size, reductions in caseloads for support staff, pay raises, and a release from strict adherence to Oakland Unified’s highly standardized teaching curriculum.  

The first three proposals would cost the district money and come during the same week that Gov. Schwarzenegger proposed a 10 percent across-the-board budget cut—including education—because of the economic downturn. 

“We are presenting bold proposals, what some might call ‘unrealistic’ in the current budget crisis,” OEA President Betty Olsen-Jones said in a prepared statement read at the press conference. “But if we don’t set our expectations high, we’ll be accepting the status quo, and the next time around we’ll be told the same thing, that ‘there’s not enough.’ We’re here to say the conversation about reforming public education has to be changed from one of scarcity to one of how we are going to solve the problem! If the district, as currently run by the California Department of Education and wealthy patrons like Eli Broad, is truly interested in fulfilling their obligation to educate all—not just some—of our children, then we challenge them to find the resources for doing so.” 

Behind Olsen-Jones, teachers held up a banner reading “Education Is A Civil Right! Corporate Oakland Pay Your Share.” 

With formal proposals expected to be presented by both sides at the Jan. 30 OUSD administrator-board meeting, OEA officials did not provide details of their contract proposals at last week’s press conference. The contract between the OEA and OUSD expires in June. 

OUSD Public Information Officer Troy Flint said by telephone a day after the OEA press conference that the OUSD state administrator’s office supports OEA’s goals in principle.  

“OEA is fighting for very important goals,” Flint said. “We support an increase in teacher compensation and a reduction in classroom size.”  

But Flint added that “we are operating in a restrictive financial environment, and there will have to be a compromise that is within the realm of realism.” 

After years of state receivership, Oakland Unified is moving into limited local control in several areas, including personnel management, and the first steps are being taken to hire a local superintendent.  

The State of California still maintains control over Oakland Unified’s fiscal decisions, however, and the contract negotiations will be conducted between the OEA and the office of interim OUSD state administrator Vincent Matthews. 

Berkeley Public Works officials told the Aquatic Park subcommittee that they expect to turn in a revised dredging work plan for the Aquatic Park lagoon to the Regional Water Quality Control Board this week. 

The city’s Public Works department dredged the lagoon at the north end of the park on Nov. 5 and unloaded the spoils along the shoreline without requesting a permit from the water board. 

Loren Jensen, supervising engineer for Public Works, told the Aquatic Park subcommittee Wednesday that the project had commenced without notifying the proper authorities and the Parks Recreation and Waterfront division. 

Jensen said the plan to dredge the lagoon to clear out the debris around the tidal tubes and clean out the Strawberry Creek storm drain to improve circulation had been entrusted to Public Works by Cliff Marchetti, the city’s former waterfront manager, and Marc Seleznow, former director of Parks Recreation and Waterfront, last February. Both are now retired. 

William Rogers, acting director of Parks Recreation and Waterfront, said that he had been unaware of the project. 

Jensen said that Public Works was responsible for the miscommunication. 

“Project manager [for the dredging project] Hamid Kondazi indicated that he had turned in applications to the Army Corps of Engineers, the BCDC and the water board, but it turned out he had not,” Jensen told the subcommittee. “We were contacted by the water board on Nov. 7 and I went out to see the work. The project was immediately stopped. 800 cubic yards of spoils have been removed so far. Another 700 to 800 cubic yards will be removed from the Strawberry Creek storm drain.” 

Jensen said that although a trench had been put around the existing spoils, it needs to be put in water-tight containment after the work plan is approved. 

The spoils, tested by W.R. Forde, the contractors responsible for the dredging, were high in lead, the principal contaminant, but were not hazardous. 

Jensen said that the city’s toxics department had done an independent test on the spoils and reconfirmed the lab tests, and that the spoils would be retested in May before being sent to a suitable landfill. 

At the Dec. 18 City Council meeting—at which the council voted to consider the six-page staff report and accompanying 63-page lab analysis of the dredged spoils—some councilmembers had questioned whether the existing spoils could be used in the park itself.  

Jensen told the subcommittee that the water board had recommended against it. 

Although the original dredging contract would have cost the city $80,000, Jensen said that a revised work plan would mean higher costs. 

Councilmember Darryl Moore has said that he would conduct workshops to look at the root cause of toxics entering the lagoons. 

The subcommittee also forwarded the Aquatic Park Improvement Program to the Parks and Recreation Commission with the recommendation that it sends the plan to council for CEQA review. 

A $2 million grant was awarded to the city by the Coastal Conservancy from Prop 50 for habitat improvement in Aquatic Park. 

The proposed project plans to do this by widening the storm drain outlets in the park to help circulation. 

Subcommittee members stressed that they would prefer the project would eliminate storm water entering the park. 

Located in West Berkeley, Aquatic Park was created in the 1930s as part of the construction of the road which later become I-80, in order to provide a water-based recreation area. 

It is made up of 101.5 acres, including 68 acres of open water and seven acres of roads and trails.  

The Main Lagoon, the Model Yacht Basin and the Radio Tower Pond are connected to the bay through a series of tide tubes and through the Potter Street Storm Drain, parts of which have deteriorated over the years.

The National Register of Historic Places granted the Berkeley High campus the status of a historic district, the National Park Service announced last week. 

The decision, made on Jan. 7, came two months after the State Historical Resources Commission unanimously approved the nomination for the campus to be listed on the National Register as a historic district. 

The school district will receive a formal letter from the State Historic Preservation Office in the next few weeks informing them of the decision. 

The Berkeley Landmarks Preservation Commission’s vote to nominate the campus to the National Register in November was tempered with the acknowledgment that the old gym on the campus, itself the subject of a landmarking battle and now slated by the Berkeley Unified School District for demolition, had been neglected and altered, and that a number of non-historic structures occupy the southern part of the campus. 

Marie Bowman, a member of Friends Protecting Berkeley’s Resources, the group responsible for writing the historic district nomination, was not available for comment by press time. 

Located on four consolidated city blocks in downtown Berkeley, Berkeley High was the first high school in California to be built according to a campus plan and is the only collection of school buildings in Berkeley which comprises different architectural styles of early 20th-century school designs. 

“It’s gratifying,” said Berkeley landmarks commissioner Carrie Olson, who attended the school. “The state has finally recognized the hard work and years of research of the few willing to give up their lives and push on. I am thrilled that the city supported it in the end. I honestly don’t know what the school district will do in the end but these designated structures are not something to be taken lightly. It’s a matter of great honor.” 

The school district had sent a letter asking the state to exclude the old gym since it lacked the integrity needed to belong to the historic district. 

In her letter to Milford Wayne Donalds, the state historic preservation officer, district Superintendent Michele Lawrence stated that the different buildings on the Berkeley High Campus could be more accurately defined as “several districts rather than one cohesive district.” 

“We think the important consideration for the commission is to avoid creating a historic district when there is no reason to create one,” the letter stated. “If the commission determines that an historic district is warranted, we would suggest that the district include only the Art Deco Buildings (G, H and the Community Theater) and no other buildings or landscaping.” 

The letter further states that the school district’s analysis of the old gym concluded that the most important historical characteristic of the building was not its original look or design, but its structural retrofit completed in the 1930s. 

Lawrence could not be reached for comment by press time. 

The Friends sued the school district in March for what it charged was an inadequate environmental impact report on the demolition of the gymnasium and warm water pool within its Berkeley High School South of Bancroft Master Plan.  

The Berkeley Board of Education recently approved a plan to demolish the Old Gym and the warm water pool within it to build classrooms and an athletic facility which is scheduled to take place in 2010 as part of the master plan. 

According to the letter, the retention of the building would “hinder the full utilization of the school site for educational use.” 

Lawrence urged Berkeley High teachers at a meeting last week to reach out to the community about their problems with space crunches on the campus. Currently classes are held in portables at Washington Elementary School and the lobby of the Community Theatre. 

The plan to relocate the warm pool to the school district’s Milvia Street site will require Berkeley voters to approve a $15 million ballot measure. 

The City Council last week delayed a decision to put it on the November 2008 ballot.

More than two months after HazMat experts replaced local volunteers to clean up the gunk left over from the Cosco Busan oil spill, city officials declared the Berkeley shoreline reopened Wednesday. 

William Rogers, acting director for the city’s Parks Waterfront and Recreation division, told the Planet that the city was working on an additional oil spill recovery plan to thwart unforeseen incidents in the future. 

“So that next time it happens we are even more prepared than we were,” he said. “I am overall satisfied. Our city came through at the right time. In the beginning the volunteers did a great job with the clean-up and then the hired contractors took over the dangerous bits.” 

Rogers said that the O’Brien Group, the private recovery firm hired by Cosco Busan owner Regal Stone Ltd., had finished cleaning the oil inside the Marina and from the city’s beaches. 

More than 40 HazMat professionals used hand towels to wipe the rocks along the city’s shoreline free of tar-like bunker fuel for more than seven weeks. 

At an Aquatic Park Subcommittee Wednesday, Rogers said that the lagoon had not been affected by oil at any point during the incident. 

He pointed out that the city had closed all the tidal tube gates on Nov. 9—two days after the cargo ship crashed into a Bay Bridge tower and spilled oil into the bay—except for one. 

“We put a berm in front of that gate so that no oil could enter the park,” he said. “The gates have now been opened.” 

The city also lifted its state of emergency on Dec. 19, almost a month after it had been put into place. Other emergency proclamations, including prohibition of water exposure, boat washing and off-leash dogs, have also expired. 

Restrictions on boat traffic for all commercial and recreational owners have also been lifted. 

According to a City of Berkeley online update, tar balls and other oil spill residue can still be seen in some marina locations and the city’s Environmental Health division is currently monitoring the situation. 

“I believe there may still be some health warnings posted out there,” said city spokesperson Mary Kay Clunies-Ross. 

According to the city’s website the spill advisory is still in effect: 

• Avoid direct skin contact with the oil or tar balls. 

• If you get oil on your skin, wash it off with soap and water and be sure to wash your hands before eating. 

• Do not eat mussels collected from the Berkeley shoreline until further notice. 

• Do not burn debris, driftwood or other materials contaminated with oil. 

The Cosco Busan Unified Command Oil Spill Response website reports that several East Bay beaches—including Albany Beach, Brickyard Cove shoreline, sections of Park Point Isabel Regional Shoreline, and all Richmond beaches—remained closed last week for oil monitoring and assessment. 

“Hot shot” teams with appropriate equipment to clean up oil, tar balls and contaminated debris on the water and the shoreline are still doing scheduled maintenance and monitoring while remaining on standby to respond to oil sightings. 

Oil sightings can be reported to the incident command post by calling (415)-398-9617.

Berkeley Planning Commissioners begin their review of the proposed Downtown Area Plan Wednesday, when DAPAC Chair Will Travis formally presents the document for their critique. 

Members of the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee spent two years creating their draft of a document designed to plan for a downtown that will be impacted by 800,000 square feet of new construction planned by UC Berkeley. 

The plan, created under the terms of the settlement of a city lawsuit challenging the impacts of the university’s massive expansion into the city center, must win approval of the Planning Commission, City Council and the university itself before it can be finally adopted. 

The document is certain to face a critical reception at the commission, which is chaired by James Samuels, perhaps the strongest critic of some of its proposals and one of four committee members who dissented against the 17 others who voted to endorse the plan Nov. 29. 

The three Planning Commission members who voted for the plan as members of DAPAC—Gene Poschman, Helen Burke and Patty Dacey—often find themselves on the losing side of 5-4 votes on the commission. 

DAPAC Chair Travis often sided with Samuels in his critiques, though he joined with the committee majority on their final vote. 

Commissioners will also continue their discussion of changes in city zoning ordinances that would give developers more flexibility in developing projects in West Berkeley. 

The meeting begins at 7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. at Martin Luther King Jr. Way.

AC Transit bus drivers and mechanics voted overwhelmingly last week to authorize a strike in the event ongoing contract negotiations break down, but no strike appears imminent. 

Members of Amalgamated Transit Workers Union Local 192 voted 92 percent Tuesday and Wednesday to allow a strike if and when union workers reject any “best and final offer” from the two-county bus agency. AC Transit has not yet made a “best and final offer,” and union and company officials return to the bargaining table next Tuesday in an attempt to reach agreement on a contract that ran out last summer. 

ACT Local 192 President and Business Manager Yvonne Williams said by telephone last week that working conditions, including public safety issues and meal and rest periods, are holding up agreement. 

“There are minor differences over compensation and we could get closer on health and welfare,” Williams said, adding that “we’re hoping to avoid a strike.” 

Strike votes are a common escalation tactic in labor negotiations, and AC Transit workers have approved several in the past few years before eventually agreeing to a contract. The last AC Transit strike was in 1977. 

The San Francisco Planning Commission unanimously approved the 55 Laguna mixed-use project last week. It proposes to develop the historic UC Berkeley Extension site for private use. 

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transexual affordable housing activists forced a compromise less than two weeks before the planning commission’s decision by getting the City of San Francisco to kick in money to make the 110-unit building built by OpenHouse, a non-profit LGBT senior services organization, 100 percent affordable to people at 50 percent of area median income or less, with 20 percent of the remaining 340 units meeting the city’s inclusionary requirements.  

This 15 percent increase was possible partly due to efforts from San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Office of Housing and San Francisco Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi. 

The campus, which was officially listed on the National Register of Historic Places on Jan. 7, is built on 5.8 acres of public land, 15 percent of which is owned by the City. 

It is also the former home of the San Francisco State Teacher’s College campus.  

The proposed project would result in the demolition of two of the five contributing buildings—Middle Hall Gymnasium, the oldest building on the campus, and Richardson Hall Annex.  

Preservationists rallying at the meeting said they would appeal to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to save all the buildings and sue to protect the National Register Historic District.  

They also plan to encourage UC, project developers A.F. Evans and the OpenHouse team to modify their design to prevent demolition of any of the buildings. 

According to the project’s website (www.55laguna.com), the proposed plan will “preserve the historic buildings on the site by transforming them into market-rate and affordable rental apartments housing and a public community center. 

The listing of the campus on the National Register makes A.F. Evans eligible for a 20 percent Federal tax credit for all work on the historic buildings. 

The Berkeley Democratic Club could not agree on a presidential candidate to endorse at its meeting on Thursday night. The vote was: Obama 15, Clinton 13, Edwards, 4 No endorsement, 2. 

Members endorsed Yes on 92; Yes on 93; No on all the gaming measures. 

Sixty percent of those voting is required to make an endorsement. 

The Wellstone Democratic Club has endorsed Edwards. 

In other news, campaign consultant Phil Giarrizzo sent out a press release on Thursday announcing that former Alameda County Sheriff Charles Plummer has endorsed Dr. Phil Polakoff in the race for the Democratic nomination for the 14th Assembly District. Polakoff attended the BDC meeting but did not ask for the club’s endorsement. 

In endorsing Polakoff, Plummer said: “As a seasoned law enforcement officer, I have observed the political process in Alameda County for well over 50 years. Once in a blue moon, a quality individual shines down on us—and that person is Dr. Phil. He is a man of integrity, and he is smart as hell. How could you beat that for a good old one-two punch.”

California voters who have not registered with any party can vote in next month’s Democratic presidential primary if they request a ballot from their local Registrar of Voters office. 

Alameda County Registrar of Voters Public Information Officer Guy Ashley clarified that issue by telephone last week after the Daily Planet received complaints from several independent voters about confusion over the Feb. 5 primary. 

Ashley answered several other voter concerns during his interview: 

• The California Democratic Party runs an open primary. The California Republican Party does not. Non-partisan registered voters—that is, those who answer “decline to state” when asked to declare their party affiliation when they register to vote—can vote in the Democratic primary, but not in the Republican primary. 

• If “decline to state” voters do not want to vote in the Democratic primary, they can still vote for the various state propositions and local measures on the Feb. 5 ballot. 

• In order to have a ballot mailed to them in time to vote on Feb. 5, absentee voters have until Jan. 29 to request a mailed ballot from the Alameda County Registrar of Voters office. After Jan. 29, absentee voters will still be able to come into the Registrar of Voters office themselves between Jan. 30 and election day to pick up a ballot to vote. On election day itself, absentee voters can still go down to their precinct voting station and vote if they have not received a ballot by mail. 

• In answer to a question about a woman who said she had been asked to provide her Social Security number and drivers license in order to register, Ashley said that California election law now requires either a valid California Drivers License or state identification card number in order for a citizen to register. If the citizen does not have either card, they must provide the last four numbers only of their Social Security card in order to register. 

Voters with any other election or registration concerns are being urged to contact the Alameda County Registrar of Voters office directly at 272-6933. The contact number for absentee voting concerns, questions, or requests is 272-6973. 

This is hard. To write about a dear friend’s passing before her absence has fully sunk in is quite a challenging task. What I can easily write about is what I know about Rae; who she was and what she meant to me and so many others in the arts community. 

Born in New Orleans and reared in Los Angeles, Rae attended Pepperdine College and received her art degree from Cal State Northridge. After moving to the Bay Area in 1987, she took on her “day job” at Pac Bell, moving up the corporate ladder while she created beautiful pastels and paintings inspired by a trip to West Africa.  

Like many other artists of color, Rae witnessed a lack of representation in major art galleries and museums. Actually, this exclusion of black and brown artists generally begins in elementary school and continues throughout college. When I was a student at UC Berkeley in the 1970s, the entire art department faculty was white male and the only cultures represented in art history and aesthetics courses were European and Asian. I felt invisible.  

Years later, I was delighted to discover The Art of Living Black (TAOLB), an annual celebration of African-American artists co-founded by Rae Louise Hayward and Jan Hart-Schuyers in 1997.  

Each year nearly 100 black painters, sculptors, photographers, mixed media and crafts makers display their art at the Richmond Art Center. To walk into this space overflowing with vibrant colors, arresting forms, subtle lines and uniquely interwoven beads, fibers and leaves and listen to the conversations and laughter and feel the warmth and joy emanating from all who are present is no less than magical. As was Rae. 

“Rae was The Art of Living Black,” attests Jeannette Madden, a fine artist and long-time TAOLB participant. 

“She was a masterpiece,” says Latisha Baker. “When she walked into a room she lit up the place ... her gracefulness, her presence. And she was so open to all art forms. When I began my work as a pyrographer (burning images into wood), no one else around was doing it. She inspired me to go forward with my art and experiment.” 

Conceptual artist Karen Carraway-Senefuru agrees. “Rae created a place that allowed us to strip down ornamentation to reach our essence. She encouraged freedom of expression.” 

Rae was a vision. Her natural beauty adorned by unusual jewelry, classic scarves and tasteful attire radiated a certain creative elegance that could be seen in her artwork as well. A striking balance of rich colors and forms, Rae’s work is often geometric, always well thought out. Rae, who was full of praise and encouragement when it came to other artists, was humble about her own artwork. So it followed that very few knew just how ill she was. Diagnosed with cancer in October of 2007, Rae quietly began planning her own service while she continued to work on this year’s TAOLB exhibit.  

Karen Carraway-Senefuru, who also creates incredible handmade dolls, was working on a new doll when she heard of Rae’s transition. Karen hadn’t made a doll in quite awhile and Rae had been encouraging her to do so. 

“I had a bead in my hand and was applying it to cover up some negative space and thinking ‘Rae is going to love this’ when I heard,” Karen told me. I gave Karen a hug and told her that I would take over where Rae left off—that I would call her and bug her until she created yet another masterpiece out of beads and cloth and spirit. 

And I will. It’s up to us, after all. It is up to each one of us to support and encourage each other to take our individual talent as far as we possibly can. I believe this is what Rae would have wanted: for us to continue to love and support TAOLB by working as hard and selflessly as she did to make it stronger and more successful each year. We of TAOLB promise you, Rae, to do our very best. We love you.  

The Art of Living Black 

Feb. 5-March 14. Artists’ reception 

Saturday, Feb. 9, 3-5 p.m. Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Ave., Richmond. 

620-6772.

Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), in which voters are allowed to rank their second and third choices in a multi-candidate election rather than waiting for a possible runoff between the top two vote-getters, will almost certainly not be held in Oakland and San Leandro June municipal elections in 2008 as was anticipated.  

It is still possible, however, that the system will be in place for Berkeley city elections in November. 

The problem is a long delay in IRV software approval by the Federal Elections Commission for Sequoia Voting Systems, the vendor which supplies machines for Alameda County elections. 

Oakland, Berkeley, and San Leandro have all approved IRV for their municipal elections, contingent on the county coming up with an approved electronic counting system.  

But with federal approval still pending and the state approval process to follow, making a June implementation virtually impossible, the San Leandro City Council Rules and Communications Committee has recommended to the full council that San Leandro scrap any plans for IRV and instead hold a June 3 general election with a possible Nov. 4 runoff for any undecided contests.  

Oakland City Council is scheduled to take up the question on Feb. 5. 

The spokesperson for the Alameda County Registrar of Voters, Guy Ashley, said in a telephone interview this week that approval and implementation of IRV is still possible for Berkeley’s November elections. 

In an IRV presentation given to Oakland City Council last July, Registrar of Voters Guy MacDonald said that his office and city clerks from the three Alameda County cities had been meeting regularly since March of last year to discuss IRV implementation, and said that there was “general agreement in that group that if IRV is not ready by January 2008, launch should be postponed to a date beyond November 2008.” 

Under the county contract signed with the election machine vendor, Sequoia was supposed to have IRV software developed and ready for testing by December of last year.  

Ashley said this week that Sequoia met the contract’s software submission timetable, delivering IRV software in August of last year, but said that “because IRV is still a new concept,” the federal testing and approval process has been slower than anticipated. 

The Berkeley Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) on Thursday will hear a project proposed for 1923 9th St. and 1920 10th St. involving the demolition of five rent-controlled units to allow construction of a 15-story condominium project. 

The meeting will take place at the Council Chambers of the Old City Hall at 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way at 7:00 p.m. 

Neighbors are worried about density and parking, the latter being described by some residents as extremely tight. 

Some zoning board members have expressed concern over the demolition of the five rent-controlled units. According to applicant Justin Jee, the units are occupied and the tenants will have to be evicted before construction starts. 

To approve a demolition permit for the proposed project under the Zoning Ordinance, the board needs to make specific findings that the demolition would not be detrimental to the housing stock of the neighborhood and the city. 

At an earlier meeting, board member Jesse Arreguin argued that the demolition would be damaging as it would change the character of the neighborhood. He added that the five rent-controlled units would be permanently lost and the project would set a precedent for future projects. 

However, zoning staff contends that the demolition would not be detrimental because Jee had agreed to pay an in-lieu fee to the Housing Trust Fund. 

The board might also have to make additional findings to allow the removal of rent-controlled units, one of which is that the tenant would not be involuntarily forced out of his unit. 

At the Jan. 10 meeting, the board continued the project to Thursday to allow Jee and the neighbors to enter into mediation.

Christopher Rodriguez, a 10-year-old Oakland boy who likely will be partially paralyzed for the rest of his life after being struck by a stray bullet while taking a piano lesson, “has a rough road in the future,” Dr. Jacob Neufeld said last week. 

Neufeld, a pediatric physician at Children’s Hospital Oakland, where Christopher is in fair condition in the intensive care unit following the shooting incident at a music school on Jan.10, said Christopher will remain hospitalized indefinitely and then will undergo therapy aimed at teaching him how do things on his own. 

The goal is for Christopher, a fifth-grader at Crocker Highlands Elementary School in Oakland, “to be a fully independent young man again,” said Neufeld, who was joined by boy’s parents at a news conference at the hospital to provide an update on his condition.  

In response to a reporter’s question, Jennifer Rodriguez, Christopher’s mother, said, “As a parent, of course you wish for a miracle because you have to have hope.” 

She said, “You always hope for a miracle because otherwise you won’t get through the day.” 

Richard Rodriguez, the boy’s father, was more glum, saying, “What can you say when your son has been shot and never will walk again?” 

Rodriguez said, “All the possibilities and dreams he (Christopher) had have to be changed. It’s a different world.” 

Jennifer Rodriguez said that when Christopher leaves the hospital, the family, which currently lives in a house with stairs, will have to move to a new residence that’s handicapped accessible and get a van in which to transport him.  

Richard Rodriguez said, “As a result of his injuries, we don’t have time to work, so funds are needed for a lot of things.”  

He said Christopher is starting to ask questions about what happened to him, at one point asking why he was shot in the back and whether the shooter was trying to kill him. 

Rodriguez said that when he told his son he thinks the shooting was accidental, Christopher said, “I feel much better.”  

Neufeld said the bullet went through Christopher’s left side and ripped through his kidney, spleen and spinal cord, causing paralysis below his waist. However, he said the boy “has full strength in his upper extremities” and is able to play video games while he’s in the hospital. 

Neufeld said Christopher’s injuries have affected his bowel and bladder, so he can’t eat normal food at this point and suffers from a low-grade fever.  

According to Oakland police spokesman Roland Holmgren, the bullet that injured Christopher was from one of several shots fired during a robbery attempt at a Chevron gas station at 4400 Piedmont Ave. at Pleasant Valley Road about 4:30 p.m. on Jan. 10. It traveled across the street and into the Harmony Road Music School, where he was taking a lesson.  

Several police officers were completing a traffic accident investigation in the area when they heard the gunshots from the robbery and citizens directed them to the suspects’ vehicle, which was speeding away from the scene, according to Holmgren. The officers chased the vehicle as it sped west on Pleasant Valley Road, continuing to the intersection of 51st Street and Telegraph Avenue, where it struck another vehicle and a parked car, Holmgren said.  

The driver, 24-year-old Jared Adams of Oakland, was detained by officers as he attempted to flee on foot, Holmgren said.  

Witnesses identified Adams as the robber and the shooter and officers arrested him for multiple felony charges, according to Holmgren. He said Adams has a prior criminal record, including a prior gun conviction. Holmgren said the passenger of the vehicle was identified as Maeve Clifford, who also was arrested.  

Adams has been charged with willful, deliberate and premeditated murder, robbery, evading a police officer and being an ex-felon in possession of a gun. He could face life in prison if he’s convicted. Clifford is charged with robbery and assault with a deadly weapon.  

Donations can be made to a trust account at Wells Fargo Bank: Christopher G. Rodriguez, Trust Account No. 7013202606, Piedmont Avenue Branch, 151 40th St., Oakland, 94611.  

People who want updates on Christopher’s condition can go to www.christopherrodriguez.blog.spot.com.  

Jennifer Rodriquez said Christopher had been a piano student since October of 2006 and also played the drums, performing in a concert at Yoshi’s jazz club in Oakland in December.  

She said Harmony Road will sponsor a benefit concert for Christopher at the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland on Feb. 10.

Building support for live local performances is a Gordian knot which has no easy solution. At a recent gathering of supporters of a well-regarded classical music organization, someone asked in all innocence why the staff had not been able to arrange for more reviews of the group’s one-night-only performances in what still passes for the major metropolitan daily. Well, arts reviewers are dropping like flies all over the country as newpapers perceive themselves, rightly or wrongly, as being in trouble.  

From a blog entry last June by Henry Fogel, president of the League of American Orchestras:  

“What started out as a sad story from Atlanta, where the Atlanta Journal-Constitution decided to eliminate designated titles for arts critics and to reduce the number of reviews, is now looking more and more like a trend that is gathering momentum with the speed of light...The Atlanta news was followed immediately by news that the Minneapolis Star Tribune is eliminating the position of full-time classical music critic, and that was followed in turn by New York Magazine’s dismissal of their music critic Peter Davis. To say that these developments are alarming is, frankly, to understate the case.” 

This is only one part of the generally bad news that’s coming from the newspaper industry these days. The latest Los Angeles Times editor has quit rather than agreeing to dismember his newsroom and Phil Bronstein is being kicked upstairs in the Hearst organization, either as a reward for committing successful mayhem at their San Francisco paper or as a punishment for not doing a thorough enough job. Newspapers have been crying wolf for a few years now, primarily because they’ve been taken over by financial types eager for the same obscene profits they’ve come to expect from the development industry (Sam Zell, who now owns the Chicago Tribune and the L.A. Times) or on Wall Street. The real crunch is still in the works. 

Ursula Le Guin (Berkeley-bred) has a fine piece in the February Harper’s about the alleged decline of reading. She skewers the nasty financial types who have taken over book publishing, and not-too-politely suggests that they should take their money elsewhere: “I keep hoping the corporations will wake up and realize that publishing is not, in fact, a normal business with a nice healthy relationship to capitalism... And the relationship of art to capitalism is, to put it mildly, vexed. It has not been a happy marriage. Amused contempt is about the pleasantest emotion either partner feels for the other.” Much of what she says applies just as well to journalism, and especially to the branch of journalism which has engaged with the arts, the critics. 

Arts organizations have always thought that they needed reviews to build audiences. The San Francisco Classical Voice website, sfcv.org, does a yeoman-like job of trying to fill the void left by the demise of the classical music reviewer, but it’s essentially preaching to the choir. It’s not really a substitute for the chance to catch the eye of the reader of a mass-market newspaper who might be persuaded to try a new experience by a glowing review of a new production. 

The partnership between artists and the publications which report on them has been happier than the one between Wall Street and publishing, but it’s not without stress. While it might not be a happy marriage of interests, it’s still a symbiotic relationship. Here at the Planet, a very modestly capitalized general circulation publication with a very broad audience, we try to spread our favors around as much as we can, to benefit both the artists and the consumers of their efforts, our readers.  

We generally do previews of one-time-only events, limiting reviews to repeating performances to give the readers a chance to attend if they want. This has meant that we’ve published a great number of play reviews, since theaters tend to do repeats, and many fewer concert reviews, since most concerts these days are one-night-stands. There’s not Big Money in Small Papers, even if there might be in book publishing or in owning all the papers in a metropolitan area. We’ve launched a separate arts section to make sure readers can find the arts coverage, but it has yet to attract enough advertising even to pay for itself.  

We do continue to be disappointed by the inability or the unwillingness of some theater organizations to understand that it’s conventional for advertising to pay for at least part of the cost of publishing newspapers. It might seem unbearably crass for a publication like ours to announce that we will no longer review productions by theaters which have consistently refused to advertise with us, but the temptation to do so is strong. Some groups are too poor to advertise anywhere, and that’s understandable. But when our mailbox is full of glossy and expensive brochures for seemingly well-funded theatrical enterprises, and when we see big display ads for them in regional publications which have recently fired most of their critics, the temptation to limit our arts reporting to publicizing the struggling small-fry grows ever stronger. 

The “What Were They Thinking?” award for this week goes to whoever put together the elaborate plan for inspecting every establishment in Berkeley which sells alcohol, to be paid for by a flat fee that would have been the same for all sellers, from the little deli that sells an occasional six-pack of beer to the big grocery and liquor stores that sell hard liquor by the case. It’s not that alcohol isn’t associated with problems for some users, but the city’s plan was primarily a solution in search of a problem. And the award shouldn’t go only to the bureaucrats who put it together—the elected councilmembers who passed the measure at first reading and were geared up to finalize it last week before restaurateurs rallied to protest deserve part of the credit (or blame) too. 

First, let’s be clear that Berkeley has its share of nuisances or even crimes caused by alcohol sales, just like other urban areas. What are called “corner” liquor stores—small stores in residential areas whose main business is selling alcoholic drinks in bottles—can turn into a hangout for disreputable alcoholics if they’re not aggressively well-managed to avoid selling to the wrong people. On the other hand, small grocery stores within walking distance can be a real asset to neighborhoods if proprietors do a good job of screening their clientele. Two such establishments, the Roxie Deli near our office and the Star Grocery near my home, have saved me many miles of automobile usage for grocery purchases and never caused a moment’s grief. This is because they’re primarily in the food business, with alcoholic beverages just a sideline, albeit a profitable sideline that probably keeps the rest of the enterprise solvent, and because their owner-operators are always on the job. 

The other group of problem alcohol buyers who need some form of protection is minors. Binge drinking by college and even high school students is reported to be on the rise. When I was an undergraduate it was illegal to sell alcohol within a mile of the UC campus, but as the campus has metastasized to cover large areas of Berkeley and even Oakland, Albany and Richmond that’s no longer practical.  

The primary control method for these drinkers is the same as for unruly adults: The seller needs to be careful who’s buying. But wily collegians long ago figured out that the way around this is to send a qualified older person in to buy the booze, which is then consumed in the privacy of a frat house, dorm, or (increasingly) a downtown condo. At Tuesday night’s council meeting, one restaurant owner who’d grown up in Berkeley disclosed the method of choice he knows about: a fellow named “Smitty” who hangs out in front of a chain drugstore, and who’s always willing to buy a six-pack for anyone willing to pay a suitable fee up front. We can’t expect restrictions on sellers to easily end the problem of underage consumption. 

There has never been a serious documented allegation that restaurants which allow food patrons to purchase beer and wine with their meals have created any kind of problem in Berkeley. Even bars—where the main business is alcoholic drinks by the glass, with or without a bit of food—are not usually associated with neighborhood complaints. Bar owners are justifiably wary about making the mistake of selling to an underage or intoxicated person because they are regulated by the state’s Alcohol Beverage Commission, and they could get their license pulled for lapses.  

At Tuesday’s meeting, the discussion of where complaints about establishments selling alcohol originate was a perfect illustration of the simplistic reasoning that went into drafting the ordinance. The fees are supposed to go to setting up an elaborate inspection bureaucracy. Restaurants are supposed to be checked three times a year, stores just one, though the reasoning for the differential was not made clear.  

A city employee contended that more restaurants were cited annually for violations than stores, which was his justification for charging all the same flat fee. Councilmember Wozniak (scientifically trained) pointed out that this figure was meaningless unless you took into account how many restaurants versus how many stores there are in the city, and also whether a few repeat offenders were skewing the statistics. 

On the checklist are multiple items obviously generated by the now thoroughly discredited “broken window” theory of crime prevention. Do you have any graffiti? Any broken windows? Well, then, you must have an alcohol sales problem. There’s no data offered to support this concept, however. 

And whatever is the point of inspecting genteel restaurants like La Note on Shattuck (French cuisine with a pricey winelist) or The Musical Offering (a classical recording store with a tiny cafe counter and wine by the glass) three times a year to see if they have any graffiti on the premises, or if their windows might be broken?  

Penalizing establishments which do suffer from taggers is a classic case of blaming the victim anyhow. The Planet’s office is in a somewhat gritty stretch of Shattuck south of Ashby, and we have a terrible time keeping the graffiti off of our newspaper distribution box right by our front door. There’s an anecdotal tale making the rounds of a small non-alcohol-serving restaurant which got a stern warning letter from the city because owners failed to notice and paint out a two-inch tag which was on the side of their building under a drainpipe.  

A major focus of proprietors’ complaints was the requirement that each and every individual who sells alcohol to the public receive four hours of training. Anna De Leon, who owns Anna’s Jazz Island, estimated that she has 20 part-time servers who would need the special training. When you figure in their hourly pay plus the fees, it would come to $2,500 a year, a hefty hit in an industry where profit margins are tiny. Now bar owners, per state ABC rules, get themselves trained and train their employees, and it’s a system which works just fine. It appears that councilmembers, having finally come to their senses, will dump this part of the program. 

Clubs like Anna’s and our many world-renowned restaurants are major assets for Berkeley’s economy. Jazz fans like me know that it’s the liquor that pays for the musicians, even though Anna has diversified into offering food and other beverages for non-drinkers. As more and more small shops go out of business or move to the malls, it’s food that defines Berkeley’s ground floor retail, and it’s the profitable beverage component that keep many restaurants afloat.  

This whole episode is one more case of the civic nanny thoughtlessly tossing out the baby with the bathwater. Berkeley has more than its share of Carrie Nation wannabes who think that if they don’t like it, it must be banned.  

Just two examples: I stopped smoking 40 years ago, I wrote a prize-winning article about the dangers of cigarettes in 1980, the paper doesn’t accept cigarette ads, but I think that the part of the Public Commons ordinance that blames cigarette smokers for street behavior problems is foolish. So is the rule that says street trees must be pruned up to eight feet above the sidewalk, presumably to accommodate any eight-foot-tall pedestrians we might have. There are many more foolish regs like this which scarce city funds are spent to enforce.  

There’s a general legal principle that regulations should be rationally related to the problem they’re supposed to solve, but it often seems to be ignored by Berkeley bureaucrats. The restaurant inspection ordinance looks like yet another case of city employees with too much paid time on their hands making work for themselves, and it should be remembered when tax increases are proposed.  

TRAGEDY AND COMEDY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thank goodness, things seem to have evolved a little from the days when Reagan gassed, beat, and arrested protesters who objected to UC Berkeley’s policies. Nowadays, tree-sitters haven’t been beaten or gassed; although I understand that a few of them have been cited for misdemeanors. The lawyers who represent Cal are contending that, among other things, the tree sitters are sullying the reputation of the university by making Cal the laughing stock of the country. I see it as wonderful theater, and am puzzled that the officialdom of our finest university don’t see the humor and wit in the whole enterprise. After all, as someone wiser than I once said: “Life is a tragedy to those who feel, and a comedy to those who think.” And, thinking is the point of going to college, right?  

Robert Blau 

• 

ALCOHOL INSPECTION FEE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Kudos to the City Council for backing away from the alcohol inspection fee. 

Berkeley doesn’t need additional employees to recruit hirsute teens in an attempt to entrap local businesses. And what are the chances that a quarterly inspection would turn up some loitering late-morning drinkers? 

Rather, why not have concerned citizens call the city to report sidewalk drinking or perceived sales to minors? I’m not clear why graffiti near grocery stores is more pernicious than it is anywhere else, but heck I’ll call about that too if you like. 

If “we” are desperate to pass a measure, how about a sign at the business entrance to provide a phone number and ask citizens to report untoward conduct? Not only will that be inexpensive, but it will focus attention on those businesses that require attention. 

John Vinopal 

• 

IMMIGRATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I just read in the Chronicle today that an all-time record three million new immigrants applied for U.S. citizenship last year. Hey, I thought we, the American people, had established a level of immigration at about one million per year. What’s to be done about the two million extra people per year who are now in our country? Are we now required to let anyone who wants U.S. citizenship, to have it? Who decides U.S. policy? We the American people? Or millions of foreigners? This is completely insane!  

Think this through carefully, Daily Planet readers, because there will be no turning back. The world population is now exploding out of control. Are we now responsible for the endless millions, if not billions, of immigrants who are fleeing countries that they’ve already over-populated off the face of the earth, and let them flood into our country and do the exact same thing here?  

Peter Labriola 

• 

CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL  

EXPANSION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Add my voice to Suzy Parker’s plea to protect the community in our North Oakland neighborhood, and I echo letter-writer Rhoda Slanger’s reminder that if Measure A passes, public institutions like Highland stand to lose. 

I want to see North Oakland free of the specter of a 12-story tower sprouting up amidst small single family homes, and free of the noise and pollution of construction, helicopter landings and increased traffic. Most of all, I want to protect my community from the actions of an institution which is not being truthful or cooperative with the public. 

Children’s Hospital has saved the lives of children I know and love, but that does not excuse its dismissive treatment of its neighboring community. We have tried to hold productive discussions with hospital higher-ups, only to find that our needs as a thriving community are not heard and our suggestions for constructive compromise are ignored. There are so many ways Children’s could work with the community in which it resides to create a workable solution for all. 

I urge your NO vote on Measures A and B. There are other funding options available for Children’s, a private hospital, that would not take scarce monies away from public institutions. 

Beth Baugh 

Oakland 

• 

BHS CLASSROOMS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

While I was glad to read in “Berkeley High Teachers Press District for More Space” that the critical shortage of classrooms at BHS is finally getting some attention, the article left me confused. Why is there a continuing classroom shortage at Berkeley High, when Berkeley citizens approved a bond measure ($116.5 million Measure AA of 2000) to replace the 26 classrooms lost after Building B was burned down eight years ago? 

Other school districts send frequent updates to taxpayers on how bond funds are being spent and provide progress reports on construction projects. Where has the classroom construction bond money for BHS gone? Why don’t we get updates like other taxpayers around the state do? Please, someone, find out where the funds from the bond measure to build new classrooms at Berkeley High have gone. We have fewer classrooms now than we did before the bond measure passed, while the number of students remains about the same. Is any of that money left, or is it all gone? Berkeley taxpayers and the BHS community deserve answers to these questions. It would be a relief to learn that all that money isn’t gone with the wind. 

Maureen Burke 

• 

STUFF THAT WORKS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It must be hard sometimes for the folks who run our city to get a clear picture of what’s working. Finding out what’s not working is easy—Berkeley sometimes seems to be a city inhabited solely by squeaky wheels. We squeak at council meetings and public hearings, on the phone, in countless e-mails, and in the letters column of the newspaper. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but there’s not nearly enough of the flip side—praise for what works. 

For the past 15 years in South Berkeley, Officer Jim Marangoni has been what’s works about the Berkeley Police Department. I’m writing now because he’s stepping down as lead beat officer of Beat 12, and we can’t let the moment past without recognizing what an enormous positive effect he’s had on our neighborhood. 

Jim is the definition of community policing. For starters, he knows everyone—law abiders, law breakers, and the big sliding scale in between. He has been a constant fixture of neighborhood meetings, always willing to explain whatever situation we faced at the time in a patient, clear, never condescending way. Even when he was filling us in on the drug dealing and assaults that are still-too-common features of life in this corner of the city, hearing his straight, unvarnished talk about it was always comforting. When you’re facing a scary situation, it’s incomparably scarier if you don’t have accurate information you can trust, and we knew Jim would always give us that. 

Having that information—and, more importantly, feeling that we had a solid link to the police department and the city—made it possible for us to do our part in addressing the crime scene: Suing the drug dealers, working with the DA’s office, intelligently lobbying our elected officials. I don’t know how we could have done it without Jim. 

It’s sad to think that this isn’t the norm in our city. Some parts of the Berkeley Police Department, I’m told, are suspicious about interacting too much with the community, fearing that it can only get you in trouble. Here’s my take-home lesson: Community policing requires commitment at the top to back up the officers who back up the folks on their beat. While he hasn’t always had that backing, Jim has shown it’s worth the effort. Engaging with the scattered citizens in our neighborhoods makes us into a community. It makes our gritty blocks safer for our kids. And it makes Berkeley a better city. So here’s my plea to you civic leaders: Join me in praising cops like Jim Marangoni, and give us more like him. Thank you for your attention. 

Paul Rauber 

For the ROC Neighborhood Association and the South Berkeley  

Crime Prevention Council 

• 

OLD DIVERS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

“The risk of a fatal car crash with a driver who’s 85 or older is more than three times higher than it is with a driver between 16 and 20. The very old are the highest-risk drivers on the road.” (“The way we age now,” The New Yorker, April 30, 2007.) 

At my last two license renewals I didn’t miss one question. After cataract surgery I now have better than 20/20 vision. I’m 83 and don’t want to give up driving. But I could have a seizure or a momentary disconnect and turn into a killer. 

A few years ago in Santa Monica an 86-year-old driver confused the accelerator with the brake pedal killing 10 people and injuring 60. The driver was convicted of manslaughter. Eventually (if not now!) there will have to be an age limit for driving. 

In the meantime steer clear of anyone leaving the Andronico’s parking lot in an Olds 98.  

Sam Craig 

• 

HOUSING AND HOMELESS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Never in my 40 years in Berkeley have I seen so many “For Rent” signs gracing so many buildings. Now that the bottom has fallen out of the housing market you would think that people would be clamoring for an apartment in this town but no, they seem to be empty, at least partially. If you wonder why take a tour of the mayor’s crown jewel at the corner of University and Sacramento, the one he is proudest of. It is 82 units of long, meandering halls. The apartments are small, cheaply built and should you move into one, would immediately feel like a cell with nothing to do except sit or sleep. In addition there are 17 parking places for 82 units, so chances are you have no car, and if they think, as they advertise, that you are close to amenities, that too is only partially true; if you consider BART and AC transit amenities, you can use them to go other places. The close restaurants are nice, but for special occasions, and the grocery store is close but also not cheap. Of course there is the 7-11, which the building has wrapped itself around so snugly. 

But my point is not that these developer’s buildings are unpleasant to look at and to live in, but why, if there are so many empty apartments in the city, do we have people sleeping on the sidewalks and in the parks? Shelter is shelter. These buildings are here to stay now, so we have to accept that, but why do we have to continually accept that people have to suffer in the cold on the street? 

I know that money is the issue—it always is—but it would seem that the city could work out some accommodation. It has been very cold even inside an apartment; I can only imagine what it is like to sleep outside. 

Constance Wiggins 

• 

CODEPINK SPECIAL TREATMENT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am responding to Cynthia Papermaster’s Jan. 11 letter to the editor regarding the meeting between CodePINK and Mayor Bates. Ms. Papermaster stated that Mayor Bates committed to taking three actions as a result of that meeting. It is my opinion that CodePINK is getting special treatment because of their cause. The first action the mayor apparently agreed to take was to assist the group in drafting a resolution for consideration by City Council. I ask, has the group bothered to attend any Peace and Justice (P&J) Commission meetings? The city’s website shows that there was a P&J meeting on Jan. 7, which included a status report on the Marine Recruitment Office (Section D, Item 8a.). In addition, aren’t there already resolutions regarding Iraq on the table? According to the letter, Mayor Bates also agreed to meet with the officer-in-charge of the Marine’s Officer Selection Office. To what end? What purpose does this serve? Thirdly, the mayor was asked to keep the police from doing their job, which is to keep the peace and cite individuals that are in violation of city ordinances. Having a large, loud group taking up a sidewalk is loitering, and blocking pedestrians from passing is a disturbance. Having a bus doubled parked, blocking car traffic, and parked at meters over the allotted time is an infraction—period.  

Lastly, the mayor was asked to consider giving the group their own dedicated parking space in front of the recruitment office. Given the limited parking in Downtown Berkeley, I believe the spaces should be kept for people who have business to conduct in the area. Downtown businesses are struggling as is, and eliminating parking will have the adverse effect of keeping people away who would patronize downtown restaurants and businesses. Furthermore, if the mayor gives CodePINK its own parking space, it would set a precedent for other groups to receive a space in front of City Hall, the Police Department, or any business place of their choosing. Get a grip people! Just because you want to protest an organization located in Berkeley, doesn’t mean your cause is more deserving than any other. It doesn’t allow you to disturb the lives of Berkeley business patrons or residents. You have the right to be heard within the limits of the law. Your message is getting out! You don’t need local government to bend over backwards for you. 

María Ryan 

• 

PEDESTRIAN SAFETY 

Editors, Daily Planet 

Several letters have been published in the Planet recently about pedestrian safety. I have always followed a simple rule when interacting with cars as a pedestrian: Always assume automobiles have the right of way. Indeed, this is the law in a number of other countries, and it seems to work reasonably well to protect walkers from harm without unduly inconveniencing them. I recognize that it may not be politically correct to recommend this approach in Berkeley, but it does have its tangible benefits. I walk frequently, and I have certainly avoided serious injury or death on a number of occasions by adopting this attitude. The drivers who missed stop signs or went through red lights just weren’t paying careful attention—a common occurrence in a crowded urban area such as this. 

Driving instructors teach their students to “Drive Defensively.” The main idea behind this slogan is that you should expect other drivers to make mistakes—and while another driver may be in the wrong, it is not worth risking your life to try to assert your right of way. I think it is even more important to “Walk Defensively.” You just can’t win when the equation is 3,000 pounds of hurtling metal against 150 pounds of soft flesh and bone. 

Walk defensively, and keep on walking. 

Doug Buckwald 

• 

A VOTE FOR HILLARY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

When people are unhappy with Washington, politicians market themselves as agents of change. In 2000, Bush and Gore both marketed themselves as anti-Clintons, happily married and faithful to their wives. Reagan was the anti-Carter in ’80, Carter was the anti-Nixon in ’76, and Nixon himself was the “New Nixon” in ’68. Despite the marketing, Nixon, Carter, Reagan and Bush are remembered as mediocrities or worse. How do we know the newest agent of change, Barack Obama, won’t also be a mediocrity or worse? We don’t. It’s a crap shoot. And history shows change usually isn’t an improvement. 

By contrast, Bill Clinton was an extremely competent, unusually bright, successful president. He was energetic and hard-working. As a result, he was very popular. America had eight years of peace and prosperity under Clinton. And in 2008, the safest bet to get America back on track is a vote for Hillary Clinton. 

Nathaniel Hardin 

El Cerrito 

• 

OBAMA: VISION TO GUIDE POICY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

This country has rarely had such an accomplished team of policy wonks running for president as Bill and Hillary Clinton. They understand policy and how power works our government, but, the Clintons are also lightening rods for enmity. We need a president who can inspire a vision of our country working together—Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and non-believers—to solve the enormous problems Bush and Cheney have left us with. Barack Obama reminds us of the best that America can be. With the Clintons working in his administration as policy advisors, activating the levers of power they are so experienced with, we really could turn our country toward the good society we want and that the world needs. 

Bruce Joffe 

Piedmont 

• 

POLLS AND PUNDITRY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The Jan. 22 San Francisco Chronicle’s front page positioning of the Field (popularity) Poll on the Democratic presidential candidates was unfortunate. Camillo’s group reached only 377 “likely” Democratic Primary voters and 20 percent of these had not yet decided, leaving only 300 respondents. It is known widely that for every person who willingly gives a poll response, two, three or four others decline to participate, and these decliners may have either similar or different views from those who do participate. In general, that unknown lessens the value of poll results and makes “margin of error” statistics unrealistic.  

In the presidential race, results showing candidates far ahead or behind can cause changes in voting patterns irrespective of voters’ views and beliefs. Pollsters don’t discuss this problem of the “self-fulfilling” prophecy. When there is a publicized wide discrepancy between poll results and the outcome (as in New Hampshire), the pollsters fall over each other looking for the best explanation. What they need to discuss is how much their popularity polls create momentum for and against candidates, thus undermining the democratic process. In the case of New Hampshire the polls may well have contributed to the voters’ in that maverick state shifting away from the media-anointed leader. In the case of California it might have the same or a different affect. Overall, popularity polls are an unwarranted interference in the democratic process, and resemble the circus appeal of voyeuristic reality TV programs. We’re drawn to them, though we know they are foolish. Daily popularity polls are one reason we can’t have useful elections in the current environment. They cause people to discuss the polls, rather than the issues.  

Marc Sapir 

Former director of Retro Poll  

• 

A PLEASANT FANTASY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In an idealistic Jan. 22 commentary, Nazreen Kadir calls for a peaceable world, citing our nearly identical DNA heritage. Ah, but the variable one percent or so of that DNA conceals a wide range of inherited personality traits necessary to the past survival of our species. While most of us, perhaps, are disposed to peaceful coexistence, essential for social stability, some of us carry an inclination to anger, defiance and violence, which were equally necessary social attributes called on to rally a warlike response to any attack on the tribe. Unless some future world government undertakes, through eugenics, to eliminate those traces from our DNA, a peaceful planet is a pleasant fantasy. 

As to the question of human spirituality, and whether its source is “some higher power, some super-natural energy, some extra-terrestrial, some celestial being,” I suggest it is none of these. We may reasonably expect that there is a power quite beyond our comprehension that formed the universe, but to suppose it somehow governs our worldly affairs is only superstition—a cry of the human ego that stubbornly persists in seeing itself as central to that universe, as if the unseeing power that allows the collision of galaxies and the random extinction of earthly species were somehow concerned with our mutant, wayward and destructive offshoot. 

Jerry Landis 

• 

AERIAL SPRAYING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) has a plan to aerial spray the Berkeley and San Francisco areas to “eradicate the little brown apple moth.” The new projected start date for the Bay Area has now been moved to August 2008. They have already begun aerial spraying in Santa Cruz and Monterey counties (Fall 2007) where many people became immediately ill. We understand the CDFA plans to continue spraying indefinitely until the moth is eradicated. This aerial spraying is of a synthetic moth hormone in a carrier base of toxic chemicals encapsulated in plastic. The LBAM (little brown apple moth) is not a human vector, nor has it been claimed that it even carries one. 

We want to know: 

What is the public health rational for spending our precious tax dollars on this moth? 

What are the full public health ramifications of the spraying? We are already seeing the immediate dangerous effects. 

What are the full environmental ramifications of the spraying? On wildlife, on birds, on bees, on dogs and cats and on the ecosystem as a whole? 

Why have our elected officials been so silent on this matter? 

Is there an actual problem with this moth, or are these preventative measures? If preventative, what is the theoretical problem? 

As we understand, there is no clear and present danger to people from this moth.  

We do know that the aerial spraying is dangerous to anyone and anything that breathes, or touches anything with these chemicals on the surface, such as cars, plants, etc. 

We are also aware that there are non-toxic alternatives to address any problem with this moth that the CDFA deems necessary to address. Aerial spraying is outdated, unsustainable and expensive. 

As tax payers and parents, we expect our elected and other state officials to do what is in the best interest of everyone. 

State officials will make their presentation about the aerial spraying to the Berkeley City Council Tuesday, Feb. 26,  

Sign the petition to stop the spraying and get updates at www.stopthespray.org. 

No aerial spraying; safe alternatives must be chosen! 

Alisa Rose Seidlitz 

Regina Beatus 

Co-chairs, Parents United for Health 

• 

PUBLIC DISPLAY OF IGNORANCE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

When one writes what is supposed to be a play on words, the writer should understand that which he purports to parody otherwise his ignorance might shine through. Indian tribes are not given “sovereign immunity.” It is an inherent attribute of sovereign status. Mr. Kachinga Gangale should read and analyze before spouting gibberish. See 55 I.D. 34 (1934). Does he perchance know that Indians, with the exception of the handful of highly successful gaming tribes (about 15-20), are classified as the “sickest of the sick and the poorest of the poor”? Does Gangale know that in Indian Country, health and mortality rates are above only Haiti in the western hemisphere? Does he appreciate that health-wise due to serial, improvident federal policies that Indian health is on a par with sub-Saharan Africa’s population? To the tribes he targets, say only good luck and God bless. If he wants to find out what the life of California Mission Indians has really been like, I refer him to Helen Hunt’s Century of Dishonor, specifically the appendices. Maybe facts and knowledge will temper his hubris.  

S. Willett 

• 

BUDGET CRISIS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I do not think today’s budget crisis should be solved by reducing funding for education. Even more than a balanced budget we need to build communities where justice prevails and young people are eager to do their part to maintain society. What I know from my experience as a classroom educator in my native country of India is that knowledge is power. It is through education that we can most deeply empower our children. 

Teaching is rewarding in itself but even teachers have to feed their families. Perhaps the highest paid public employees could donate one month of their salaries to prevent cuts in funding for schools and colleges. 

Let us not axe the root of community in our culture. 

Romila Khanna 

Albany 

• 

A MUZZLE FOR BUSH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Oh, please, please, won’t someone, anyone, put a muzzle on George W. Bush? With several months of his presidency remaining, this man, with his sabre-rattling and incessant ranting about Iran, is only adding to the tensions and unrest around the world. Granted that Iran does pose a danger, is this not all the more reason why we should exercise caution and diplomacy in dealing with this country? Our president, on the other hand, persists in describing Iran as “the world’s top sponsor of terrorism.” 

While I’m certainly no admirer of Malmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president, I have to agree with his charge that Bush’s message “reflects his own conceptions and is a message of rift, a message of sowing the seeds of division.” When hearing Bush repeat over and over his warnings about Iran, I can’t help comparing this reckless goading with that of the two brothers who allegedly teased and taunted the tiger in last week’s fatal attack in the tragic San Francisco Zoo incident. Granted that this comparison may be a stretch of the imagination, I nonetheless feel very strongly that our great leader is fueling much of the ominous talk and dire warnings of a possible nuclear attack. Will no one speak up and demand an end to such dangerous rhetoric? 

Dorothy Snodgrass 

Berkeley 

P.S.: Responding to a reader’s complaint that the Planet featured Ron Lowe’s letters “not once but twice in recent issues,” let me say that I, and I’m sure many other readers, look forward to Mr. Lowe’s letters. His always thoughtful and insightful assessment of this country’s problems and injustices reflect my own feelings. 

And I don’t mind one bit that he lives in Grass Valley!

I’m sure most everyone has heard about the tragic deaths of pedestrians in our neighborhood. In less than seven months, four people have died within one mile of Thousand Oaks. Laurie Capitelli, our city councilmember, Betty Olds, and Dona Spring are gathering information to determine what kind of new safety measures the city can take to limit these horrendous accidents. In the Friday, Jan. 11 edition of the Berkeley Voice, Mr. Capitelli is quoted “We want to know if these deaths are a horrible coincidence or if there are some things going on that we need to address.” I have no doubt that all of our political leaders would like to improve the safety of our streets, but Mr. Capitelli also said in a recent e-mail to his constituents “After three years in the District 5 office, I can truthfully say the number one constituent complaint is about traffic; too much, too fast, too reckless.” It has been obvious to me and anyone who walks, rides, or rolls around Berkeley that the conditions for these “horrible coincidences” were all in place, even though alcohol and impaired visibility were a factor in two of these accidents. Over the last few years, traffic and related safety issues have been the number one topic of Thousand Oaks Neighborhood Association (TONA) meetings, and repeated requests to improve enforcement have fallen on deaf ears. Our previous Councilmember Mim Hawley, told a TONA meeting that police were reluctant to write tickets as the city only kept half of the fine, the other half going to the state. 

I agree with most everything Mr.Capitelli says in his e-mail. We do need to “change the culture of driving in Berkeley.” Most importantly, we need have the City Council direct the Police Department to enforce the existing laws. The driving habits and “the culture” will change if the City Council could think outside the box and campaign for safer streets by having no tolerance for “failure to yield”, rolling stops, and other careless driving. Start by setting up “sting operations” at various crosswalk locations on a regular basis, installing many, many more of the flashing lights in crosswalks, and putting up blunt signs such as In Less Than 7 Months, 4 People Were Struck And Killed Within 1 Mile Of This Location. Slow Down. Pay Attention. Pedestrians and bicyclists have their own responsibility to do the right thing. Use crosswalks. Don’t cross on red. Everyone please, Look left, look right, look left again. It’s all stuff we learned in grade school, but we’re all too distracted. If the city put up signs and banners on Ashby, University, and all the major streets announcing their new campaign, out-of-towners would understand that Berkeley can actually do something humanitarian and wise.  

If you are sick and tired of feeling in danger every time you cross the street, please take a moment to contact your councilmember, and pass the word. 

Steve Douglas lives in Berkeley’s  

Thousand Oaks neighborhood. 

After a second tragic pedestrian death on Marin Avenue, I’m glad to hear several Berkeley City Councilmembers calling for better traffic enforcement, signage, and analysis of collision statistics—and for driver restraint. 

Less obvious is what we should consider doing next: Undo recent street modifications, based on unfounded “safety” fads, that may have actually made streets less safe. 

I suspect the last thing we want to do is to “implement area-wide traffic calming,” as Michael Jerrett’s Jan. 15 commentary advocated. 

I’ll eagerly await the collision-data analysis that Councilmember Spring and colleagues seek. But as a lay volunteer participant in past city bicycle and pedestrian safety campaigns, I’ve helped analyze similar statistics before. Here are a few patterns to expect: 

First, and not surprisingly, peds and cyclists get hit primarily at locations where there is a high volume of both nonmotorist and vehicle traffic. Collisions are very rare on residential streets. 

(This implies that Berkeley spends much of traffic-management budget and effort on residential locations that aren’t very hazardous. As we’ll see, those investments must be about something other than safety.) 

Second, it doesn’t help when traffic signals aren't designed to adequately sort out different transportation modes and directions. 

Third, it doesn’t help when an intersection confuses motorists with unfamiliar physical features. 

Some places, like the odd dogleg intersection of University and Milvia, brew up a perfect storm of all three problems. It’s no surprise that University/Milvia regularly ranks as one of the city’s worst collision hotspots. 

Where systematic statistics are lagging, sometimes anecdotes paint an instructive picture. Let’s start with mine. 

Last month, I was almost run over beside a “traffic circle” installed months earlier at Berkeley’s Spruce/Vine intersection. This is near the unobstructed Spruce/Virginia intersection where Professor Jerrett complains of high vehicle speeds. Be careful what you wish for. 

A taxi whizzed by inches from my nose, making no effort to slow down. I doubt the driver ever saw me. This was after dark, when the shrubbery planted atop traffic circles can make pedestrians invisible to motorists approaching from the opposite side. 

So, tentative conclusion No.1: Traffic circles are a visibility hazard to nonmotorists. 

I’ve had several near-collisions at other Berkeley traffic circles, while driving or bicycling. Few motorists bother to signal turns these days, and the circles hide the remaining clues about other vehicles’ directions. 

Everyone entering a traffic circle looks like they’re turning right. If they continue past the first corner, you assume they’re going straight. If the nitwit is secretly planning to turn left—usurping your right of way to enter the intersection—you barely know until it’s too late. 

So, tentative conclusion No. 2: Traffic circles are a confusion and navigation hazard. 

My tentative conclusions are debatable. But no one seriously claims that thrusting a large bollard into a small residential intersection makes that intersection inherently safer. 

Strictly speaking, constricting the intersection makes it physically less safe. The apologist’s claim is that this causes motorists to drive more slowly and prudently. 

But I’ve seen no indication that California’s rebellious drivers react that way. The strongest evidence for traffic circles’ benefits comes from the Northwest and Northern Europe—places where some civility still reigns. 

Anyway, many “traffic-calming” devices aren’t even designed to directly affect safety where they’re installed. They’re designed to make that location onerous enough to divert vehicles (and any accompanying nuisance or collisions) elsewhere. 

“One study found a 72 percent reduction in injury crash rate on traffic-calmed streets in Denmark and a 96 percent increase in the injury crash rate on adjoining streets.” That striking summary is from the most systematic report I’ve seen on this subject, Reid Ewing’s “Traffic Calming: State of the Practice.” This federally funded metastudy is a free download at: www.ite.org/traffic/tcstate.htm. 

Diversion brings us back to Marin Avenue The stretch where Sandra Graber was killed on Dec. 31 had been narrowed in 2005 by two lanes. 

Marin Avenue homeowners in Albany and Berkeley had requested this restriping. They asserted that it would reduce vehicle speeds, protect pedestrians, and benefit the environment. 

But an advance environmental study showed that the narrowing would instead worsen air pollution and noise. One later evaluation found that average vehicle speeds actually increased after restriping. 

Skeptics began to wonder: Had the narrowing’s real goals been to divert traffic elsewhere, raise property values, and make it easier to back out of one’s driveway? 

In a bitter irony, the first person killed on this restriped stretch (last June) was respected Albany environmental leader Ruth Meniketti. Like her, Sandra Graber was a pillar of her community. 

Would either woman be alive today if Marin Avenue had never been narrowed? One can only wish. In each collision, a motorist was found at fault in ways unrelated to the street’s layout. 

But opponents had warned early on that the restriping would eliminate pedestrian safety islands. And anyone who’s been on Marin lately at peak hours knows that the single remaining lane leaves traffic backed up with impatient, stressed-out drivers. 

Other “traffic-calming” approaches have their own detriments. Berkeley stopped installing speed humps not just to avoid delaying emergency vehicles. Disability-rights activists pointed out that driving or riding over them caused excruciating pain to some people with spinal injuries. 

So, what are we left with to protect nonmotorists? The basics. Prof. Jerrett himself writes that “even modest measures such as stop signs will reduce accidents by 70 percent.” Stop signs are cheap and well-understood. 

Councilmember Capitelli (in a Jan. 4 Planet commentary) correctly admonished every driver to “SLOW DOWN and PAY ATTENTION and BE RESPONSIBLE.” And, we need to teach our children well: that every vehicle is a threat. 

From city staff, we need to demand diligent traffic enforcement, smart signals, and careful evaluation to ensure that every dollar we invest yields maximum safety benefits, with minimum detriments. 

Simply placing novel obstructions in drivers’ paths doesn’t automatically improve safety. The sad, unintended consequence is that it sometimes does the opposite. 

Michael Katz writes, rides, walks, BARTs, buses, and drives around Berkeley. 

On this day reflecting over Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, we remember his famous words: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”  

However, other quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. in the same talk don’t ring as frequently: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  

On this day of remembrance in 2008, storm clouds fill the sky, gloom lingers in the atmosphere, and rains saturate the ground as the right of life and pursuit of happiness mimic the weather amongst the hundreds of homeless residing within the East Bay of California. It is here that a non-profit organization, Nights on the Street - Catholic Worker, attempts to make life a little happier by easing hunger pains and providing ponchos to help repel the rain. Outside on the corner of College and Dwight, in the Newman-Holy Spirit parking lot, a handful of volunteers ranging in race, age, and stages of life provide a full meal including salad, beans, fried chicken, and juice to over a 150 people indiscriminate of job status, drug afflictions, race, sex, religious background, medical condition, etc. As many cuddle in front of a warm fire with a hearty meal throughout this cold, rainy season in the East Bay, it is easy to forget about our brothers and sisters on the streets. As volunteers and friends, members of Nights on the Streets hear their stories, visit them in hospitals and prisons, attempt to comfort and attend services in the loss of friends and family, etc. For whatever reason, post-war syndromes, broken families, raped and battered children and/or adults, spiritual journeys, physical handicaps, neurological disorders, etc, these fellow brothers and sisters lay on the streets unable to support a roof over their head amidst astronomical tenant prices consistent in the East Bay. Organizations like Nights on the Streets attempt to lessen the suffering even if for a couple of hours.  

Nights on the Street - Catholic Worker is an organization that was developed here in Berkeley by J.C. Orton over 10 years ago to help serve those in need on “their turf.” It started and continues to run out of Mr. Orton’s house, which has been transformed into a soup kitchen and “supply warehouse” housing crates of canned foods and stacks of sleeping bags and ponchos. Volunteers come together every Sunday morning from 7:30-9 a.m. to serve breakfast, including oatmeal, grits, English muffins, eggs, fruit juice, coffee and hot chocolate to those in need at People’s Park (2556 Haste St.) and Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park (MLK Way between Allston Way and Center).  

During the winter months, volunteers drive along the main streets of Berkeley three nights a week bringing hot soup and hot chocolate with a smile to the homeless and needy, in addition to handing out hundreds of ponchos, jackets, and sleeping bags. On average, between 50-100 people anxiously await the “blue van’s” soup on wheels. On nationally recognized holidays, like MLK Jr. Day, where the government takes a vacation from feeding our homeless, Nights on the Streets provides a full meal. 

Until we can figure out a way to end homelessness and poverty in America, we have a responsibility to treat all humans with dignity and respect regardless of race, sex, job, income, social activities, religious preference, etc. Rev. King had a dream: equality for ALL . . . let’s continue striving to make this dream a reality. We take a moment to thank all of those who volunteer financially, physically and/or spiritually with humanitarian work aiding “in a dream.”  

If you would like to make a tax-deductible donation (financial, clothing and/or food) or volunteer with Nights on the Streets, please contact J.C. Orton at 684-1892 or e-mail: noscw@sbcglobal.net.  

Troy Skwor is on Nights on the Street - Catholic Worker’s board of directors. 

PLAYGROUND EQUIPMENT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Could we please have a “baby changing table” at the Totland playground?  

Thank you. 

Philip and Fionn Rowntree  

• 

ACCOUNTABILITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

During President Clinton’s second term of office he was impeached for perjury in front of the grand jury. This crime seems so minor comparatively to the crimes committed by President Bush and Vice President Cheney in their efforts to extend the power of the executive branch and use of executive privilege. If we do not bring charges against them before they leave office, then we may never know the extent of what they’ve done, as they are refusing to give Congress “Top Secret” documents that they claim are essential to National Security. 

It will be more harmful to National Security if we do not know the extent of the torture programs and the internal civil rights violations committed by the vice president and president. We know that they have committed numerous crimes. We need to hold them accountable, to uphold our Constitution, so that this practice does not become an accepted precedent. 

Rebecca DePalma 

• 

HAVE A HEART 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Have a heart O you rich people! Provide health care. Don’t raise rents. Don’t raise taxes for the poor and the middle class. Give to each according to his or her need. Have a heart. 

Romila Khanna 

Albany 

• 

BUS RAPID TRANSIT DEBATE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Sure, we’d like to hear more about BRT. I’d still like to hear from someone who hasn’t yet spoken, someone who would ride the BRT instead of drive. The population of Berkeley can’t be made up of only dedicated bus riders like me, dedicated car drivers like Vincent Casalaina and people who don’t care about congestion, greenhouse gases or the end of oil. 

Steve Geller 

• 

GREENING THE EAST BAY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

If East Bay mayors are truly interested in creating “conditions that support new and emerging green industry,” they don’t need to go to Washington for money. 

On a recent trip to Cambridge, Mass., I learned that there are 50 biotech startups and countless software development firms within walking distance of MIT. How many similar firms are there in Berkeley? We have the same first-class university setting, but the jobs associated with UCB’s research efforts migrate elsewhere. 

Two changes to existing Berkeley regulations will stimulate new, “green collar” and other “high tech” businesses: 1) eliminate the gross receipts tax which is a killer for start-ups with revenues but no profits in the early years, and 2) eliminate the antiquated prejudice against intellectual work in favor of “light manufacturing” in the zoning laws. 

Make these two changes, stand back, and let the start-ups bloom. 

Tom Burns 

• 

A PREFERENCE FOR PRIVATE TRANSIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In theory, I think public transit is a fine thing. For many years I did without a car—until I missed a job opportunity because you had to drive to get there. Now, a driver and partially disabled senior, I note these reasons (among many) to continue driving. 

• I never have to stand waiting 45 minutes for my car to arrive.  

• My car never passes me by because it is already full to capacity. 

• My car never passes me by although it is empty. 

• There is never a puddle of unidentified liquid on the seat next to mine. 

• None of the passengers in my car ever cusses me out for my skin color. 

• None of the passengers in my car ever tries to steal my bag. 

• The driver of my car does not play the radio too loudly. 

• The driver of my car does not let me off blocks past my stop. 

• When winter comes, the heat in my car works. It is not turned on too high. 

• When winter comes and I turn on the heat in my car, no cockroaches come out of hiding. 

• The floor and seats of my car are clean and free of debris. 

• The windows of my car are not blocked by dirt or advertisements. 

• No passenger in my car coughs flu germs into my face. 

• The driver of my car never tells me to hurry up, he doesn’t have all day. 

• No passenger in my car takes two seats for sleeping. 

• No passenger in my car has been falling-down drunk. 

• The rear exit of my car does not smell like urine. 

• I can transport heavy items in my car because the walk to my apartment is short. 

Riding on public transit as it exists is seldom quality time. One must be vigilant and on guard. It practically guarantees illness in winter, generally unsanitary conditions, harassment, delays, and danger. I can’t trust a bus or BART to get me to medical appointments on time. Expensive new coaches don’t provide solutions to any of these issues. May I suggest that if public transportation is to attract and keep riders, convenience, courtesy, promptness, order and cleanliness might be addressed in addition to ecological concerns. 

A. Zagata 

Oakland 

• 

FLUORIDATED WATER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Fear now tempers my once pure pleasure at swimming at the Berkeley city warm pool (sadly on BHS property); I worry about BUSD bulldozers but even more I dread the uncertain prospect of increasing arthritis-like symptoms not due just to the passage of time and aging but perhaps due to fluoridation of the water supply. Lena Berman on KPFA points to research indicating children may be especially at risk that way, of fluoridation-linked arthritis. Berman follows medical research closely. 

Berman outlined other suspected risks related to fluoridation of the domestic water supply in recently broadcast programs. 

My knees and hip joints won’t straighten out anymore; my doctor is puzzled because there is no significant pain. Due to this, I can no longer stand; should I quit swimming for a while? Forever? Stay in for shorter times? Scrub down with abrasives? 

Fluoridation (mandatory by law!, I learned from an East Bay Municipal Utilities District representative) of the U.S. domestic water supply seems like overkill. The topical use of fluoride, applied directly to the outer surfaces of teeth by dentists in their offices is thought, found, said by some researchers to be somewhat useful to “harden” or toughen the enamel—that is to say, to make them mysteriously less vulnerable to bacterial penetration related to “bio-film” buildup. But internal application from swallowing fluoridated water is hardly the same thing. 

(Exceedingly tough bio-films such as plaque notoriously require a jackhammer approach to their demolition and control, such as abrasive scrubbing by a qualified professional in your dentist’s office.) 

Perhaps related: Fluoride-induced bone-embrittlement is strongly suspected, according to some research, says Berman on KPFA. 

The warm pool at BHS provides an ironic example: Fluoride as used to treat water here and now largely in the United States has been causally linked to arthritis by some researchers including or especially by some in China, according to Berman; meanwhile the warm fluoridated-water pool is used by many who seek relief from the pains and other agonies associated with arthritis. 

Also, “endocrine disrupters” in general are recommended to be avoided; fluoride, even in the usual minuscule proportions is thought by some researches to fall into that class, according to Berman’s sources. 

If fluoride is capable of affecting, protecting, or enhancing the hardness of the surface of the hardest surface in our bodies—tooth enamel—what might fluoride inadvertently be capable of doing to other organs, such as the skin, or even more delicate internal organs like the nerves, etc.? Tooth enamel as a bio-mineralized hard cover with some thickness is not especially actively fed or regulated, one reasonably assumes, by or via the internal blood supply; so fluoride, if at all, reaches this enamel layer of the tooth essentially from its outer surface, not from within. 

Therefore, why add a potentially dangerous chemical into drinking water used for many delicate purposes besides rinsing the teeth? Further: Fluoridated toothpaste is not intended to be swallowed. Why force us to drink a substance from which we can’t or might not reasonably benefit? 

If any of this is true, it seems fluoridation simply defies reason and is tantamount to legislating the poisoning of our water! Is this yet another example of more ignorant corporate meddling with legislation and lawmakers? 

In Europe, the tapwater does not contain added fluoride, says Berman! We must assume they have looked into the entire matter with care and find fluoridation’s credibility to be tenuous, if that. 

Berman says bone brittleness is suspected by some researchers to be increased, induced by fluorides. Researchets link fluoride to bone cancer in children, says Yolanda Huang, a member of the Berkeley Parks and Recreation Commission, in a recent letter to the Daily Planet. Huang cites sources; Berman refers to a website. 

Chemicals never tested for their toxicity due to corporate meddling are daily used by the American public. They number in the thousands; some say tens of thousands. We the public are experimental lab rats for the profits of the chemical industries; we already know that. We don’t have to like it. 

Terry Cochrell 

• 

WAKE UP AMERICA! 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

On Nov. 23, 2007, John Rothman, on his KGO radio program, referring to the Valerie Plame leak, picked up the story where former White House spokesman Scott McClellan made the following statement: “I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials of the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president’s chief of staff, and the president himself.” 

Rothman, an erudite historian who knows well constitutional law, pointed out that this statement should be investigated by the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Sen. Patrick Leahy. Rothman called on listeners to flood Sen. Leahy’s office with phone calls or e-mail to summon McClellan immediately, under oath, to testify to the veracity of this statement. Bush and Cheney et al. should be held accountable for perjury and the obstruction of justice. 

I am an 84-year-old grandmother living in a Berkeley senior housing residence, and have asked my friends and fellow residents to communicate with Sen. Leahy’s office as well as Sen. Feinstein, who is also on the Judiciary Committee, to take immediate action regarding McClellan’s statement. I appeal to Daily Planet readers to join in our endeavors to save our country for our grandchildren and let your voices be heard. Congressional office: 1-800-828-0498. 

(Remember how Watergate started.) 

Helen M. Harris 

• 

FERAL CATS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Concerning the feral cats: Wildlife is receiving large donations now, so let us spread the wealth. Trapping these ferals, neutering, and spaying them is a big help to the feral population.  

I have been feeding and helping to trap these ferals. Kittens are being poisoned by anti-freeze, harmed or killed by humans, cars, and foxes. There is no excuse for letting these baby ferals suffer so.  

I have been feeding ferals for four years, and still do. It breaks my heart to see them running down the hill, waiting for me every morning. 

I have raised a feral that is now four years old, and is now a house cat. 

Please give ferals your attention. 

Alice Noriega 

San Pablo 

• 

EFFECTS OF ALCOHOL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In the new year the papers carry the statistics of those killed by drunken holiday celebrants driving illegally. No doubt designated drivers lessen the slaughter, yet I write to remind those I can that millions continually suffer personally or indirectly from the effects of alcoholic drinks. No one ever suffered from never taking an alcoholic drink. 

Like everyone else I know, I have had bad, unforgettable encounters with the effects of drink. I once read in the paper that a high school classmate had confessed to and received a long sentence for the axe-murder of his wife. It was not so stated but I’m sure the crime was committed drunkenly; the confession proved it. His drunken behavior was bad and always ended with remorse. Abstention from birth would have guaranteed him a far better life. Yet not even AA meetings I’ve visited ever spoke of that obvious faction axiom that should be universally affirmed to children. 

Liquor can decide large battles. One early Sunday morning Japan succeeded at Pearl Harbor because the attackers knew the U.S. Army and Navy would be (and were!) suffering a hangover. 

Not long ago there played in local movie houses, and elsewhere, without negative comment, a film depicting at least one carefree schoolteacher who drove up to Napa with open liquor bottles in his car and drank from a bottle of beer or wine while driving. Several friends I asked found the movie amusing. Not one noticed or was shocked by being shown without opprobrium a schoolteacher’s flaunting of what, if they considered it, my acquaintance would say was good law—no drinking while driving. 

In San Francisco, small businesses used to give policemen wine or hard liquor as holiday gifts. Is the custom widespread? 

Judith Segard Hunt 

• 

OPEN LETTER TO THE UC REGENTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am a 2007 graduate of our flagship institution, Berkeley. I am writing to express my outrage over the actions your board has taken, since 2002 and prior, in order to make a UC education less affordable and attainable. 

I consistently watched as you raised tuition almost every single year by a matter of five to seven percent. The justifications are many, but legitimate ones are few. 

You raised a secretary’s salary by about $60,000 to bring her to over a quarter-million dollar salary? Your justification is that you want to retain top talent. What is top talent worth when the people who are paying their salaries won’t have a chance to benefit from it? Its unlikely that California taxpayers and students will get their money’s worth. 

If your priority was to ensure student access, and to mitigate the UC’s financial problems in the least bit, you would stop increasing administrator (and their aides) salaries by as much as you do. I am a huge labor advocate, but I also believe in getting paid what your deserve, and what is reasonable. These increases can’t be seen as reasonable—maybe only by those receiving them. But, at whose detriment? The students. 

I would assume that most of your students are on financial aid, and by increasing fees, you are levying an unnecessary loan—the fee increases that we will pay for- on top of standard financial aid loans. 

It seems as if UC is no longer a state-subsidized, public university. I will always be proud of my degree from Berkeley, but saddened by the chance that others, thousands per year, will not be able to say the same. 

Stop the fee increases. Find another way. 

Nicholas Smith 

• 

THE UNITED NATIONS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

There are several conservative think tanks in this country that want to get rid of the United Nations with their distorted accusations. They say that the UN is irrelevant and this country should pull out of the organization. For example, these think tanks tell lies about the United Nations involvement in the Oil for Food scandal. There was no proof of their accusations. 

However, people in this country believe the accusations, which may explain the fact that public support for the United Nations is at an all-time low. Let me set the record straight. While this organization is not perfect, it does a lot of good things, like being concerned about indigenous people’s rights, human rights, women’s rights, preventing war, and protecting the environment. 

I feel that the real reason for these conservative think tanks’ animosity toward the United Nations is that the UN believes in both a multi-cultural and multi-racial world which these think tanks despise. I feel that more Americans need to be aware of the good things that the United Nations is doing. 

Billy Trice, jr. 

Oakland 

• 

ROUNDABOUT SIGNAGE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Berkeley and Albany have the wrong signs for entering their roundabouts. The use of yield signs is done by all other cities that have roundabouts. 

The stop signs of Berkeley and Albany are an unnecessary bother for motorists who should just pause briefly. The Police Department may be issuing more citations as well. 

Part of the use of stop signs has resulted from Berkeley letting residents in nearby cities decide what they want, which is a funny way to decide what is right and proper. 

A full discussion of roundabouts is contained in the Tech Transfer newsletter, No. 58, published by the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California. Their phone number is 665-3632. 

Charles Smith 

• 

JOHN McCAIN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Don’t be fooled, John McCain is no moderate. He is much like conservative ideologue George Bush. McCain is as pro-war as they come, an anti-abortion activist; forget a woman’s freedom of choice and Roe v. Wade under John McCain as president. McCain now loves those Bush tax cuts for the wealthy which endears him to anti-tax conservatives. 

The “Mac Is Back” campaign slogan is perfect: With John McCain as president, George Bush would be back in the White House. There is little or no difference between the two Republicans. 

Ron Lowe  

Grass Valley

We—all 6.6 billion of us humans—live on the surface of a ball which we call planet earth. We have some theories and some evidence as to how land masses and oceans formed over millennia. The land masses were fixed, for the most part, until recently when the waters start to rise and encroach on bordering populations. We are in this together, so what should our response be? What should be our guide? 

If we follow the teachings of Jesus, we would live and let live, love our neighbors as ourselves, and treat others as we would want them to treat us. If we follow the Ten Commandments, we would not covet our neighbors’ goods and property. If we follow Qur’anic teachings, we would view the earth as a carpet on which people should be free to walk. If we follow the Golden Rules, it’s even simpler—we would do no harm. If we believe that all men, women, and children are created equal, then crafting public policies around these simple tenets should not be difficult. These tenets would guide our justice and economic systems and immigration laws, and we would not wage wars. But we do not adhere to any of these principles. So we should agree that religion does not shape our public decisions and activities and set it aside. So what should we fall back on to guide us? 

For a start, we should recognize that the entity we refer to as the human spirit runs through all 6.6 billion of us. In other words, we share an identical human spirituality. To the extent the source of this spirituality is some higher power, some super-natural energy, some extra-terrestrial, some celestial being, it’s the same for all of us. There is not one source for North Americans, another for Europeans, a different one for Asians and yet another for Africans. It gets easier. Scientists tell us that we share 98.5 percent of our genetic make-up, our DNA, our biological heritage, with primates, our closest non-human relatives. By this reasoning we have a one and half percent wiggle room in our humanness. It’s a tight fit. This is the physical diversity we spend so much time writing about, arguing and fighting over. It’s really silly when you think about it.  

If we accept that our finite resources are not to be wasted but to be shared equally until the last hungry child on the planet has been fed, we would start to behave differently towards each other. We would begin to view the world as a whole system. We would develop technologies, through mutual cooperation not market competition, that are beneficial to the entire system. We would develop whole systems making sure that a perceived gain in one part of the system does not produce a negative consequence in another part. We would elect public leaders who are capable of thinking in these terms; who would develop policies whether in food, health, education, housing, transportation, energy, the environment or foreign policy built upon these simple basic principles. This would be genuine democracy. This should be the basis of a universal human religion if we want to face an imperiled planet together as a single human race.  

Nazreen Kadir is an Oakland resident. 

Almost everything I know I learned from sitting in front of the television watching old movies. 

Recent events in Oakland recall the 1943 Western classic, The Ox-Bow Incident, made before American right wingers awoke from their united front against fascism stupor and drove all the communists out of Hollywood. 

In the town of Ox-Bow, during the early days of the West, when towns were not blessed with the paragons of blind justice and eminently fair and qualified law enforcement agencies we enjoy today, three cow herders are falsely accused and hung by a lynch mob for the murder of a local rancher, who it turns out was not even murdered. 

Leigh Whipper, the Hollywood pioneer and founder of the Negro Actors Guild who unbelievably goes un-credited in this film classic (apparently even the communists couldn’t get the studios to credit black supporting actors), plays Sparks, the itinerant black preacher of Ox-Bow who gives voice to the humanitarian conscience of the Ox-Bow townspeople who unsuccessfully take a stand against the lynching. 

I watched this film for perhaps the 10th time the other day and became intrigued by the role of Sparks in the lynching. Of all the lynchings I had heard or read about, black folk usually made themselves “unavailable” when white America went into its nationalistic fervor/holiday mode of lynching. 

I spent an entire day reading about lynchings, usually of African Americans, and scoured many books at the University of California’s Bancroft Library to see if there was one recorded incident of a black man playing the anti-Sparks, one who actually supplied the rope. Although there are numerous occasions in U.S. history of blacks owning other blacks I couldn’t find one example of a black person being so twisted in emotional development as to have participated in a lynching. 

Which is why the Ox-Bow incident in Oakland is so disturbing.  

Apparently because the Barry Bond’s trial is on hiatus and we are between baseball seasons, the Bay Area’s daily newspapers, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Oakland Tribune, feel they can move beyond the crassness of simply spiking readership by publically lynching Barry Bonds and get about with the more serious business of stoking the flames of mob mentality by publically lynching Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums. 

But what is so disturbing about the campaign against Dellums, even more disturbing than the campaign against Bonds, is that a black man, Chip Johnson of the Chronicle, is playing the anti-Sparks, the town drunk, who provides the rope and bullies the mob into action. 

Two years ago former Congressman Dellums was minding his own business, enjoying life as most former members of Congress do, raking in the cash by lobbying for the same corporations they were supposed to have been protecting us from. 

Then the congressman’s friends decided he would be an excellent antidote to everything that ails Oakland, he could fix Oakland’s crime problem and most importantly he could make them feel good about living in Oakland. In fact he made them feel so good they drafted him for mayor and elected him. 

Today Dellums has been mayor for one year. His most notable successes have been ending the union busting-inspired garbage strike, facilitating the amazingly quick fix of the portion of the freeway that melted following a fuel truck explosion and overseeing a 10 percent decline in Oakland homicides. 

What? Homicides went down 10 percent in Oakland last year and nobody informed us? Does a lynch mob draw up a bill of particulars before it throws a rope over the nearest tree? 

Obviously here are massive problems in Oakland; in fact the rate of serious crimes rose three percent last year. 

But the Chronicle’s Johnson wrote in the Jan. 15 edition, “The only way a politician could get any softer on crime would be to hold a party in honor of convicted felons and pass out manuals on how to beat the criminal justice system.” 

In fact Johnson has written likely more columns attacking Dellums in just the last year than he wrote addressing the previous mayor on any issue in the previous eight years. 

Meanwhile in San Francisco, last year the city experienced its highest homicide rate in more than a decade, its’ highest since 1995 in fact. Meanwhile the mayor, most noted for his high-profile serial monogamous relationships and an alcohol-fueled tryst with his campaign manager’s wife, is not held in the least accountable, for anything, ranging from his personal behavior to the crashing of the city attorney’s witness protection program, to the genocidal conditions that exist in much of much of the city’s public housing. 

One is forced to wonder, why is a black mayor of Oakland held to levels of accountability to which his white predecessor was never held and to which his counterpart in San Francisco who is white is not held? 

What is at work is more than a simple racist double standard of treatment that has worked against Barry Bonds and the steroid issue. 

In Oakland what seems to be at work is racism in response to changing demographics. 

White people, for whom Chip Johnson, a black man, has become their primary voice, are fearful of having to exist as minorities in a majority black, brown and Asian city, which is Oakland. 

As of the 2000 census, white people make up just one third of the Oakland population and there is no question it is white people who are largely behind the effort to expand the size of the Oakland Police Department, an agency Oakland blacks have long distrusted, in order to alleviate conditions that have historically been assigned to black and other minority communities. 

The strange and uniquely tragic aspect of the situation in Oakland is that it is a black man who unlike Sparks in The Ox-bow Incident speaks out against the lynching, holds the rope and pours alcohol on the racist fires of white rage against the black mayor.  

Jean Damu is the former western regional representative for the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA), taught Black Studies at the University of New Mexico, and currently serves as a member of the Steering Committee of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration.

As I once again encounter the god-damned Jesus freaks holding forth at the corner of Telegraph and Haste, and wonder what should be done about them, the answer seems clear: put up with their crap. My reasoning follows.  

This situation, a group with a religious axe to grind taking up residence in the heart of Berkeley’s “time warp” zone extending straight back to the 1960s, with the expected resulting jaw-grinding, is the classic free speech conundrum. And the proper reflex here, one would think, would be to let free speech prevail. After all, this spot is just a couple blocks from the holiest of holies, the public birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, the place where free speech became sacrosanct. 

Now along come these absolute clowns, these bible-thumping jerks, these brothers to the assholes who traumatize women outside of Planned Parenthood clinics, right in our faces! So the reaction becomes, OK, we have to defend free speech; but isn’t there something we can do about these idiots? Can’t we restore (relative) peace and quiet to this stretch of Telegraph? After all, these jerks torque my jaw too every time I pass by them. 

The answer, unfortunately, is no: we can’t have it both ways. We can’t pay lip service to Free Speech and at the same time cunningly think of ways to hem in that troublesome right, circumscribe it so it doesn’t disturb our stroll down the street or our sleep. But wait a minute: let’s put the shoe on the other foot, shall we? What if we, proud descendents of the FSM, took on a cause—South African apartheid, opposition to a brutal war, you name it—and decided that we needed to disrupt business as usual in order to bring it to the attention of the public. What if we felt compelled to, in those celebrated words, throw ourselves on the gears, wheels and levers of the machinery of the oppressor? Wouldn’t we then also feel compelled to raise our voices, to disrupt the normal flow of daily life, to get in people’s faces, to make things uncomfortable for passersby, so that they would be forced to deal with the issue? In fact, isn’t that exactly what many of us have done? And if so, then how does this differ from what the Jesus freaks are doing? After all, one would think they feel the same urgency towards their “mission,” even if one feels they are misguided. 

I just wonder how much of the growing opposition to the holy rollers is good old-fashioned Berkeley whining, without even the pretense of a nod to free speech. After all, that’s another time-honored tradition here: endless kvetching about the smallest perceived slight, the tiniest disruption to peace and quiet, characterized as a personal assault on My Precious Space. Isn’t this, after all, pretty much the genesis of the current manifestation of hyprocisy known as the “Public Commons for Everyone” catastrophe? Isn’t this the impulse that leads to the construction of “free speech zones” at major protest sites? Where does it stop?  

If one can dish it out, shouldn’t one be able to withstand it? 

What would Mario do? 

David Nebenzahl is a North Oakland resident.

Beyond all the bloviating, bombast that we have been subjected to in the last few months, (and will continue to be bombarded with for the foreseeable future) there are several questions we voters should be asking ourselves amidst this egomaniacal cacophony, otherwise known as politics. 

First of all, given the positions of power they have occupied, what have of these candidates tried, with any earnestness, to accomplish that might be of interest, relevance or importance to us? Secondly, what have any of them actually carried out? Third, why would they be more likely to realize these objectives in their ascendancy to higher office? 

I bring these specific matters to bear as it has become perfectly clear that the greatest challenge to the integrity of a dynamic democracy is dissolving the chasm between what a politician says he or she will do, and what that politician actually does, or at least attempts to do with any focus and vigor. Politics has been fraught with this dilemma for decades, but never before has the media fostered such a chronic “American Idol” political mentality that has all but obfuscated the nuts and bolts of what is involved with getting real problems solved. Instead, we are assaulted with a ratings driven, horse-race like energy as the candidates are let out of the gate before any of them really addresses anything beyond their myopic preoccupation with generalizations, and imagistic claptrap. 

More than 200 years ago, John Adams remarked: “Public affairs go on pretty much as usual: perpetual chicanery and rather more personal abuse than there used to be...” Today, it appears we have reached what is hopefully the apex of such debauchery in the name of “the people.” How many times can we tolerate a candidate roaring like a bellicose beast: “When I’m president, I’m going to.....blah...blah....blah!... we’re not taking anymore of that other person’s or party’s blah-blahbedy-blah.” 

When was the last time you heard a candidate reference national, or populist ethics (beyond corporate greed) as a major talking point? When has the word “honesty” been thrust forward into the rhetoric with the same spirit as the endless attacks, and concocted, facile misrepresentations of the scope and challenges that these circus-like campaigns and pitiful ‘debates’ suggest as necessary? 

As Billy Joel so eloquently sang: “Honesty is such a lonely word”....but, it’s mostly what we need from them, and from each other, if we’re ever going to transcend the inflated sense of self that has come to define politics abroad, and increasingly so here in the U.S.. Today, our problems have become defined by such gravity and urgency that anything less would be nothing more than ‘business as usual’...and that won’t come close to saving our crisis-laden, teetering times. 

Marc Winokur is a Berkeley  

resident.

The Berkeley old Adult School complex on lower University Avenue (directly across from All Star Donuts, 1255 University, Berkeley 94702) sits empty, idle, deteriorating, just as it did when I arrived in Berkeley three years ago. I’ve had countless conversations with Berkeley’s homeless, frequently centering on how the old unused Adult School would make an ideal shelter complex. As it surely would. The building has miles of space for dormitories, numerous lavatories and several full-service kitchens. 

Last year at Thanksgiving I approached social worker J.C. Orton who operates Catholic Charities “Night on the Streets” van, in an effort to learn who could be contacted about the old Adult School.  

Orton promptly said, “It’s been proven, large shelters don’t work,” and hurried away. 

Wake up and smell the coffee, J.C.! 

The kind of thinking that worked in the sixties is hopelessly outdated in post-millenium America, more out of tune with the times than Scarlett’s green print barbecue dress from the set of Gone With the Wind. 

And it is disastrous for Berkeley’s 2,000-plus population of homeless men and boys. There is only one shelter with tolerable conditions in Berkeley, the YEAH shelter for homeless teens at the Lutheran Church of the Cross at 1744 University Ave. 

Homelessness is undesirable, so the old social reform thinking went, and if homelessness is made as disagreeable as possible, the homeless will disappear. A tidy way to justify allocating as little as possible from public monies for services to the homeless. 

Too much of so-called social reform thinking remains based on the underlying fallacy that the poor themselves are to blame for their poverty. 

Thousands of Americans are currently jobless and homeless, the majority through little fault of their own. The United States continues to squander multi-billions—on the space program, for instance, on futile educational and crime-fighting programs and third-world aid packages. 

I came to Berkeley believing in its model programs like the Center for Independent Living. Berkeley was the first town in the United States to have a C.I.L., the first to make pavements and public transportation wheel-chair accessible.  

The Daily Planet has run stories on Berkeley’s outstanding and unique examples of WPA work projects, the Rose Garden for instance. No reason why the old Adult School could not become a town-sized work project with those who would benefit most working make it habitable. The homeless themselves could clean and repair the shelter, collect necessities for bedding, canvas Berkeley’s many restaurants, supermarkets and markets for food to augment government surplus allotment. 

The key to making the shelter complex would be to end the outdated dictate that homeless clients must be turned out in the wee hours of the morning to wander the mean streets, even in the most inclement weather.  

A realistic program allowing for all-day long term stays of several months would give homeless people a real opportunity to contact distant family or work with social agencies to find subsidized housing. Those who receive government checks could contribute a stipend for board. Berkeley’s homeless population, given a real chance to help themselves, could become a model for national reform. 

Channel surfing one night in 2005 I caught Jim Jeffords, now retired as the Independent senator from Vermont on Fox News’ “O’Reilly Factor.” Asked what he thought was America’s greatest problem, Jeffords immediately replied, “Unemployment.”  

America’s most popular television commentator and best-selling author was taken aback.  

“What?” O’Reilly snapped, trademark glibness momentarily punctured. “Bigger than the war in Iraq—or illegal immigration?” 

Right-on Mr. Jeffords.  

Nobody, much less our politicians, will admit as much, but America is currently is as bad or worse shape than it was during the Great Depression, when breadlines stretched for city blocks, thousands of families went homeless—and hundreds of Oakies and Arkies migrated to the Promised Land formerly known as California.  

The manufacturing industries that created the hundreds of thousands of jobs that made Americans prosperous are long departed—having relocated and reformed as Third World sweatshops. Family farms, especially in the Midwest went under during the eighties and nobody but Willie Nelson gave a damn. Our universities have long since become Big Businesses, staffed by well-paid neo-feminists and other elitists. 

Some of the homeless I suppose, deserve the label “undesirables.” How about the alcoholic Vietnam vets who sprawl nightly on Berkeley pavements, victims of a disgraceful, futile war nobody wanted? They have since been joined by the Gulf War vets.  

Then there are the 20 and 30-something victims of the social and educational “war on boys.” 

You can see these lads in any fair-sized town in the United States always in uniform: sneakers, sweats, baseball cap, cellphone.  

Many are street-level drug dealers, making less than it takes to keep their cells activated, their canine companions fed and themselves high. In homeless “capitals” (Portland, Ore. being the current homeless center for GenX) they are accompanied by their girls and their babies. About five years ago, the ever-elitist New York Times ran a full color feature on these jungfolk and their culture and music in the devastated Midwest, warning the affluent liberal elite readership about their “dangerous” anger and lifestyle.  

Are the disenfranchised “dangerous?” You betcha. 

Like many in the East Bay I suppose, I was shocked when the Siberian tiger Tatiana at the San Francisco Zoo went berserk at Christmastime for the second year in a row and, (on almost the same date) this time killing a young male bystander.  

Surely there is a warning to be taken from this inexplicable holiday tragedy. A quote from Churchill kept running through my head: “Dictators ride about on tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are growing hungry.” 

Randall Busang is a Berkeley resident.

Ciao. I’m Don Tommaso. I’m the capo of the Kachinga Tribe, and I’m makin’ a special appeal to youse, the voters of California. When youse go to the polls on Feb. 5, please vote yes on Propositions 94, 95, 96, and 97. These propositions would approve agreements that four Indian tribes have negotiated with the State of California to triple the number of Indian-run slot machines in some parts of the state. Ka-CHING! 

Naturally, my tribe, which has certain business relationships with the other four, is positioned to get a piece of the action. So, we who discovered America are doin’ business with those who were already here when we discovered it. It’s workin’ out for everybody, and it’s tax-free, sweetheart. Ka-CHING! Of course, bein’ a benevolent and generous people, we Kachingas share our good fortune with our needy relatives in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and elsewhere in the Badabinga nation. So, don’t screw it up for us. 

Sure, these so-called “amended gamin’ compacts” allow California environmental regulations to be circumvented, so youse won’t have any of those long, boring environmental impact reports to look over, it’ll just be a done deal. Easier for you, cheaper for us. This’ll minimize our start-up costs. Ka-CHING! Remember that Indian who used to cry about the litter on the side of the road? Forget about it! There’s gonna be so much traffic in and out of these joints we’re gonna build that youse’ll probably run over the guy without ever seein’ him. And never mind that a lot of the traffic will be poor mooks who can’t afford to spend a weekend in Nevada. 

Oh, and labor law, we can get around that, too, which’ll minimize our operatin’ expenses. Ka-CHING! That’s because these tribes have what they call “sovereign immunity.” Now, normally I don’t do business with guys who have been given immunity by the feds, but in this case, it’s a beautiful setup. 

Believe it or not, the feds are actually in bed with us on this one. The Bush Administration approved the compacts for the big four gamblin’ tribes without a public hearing, which could preempt the state propositions on the February ballot, so maybe your vote won’t even count. How did we pull this off? Sovereign immunity. There are no political contribution limits placed on Indian tribes. It’s legalized bribery. Ka-CHING! You oughta see how they wine and dine both political parties. I tell you, these guys are untouchable, so we deal through them. 

Now, what the four Indian tribes do with their piece of the action, it’s not my concern. Accordin’ to the gamin’ compacts, they’re supposed to give the state government its fair cut. Yeah, well, who knows for sure? Again, sovereign immunity. The state can’t audit the books, and you know these accountants, occasionally they make innocent mistakes. Ka-CHING! What are you gonna do?  

It’s also not my concern that the dozens of other tribes in California are cut out of the deal that these four tribes made with the state. Let the other tribes take care of their own. Another thing California gamblin’ tribes have figured out is that the fewer the people in the tribe, the bigger cut of the gamblin’ profits each of the tribal members gets. Ka-CHING! So, they’ve been doin’ a lot of downsizin’, as they say in the corporate world. They’re disenrollin’ thousands of their own relatives from tribal rolls. It’s nothin’ personal, it’s just business. 

And what a business! Some Indians are havin’ a hard time adjustin’. I heard one woman complained, “I get forty thousand dollars a month and I think it’s wrong.” Ka-CHING! Keep your mouth shut and get used to it. 

So, vote for these gamblin’ compacts, otherwise there’ll be less money goin’ to the Badabinga nation, less environmental degradation, fewer social problems, better labor practices, and maybe even less corruption in Indian tribal governments and in our state government. Who wants any of that? 

Namaste. (That’s Indian talk.) 

Thomas Gangale is the author of From the Primaries to the Polls: How to Repair America’s Broken Presidential Nomination Process, published by Praeger.

Concord, New Hampshire, Thursday, Jan. 3, 8:30 a.m., 4°F 

It’s hard to believe we actually get votes and elect presidents this way—standing on street corners waving signs and yelling, driving miles and walking miles and missing three dozen people, talking to a dozen more who aren’t even slightly interested just so we can talk to one or two people who might possibly, with a lot more coaxing and contact, be persuaded to vote our way.  

It is, after all, the way they really want to vote, the candidate so many say they agree with, but no, they’re going to vote for (fill in name here). We have a hard time understanding that. We’re frustrated about it and talk about it all the time; we come up with responses but no resolution.  

We’re a small, underfunded campaign and there are only eleven of us for this town and the towns around it. We’re vastly outnumbered and months late getting to each person and neighborhood. So how come we’re so excited about doing it? 

I left my house at 2 a.m. yesterday to get a plane to New Hampshire, via Chicago. I’ve only flown three other times since 2001. Before that I had a job that involved charter flights—lots of room and personal attention and few rules. So to me flying is misery now, compounded by my views on living in a police state.  

But the train cost three times as much—a reminder of why I’m supporting the candidate I am. What’s old hat to many is new and annoying to me—seats too close for a laptop or stretch (I’m 5’10”, a statistically average man), too many people to climb over to bother getting up. The seats are perfectly sized to be absolute—well, I was going to say torture, but what’s coming makes me pause.  

I have a choice—sit up straight and let my head loll around hurting my neck as I doze and wake, or hurt my lower back by scrunching down so the seat supports my head. I go back and forth so both hurt half as much. When I’m not amusing myself with that I read—The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein.  

The first chapter is about how the CIA perverted electroshock, an already perverse method of “therapy,” into torture. With the help of a few psychologists they combined it with all the familiar abuses we’ve been hearing about into a scientific program to break people. Two of the chief techniques are sleep deprivation and stress positions, so I am in an appropriate state to read this. No hallucinations yet but everything about this trip feels a little unreal to me already. 

Friday, Jan. 4, 11°F 

Couldn’t get to my stored winter clothes so before canvassing the first night I bought a hat and gloves. Now when I get smiles talking to people, I can’t decide if it’s the funny hat, the hat hair, ice on my beard fellow volunteers call my Mountain Man look, or sheer delight in the democratic process. No, I’m not being sarcastic.  

People—most people—in New Hampshire seem to love this: being first, the “retail politics” of the state, not the media blitzkrieg but the door-to-door neighbor-to-neighbor Norman Rockwell-Frank Capra extraordinary ordinariness of it. Most of them even seem to love us, funny-sounding southern flatlander radicals from California, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey who have come here because we believe in the process, believe our candidate deserves a hearing, and want to help him get it.  

We hold that belief in the way that a child holds the belief early Christmas morning that s/he actually will get the pony. That is, we believe in the potential of the process, even though it’s knocked us down and kicked us senseless more times than we can count. We hope that a better-than-expected vote here will lead to coverage which will lead to money which will lead to votes in the next primary and so on, the underdog insurgent everybody agrees with but nobody votes for.  

The hope is held through the week, immovable at first, then rising and falling in response to 12-hour days in the cold, caffeine, blood sugar, excitement from supporters and wannabe supporters “I really like your guy, but he can’t win. I’m voting for __________.” We show people the poll graph—76 percent of the people in our party agree with him most, out of all the candidates running, on the issues.  

The People are unmoved; the circular logic of ‘nobody will vote for him because he can’t win because nobody will vote for him’ is unassailable. Trying to avoid antagonizing, and because he is ‘ the peace candidate’ after all, we restrain our impulses to beat people with our signs and clipboards.  

As we go on, the hope dips lower and lower between the highs, and the highs and high fives are predicated on less and less—one yes instead of ten in a neighborhood, jokes and encouragement among ourselves, the rare media mention of our candidate or an actual issue, a meal that’s not pizza.  

We’re frustrated that we weren’t here six months ago, by the disorganization of the campaign, by the overwhelming odds we face out in the streets, in the media, and at people’s doorways. “Yeah, I love your guy on the issues. I think he’s the best candidate. But I’m voting for ____________.”  

Saturday, Jan. 5, 21°F 

So many people are not home when we canvas we’ve been looking forward to getting out on the weekend. Saturday, 40 minutes into a 45 minute drive to Hooksett, neighborhoods divvied up, enthusiasm high again, the phone rings. It’s campaign headquarters; we go back to Concord and then Manchester (via Hooksett) for a spouse’s forum.  

There’s Elizabeth Kucinich—who yes, is gorgeous—and Whitney Gravel. Fifty people are in the audience; maybe 30, I learn as the week goes on, are my candidate’s volunteers and interns. All the other spouses declined or cancelled.  

At least we’re inside. And Elizabeth is smart, informed and articulate—besides, you know, that other thing. The two almost agree on almost everything; all is cordial and civilized. We have lunch in a booth next to Chris (Hardball) Matthews. The televisionless among us (me) have to be told that. 

The congressman has been excluded from the Democratic debate outside Manchester tonight, so we go, he goes, all the volunteers in the state go, and in the medieval/post-Apocalyptic scene, with snow and camera lights and steam rising in the darkness and a dozen different chants going without a pause for hours, we march around chanting “Let him debate!” until we can’t. He does some TV interviews, they have the debates without him, we chant some more and then go home. I write, then read a bit more.  

Klein is talking now about parallels between personal and political shock—neoconservative economics that have destroyed so many countries and the mutually reinforcing military and torture policies pioneered here in the U.S., where they are also now being applied. I’m reminded again why I’m in New Hampshire. 

Sunday, Jan. 6, 25°F 

Frustrated desire to actually recruit votes is making some of the volunteers manic. The phone rings: the congressman, his wife and Viggo (Aragorn) Mortensen are coming to Concord. We have four hours to make flyers, distribute them, notify the local media, get two hundred people there, and by the way, clean the office—a jumble of snack food, campaign literature, computer cables and winter clothes. We look outside, see only people carrying Hillary and Obama signs.  

We fan out, we drive to all the video stores in and near town: three chain stores and one little VHS-only independent. I’m reminded again why I’m here. All goes well; “Gondorians for the Congressman” and all the usual signs and balloons on the walls. As the sun sets and cold settles, we go out to canvas. The primary is two days off; people are turning off lights when they see us coming.  

The last two days are more of the same: canvassing; corners; events; rising temperature no longer a factor. Almost everyone’s mind is made up.  

We become aware we’re fishing for an ever-tinier segment of the small primary electorate for one party in a small atypical state. The first primary hasn’t even been held and the decision is made already—has been for months, in fact. The miracle we’re hoping for—the pony, is beginning to seem impossible even to us. Is this really how we choose presidents? And the answer, it seems to us, is no.  

The candidates are sorted early into ‘supported by corporate money’ and ‘not’; only a vanishingly narrow range of views is heard, and the longer the race and the polls go-on the narrower it gets. The news is about who has more money and who’s ahead in the polls (that ole devil, circular logic again) broken up by the occasional furor over the most foolish and trivial matters possible. Haircuts. Tears.  

It reminds me of an argument I had once about painting a room. It took five minutes to eliminate all colors but one. And then hours to choose between cream, ivory, eggshell, ecru or beige. Turns out it wasn’t about the paint. We broke up and I painted the room her choice—yellowish-ivory. Sunny mornings it was nice. 

Tuesday, Jan. 8, the day of the primary 

We scattered to polling places and stood with signs. I gave up handing out literature—too late and too … profane? ... for this place this day. So I just handed out copies of the Constitution. It was why I was here, after all. And Walt, the guy standing next to me, holding a sign promoting alternative energy. The local Congresswoman left and the sun went down.  

Walt’s wife, sitting in a wheelchair next to him, didn’t speak to me the whole time he and I talked—an hour, I’d guess. She has MS and dementia; he had given up his job and benefits and impoverished them both to take care of her. Just one of her medications costs $3,000 a month, he said.  

The house was next; he didn’t know how they were going to live. Across the street were enormous signs for one of the other, tax-cutting candidates. “ I hope this never happens to any of them,” he said. “But you know it would change their tune about government.” 

“I like your guy, though,” he said. I offered a Constitution to someone walking toward the poll; she shook her head and kept going. Who refuses a Constitution? I thought. 

“You going to vote for him?” I asked, feeling stupid and regretful, simultaneously collapsing and bracing for it. “No, I voted for _______. Your guy can’t win.” 

For over a year now walking has been my primary commute mode from my house on Grizzly Peak to my job (via BART) in downtown San Francisco. This has been made possible by the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association’s work to build paths on the rights of way created long ago when the Berkeley Hills were originally mapped and subdivided. (See BPWA’s website at www.berkeleypaths.org for more on this excellent organization and the history of the paths of Berkeley.) 

It takes me exactly half an hour to get from my front door to the downtown Berkeley BART station. Coming home is uphill and takes about seven minutes longer. Compared to the alternative of driving to North Berkeley BART (which I did for many years), I figure walking takes an extra 27 minutes a day. 

I have long meditated on the meaning of those 27 minutes. In our speed-crazed world, a previous me would have thought those minutes wasted in the race to get work and “be productive.” The actuality is that those 27 minutes spent disengaged from tools and in the presence of nature are extremely effective for my work. Many has been the time when an insight came unsolicited while walking, solving a problem or puzzle that has been challenging me. Where these thoughts come from, I don’t know, but I am happy to be the beneficiary of them. 

The 27 minutes “saved” by driving are also rather illusory. For one, you have to calculate the cost of driving to fairly estimate the costs vs. benefit of walking. This is a complex task. Most of us don’t add up all the costs of owning, maintaining, operating and insuring a vehicle, paying license fees, parking (now a buck a day at BART) and occasional traffic tickets (they’re just gonna happen). We would probably cry if we did! So to drive instead of walk surely adds up to several hundreds of dollars a year or more. And in order to earn this money, I then have to spend more time working, offsetting the 27 minutes “saved” by driving. 

On top of the more obvious costs of automobiles, there are also the hidden costs. I understand that driving a car a mile adds about pound of carbon to the atmosphere. We don’t know yet how to price a pound of carbon in this country. Yet surely in the coming years including carbon costs—indeed, learning to measure all the costs of all our actions—will need to become part of our everyday thinking.  

The 27 extra minutes spent walking compared to driving also give me very valuable exercise and health benefits. Were I to drive, I would need to go to the gym, or go for a run, or do some other kind of physical activity during my day to avoid becoming sedentary. Viewed from this angle, walking is an extraordinarily efficient way to get healthful, low-impact exercise. The walk back uphill in the evening is pleasantly strenuous and I break into a pretty good sweat on all but the coldest days.  

Simply getting more people to walk instead of drive would do wonders for the obesity epidemic in this country and go a long way toward solving the problem of our spiraling health care costs. An ounce of prevention is surely worth a pound of cure when it comes to exercise and health! 

Just as important as the health and ecological benefits are the mental and emotional ones. Walking is a form of meditation and healing. My route is a very pretty one, especially in the wooded hills and walking across the UC campus alongside Strawberry Creek. I find walking calms my thoughts, lowers my stress level, and puts me into a mood of “positive affect” that permeates my day at work and my evening at home with my family. For people who have a hard time practicing formal sitting meditation, walking is almost as good (as long as you leave your i-Pod at home!). 

Walking also connects me to the seasons, and having walked for over a full year, I have found walking to be a joy in every kind of weather. Thanks to lightweight rain gear from Marmot and my Ecco Gore-Tex hiking shoes, I am practically indifferent to inclement weather (in fact, I find walking in the rain is very cool). And were it not for walking, I doubt I would be as aware of the camellias blooming and the first acacia buds starting to open, or the first songbirds of the year announcing in the dawn of morning that light is returning.  

Walking gives me hope— and it is in the spirit of hope that I offer these reflections, that they may benefit others as I have benefitted from walking the paths of Berkeley.

My neighbors and I put together a website (www.livableoakland. com) about our fight against Measure A, which will appear on the Feb. 5 ballot. In it we posted information about our neighborhood, sometimes known as Lower Temescal, or Baja Rockridge, or just plain North Oakland.  

We added facts about Children’s Hospital Oakland (CHO), and the history of measures A and B. We included content on eminent domain because the public needs to know that Children’s Hospital thinks it has the right to take away our homes. Also on the website are photographs of neighborhood houses and kids.  

We want to show that the blocks surrounding CHO are ethnically and socially diverse, and that many young children live here. They will be directly affected by the 12-story tower and helicopter landing pad Children’s plans to build if Measure A passes.  

I have lots of photographs of neighbors and neighborhood structures stored in my computer because I once took a class in graduate school that involved studying my hood, specifically the blocks between 54th and Dover streets and 36th Street and San Pablo Avenue. Every week I accompanied my then housemate, Willie, to and from his place of employment, Doug’s Barbecue.  

While walking with Willie I’d always find something interesting to photograph: a pair of well-worn work boots dangling from a telephone wire; a porcelain toilet bowl in the middle of a beautiful garden; a heartfelt message on a church signboard; a homeless encampment underneath a freeway overpass.  

To prepare for our campaign against Measure A, I looked through my old pictures. I found photos of every church Willie and I had passed by, 17 in all, and 4 that will be within the shadow of CHO’s proposed 196-foot high-rise. There were photographs of Mrs. Brown’s 80th birthday bash and pictures of several summer block parties.  

I’ve got lots of snapshots of kids in red plastic fireman hats climbing in and out of a big ladder truck, neighborhood canines eating leftover hot dogs, teens listening to music and talking on cell phones. I found photographs of Andrea’s sister selling Valentine’s Day flowers on the corner of 54th Street and MLK, and shots of Jernae taken when she was 14. She is dressed in a long white gown, sitting on a church pew next to our neighbor Chris, also 14 and clad in an oversized orange and black basketball jersey and matching sweatpants.  

Jernae has just completed her Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Program at The First African Methodist Episcopal Church down on 34th Street, and she looks pure and virginal, in contrast to the next photo on file: Andrea, just out of jail, standing in my hallway, relieved to be home and wearing the same formfitting red shift and leopard-printed bedroom slippers she wore on the night she was arrested, six weeks before.  

My neighbors chose not to post Andrea’s photograph although they admitted that she sure looked happy. Another rejected photo was of my niece, Kanna, her tiny body covered in a blue hospital gown, an IV line in her small, thin arm. The photograph was snapped two years ago in a pediatric wing at Children’s Hospital. Kanna was taken there after having an allergic reaction to a vaccination. 

I thought that the photograph should appear on our website as it exemplifies the emotional dilemma Measure A presents to Alameda County voters. No one wants to vote against sick children. But to have any rational debate about Measure A, we have to separate what CHO does for kids from what it wants to build at 53rd and Dover streets, and how it wants to pay for it. 

On the Livable Oakland website are photographs of my neighbors and me. We look happy. We look sad. Some of us seem scared, while others exude confidence. We appear frazzled and wrinkled, young and healthy, big and strong, little and fragile. We probably look a lot like you and your neighbors.

I don’t usually find myself in agreement—even partial agreement—with NovoMetro columnist V Smoothe, but she raises some points in her Jan. 16 post “Mayor’s Cop Promise Impossible To Keep” that ought to be considered.  

Ms. Smoothe (she’s never given any other identification, so I can’t call her by any other name), writes, “During Monday night’s State of the City address, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums made one promise to the city of Oakland, saying, ‘Whatever it takes, by the end of this year, we will be at 803 police officers. Whatever it takes.’ Sadly, no matter how sincere the Mayor’s intentions are, the realities of the Police Department hiring process make this impossible, even with intensified recruitment efforts.”  

After citing some facts and figures to show why she believes this, Ms. Smoothe’s column concludes that “the first available Academy for applicants who take the Feb. 21 test will be the 166th Academy, beginning in September 2008, which will not be graduating until February 2009. Even if the department makes immediate changes to recruitment and training, it is already too late to have any impact on the number of police that will complete the Academy during this year.” 

Jeff Collins of the Community Policing Advisory Board made the same point during public comment following the mayor’s shorter address to Oakland City Council the night following his Marriott speech, Mr. Collins saying that despite stepped-up recruiting, “the Oakland Police Academy is flunking more people this year than ever before. It’s not a function of our recruiting. It’s a function of the heightened marketplace.” Mr. Collins told me before the Council meeting that police recruiting is getting to be like corporate head-hunting these days, with some of the larger departments even offering lucrative signing bonuses. 

For those reasons, I had the same doubts about the ability of Mr. Dellums’ to fulfill his full-strength police promise. During his speech, the mayor gave eight approaches to how to reach the 803 goal by the end of this year. While most of them were very important initiatives to raise the number of Oakland police to full strength in the long term—such as sponsoring pre-academy preparation programs in conjunction with the Peralta colleges, or supporting concurrent academies rather than one at a time—only one of the mayor’s proposals, encouraging veteran officers to stay on rather than retiring, appeared to have much chance of making a difference in absolute OPD numbers by the end of this year. 

The mayor is most likely going to take a political hit on this as we near the end of 2008 and if—one could even say when—we are short of the 803 full-strength target. How big a hit will be determined by how short, as well as how successful (or unsuccessful) are Mr. Dellums’ other police reforms, particularly Chief Wayne Tucker’s breaking down of the department’s command and deployment structure into more manageable, community-friendly geographic districts. If the police reorganization results by the end of the year in citizens seeing better response and follow-up from patrol officers and commanders, as well as police and city actions to mitigate crime and violence problems in advance, then the significance of reaching the 803 police strength will seem less immediately important. 

It’s good, for a change, to see some reasoned, thoughtful criticism of the mayor. The silly season of the Dellums Corps d’Attack continues, at the gallop, led with spurs digging and whips flailing by the folks at the San Francisco Chronicle. 

Two weeks ago was the “Could Dellums Be An Albatross?” Jan. 11 posting by Chronicle political blogger Carla Marinucci, in which Ms. Marinucci began by asking the rhetorical question “Is it time wonder whether Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s wooing of Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums was really such a wise move?” 

She thinks that it was not, saying that Ms. Clinton’s decision to ask Mr. Dellums’ advice on urban matters, including public safety, has “got to rankle Oakland residents in both the flatlands and the hills who are increasingly livid about what critics complain is Dellums’ utter lack of urban policy. To wit: the Oakland police department is working without a contract, the schools are in receivership, and even the streets are on an 85-year resurfacing cycle. That means it might happen once in your lifetime, if you’re lucky.” 

This borders on the witless, if not boldly stepping over. Granted, Ms. Marinucci is no Oakland expert, her column generally concentrating on state and national politics. Still, if one is going to write about Oakland politics, one ought to at least get within shouting distance of the actual implication of the facts. And so: 

1. The Oakland police department is working without a contract. True. However, the current contract expired in June of last year, meaning that if former Mayor Jerry Brown began negotiations six months in advance, which is normal, both he and Mr. Dellums have had equal time trying to work out an agreement. Why this is an indication that Mr. Dellums has “no urban policy” but does not mean the same thing for Mr. Brown is a mystery you will have to take up with Ms. Marinucci and her Chronicle colleagues (more on that point in a second). Why conducting contract negotiations while the employees continue to work under the old contract is an indication of anything other than the normal give-and-take of labor relations is a puzzlement to me as well. Meanwhile, we do know that the Dellums Administration had a breakthrough in a corollary contract issue, winning an impartial arbitrator’s ruling over the ability of the Oakland Chief of Police to assign patrol officers to 12-hour shifts. 

2. The schools are in receivership. True, again, and two for two for Ms. Marinucci. However, Oakland public schools—like most schools in the State of California—operate independently of city government, so it is difficult to understand how Ms. Marinucci can conclude that this is a bad mark on Mr. Dellums. In any event, the state takeover of the Oakland public schools took place under former Mayor Jerry Brown (yes, there’s that man again) and, if you are to believe the articles by former Oakland Tribune investigative reporter Robert Gammon, with Mr. Brown’s active collusion. So again, the bad mark would seem to stick on the departed Mr. Brown rather than the present Mr. Dellums, if any bad mark need accrue. Meanwhile, after he was elected but before he was sworn in as mayor, Mr. Dellums intervened with California State Superintendent Jack O’Connell to help stop the pending sale of OUSD’s 2nd Avenue properties. The OUSD state administrator and board are now cooperating to turn part of that property into an educational center, protecting five schools from dispersal. And during his tenure, Mr. Dellums has instituted cooperation with the Oakland schools that was distinctly absent during Mr. Brown’s time in office, including proposing a joint city-school effort to put health clinics in every high school and middle school in Oakland, and using Oakland City Hall facilities to convene an OUSD teacher recruitment summit last summer in coordination with then-OUSD state administrator Kimberly Statham and Oakland Education Association (teachers’ union) president Betty Olsen-Jones. This seems to indicate an education policy. 

3. The streets are on an 85-year resurfacing cycle. Potholes and dilapidating streets are an increasing problem and we wish the city administration could (or would) do something about it. That they haven’t is a function more of a lack of available money and personnel than a lack of policy. But if this is the most Ms. Marinucci can come up, we’ll concede the argument. Yes, Ron Dellums has not yet fixed Oakland’s potholes. 

At the same time Ms. Marinucci is “criticizing” Mr. Dellums for an alleged lack of urban policy, my good friend, Chronicle East Bay columnist Chip Johnson, is continuing his ongoing criticism of the mayor over public safety issues, and longing for the days when he appears to believe that things were being done under the administration of Jerry Brown. Really. 

In an “OK, Mayor Dellums, It’s Time To Actually Do Something” column printed the same day as Ms. Marinucci’s posting, Mr. Johnson writes “One of Oakland’s most prominent citizens, state Attorney General Jerry Brown, said his office would be willing to discuss [with Mr. Dellums’ office, presumably] any plan to provide resources and aid to help Oakland police take on special projects and cases. ‘If we see a plan from them, we’ll listen to it,’ Brown said Thursday.” 

And then in a “Hiring Cops Is A Good Start But Dellums Must Get Tough On Crime” column a week later, Mr. Johnson reiterated his suggestion that Mr. Dellums should use Mr. Brown as a public safety resource, Mr. Johnson added: “If [Mr. Dellums] wants to put a dent in crime, he’s going to have to develop long-term strategies and become a crime-fighting mayor, like his predecessor.” The predecessor Mr. Johnson refers to is Jerry Brown. 

This is an odd resurrection being conducted by Mr. Johnson of Jerry Brown’s Body (of work) in the field of public safety. We don’t remember Mr. Brown as a “crime-fighting mayor,” and this is the first time we can think of that term being applied to him.  

We do remember Mr. Brown generating considerable publicity by calling in the police to clean up the Telegraph Avenue and 27th Street neighborhood where he and his new wife, Anne Gust, had recently moved, and once he went down to a downtown club and reportedly snatched a cellphone out of a woman’s hand during a police action. But perhaps Mr. Johnson can provide more details on why he believes Mr. Brown should be considered a “crime-fighting mayor.”  

Finally, we seem to recall, from dim memory, that Oakland’s problems of crime and violence were virtually identical during the Brown years as they are, now, in the first year of Mr. Dellums’ tenure, leading to the conclusion that if Mr. Brown did fight crime while he was mayor of Oakland, crime won. But perhaps that’s being too flip. If so, I apologize. 

In any event, why all this leads Mr. Johnson to believe that Mr. Dellums should copy the Brown public safety strategies, rather than develop and implement his own, is beyond my capabilities to understand. 

The settlement of the residential blocks south of the UC campus began, naturally, on the streets closest to the university and progressed southward. In 1903, the area now known as the Willard neighborhood, comprising the Hillegass and Berry-Bangs tracts and bounded, clockwise, by Dwight Way, College, Ashby, and Telegraph Avenues, was most densely built along Benvenue and Hillegass Avenues north of Derby Street. 

By 1911—five years after the San Francisco earthquake—Benvenue, Hillegass, and Regent Streets were almost completely built out to Ashby Avenue, streetcars and commuter lines were running along Ashby and College, and a cluster of local shops and services served the neighborhood. 

The homes built along Benvenue, Hillegass, and Regent were spacious and elegant—often architect-designed—and many featured brown-shingle exteriors and craftsman interiors complete with wood-paneled walls and beamed ceilings. It was a fashionable neighborhood, populated by businessmen and professionals. Apartment buildings were unknown here. 

This changed on May 6, 1916, when the Berkeley Daily Gazette announced: 

The new apartment house, “Hillegass Court,” 2821 Hillegass Ave., is just completed for the owner, G. A. Mattern, and is rapidly being occupied by families which had made their choice of apartments during its construction. Architects Wright & Rushforth, of San Francisco, have endeavored to carry out a design suitable to the character of its surroundings, with ample lot area for lawns and shrubbery on all sides, with a driveway to the garage located on the south and in the rear. The central court arrangement affords a degree of privacy to the three entrances, there being one in each wing, and within the terraced court is sufficient area for a nice display of lawn. 

There are a total of sixteen apartments of two, three and four rooms each, with sleeping porches to eight of them. The owner has spared no expense to provide the essentials to health and comfort; light, air, sun, heat and ventilation are well provided for. The basement being high and dry, affords ample storage facilities for tenants, besides a social room, kitchen, laundry and the usual basement equipment. Louis Engler of this city was the contractor, and the cost amounted to about $30,000. 

Hillegass Court went up on a triple lot that had remained open on the block between Stuart and Russell Streets. A handsome, C-shaped structure, it bears a vague resemblance to a lakeside Kurhaus in an Alpine resort. According to a legend that circulated for many years among the tenants, the design is a copy of a 1912 French building Mattern admired. Since there is no record of Mattern having traveled to Europe in the 1910s (he would travel there frequently between 1921 and 1940), it’s possible that he might have seen such a building in a magazine or in an architectural journal shown him by the architect. 

The architect, George Rushforth (1861–1943), was an Englishman who, with his new bride, immigrated to California in 1887. The couple’s first stop was Los Angeles, where their eldest son was born. By 1890, they had moved to Stockton, where they lived for a decade and a half, bringing three more sons into the world. In 1902, George designed Stockton High School. 

In the wake of the 1906 earthquake, Rushforth shifted his field of operations to San Francisco. The move was motivated not only by the better professional opportunities available in the Bay Area but by the need to educate four sons born between 1888 and 1894. 

In 1907, Rushforth opened an office at 2277 California Street with two compatriots, George A. Wright and Bernard J.S. Cahill. He commuted from Berkeley, where the family home was at 2321 Blake St. 

A practical architect, Rushforth was no prima donna; he sought to give his clients what they wanted. This flexibility is evident in the variety of styles seen in his work. Among the better-known San Francisco buildings designed by Wright, Rushforth & Cahill is the 7-story Hotel Whitcomb at Market and Eighth Streets (1911), which was adapted by the architects for use as a temporary City Hall from 1912 to 1915. 

In Berkeley, Rushforth’s most famous work is the Gothic-style Trinity Methodist Church (1927–28) and Trinity Hall (1934) on Dana Street between Durant Ave. and Bancroft Way. 

Rushforth’s connection to his Hillegass Court client was a family affair—his second son, Archibald (1890–1976), married Mabel Mattern and worked in her father’s business. The firm was the famous Gantner & Mattern Co. of San Francisco, later known as Gantner of California. It manufactured sweaters and coats, knit underwear and hosiery, but was especially known for its swimwear. In 1907, it advertised ladies’ bathing suits from $1.90 to $40, men’s from $1 to $6, and boys’ from 75 cents up. Girls at the time did not seem to merit their own swimwear. 

The company promoted its aquatic apparel by exhorting the public to learn to swim, offering a pair of water wings free with every suit. It maintained a baseball team, the Gantner-Matterns, who played in an amateur league that included St. Mary’s College in Oakland. In March 1906, the team played a benefit game against the university’s varsity team, with U.C. president Benjamin Ide Wheeler pitching the first ball. The proceeds went to pay off the $900 mortgage on the house of James Tate’s widow at 2022 Delaware Street. Mr. Tate, known as “Jimmie Potatoes,” had been a university gardener for 20 years. 

The company’s owners, John Oscar Gantner (1868–1951) and George Alfred Mattern (1864–1945), were immigrants’ sons. Gantner’s father was a Swiss saloon keeper, while Mattern’s was a German boat maker. In 1870, the Gantners lived next to another Swiss immigrant family, the Pfisters. John Pfister (born c. 1809) was a brewer who supplied the Gantner saloon. 

The family connections continued into the next generation, but not in the same field. By 1880, John Jacob Pfister (b. 1844) was running the J.J. Pfister Knitting Company, manufacturers of crochet and knitted goods, bathing suits, tights, underwear, sporting uniforms, and importers of bolting cloth. That year, 16-year old Alfred Mattern was working in a woolen mill. He would rise to superintendent at J.J. Pfister & Co. while still in his mid-twenties. At the same time, John O. Gantner would become Pfister’s corporate secretary. 

Mattern, who could never make up his mind whether he was George A. or Alfred G., first appeared in the Berkeley directory in 1893, residing at 2157 Dwight Way. The last time he was listed as a Pfister employee was in 1897, and two years later his occupation was given as “manufacturer.” In 1907, he built a new house at 2701 Regent Street and Derby (the site is now a lawn facing the Willard Park mosaic bench). 

Not much has come down to us about G.A. Mattern’s personal life. He fathered a boy and two girls. His son, Hermann A. Mattern, and his son-in-law, Archibald W. Rushforth, would spend their careers as managers at Gantner & Mattern. The only family member who didn’t fit the business mold was the youngest daughter, Laurinne Easter Mattern, who edited the 1915 commencement issue of the Anna Head School publication, Nods and Becks, and listed herself as an orchestral musician in the 1930 U.S. census. 

In December 1907, the San Francisco Call recorded that G.A. Mattern was one of 750 citizens who attended a Merchants’ Association banquet promoting consolidation of all the cities around San Francisco Bay. A rare lighter note was struck by the same newspaper in August 1910, when it reported, “Frightened by the shouts of his son, who had a nightmare, G.A. Mattern, a wealthy manufacturer of 2701 Regent street, jumped out of bed at an early hour this morning and fell off the sleeping porch of his home, 15 feet to the ground. […] He is now suffering from a fracture of the hip and other injuries.” Awakened by his own screams, Hermann found his father in the garden and summoned Dr. Edith Brownsill, who lived at 2614 Channing Way (current site of the university’s Crossroads dining center). 

In the late 1910s, the Matterns would build a new home at 100 Tunnel Road, but before departing from the Berry-Bangs tract, they beautified it with Hillegass Court. Ron Erickson, a former tenant in the building, described it in 1986: 

There is still a low-ceilinged dance room in the basement, about 60’ x 30’, with original light fixtures, a wood dance floor, and a small serving area at one end. It is thought to have been a meeting-place for the Red Cross during the war. 

Many if not all rooms contained wall beds, built-in ironing boards (still being used), and cabinets just outside each apartment door, accessible for deliveries. All the apartments differ in small, charming details. The larger ones have built-in china closets or secretaries. 

The ornamental work in the exterior design is reflected somewhat in the original stair banisters. All hallways, and much of the apartment interiors, is paneled in beautifully grained cedar divided by three-inch ribs. Unfortunately, all woodwork in the halls was painted a light green, probably in the Fifties. Fortunately, this paint is scraped off fairly easily without chemicals, revealing a rich-grained, brown-reddish stained surface. Altogether, except for superficial alterations, the building seems to be in its original form. 

Once Hillegass Court was completed in 1916, Mattern erected a house for Mabel and Archie Rushforth on the open southern third of the property. To design this unprepossessing Brown Shingle, he didn’t have to go farther than his in-law, Rushforth père. 

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

Daniella Thompson 

Hillegass Court, an elegant 1916 apartment building at 2821 Hillegass Ave.

When you crawl around under houses every day, you see some odd things. It’s part archaeology, a little zoology and, of course, all that construction stuff. It doesn’t take too long doing this to realize that you’re not always alone down under the house (or up in the attic). There are little neighbors that like to share the space. They’re not trying to get inside your house, per se. It’s just that they want a safe warm space and you happen to be right there. Termites use the same logic. They don’t know that they’re eating a house. What’s a house to a termite. They’re just eating some fallen trees that happen be in their path.  

One of my favorite critter sightings, and I’ve seen this a number of times, is seen in a crawlspace. It’s a pile of empty snail shells mounded up like a stack of beer cans on a bachelors beaten-up coffee table. It took me a while to figure it out but apparently, raccoons like snails and will collect a bunch of them, kick back under the house and snack away. Are raccoons French? 

A range of animals also live out their lives, fight, give birth and die under and inside houses. At least one or twice a year, I’ll get a call that has to do with animal sounds in a wall, attic or below the floor. If they can get in, all the things that would be happening in the woodland will occur in your house at 3 a.m.; and you get to listen. (That seems to be a favored time for figuring or amour d’bete). 

Some odd few may enjoy these interlopements but most people prefer to keep the wilds outside. If you are among the latter, you may wish to avail yourself of some of the following strategies and data. 

First, mice and rats get inside of almost everyone’s house. If you see evidence (scatological or otherwise) don’t be surprised. Rodents come into houses for warmth, food (when they can get it) and to escape predators, which is why they like the tiny entryways that bar the cat but allow the mouse. 

Mice are very small, smaller than they look. Their skulls are somewhat flexible and they are more fur than flesh. Field mice can enter through openings smaller than one half inch in diameter. Rats vary in size but can also squeeze through three quarter inch openings below doors or around pipes. To prevent these from entering, you will need to begin by identifying every tiny opening in the side of your building. Louvered metal or wooden vents often allow for rodent entry. Replace louvered (with stamped out slits that you can fit your fingers through) metal vents with ones made of quarter inch galvanized steel mesh. Caulk the back rim and screw them in place. 

If you have an old house with wooden foundation vents, you can install the same quarter-inch steel mesh on the inside of these without ruining their marvelous grandmotherly appeal. Take a roll of mesh and a pair of tin snips and cut a rectangle two to four inches larger in each direction than the vent space. Cut away the corners so that you have four tabs that you can bend onto the adjacent jambs or framing or simply snip into the corners diagonally and fold then over each other. Affix these firmly in place using a staple gun and half inch long staples. 

You can do the same thing behind half inch steel mesh vents or any grate that has a larger than one centimeter opening. 

Look carefully around the doors to your electrical or gas compartments. Many do not fit tightly and are virtual rat freeways into your house. Some doors fit so badly that the only real answer is to replace them and make the replacement a nice snug fit. Some doors can be altered with a piece of trim. Remember that a small opening for you may be huge to an animal. 

By the way, once their under the house, there are loads of vessels, chaseways and separations between the crawlspace and the inner walls for critters to traverse so keeping them out at the perimeter is the easiest way. 

Gaps around plumbing, especially large waste lines, are very common. Gaps can be caulked using a good quality caulk. I like polyurethane caulks for their ability to grasp porous materials such as wood. Sikaflex is one good brand. For larger openings you can decide if wood and nails are the answer or something like expanding foam. Keep in mind that rats can eat through foam. If you do use foam, it should be covered over with wood, paint or anything that can minimize exposure.  

For larger openings, mesh can be secured in place thus preserving more ventilation. 

Large mesh areas can be torn out by raccoons and it may be wise to double the mesh. I like a combination of quarter inch mesh and chicken wire. Very large openings can be a combination of quarter inch mesh and welded wire (which comes in a range of mesh sizes and is very heavy duty). 

While you’re at it, it pays to check your attic vents. Many have very large openings and I’ve seen more than a few full sized bird’s nests as evidence. Since bird feces can be virally rich, birds nesting should be considered a real health hazard. 

While it’s nice to make sure the doors to your house fit well for energy conservation reasons, a large bottom gap is also how mice can get inside. This too, is worth looking at. The last one I’ll mention is perhaps the least likely but I have seen evidence of animal entering through roof vents these, too, can be screened except in the case of gas appliances and dryer vents (which shouldn’t go through your roof anyway but, hey, there they are). 

If you’ve really worked your way through all of this, you are in much better shape and likely to have fewer all night parties raging in the wall. A determined animal may still enter by burrowing or may gnaw through a wooden barrier but this isn’t worth worrying about. Deal with that when you have the evidence. 

Ants can’t be stopped by any of these methods so don’t try. Keep the kitchen floor clean and take out the garbage regularly. If that doesn’t do it, you may need to use one of the nasty agents that we all prefer to avoid. Grant’s Ant Stakes work pretty well but be sure to follow the instructions. 

Many a night as I drive home, my headlights catch the eyes of a deer on my curvy little Berkeley street. How lucky we are, I think, to live in a time and place where life flourishes and lives safely among us. While I may not want to hear raccoons fighting over dinner late at night, their presence in my neighborhood is a blessing. I don’t want to live in a city devoid of animal life and if I have to work a bit to corral them, oh well, it’s a small price. 

Photograph by Matt Cantor. 

This wooden ventilation screen, seen from the inside, lets in six rats at a time.

Woodland gardening takes on a new aspect when one is practicing it here in coastal northern California. There are considerations one must take with regard to natural resources and scarcity—as much a product of time as of place, as everything living here gets more squeezed by human overpopulation, including us humans who are doing the overpopulating.  

Add that to the huge number of endemic species we have here, and the proportion of them that are threatened or endangered, and it’s hard to make a case for much other than conservation and restoration in our gardens.  

Here again is where my own history and bias inform my thinking, and I’ll be forthright about it. I came to gardening via birding and natural history. Wanting to know what the bird was sitting on led top wanting to know how it all fit together, then who the individuals in the system were. So when it comes to plants as well as other organisms, I guess my mindset is one of discovery rather than shaping.  

I got to thinking about that a few years back when we stumbled upon a woodland garden just north of Yuba Pass in the Sierra. It was, at the time, open to the public; I believe it’s closed since. We try to get up to the area every summer for the wildflowers and birds, and so spend some time tramping about in the yellow pine and red fir forests.  

We’ve seen fantastic things like the baroque red saprophytes snowplant and pine drops; stalks of tiny white rein orchids massed in roadside ditches; whole meadows of impossibly blue camas and fizzy yellow madia; violets and larkspurs and lilies and paintbrush and pussy paws—all more or less by accident. Creeks spread out into wet meadows of elephant’s-heads and corn lilies and shooting stars, then re-channel themselves to make perfect bankside gardens of moss and ferns and buttercups.  

Streamcourses and boulders and shrub groupings all follow the original aesthetic of Nature, ruled by gravity and light and water arriving all the way to the local sky and peaks from the Pacific. Every form, no matter how varied, has the inevitability of mathematics. Who could improve on this?  

Not, as it seemed, the planners of this garden. It was pleasant enough, but even allowing for its raw, not-quite-finished state, it seemed forced in some places, bare in others. There was a lake and a lakeside lodge with flagpoles, an arched bridge and some rather handsome paths, but nothing looked so perfect as the surrounding mountains do, despite human incursions and devastations.  

Compared to the manzanitas and ceanothuses beyond its borders, the shrubs looked thirsty and out of place. Compared to the unique local wildflowers, the herbaceous stuff looked ordinary; I’d seen most of it in gardens here at home. Why go all the way up there to see what I’d seen here? 

If I didn’t know any better I think I’d have loved the place. But having returned to the area year after year, having come to know it, I did know better: the wilderness next door. 

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.

As we sail into the murky political waters of 2008, it’s useful for liberals (progressives) to remember our core beliefs. Two elemental American narratives illuminate these values: the triumphant individual and the benevolent community. 

The triumphant individual is the story of the man or woman who starts from humble beginnings and becomes a success through a combination of hard work and self-confidence. It’s a testimony to the value of perseverance.  

In the movies, this is the Rocky narrative; in American history it is the biography of Ben Franklin or Abe Lincoln. In the 2008 presidential race, this is the story of Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama, who have had to overcome substantial obstacles—gender, poverty, and race—to get where they are. 

While all Americans cherish the triumphant individual myth, we often disagree on crucial elements of the narrative. One point of contention is the eligibility rules. Historically, liberals have supported a more inclusive definition of whom the narrative applies to. For example, progressives argue that everyone should be eligible to run for president: male or female, black or white, gay or straight, believer or atheist, able-bodied or physically challenged. Conservatives contend that the position should be reserved for white, male, straight, able-bodied Christians, and apply similar restrictions to other positions of power. 

Another point of contention concerns the starting line for each of our lives. Liberals believe in the notion of a level playing field. They contend that every American deserves the right to unfettered opportunity and, therefore, it is unfair to provide some children with advantages that others do not have: For example, progressives believe every child has the right to a quality education.  

In contrast, conservative thinking is heavily influenced by economic Calvinism, particularly the notion that poverty is an indication God does not look with favor upon an individual: If a poor child is served by mediocre public schools and has inadequate healthcare, conservatives argue, that’s what God intended. 

Liberal and conservative values and policies stem from their interpretation of the triumphant individual myth. Progressives defend the notion of elemental human rights, the idea of a strong social safety net—food, housing, medical care, and education. Conservatives emphasize property rights and the necessity of the rich and powerful to operate without interference. 

The benevolent community is the narrative of the group of individuals who set aside personal concerns and work for the common good. In the movies, this is the town in It’s a Wonderful Life. In American history it is illustrated by our response to natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, where millions of Americans helped the victims. When Americans came together after 9/11, it represented the best aspects of community. 

While all of us cherish the benevolent community myth, we often disagree on critical elements of the narrative. Liberals visualize the American community as including everyone in the United States and believe: “I am my brother’s keeper and my sister’s keeper.”  

Social conservatives restrict the notion of community to those who identify as Christian, particularly those who say they have been “born again.” In the Left Behind series, La Haye and Jenkins posit that at the end of the world, the rapture, only true Christians are saved. The same discriminatory logic underlies “compassionate conservatism,” where conservatives argue that Christian churches should be enabled to help the needy, but in order to gain social services one must be a believer—participation in social programs requires church attendance. When conservatives seek to disable the social safety net, this reflects their belief there is no national community, only the brotherhood of Christian believers. 

The social consequences of these differing philosophies are profound. Liberals seek an activist federal government that takes seriously the notion of human rights. Conservatives want a passive, diminished government that supports the twin notions of the unfettered market and faith-based social programs. They couple this with a narrow view of human rights, restricting the right of government to interfere with individual activities. 

In the 2008 presidential campaign, there’s been a lot of talk about the “two Americas,” the division between the rich and the poor. But there are also two ideological Americas, two sets of citizens who see our country quite differently. Consistent with their believe in an expansive myth of the triumphant individual and the benevolent community, liberals speak of the common good and have a set of values that reflect their belief “we’re in this together.” Conservatives use a different moral standard, “what’s in it for me?”  

On issue after issue, liberals and conservatives see things in a radically different light: The environment? Progressives believe they have a responsibility to sustain a healthy environment for future generations—it’s an extension of the notion of the common good. Conservatives see the environment as free resources to be used to maximize individual advantage. We perceive differently, because we have different, core beliefs. 

Democratic presidential candidates Clinton, Edwards, and Obama differ on policy details, but their liberal core values are similar. Each of them offers a stark contrast to any of the GOP candidates. 

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

Lately I’ve been channeling my old friend Mrs. Scott. She’s the neighbor who came to our rescue after Ralph had his bicycling accident 13 years ago. The day Ralph came home from the hospital, she marched through our back door and took over. She cooked and cleaned and introduced us to others in the neighborhood. She went with us to doctors’ appointments, watched over the people I hired to help with Ralph’s care, became my right (and left) arm, my best friend, my guardian angel.  

When she died, on Sept. 6, 2001, I lost the most colorful person in my life. She was big and stubborn and ornery, and when she said “Jump” I always asked, “How high?” 

I could use Mrs. Scott’s assistance right now to help me with this Children’s Hospital mess. If she were alive today, she’d walk with me to the office of Mary Dean, CHO’s senior vice president of external affairs, and give her a piece of her mind. She’d tell Ms. Dean in no uncertain terms that the hospital needs to come up with a plan we all can live with, not a colossal 12-story tower that will cast a shadow on her home, making it impossible for her to grow greens and tomatoes in the backyard. Mrs. Scott would have shook her cane and shouted a few curse words, reverently invoked the name of the lord and his son Jesus Christ, and then told Mary “to be sweet and have a blessed day.” She would have grabbed my arm and yanked me out of Ms. Dean’s fancy office and said “Go get the car, Suzy Parker. My feet are all swelled up and I need a ride home.” I would have run the three blocks to her house, jumped into the front seat of her old Ford Mustang, and driven back to the hospital in order to get her. That was the nature of our relationship. She did the talkin’ and I did the walkin’.  

Recently, when my neighbors and I attended a meeting of the Alameda County League of Women’s Voters in order to present our opposition to Measure A, I wore, for good luck, a sweater Mrs. Scott had given me. It’s big and black and it has huge round plastic buttons down the front, each one a different iridescent color: hot pink, lime green, bright blue, and glow-in-the-dark yellow. Sparkle-lee doodads and whatnots cover the front and back of the cardigan. It’s the kind of sweater Mrs. Scott would have worn, if she could have found one in size XXX.  

My neighbors and I aren’t politicians or professional community activists, and none of us has led a fight against a specific ballot measure before. But we did okay. We presented our arguments. We let the League women have a look at us. We showed them our most precious possessions, our children. I brought my niece and nephew with me. Yasmin brought her 3-year old son, Liam. Rainjita held her 2-year old daughter, Kianna, in her arms. Jenna rubbed her big belly, hoping she wouldn’t give birth until the end of the meeting.  

We told the League that it is because we have kids that we don’t want a 180-foot tower looming over us or helicopters whirling above our heads. And it is precisely because of our families that we support Children’s Hospital’s core mission. We have used its facilities and resources. We have sat in its emergency waiting room, visited its critical care unit, its neonatology nursery, its gift shop and cafeteria.  

Yesterday I received the following e-mail from Yasmin. 

“This fight against Children’s Hospital’s high rise has opened doors for all of us and unleashed powers we didn’t know we had. I would never have gotten to know Jean, Geoff, Jenna and all these neighborhood friends and characters if it weren’t for this. It must be a fraction of how you bonded with Mrs. Scott and other neighbors after Ralph’s accident.” 

She’s right, our crusade to get Measure A defeated and to make Children’s Hospital a responsible neighbor has opened many doors and given us a sense of pride and determination. And yes, it is a little like what happened after my husband’s accident. I met Mrs. Scott and she changed my life. 

I don’t know how old you have to be to think of Sunset magazine and early 1960s swimming-poolside dioramas whenever you see a Cordyline australis in its other vocation, as a plain old yard or streetside tree. It’s a classic, though, to complete the post-TK look that starts with a turquoise pool, maybe kidney-shaped, and a Weber kettle. Some of us get whiffs of vinyl, chlorine, and firestarter fluid from our subconscious every time.  

It wasn’t just aesthetic, that fad for “cabbage tree.” Certainly it fit that angular, minimalist, post-Thomas Church look. But its practical virtues include toughness—it won’t flinch from regular sloshing with chemical-laden pool water—and big sturdy leaves that don’t disintegrate and clog the pool filter and don’t get shed often anyway.  

That fibrous toughness has brought cordyline halfway ‘round the world: a few years back, I heard a member of a group of visiting Maori artists laughing about how seeing it and New Zealand flax all over the landscaping made her feel right at home.  

Cordyline has been around the block taxonomically speaking, too. In older books it’s a member of the Amaryllis family. The most recent Sunset Garden Book has it in the Agavaceae, as are the dracaenas. In fact it was at one point assigned to the genus Dracaena, along with the dragon tree and all those indoor plants. Now it’s not even in the same family. In the latest classification dracaenas share the family Ruscaceae with lilies-of-the-valley, Solomon’s-seals, and Sansevieria, the house plant variously known as snake plant, bowstring hemp, and mother-in-law’s-tongue. This week, cordylines—including the Hawai’ian ti plant, C. fruticosa—appear to be in the closely related family Laxmanniaceae.  

Plant taxonomy can be brutal—more so since the geneticists got into the act. They’ve really done a job on the monocots, the plant clade that includes lilies, palms, and grasses. The lily family has been shrunk radically, with all kinds of plants that used to be lilies spun off into their own families. True lilies (like tiger lilies and the showy Oriental types), tulips, fritillaries, and fawn lilies are still lilies, and that’s about it. 

One likely reason that agaves, yuccas, and cordylines were lumped together in the first place, apart from their pointy leaves, is that all three groups include woody species. In general, with the great exception of the palms, monocots don’t get woody. Monocot timber, according to Colin Tudge’s The Tree, is highly variable in structure, and not much like either conifer timber (pines and redwoods) or dicot timber (oaks, mahoganies, and other such broadleaf trees).  

Conifers and dicot trees share the phenomenon called secondary thickening, in which a complete cambium sheath, the live underskin of xylem and phloem just beneath the bark, allows a tree to get thicker and thicker, for years or centuries as it relinquishes its circulatory function and lignifies into supportive heartwood. Dragon trees and cabbage trees have reinvented this strategy, but somehow manage it without the cambium sheath. 

C. australis is tree enough to be included in the Collins Handguide to the Native Trees of New Zealand, where it grows in swampy areas and lower montane forests up to 2,000 feet. Just as cacti on the Galapagos Islands evolved tall tree-like forms under pressure from grazing giant tortoises, the cabbage tree may have been spurred to treehood by the moas, the giant flightless birds that took over the role of browsing mammals on those mammal-less (except for the bats, who don’t graze much) islands. 

When the Maori discovered New Zealand, they recognized the cabbage tree—which they called ti rakau, ti kouka, or whanake—as a potential food source. The pith of young stems was eaten raw, boiled, or baked in earth ovens; roots required longer cooking They must have been patient as well as adventurous, culinarily speaking. Ti kouka was a major dietary starch, along with fern roots. After intensive processing, cordyline roots yielded a juice that they used as a sweetener; other extracts made traditional medicines.  

The Maori also fashioned ropes from trunk and root material and used fiber from the leaves, along with those of another of our landscape favorites, New Zealand flax, Phormium tenax, to make clothing and sandals. There’s good evidence that they developed cultivars for different purposes.  

Early European missionaries were said to have “brewed a tolerable beer” from cordyline, although just what an early missionary would tolerate is an open question.  

As “mid-century modern” architecture—those Eichlers and the Thomas Church gardens that, if their owners are incredibly fortunate, accompany them—get dragged back into fashion, maybe we’ll be seeing even more cordylines in the landscape. Until then, just hail every one you see as an historical marker. Let’s refrain from any discussion of giving them landmark status just yet, though.  

Photograph by Ron Sullivan. 

A streetside tree dreams poolside dreams: Cordyline australis. 

FRIDAY, JAN. 25 

THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley “Barefoot in the Park” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. at Berryman, through Feb. 16. Tickets are $10-$12. 649-5999. www.aeofberkeley.org 

Altarena Playhouse “Wait Until Dark” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Altarena Playhouse, 1409 High St., Alameda, through Feb. 16. Tickets are $17-$20. 523-1553. www.altarena.org  

Aurora Theatre “Satellites” at 8 p.m. at 2081 Addison St. through March 2. Tickets are $40-$42. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

Contra Costa Civic Theatre “The Cocoanuts” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., some Sun. matinees at 2 p.m., at 951 Pomona Ave., at Moeser, El Cerrito, through March 2. Tickets are $15-$24. 524-9132. www.ccct.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. www.shotgunplayers.org 

Masquers Playhouse “Angel Street” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2:30 p.m. through Feb. 23 at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond. Tickets are $18. 232-4031. www.masquers.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Best Western” Art by Martin Webb. Artist reception at 5 p.m. at Estaban Sabar Gallery, 480 23rd St., Oakland. Exhibit runs through Feb. 18. 444-7411. www.estebansabar.com 

FILM 

Jean-Pierre Léaud “Love on the Run” at 7 p.m. and “Sweet Love, Bitter” at 8:40 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Sonja Lyubomirsky describes “The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Oakland East Bay Symphony Verdi’s “Requiem” at 8 p.m. at Paramount Theater, 2025 Broadway, Oakland. Pre-concert lecture at 7 p.m. 444-0801. www.oebs.org 

Pacific Lutheran University’s University Chorale Concert at 7 p.m. at St. Paul Lutheran Church, 1658 Excelsior Ave., Oakland. Free, donations accepted. 530-6333.  

“The Solo Violin” with Donna Lerew at 8 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. Cost is $5-$10.  

The Isaac Schwartztet at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$10. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Rhonda Benin & Soulful Strut at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Tempest, Avalon Rising at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Joni Davis at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Any Old Time String Band at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $20.50-$21.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Ben Ross, Christopher Hanson at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Straggler, Superthief, Humanzee at 9 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Benefit for People’s Park Anniversary with New Thrill Parade, Tulsa, Wildlife, Jump off a Building and the Functionelles, at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

Mark Hummel’s Blues Harmonica Blow Out with John Mayall, Kenny Neal, Fingers Taylor & Lazy Lester and the Blues Survivors at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $22-$30. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com  

Bayonics at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5. 548-1159.  

Paula Fuga at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Russell Taylor, R&B, at 9 p.m. at Maxwell’s Lounge, 341 13th St., Oakland. Cost is $10-$15. 839-6169. 

SATURDAY, JAN. 26 

CHILDREN  

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with EarthCapades at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5 for adults, $4 for children. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Active Arts Theatre for Young Audiences “Little Women” Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m., through Feb. 3, at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $14-$18. 925-798-1300. www.willowstickets.org  

Uncle Eye Songs and stories at 11 a.m. at Studio Grow, 1235 Tenth St. Cost is $7. 526-9888. 

THEATER 

San Francisco Theater Project “Aftermath of War: in their own words” Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 7:30 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $15-$20. 925-798-1300. www.willowstickets.org  

EXHIBITIONS 

“Don Clausen: Retrospective, 1964 to Present” Reception at 2 p.m. at Alta Galleria, 2980 College Ave., Suite 4. Exhibition runs to March 1. 421-1255. www.altagalleria.com  

FILM 

African Film Festival “Waiting for Happiness” at 6:30 p.m. at “Bamako” at 8:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“As if in Sleep: Collected Stories by Tim Barsky” at 8 p.m. at at the JCC of the East Bay, 1414 Walnut St. Tickets are $12. 848-0237. 

“The Music of Kurt Weill: September Songs” A film of staged and choreographed dramatizations of Brecht-Weill songs set in an old warehouse, at 5 p.m. at the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library, 6501 Telegraph at Alcatraz, Oakland. 527-9584. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Jane Bernstein describes “Rachel in the World: A Memoir” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

A Conversation with Christopher Taylor and David Benson author of “Music: A Mathematical Offering” at Chern Hall, Grizzly Peak and Centennial Way. 642-9988. 

Andrew Demcak and Nina Lindsay, poets, at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. claybanes@gmail.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

American Bach Soloists “Christmas Oratorio” at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $16-$42. 415-621-7900. 

The Arlekin String Quartet Celebration of the 35th Anniversary of Young People's Chamber Orchestra at 4 p.m. at Arlington Community Church, 52 Arlington Ave. Suggested donation $15-$25, includes dinner. 595-4688. 

Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, with Winton Marsalis, trumpet, at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $34-$68. 642-9988. www.calperformances.net 

De Rompe y Raja “Diáspora Negra” at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $13-$15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Yancie Taylor & His Jazztet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Baba Ken & Kotoja at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. African dance lesson at 9 p.m. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Benefit for the Oak Grove Tree Sitters Legal Defense with music by The Funky Nixons, Hali Hammer, Rockin’ Solidarity Labor Heritage Chorus and others at 7 p.m. at Redwood Gardens Community Room, 2901 Derby St. 548-6310. 

Fatlip, Omni at 8 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $12. 548-1159. www.shattuckdownlow.com 

Jon Roniger, Scott Waters at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Danny Maseng and Soul on Fire, a multi-media concert at 8:15 p.m. at Temple Sinai, 28th and Webster, Oakland. Free. 451-3263. 

Ravi Abcarian Group at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Any Old Time String Band at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $20.50-$21.50. 548-1761.  

Jonathan Alford Group with Maria Marquez and Alan Hall at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15-$18. 845-5373.  

George Cotsililos Jazz Group at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $3. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Izabella, Cas Luas at 9 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082.  

Mark Hummel’s Blues Harmonica Blow Out with John Mayall, Kenny Neal, Fingers Taylor & Lazy Lester and the Blues Survivors at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $22-$30. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SUNDAY, JAN. 27 

FILM 

“The Trial of Joan of Arc” at 3 p.m., “The Passion of Joan of Arc” at 4:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Dorothy Bryant reads from “The Berkeley Pit” at 4 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 559-9500.  

“Egyptology: Asasif Tombs of the 25th and 26th Dynasties: A Case Study in the Construction of Identity” with Jean Li, at 2:30 p.m. at Barrows Hall, Room 20, Barrow Lane and Bancroft Way, UC Campus. 650-363-8081. 

Linda Jon Myers and workshop students read from “Becoming Whole” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

San Francisco Chamber Orchestra “Virtuosi” by Yu-Hui Chang at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Pre-concert talk at 7:30 p.m. Free. 415-248-1640. www.sfchamberorchestra.org 

Christopher Taylor, piano, at 3 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $34. 642-9988. www.calperformances.net 

Prometheus Symphony Orchestra at 3 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 116 Montecito Ave., Oakland. Free, donations suggested. 415-864-2151. www.prometheussymphony.org  

Midsummer Mozart Festival Benefit Concert featuring pianist Seymour Lipkin, at 5:30 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant. Tickets are $75 and include reception. 415-627-9141. lori@midsummermozart.org.  

Grace Woods Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

John Young at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Bandworks at 1:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $5. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Dayna Stephens, tribute to Sonny Rollins, at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15-$18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Cheap Suit Serenaders at 5 and 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $24.50-$25.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Flamenco Night with Dani Torres at 5 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Mark Hummel’s Blues Harmonica Blow Out with John Mayall, Kenny Neal, Fingers Taylor & Lazy Lester and the Blues Survivors at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $22-$30. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

MONDAY, JAN. 28 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Cycle of Life: Awakening” Works by Asian women artists. Opening reception and lecture at 4 p.m. at Institute of East Asian Studies, 2223 Fulton St., 6th flr. Exhibit runs to May 15. 642-2809. 

“New Works by Gallery Artists” including Tyrell Collins, Carol Dalton, Hedi Desuyo, Anne Hunter Hamilton, Jenifer Kent, Grayson Malone, Lucy Matzger, Kevin Nierman, and others, opens at the Cecile Moochnek Gallery, 1809-D Fourth St., upstairs. 549-1018. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Sylvia Sellers-Garcia reads from her debut novel “When the Ground Turns in its Sleep” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Poetry Express with Nancy Wakeman at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Megan Lynch, bluegrass, at 7 p.m. at Le Bateau Ivre, 2629 Telegraph Ave. 849-1100.  

Musica ha Disconnesso, traditional Italian music, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Classical at the Freight with S.F. Chamber Orchestra at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $6.50-$7.50. 548-1761  

Kenny Durham Project co-led by Jules Rowell and Bill Belasco with Joel Dorham at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $6-$10. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

TUESDAY, JAN. 29 

FILM 

Experimental Documentaries “we will live to see these things, or, five pictures of what may come to pass” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Beth Lisick reads from “One Skeptic, Ten Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone” at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Louise Dunlap describes “Undoing the Silence: Six tools for Social Change Writing” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Del Sol String Quartet “Rhythms and Sounds from Around the World” with clarinetist Jeffrey Anderle at 8 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Tickets are $20. 525-5211. 

Singers’ Open Mic with Kelly Park at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Randy Craig Trio, jazz, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

Bandworks at 7:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $5. 525-5054. 

Chris Botti at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $35-$40. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Jazzschool Tuesdays at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

WEDNESDAY, JAN. 30 

EXHIBITIONS 

Youth Arts Festival Artwork from Berkeley K-12 public school students. Opening reception at 5 p.m. at Berkeley art Center. 1275 Walnut St. in Live Oak Park. 644-6893. 

“Awakening” Hand-drawn mandalas by Maia Apalonia, opens at NoneSuch Space, 2865 Broadway, Upper Floor, Oakland, and runs through March 1. 625-1600.  

Works by Sunhee Kim opens at Christensen Heller Gallery, 5829 College Ave., Oakland. 655-5952. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“From the Cinema of Abstractions to Narrative Illusionism” with Prof. Marilyn Fabe at 3 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808.  

The Believer Magazine Pizza Party at 7:30 p.m. at Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Andrés Reséndez describes “A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey to Cabeza de Vaca” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik and Three Blind Mice, at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Wednesday Noon Concert “Schubert and Beethovan in Vienna” at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Free. 642-4864. http://music.berkeley.edu 

Chuck Brodsky at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Michael Zilber Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Gator Beat at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun/Zydeco dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $7. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Orquestra Bakan at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Salsa dance lessons at 8:30 p.m. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Pacific Manouche at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

THURSDAY, JAN. 31 

FILM 

Jean-Pierre Léaud “Two English Girls” at 6:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Jennie Wang reads from “The Iron Curtain of Language: Maxine Hong Kingston and American Orientalism” at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. www.universitypressbooks.com 

Lashonda Barnett describes “I Got Thunder: Black Women Songwriters on Their Craft” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Richard Friar discusses “The Keepers: Part 1: WWIII” the first book in “The Keepers” trilogy and the battle machines he has included in the novel at 6:30 p.m. at El Sobrante Library, 4191 Appian Way, El Sobrante. 374-3991. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“Change the Beat” Benefit for Educate, Ugandan and Rwandan refugees, at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Berkeley Symphony with the US premiere of Toshio Hosokawa’s “Lotus under the moonlight” at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $20-$60. 841-2800. www.berkeleysymphony.org 

Jim Malcolm at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Bob Kenmotsu Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Houston Jones at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Ben Benkert and the Burnouts, Raya Nova at 9 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082. 

Joe Reilly, singer-songwriter, at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $5-$10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

The Phantom Family, La Otracina, rock, heavy metal, at 9 p.m. at Maxwell’s Lounge, 341 13th St., Oakland. Cost is $7. 839-6169. 

Chris Botti at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $35-$40. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com

There is no shortage of great film festivals in the Bay Area, celebrating the cinematic heritage of every corner of the globe.  

However, there is just one San Francisco festival that focuses purely on American film, or at least on a purely American film genre. For despite the Frenchified name, film noir is uniquely American in origin and in tone. 

The annual Noir City festival begins today (Friday) at the Castro theater in San Francisco, screening double features every day—20 films in all—through Sunday, Feb. 3. 

Film noir was not a self-conscious movement. Indeed, it was only defined in retrospect, and by outsiders, hence the French term. And yet, nearly 70 years since its genesis, it is still not easily defined.  

The genre stems from the crime fiction that emerged during the 1930s, when the Great Depression rocked the foundations of the devil-may-care America of the Roaring ’20s. Writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and multitudes of lesser-known pulp authors reshaped the literary landscape with dark, cynical, morally ambivalent tales of crime, sex and vice, stories steeped in shadowy imagery, tough talk, and a hardscrabble hyper-realism that portrayed a brutal, hostile world. There were no heroes, only anti-heroes, self-preserving pragmatists whose cynicism was born of dashed hopes and faded ideals.  

The genre didn’t spread to film until the 1940s, where it took on the darker undercurrents of the American psyche during and following the horrors of World War II. And while there is still some debate over which film deserves the mantle of the first noir, the most influential of the early efforts was John Huston’s 1941 adaptation of Hammett’s Maltese Falcon, in which Humphrey Bogart captured the cynicism and weariness of San Francisco private eye Sam Spade as he fell into and then delicately extricated himself from a web of deceit spun by Mary Astor, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), though not itself a noir, had a strong influence on the visual side of the genre, with its shadowy sets, striking German Expressionism-derived camera angles and somber tone. And Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder’s 1944 thriller starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, is frequently cited as the film that essentially codified the genre and its dominant characteristics, including the ruthless femme fatale as personified by Stanwyck’s icy Phyllis Dietrichson. 

Noir City, the festival and the foundation, were founded by Eddie Muller and Alan Rode to present and preserve this cinematic legacy. And it is a legacy greatly in need of preservation, for although noir has enjoyed a great resurgence in recent years, many of these films were B pictures, cheap studio products created simply to fill out a double bill, and then forgotten days after they closed. The Film Noir Foundation helps to rediscover, preserve, and strike new theatrical prints of these neglected classics so that they can be presented in all their tawdry glory. 

The festival starts Friday with a two-film tribute to actress Joan Leslie, who will be interviewed on stage during the intermission. Repeat Performance (1947) is the first of the festival’s many rare films, none available on DVD, many not available even on VHS, and some which have not screened in decades. Leslie stars as a young woman given the opportunity to relive the past year of her life, and the chance to opt this time not to kill her husband in what the festival program describes as a noir version of It’s a Wonderful Life. The Hard Way (1943), directed by Vincent Sherman and photographed by the great James Wong Howe, is what the festival has termed an “honorary noir,” for though it doesn’t quite qualify, it is certainly one of Leslie’s darker films. 

Other highlights include Saturday’s tribute to screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, featuring The Prowler (1951), presented in a brand-new 35-millimeter print, and Gun Crazy (1950); Hangover Square (1945), a quintessential noir featuring a melodramatic plot of madness and murder, beautiful but dangerous dames, Wellesian camera angles, and an ominous and evocative score by the great Bernard Herrmann; a double feature by director Anthony Mann and cinematographer John Alton (Jan. 30); D.O.A. (1950), set in San Francisco (Jan. 31); and Conflict (Feb. 1), one of Bogart’s lesser-known noirs. 

Saturday Feb. 2 will feature three films, including the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), the most recent production on this year’s program, along with (schedule permitting) an onstage interview with actor Billy Bob Thornton. And the festival will close Feb. 3 with a screening of Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950), one of the darkest films in the genre. 

NOIR CITY 6 

Through Feb. 3 at the Castro Theater,  

429 Castro St., San Francisco. 

For more information see www.noircity.com or  

www.thecastrotheatre.com.

‘APPARITION OF THE ETERNAL CHURCH’ 

Tonight (Friday) at 7 p.m. Paul Festa’s acclaimed music film, Apparition of the Eternal Church, which registers the “often riotous” responses of 31 nonbelievers to Catholic composer Olivier Messiaen’s apocalyptic musical vision, receives its Bay Area premiere by CalPerformances at Wheeler Auditorium—admission free. Participants include local cultural folk such as Richard Felciano, Eisa Davis and Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket), as well as pronouncements from Harold Bloom.

A door on-stage is thrown open, and a vivacious young woman (Wendy Welch as Corie Bratter) surveys the room before her, and heaves a happy sigh. The room is a bare, freshly-painted fifth-floor walkup apartment, with only a ladder and paint cans for adornment. 

Corie’s little Arcadia is, in her mind, a love nest for her and brand-new husband Paul (David Irving), from which they may romp in early ’60s New York. Corie’s the pert, adventuresome one, whose escapade gives Neil Simon’s comedy its title, Barefoot in the Park, at Berkeley Actors Ensemble.  

Paul’s her straight man, a lawyer just handed his first case: “Staid,” Corie taunts him with when they argue, an observer to her doer. She’s constantly egging him on, in her exuberance, to join her in stunts and games. 

Corie also thinks the five-floor walkup will serve as a barrier to her stifling mother (Ljuba Davis as Ethel Banks), though it just gives the be-furred yenta another scene to dramatize, when she makes it over from ‘way out in Jersey, where she lives alone. 

(Though a comic telephone man (Jerome Solberg) has a few tart things to say about the ascent; a delivery man (Jose Garcia) on the other hand is too winded to complain.) 

Rounding out the cast is eccentric upstairs neighbor, Mr. Victor Velasco (David Spinner), bon vivant, raconteur and jack-of-all-trades, who makes his appearance requesting the use of the Bratter’s window to enter his apartment.  

Corie craftily sets up her mother with Mr. Velasco, who insists they all convene at an Albanian restaurant on Staten Island. But her cleverness hits the wall when Mrs. Banks and Mr. Velasco really do seem to hit it off—and her husband gets on her about her irresponsible highjinks. Corie suddenly is more overprotective of her mother than her mother is of her and falls apart over Paul’s criticism, questioning whether they were ever in love. 

Director Alan Barkan, together with assistant director Eric Carlson, worked well with cast members, who rise up from the one-liners of former TV gagman Simon to become an ensemble, especially during the hysterical second act. But even Simon’s gags aren’t so easy to deliver—the combination of tossed-off giddiness with a little Big Apple sangfroid is often missed in productions far from Manhattan. The Actors Ensemble bunch hits the mark much more often than not. 

Wendy Welch shows great comic flair, her maniacally gesturing hands and forearms syncopating the madcap movement of her various funny walks. David Irving is a fine foil for her nutty exuberance, getting his own back in the end.  

Ljuba Davis, in her theatrical debut, shows her long experience as a folk singer, comfortable with stage and dialogue as she spins out a performance that seems to send up both her character and herself, with great good humor. And David Spinner is a dead ringer for his Neil Simon eccentric turn, charming and goofy and at moments the sanest of the bunch. 

Alan Barkan, in his program note, points out that the play opened a month before the JFK assassination, at the tail-end of that time of public optimism that characterized the early ’60s. “At least then, laughter came easier.” Helen Slomowitz’s costumes, as ever, pinpoint the time and place, as well as Shu Ping Guan’s “decorated” apartment, which goes from blank to busy, bare to kitsch.  

In the end, the comedy goes through the roof: Corie and Paul, dimly glimpsed above the skylight, shouting admonitions and endearments to each other, and boisterous nonsense to the rest of the world—that is, New York—in general. 

BAREFOOT IN THE PARK 

Presented by Berkeley Actors Ensemble at  

8 p.m. Friday and Saturday through Feb. 16 at  

Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. $10-$12.

This Sunday at the Berkeley City Club, world-renowned pianist Seymour Lipkin will join music director George Cleve and the Midsummer Mozart Orchestra to initiate the 34th season of the Midsummer Mozart Festival.  

They will be performing intimate pocket versions of some of Mozart’s most charming compositions for an audience of exactly 100 people. For the lucky century of Amadeans who get into this benefit concert, there will also be largesse of fine food and wine along with the great music. 

Seymour Lipkin, a student of Rudolf Serkin’s who won the Rachmaninoff Competition at 19, has conducted and played the piano with every major orchestra, conductor, chamber ensemble and festival in the world. He has been a frequent guest with the Midsummer Mozart Orchestra and a longtime friend, colleague and, at one time, a teacher of piano and conducting to George Cleve. He will be donating his performances to the festival.  

For this benefit concert, Lipkin and four string players from the festival Orchestra will be playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 13 in C Major in a transcription for piano accompanied by string quartet, a performance possibility suggested by Mozart. This sparkling work was composed by Mozart after his first year living in Vienna, and first played there in March and later in the year in Salzburg in October of 1783 It was one of his few piano concertos published during his lifetime. 

Lipkin will also perform as a soloist on the Piano Sonata in D Major, Mozart’s final piano sonata. It was composed in 1789 and has often been associated with the six easy sonatas Mozart was supposed to compose for Princess Frederika of Prussia in that year. The difficulty and experimental nature of the music, though, belies this unless the Princess was an amateur with virtuosic capabilities. 

Also on the program is the late serenade, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, probably Mozart’s single most familiar melody. It has been heard in over three dozen films and television episodes and has been used to catch the ears of battalions of insomniacs by many a late night CD offering of classical music treasures. Even these indignities have not destroyed it. Mozart wrote it in Vienna in 1787 and for this performance it will be performed by a nonet from the Orchestra’s string section.  

The Orchestra horn section will also have a chance to present its talents when flutist Maria Tamburino and oboist Laura Griffiths combine to play instrumental duets from a 1792 edition of operatic arias taken from The Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro. Some of the duets for flute and violin from this edition have been performed at a previous benefit and although the words are missing the emotions and personalities of the characters in the operas are perfectly transposed into their wood and metal alter egos. 

It is easy to convey the personal and historical facts surrounding the creation of this music during the rococo epoch in Eighteenth Century Europe. It is harder to explain the afterlife of this music, its movement from ephemeral popularity during Mozart’s lifetime to appreciation from a few cognoscenti like E.T.A. Hoffman, Eduard Morike and Soren Kierkegaard to the preternatural fame of the man today. The reason we still listen is not because of the cheese monger/French horn player, the Masons, the Popes and cardinals, Sheridan’s brother-in-law, princes and princesses, mesmerists and Jewish-Italian librettists, fascinating as these are. 

We listen not because this music was once great, but because it is now even greater and we need it even more today. In order to have it, we also need the imagination and insight and virtuosity of a George Cleve or a Seymour Lipkin. Through their work with the Midsummer Mozart Festival they inspire and discipline fellow musicians in order to bring these sacred treasures to life, not as musty, mechanical, note-perfect simulacra but as living, moving experiences full of beauty, surprise and humanity.  

Even if you cannot be one of the lucky hundred who attend this benefit concert, watch for this summer’s schedule of five programs, July 18 through Aug. 3, in San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Jose, Berkeley, and Sonoma. Complete concert details will be available in the spring at www.midsummermozart.org. 

MIDSUMMER MOZART FESTIVAL BENEFIT CONCERT 

5:30-8:30 p.m. Sunday at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Hors d’oeuvres, fine wines and a silent auction. Admission is $75, limited to 100. (415) 627-9141, or lori@midsummermozart.org.

The settlement of the residential blocks south of the UC campus began, naturally, on the streets closest to the university and progressed southward. In 1903, the area now known as the Willard neighborhood, comprising the Hillegass and Berry-Bangs tracts and bounded, clockwise, by Dwight Way, College, Ashby, and Telegraph Avenues, was most densely built along Benvenue and Hillegass Avenues north of Derby Street. 

By 1911—five years after the San Francisco earthquake—Benvenue, Hillegass, and Regent Streets were almost completely built out to Ashby Avenue, streetcars and commuter lines were running along Ashby and College, and a cluster of local shops and services served the neighborhood. 

The homes built along Benvenue, Hillegass, and Regent were spacious and elegant—often architect-designed—and many featured brown-shingle exteriors and craftsman interiors complete with wood-paneled walls and beamed ceilings. It was a fashionable neighborhood, populated by businessmen and professionals. Apartment buildings were unknown here. 

This changed on May 6, 1916, when the Berkeley Daily Gazette announced: 

The new apartment house, “Hillegass Court,” 2821 Hillegass Ave., is just completed for the owner, G. A. Mattern, and is rapidly being occupied by families which had made their choice of apartments during its construction. Architects Wright & Rushforth, of San Francisco, have endeavored to carry out a design suitable to the character of its surroundings, with ample lot area for lawns and shrubbery on all sides, with a driveway to the garage located on the south and in the rear. The central court arrangement affords a degree of privacy to the three entrances, there being one in each wing, and within the terraced court is sufficient area for a nice display of lawn. 

There are a total of sixteen apartments of two, three and four rooms each, with sleeping porches to eight of them. The owner has spared no expense to provide the essentials to health and comfort; light, air, sun, heat and ventilation are well provided for. The basement being high and dry, affords ample storage facilities for tenants, besides a social room, kitchen, laundry and the usual basement equipment. Louis Engler of this city was the contractor, and the cost amounted to about $30,000. 

Hillegass Court went up on a triple lot that had remained open on the block between Stuart and Russell Streets. A handsome, C-shaped structure, it bears a vague resemblance to a lakeside Kurhaus in an Alpine resort. According to a legend that circulated for many years among the tenants, the design is a copy of a 1912 French building Mattern admired. Since there is no record of Mattern having traveled to Europe in the 1910s (he would travel there frequently between 1921 and 1940), it’s possible that he might have seen such a building in a magazine or in an architectural journal shown him by the architect. 

The architect, George Rushforth (1861–1943), was an Englishman who, with his new bride, immigrated to California in 1887. The couple’s first stop was Los Angeles, where their eldest son was born. By 1890, they had moved to Stockton, where they lived for a decade and a half, bringing three more sons into the world. In 1902, George designed Stockton High School. 

In the wake of the 1906 earthquake, Rushforth shifted his field of operations to San Francisco. The move was motivated not only by the better professional opportunities available in the Bay Area but by the need to educate four sons born between 1888 and 1894. 

In 1907, Rushforth opened an office at 2277 California Street with two compatriots, George A. Wright and Bernard J.S. Cahill. He commuted from Berkeley, where the family home was at 2321 Blake St. 

A practical architect, Rushforth was no prima donna; he sought to give his clients what they wanted. This flexibility is evident in the variety of styles seen in his work. Among the better-known San Francisco buildings designed by Wright, Rushforth & Cahill is the 7-story Hotel Whitcomb at Market and Eighth Streets (1911), which was adapted by the architects for use as a temporary City Hall from 1912 to 1915. 

In Berkeley, Rushforth’s most famous work is the Gothic-style Trinity Methodist Church (1927–28) and Trinity Hall (1934) on Dana Street between Durant Ave. and Bancroft Way. 

Rushforth’s connection to his Hillegass Court client was a family affair—his second son, Archibald (1890–1976), married Mabel Mattern and worked in her father’s business. The firm was the famous Gantner & Mattern Co. of San Francisco, later known as Gantner of California. It manufactured sweaters and coats, knit underwear and hosiery, but was especially known for its swimwear. In 1907, it advertised ladies’ bathing suits from $1.90 to $40, men’s from $1 to $6, and boys’ from 75 cents up. Girls at the time did not seem to merit their own swimwear. 

The company promoted its aquatic apparel by exhorting the public to learn to swim, offering a pair of water wings free with every suit. It maintained a baseball team, the Gantner-Matterns, who played in an amateur league that included St. Mary’s College in Oakland. In March 1906, the team played a benefit game against the university’s varsity team, with U.C. president Benjamin Ide Wheeler pitching the first ball. The proceeds went to pay off the $900 mortgage on the house of James Tate’s widow at 2022 Delaware Street. Mr. Tate, known as “Jimmie Potatoes,” had been a university gardener for 20 years. 

The company’s owners, John Oscar Gantner (1868–1951) and George Alfred Mattern (1864–1945), were immigrants’ sons. Gantner’s father was a Swiss saloon keeper, while Mattern’s was a German boat maker. In 1870, the Gantners lived next to another Swiss immigrant family, the Pfisters. John Pfister (born c. 1809) was a brewer who supplied the Gantner saloon. 

The family connections continued into the next generation, but not in the same field. By 1880, John Jacob Pfister (b. 1844) was running the J.J. Pfister Knitting Company, manufacturers of crochet and knitted goods, bathing suits, tights, underwear, sporting uniforms, and importers of bolting cloth. That year, 16-year old Alfred Mattern was working in a woolen mill. He would rise to superintendent at J.J. Pfister & Co. while still in his mid-twenties. At the same time, John O. Gantner would become Pfister’s corporate secretary. 

Mattern, who could never make up his mind whether he was George A. or Alfred G., first appeared in the Berkeley directory in 1893, residing at 2157 Dwight Way. The last time he was listed as a Pfister employee was in 1897, and two years later his occupation was given as “manufacturer.” In 1907, he built a new house at 2701 Regent Street and Derby (the site is now a lawn facing the Willard Park mosaic bench). 

Not much has come down to us about G.A. Mattern’s personal life. He fathered a boy and two girls. His son, Hermann A. Mattern, and his son-in-law, Archibald W. Rushforth, would spend their careers as managers at Gantner & Mattern. The only family member who didn’t fit the business mold was the youngest daughter, Laurinne Easter Mattern, who edited the 1915 commencement issue of the Anna Head School publication, Nods and Becks, and listed herself as an orchestral musician in the 1930 U.S. census. 

In December 1907, the San Francisco Call recorded that G.A. Mattern was one of 750 citizens who attended a Merchants’ Association banquet promoting consolidation of all the cities around San Francisco Bay. A rare lighter note was struck by the same newspaper in August 1910, when it reported, “Frightened by the shouts of his son, who had a nightmare, G.A. Mattern, a wealthy manufacturer of 2701 Regent street, jumped out of bed at an early hour this morning and fell off the sleeping porch of his home, 15 feet to the ground. […] He is now suffering from a fracture of the hip and other injuries.” Awakened by his own screams, Hermann found his father in the garden and summoned Dr. Edith Brownsill, who lived at 2614 Channing Way (current site of the university’s Crossroads dining center). 

In the late 1910s, the Matterns would build a new home at 100 Tunnel Road, but before departing from the Berry-Bangs tract, they beautified it with Hillegass Court. Ron Erickson, a former tenant in the building, described it in 1986: 

There is still a low-ceilinged dance room in the basement, about 60’ x 30’, with original light fixtures, a wood dance floor, and a small serving area at one end. It is thought to have been a meeting-place for the Red Cross during the war. 

Many if not all rooms contained wall beds, built-in ironing boards (still being used), and cabinets just outside each apartment door, accessible for deliveries. All the apartments differ in small, charming details. The larger ones have built-in china closets or secretaries. 

The ornamental work in the exterior design is reflected somewhat in the original stair banisters. All hallways, and much of the apartment interiors, is paneled in beautifully grained cedar divided by three-inch ribs. Unfortunately, all woodwork in the halls was painted a light green, probably in the Fifties. Fortunately, this paint is scraped off fairly easily without chemicals, revealing a rich-grained, brown-reddish stained surface. Altogether, except for superficial alterations, the building seems to be in its original form. 

Once Hillegass Court was completed in 1916, Mattern erected a house for Mabel and Archie Rushforth on the open southern third of the property. To design this unprepossessing Brown Shingle, he didn’t have to go farther than his in-law, Rushforth père. 

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

Daniella Thompson 

Hillegass Court, an elegant 1916 apartment building at 2821 Hillegass Ave.

When you crawl around under houses every day, you see some odd things. It’s part archaeology, a little zoology and, of course, all that construction stuff. It doesn’t take too long doing this to realize that you’re not always alone down under the house (or up in the attic). There are little neighbors that like to share the space. They’re not trying to get inside your house, per se. It’s just that they want a safe warm space and you happen to be right there. Termites use the same logic. They don’t know that they’re eating a house. What’s a house to a termite. They’re just eating some fallen trees that happen be in their path.  

One of my favorite critter sightings, and I’ve seen this a number of times, is seen in a crawlspace. It’s a pile of empty snail shells mounded up like a stack of beer cans on a bachelors beaten-up coffee table. It took me a while to figure it out but apparently, raccoons like snails and will collect a bunch of them, kick back under the house and snack away. Are raccoons French? 

A range of animals also live out their lives, fight, give birth and die under and inside houses. At least one or twice a year, I’ll get a call that has to do with animal sounds in a wall, attic or below the floor. If they can get in, all the things that would be happening in the woodland will occur in your house at 3 a.m.; and you get to listen. (That seems to be a favored time for figuring or amour d’bete). 

Some odd few may enjoy these interlopements but most people prefer to keep the wilds outside. If you are among the latter, you may wish to avail yourself of some of the following strategies and data. 

First, mice and rats get inside of almost everyone’s house. If you see evidence (scatological or otherwise) don’t be surprised. Rodents come into houses for warmth, food (when they can get it) and to escape predators, which is why they like the tiny entryways that bar the cat but allow the mouse. 

Mice are very small, smaller than they look. Their skulls are somewhat flexible and they are more fur than flesh. Field mice can enter through openings smaller than one half inch in diameter. Rats vary in size but can also squeeze through three quarter inch openings below doors or around pipes. To prevent these from entering, you will need to begin by identifying every tiny opening in the side of your building. Louvered metal or wooden vents often allow for rodent entry. Replace louvered (with stamped out slits that you can fit your fingers through) metal vents with ones made of quarter inch galvanized steel mesh. Caulk the back rim and screw them in place. 

If you have an old house with wooden foundation vents, you can install the same quarter-inch steel mesh on the inside of these without ruining their marvelous grandmotherly appeal. Take a roll of mesh and a pair of tin snips and cut a rectangle two to four inches larger in each direction than the vent space. Cut away the corners so that you have four tabs that you can bend onto the adjacent jambs or framing or simply snip into the corners diagonally and fold then over each other. Affix these firmly in place using a staple gun and half inch long staples. 

You can do the same thing behind half inch steel mesh vents or any grate that has a larger than one centimeter opening. 

Look carefully around the doors to your electrical or gas compartments. Many do not fit tightly and are virtual rat freeways into your house. Some doors fit so badly that the only real answer is to replace them and make the replacement a nice snug fit. Some doors can be altered with a piece of trim. Remember that a small opening for you may be huge to an animal. 

By the way, once their under the house, there are loads of vessels, chaseways and separations between the crawlspace and the inner walls for critters to traverse so keeping them out at the perimeter is the easiest way. 

Gaps around plumbing, especially large waste lines, are very common. Gaps can be caulked using a good quality caulk. I like polyurethane caulks for their ability to grasp porous materials such as wood. Sikaflex is one good brand. For larger openings you can decide if wood and nails are the answer or something like expanding foam. Keep in mind that rats can eat through foam. If you do use foam, it should be covered over with wood, paint or anything that can minimize exposure.  

For larger openings, mesh can be secured in place thus preserving more ventilation. 

Large mesh areas can be torn out by raccoons and it may be wise to double the mesh. I like a combination of quarter inch mesh and chicken wire. Very large openings can be a combination of quarter inch mesh and welded wire (which comes in a range of mesh sizes and is very heavy duty). 

While you’re at it, it pays to check your attic vents. Many have very large openings and I’ve seen more than a few full sized bird’s nests as evidence. Since bird feces can be virally rich, birds nesting should be considered a real health hazard. 

While it’s nice to make sure the doors to your house fit well for energy conservation reasons, a large bottom gap is also how mice can get inside. This too, is worth looking at. The last one I’ll mention is perhaps the least likely but I have seen evidence of animal entering through roof vents these, too, can be screened except in the case of gas appliances and dryer vents (which shouldn’t go through your roof anyway but, hey, there they are). 

If you’ve really worked your way through all of this, you are in much better shape and likely to have fewer all night parties raging in the wall. A determined animal may still enter by burrowing or may gnaw through a wooden barrier but this isn’t worth worrying about. Deal with that when you have the evidence. 

Ants can’t be stopped by any of these methods so don’t try. Keep the kitchen floor clean and take out the garbage regularly. If that doesn’t do it, you may need to use one of the nasty agents that we all prefer to avoid. Grant’s Ant Stakes work pretty well but be sure to follow the instructions. 

Many a night as I drive home, my headlights catch the eyes of a deer on my curvy little Berkeley street. How lucky we are, I think, to live in a time and place where life flourishes and lives safely among us. While I may not want to hear raccoons fighting over dinner late at night, their presence in my neighborhood is a blessing. I don’t want to live in a city devoid of animal life and if I have to work a bit to corral them, oh well, it’s a small price. 

Photograph by Matt Cantor. 

This wooden ventilation screen, seen from the inside, lets in six rats at a time.

Woodland gardening takes on a new aspect when one is practicing it here in coastal northern California. There are considerations one must take with regard to natural resources and scarcity—as much a product of time as of place, as everything living here gets more squeezed by human overpopulation, including us humans who are doing the overpopulating.  

Add that to the huge number of endemic species we have here, and the proportion of them that are threatened or endangered, and it’s hard to make a case for much other than conservation and restoration in our gardens.  

Here again is where my own history and bias inform my thinking, and I’ll be forthright about it. I came to gardening via birding and natural history. Wanting to know what the bird was sitting on led top wanting to know how it all fit together, then who the individuals in the system were. So when it comes to plants as well as other organisms, I guess my mindset is one of discovery rather than shaping.  

I got to thinking about that a few years back when we stumbled upon a woodland garden just north of Yuba Pass in the Sierra. It was, at the time, open to the public; I believe it’s closed since. We try to get up to the area every summer for the wildflowers and birds, and so spend some time tramping about in the yellow pine and red fir forests.  

We’ve seen fantastic things like the baroque red saprophytes snowplant and pine drops; stalks of tiny white rein orchids massed in roadside ditches; whole meadows of impossibly blue camas and fizzy yellow madia; violets and larkspurs and lilies and paintbrush and pussy paws—all more or less by accident. Creeks spread out into wet meadows of elephant’s-heads and corn lilies and shooting stars, then re-channel themselves to make perfect bankside gardens of moss and ferns and buttercups.  

Streamcourses and boulders and shrub groupings all follow the original aesthetic of Nature, ruled by gravity and light and water arriving all the way to the local sky and peaks from the Pacific. Every form, no matter how varied, has the inevitability of mathematics. Who could improve on this?  

Not, as it seemed, the planners of this garden. It was pleasant enough, but even allowing for its raw, not-quite-finished state, it seemed forced in some places, bare in others. There was a lake and a lakeside lodge with flagpoles, an arched bridge and some rather handsome paths, but nothing looked so perfect as the surrounding mountains do, despite human incursions and devastations.  

Compared to the manzanitas and ceanothuses beyond its borders, the shrubs looked thirsty and out of place. Compared to the unique local wildflowers, the herbaceous stuff looked ordinary; I’d seen most of it in gardens here at home. Why go all the way up there to see what I’d seen here? 

If I didn’t know any better I think I’d have loved the place. But having returned to the area year after year, having come to know it, I did know better: the wilderness next door. 

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, JAN. 25 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Robert E. Friend on “Permanency for Foster Youth” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925.  

Albany Lions Club Annual Crab Feed at 5:30 p.m. at Albany Veterans Memorial Building, 1325 Portland Ave., Albany. Tickets are $30. 418-6101, 236-1344. 

Friday Films for Teens at 3:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 3rd flr., 2090 Kittredge St. For details call 981-6121. 

Kol Hadash Humanistic Tu B’Shvat Seder at 7:30 p.m. at the Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin Ave. Details on what ritual food items to bring are posted at www.kolhadash.org 

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310. 

SATURDAY, JAN. 26 

Bird Rescuers’ Get-Together Celebrate the Bay and join in a thank-you get-together for everyone who helped after the November oil spill. We will see pictures from the spill, celebrate wildlife that was rescued, chat and hear about what others did, remember and reflect on plans to make it better next time, at 3 p.m. at Shorebird Park Nature Center, 160 University Ave. 981-6720. 

Help Plant Natives on Berkeley Paths Please join BPWA and Friends of Five Creeks planting natives and removing weeds on Covert Path, part of a long-term project creating demonstration plantings and an “interpretive trail” from hills to Bay in the Codornices Creek watershed. Meet at 10 a.m. at the top of Covert Path, downhill side of Keeler Ave. a short distance southeast of Twain Ave. 848-9358. www.fivecreeks.org 

Civil Rights Panel and Community Speak-Out with Kris Worthington, Berkeley City Council member, Osha Neumann, Attorney and former Police Review Commissioner, Melvin Dickson, Commemoration Committee for the Black Panther Party, Andrea Prichett, Copwatch, Subcommittee on Evidence Theft Issues, Mike Diehl, Activist and advocate for homeless rights, James Chanin, Attorney, former Police Review Commissioner, from noon to 2 p.m. at 1730 Oregon St., below MLK Jr. Way. www.berkeleycopwatch.org  

Celebrating the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with Jamil Dakwar, American Civil Liberties Union Director of Advocacy and Human Rights Programs from 2 to 5 p.m. at Pacific School of Religion, 1798 Scenic Ave. Sponsored by United Nations Association-USA East Bay. Cost is $5-$15. 864-9005. www.unausaeastbay.org 

Vegetarian Cooking Class “Healthful Resolutions: Lo-Cal, High Flavor” featuring kale and nori salad, Asian-inspired lettuce wraps, yellow split pea dal, hummus and fruit smoothies, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at First Unitarian Church of Oakland, 685 14th St. at Castro. Cost is $55 plus $5 material fee. to register call 531-COOK. www.compassionatecooks.com 

Benefit for the Oak Grove Tree Sitters Legal Defense with music by The Funky Nixons, Hali Hammer, Rockin’ Solidarity Labor Heritage Chorus and others at 7 p.m. at Redwood Gardens Community Room, 2901 Derby St. 548-6310. 

Play Around the Bay Symposium on the disappearance of children’s play, and proposals for postitive change, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Doubletree Hotel, 200 Marina Blvd. Cost is $40-$55. 647-111 ext. 35. www.habitot.org  

Scalky Sleepers Learn how scales help animals weather the cold at 10:30 a.m. at the Oakland Zoo, 9777 Golf Links Rd. Cost is $7.50-$10. Registration required. 632-9525. www.oaklandzoo.org 

Kids Go Green Activities centered on ecology and climate change from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Chabot Space and Science Center, 10000 Skyline Blvd., Oakland. Cost is $9-$13. 336-7373.  

Preschool Storytime, for ages 3-5, at 11 a.m. at Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

“The Music of Kurt Weill: September Songs” A film of staged and choreographed dramatizations of Brecht-Weill songs set in an old warehouse, at 5 p.m. at the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library, 6501 Telegraph at Alcatraz, Oakland. 527-9584. 

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.  

Oakland Artisans Marketplace Sat. from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Jack London Square. 238-4948. 

SUNDAY, JAN. 27 

“End the Occupation” A discussion with Max Elbaum, editor of War Times, at 11 a.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donations accepted. www.Humanist Hall.org 

“Labor, the WPA Proposals and the Fight for New Orleans and Katrina Survivors” A public forum and video screening at 2 p.m. at the Fellowship of Humanity, 390 27th St., Oakland. Sponsored by the Labor Video Project. 415-282-1908. 

Films for a Future: “The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil” at 2 p.m., followed by a discussion, at Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

People’s Park Anniversary Planning Meeting at 5:30 p.m. at Cafe Med Telegraph, north of Dwight New people encouraged to come. 658-9178. 

“Elections: Not how Leaders are Chosen, Not how Decisions are made and Not how you can make a difference” with Larry Everest at 7 p.m. at Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way. 848-1196. www.revolutionbooks.org 

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, JAN. 28 

“Exploring Jazz with Len Lyons” A course to explore the basic building blocks of this unique musical language Mon. from 6 to 8 p.m. through March 10, at 2199 Addison St. For information contact Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, a continuing education program for people 50 and over. 642-9934. olli.berkeley.edu 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

TUESDAY, JAN. 29 

Community Meeting on Pacific Steel and West Berkeley Air Quality Monitoring Learn about air monitoring results in West Berkeley and what toxics have been found in the air at 7 p.m. at West Berkeley Senior Center, 1900 6th St., at Hearst. Sponsored by Greenaction, Global Community Monitor, West Berkeley Alliance for Clean Air and Safe Jobs, and the Ecology Center. 415-248-5010. 

“The Eleventh Hour” A documentary by Leonardo DiCaprio on the state of the global environment, and practical solutions for restoring the planet’s ecosystems at 5 p.m. at Boalt Hall, Room 110, UC Campus. Sponsored by the California Center for Environmental Law and Policy. 642-6774. 

“Navigating the Mekong” A film by Mic O’Shea on his solo kayak adventure from Tibet to the South China Sea at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Berkeley School Volunteers Orientation from 4 to 5 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. Come learn about volunteer opportunities. 644-8833. 

Alameda Women’s Commission “Community Conversation” to gain support for CEDAW (The United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women) at 5:30 p.m. at the Alameda Library, 1550 Oak St., Alameda. Free, but reservations requested. 259-3871. 

Family Storytime at 7 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043.  

“The TV show House and the Experience of Socialist Society So Far” Discussion taking off from an excerpt of “Making Revolution and Emancipating Humanity” by Bob Avakian at 7 p.m. at Revolution Books 2425 Channing Way. 848-1196. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

End the Occupation Vigil every Tues. at noon at Oakland Federal Bldg., 1301 Clay St. www.epicalc.org 

Street Level Cycles Community Bike Program Come use our tools as well as receive help with performing repairs free of charge. Youth classes available. Tues., Thurs., and Sat. from 2 to 6 p.m. at at 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704.  

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, JAN. 30 

Proposed Spraying to Combat Apple Moth in Alameda County A community meeting on the spray will take place at 7:30 p.m. at the Center for Environmental Health, 528 61st St., Oakland. 594-9864. 

Pools for Berkeley meets at 7 p.m. at the City of Berkeley Corporation Yard, 1326 Allston Way. www.poolsforberkeley.org 

“Paradise Now” A film about Palestinian recruits for a major operation in Tel Aviv, at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donation $5. www.Humanist Hall.org 

“Understanding Children’s Temperament” with Rona Renner, R.N., at 6:30 p.m. at Windrush School, Multipurpose Room, 1800 Elm St., El Cerrito. 970-7580. 

Cash for College Workshop at 6:30 p.m. at Albany High School, 603 Key Route Blvd. or Oakland High School Theater and Library, 1023 Macarthur Blvd. For deatails see www.calgrants.org 

“Women’s Hormone Balance: PMS, Infertility, and Menopause” at 7:30 p.m. at Rockridge Curves, 5665 College Ave., Suite 1, Oakland. Free. Foundation for Wellness Professionals. 849-1176. 

Pacific Boychoir Auditions for boys ages 5-9 at 410 Alcatraz in Oakland. Please call for an audition appointment. 652-4722.  

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. 

Teen Chess Club from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. at the North Branch Library, 1170 The Alameda at Hopkins. 981-6133. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at 6:30 p.m. at the Berkeley BART station. www. 

geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

Morning Meditation Every Mon., Wed., and Fri. at 7:45 a.m. at Rudramandir, 830 Bancroft Way at 6th. 486-8700. 

After-School Program Homework help, drama and music for children ages 8 to 18, every Wed. from 4 to 7:15 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Cost is $5 per week. 845-6830. 

Stitch ‘n Bitch at 6:30 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

THURSDAY, JAN. 31 

Babies & Toddlers Storytime at 10:15 and 11:15 a.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043.  

World of Plants Tours at 1:30 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $5. 643-2755.  

Fitness Class for 55+ at 9:15 a.m. at Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237. 

ONGOING 

E-Waste Recycling St. Vincent de Paul of Alameda County accepts electronic waste including computers, dvd players, cell phones, fax machines and many other ewaste products for disposal free of charge at many of its locations throughout Alameda County. Free bulk pick-up available. 638-7600. www.svdp-alameda.org 

Help a Newt Cross the Road Every year newts migrate across Hillside Drive to reach their breeding pools in Castro Creek. Volunteers prevent many of these creatures from being crushed by cars. We need volunteers every evening during January and February in El Sobrante. The newts are most active on rainy nights. annabelle11_3@yahoo.com 

Free Tax Help If your 2007 household income was less than $42,000, you are eligible for free tax preparation from United Way's Earn it! Keep It! Save It! Sites are open now through April 15 in Alameda and Contra Costa counties. To find a site near you, call 800-358-8832. www.EarnItKeepItSaveIt.org 

Donate the Excess Fruit from Your Fruit Trees I’ll gladly pick and deliver your fruit to community programs that feed school kids, the elderly, and the hungry. The fruit trees should be located in Berkeley and organic (no pesticides). This is a free volunteer/ 

grassroots thing so join in!! To scehdule and appointment call or email 812-3369. northberkeleyharvest@gmail.com http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu

TUESDAY, JAN. 22 

CHILDREN 

Bill Nemoyten “The Hornman” for ages 3 and up at 6:30 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. 524-3043. 

FILM 

Experimental Documentaries “Milk n the Land: Ballad of an American Drink” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Freight and Salvage Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $4.50-$5.50. 548-1761.  

Gabor Gyukics, poet and translator, at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Charles Halpern introduces “Making Waves and Riding Currents: Activism and the Practice of Wisdom” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Courtableu at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054.  

Singers’ Open Mic with Kelly Park at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ.  

David Lindley at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $24.50-$25.50. 548-1761.  

Bob Kenmotsu, jazz, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Festival, featuring Cyril Pahinui, Dennis Kamakahi & George Kahumoku at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $14-$20. 238-9200.  

Jazzschool Tuesdays at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

WEDNESDAY, JAN. 23 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Cycle of Life: Awakening” Works by Asian women artists, opens at the Institute of East Asian Studies, 2223 Fulton St., 6th flr. Exhibit runs to May 15. 642-2809. 

FILM 

“Reel Bad Arabs” A documentary on the degrading images of Arabs in cinematic history, at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donation $5. www.Humanist Hall.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Introduction to Film Language” with Prof. Marilyn Fabe at 3 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Mona Sutphen and Nina Hachigian describe “The Next American Century: How the U.S. Can Thrive as Other Powers Rise” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Vikram Chandra reads from “Sacred Games” at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Sue Miller reads from “The Senator’s Wife” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Writing Teachers Write at 5 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

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 

David Lindley at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $24.50-$25.50. 548-1761.  

Erik Jekabsen Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Balkan Folk Dance at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $7. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

La Verdad at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Code Name: Jonah at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Cyrus Chestnut at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$18. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, JAN. 24 

FILM 

African Film Festival “Bamako” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Jacqueline Shea Murphy in Conversation with Hertha Dawn Sweet Wong on “The People Have Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance Histories,” at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. www.universitypressbooks.com 

Hillary Gravendyk and Logan Ryan Smith, poets, at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

Sudhir Venkatesh describes “Gang Leader for a Day” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Emam & Friends, Kirtan and world music, at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Kelly Joe Phelps at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Count Basie Tribute Orchestra Benefit at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $15. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Laura Zucker at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

The David Thom Band, Jacob Groopman and The Mountain Boys at 9 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082  

Son de Madera at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12-$15. 849-2568.  

Cyrus Chestnut at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$18. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Planet Loop, electro-jazz, worldbeat, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

FRIDAY, JAN. 25 

THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley “Barefoot in the Park” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. at Berryman, through Feb. 16. Tickets are $10-$12. 649-5999. www.aeofberkeley.org 

Altarena Playhouse “Wait Until Dark” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Altarena Playhouse, 1409 High St., Alameda, through Feb. 16. Tickets are $17-$20. 523-1553. www.altarena.org 

Aurora Theatre “Satellites” at 8 p.m. at 2081 Addison St. through March 2. Tickets are $40-$42. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

Contra Costa Civic Theatre “The Cocoanuts” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., some Sun. matinees at 2 p.m., at 951 Pomona Ave., at Moeser, El Cerrito, through March 2. Tickets are $15-$24. 524-9132. www.ccct.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. www.shotgunplayers.org 

Masquers Playhouse “Angel Street” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2:30 p.m. through Feb. 23 at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond. Tickets are $18. 232-4031. www.masquers.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Best Western” Art by Martin Webb. Artist reception at 5 p.m. at Estaban Sabar Gallery, 480 23rd St., Oakland. Exhibit runs through Feb. 18. 444-7411. www.estebansabar.com 

FILM 

Jean-Pierre Léaud “Love on the Run” at 7 p.m. and “Sweet Love, Bitter” at 8:40 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Sonja Lyubomirsky describes “The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Oakland East Bay Symphony Verdi’s “Requiem” at 8 p.m. at Paramount Theater, 2025 Broadway, Oakland. Pre-concert lecture at 7 p.m. 444-0801. www.oebs.org 

Pacific Lutheran University’s University Chorale Concert at 7 p.m. at St. Paul Lutheran Church, 1658 Excelsior Ave., Oakland. Free, donations accepted. 530-6333.  

“The Solo Violin” with Donna Lerew at 8 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. Cost is $5-$10.  

The Isaac Schwartztet at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$10. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Rhonda Benin & Soulful Strut at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Tempest, Avalon Rising at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Joni Davis at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Any Old Time String Band at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $20.50-$21.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Ben Ross, Christopher Hanson at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Straggler, Superthief, Humanzee at 9 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Benefit for People’s Park Anniversary with New Thrill Parade, Tulsa, Wildlife, Jump off a Building and the Functionelles, at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

Mark Hummel’s Blues Harmonica Blow Out with John Mayall, Kenny Neal, Fingers Taylor & Lazy Lester and the Blues Survivors at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $22-$30. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com  

Bayonics at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5. 548-1159.  

Paula Fuga at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Russell Taylor, R&B, at 9 p.m. at Maxwell’s Lounge, 341 13th St., Oakland. Cost is $10-$15. 839-6169. 

SATURDAY, JAN. 26 

CHILDREN  

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with EarthCapades at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5 for adults, $4 for children. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Active Arts Theatre for Young Audiences “Little Women” Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m., through Feb. 3, at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $14-$18. 925-798-1300. www.willowstickets.org  

Uncle Eye Songs and stories at 11 a.m. at Studio Grow, 1235 Tenth St. Cost is $7. 526-9888. 

THEATER 

San Francisco Theater Project “Aftermath of War: in their own words” Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 7:30 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $15-$20. 925-798-1300. www.willowstickets.org  

EXHIBITIONS 

“Don Clausen: Retrospective, 1964 to Present” Reception at 2 p.m. at Alta Galleria, 2980 College Ave., Suite 4. Exhibition runs to March 1. 421-1255. www.altagalleria.com  

FILM 

African Film Festival “Waiting for Happiness” at 6:30 p.m. at “Bamako” at 8:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“As if in Sleep: Collected Stories by Tim Barsky” at 8 p.m. at at the JCC of the East Bay, 1414 Walnut St. Tickets are $12. 848-0237. 

“The Music of Kurt Weill: September Songs” A film of staged and choreographed dramatizations of Brecht-Weill songs set in an old warehouse, at 5 p.m. at the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library, 6501 Telegraph at Alcatraz, Oakland. 527-9584. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Jane Bernstein describes “Rachel in the World: A Memoir” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

A Conversation with Christopher Taylor and David Benson author of “Music: A Mathematical Offering” at Chern Hall, Grizzly Peak and Centennial Way. 642-9988. 

Andrew Demcak and Nina Lindsay, poets, at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. claybanes@gmail.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

American Bach Soloists “Christmas Oratorio” at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $16-$42. 415-621-7900. 

The Arlekin String Quartet Celebration of the 35th Anniversary of Young People's Chamber Orchestra at 4 p.m. at Arlington Community Church, 52 Arlington Ave. Suggested donation $15-$25, includes dinner. 595-4688. 

Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, with Winton Marsalis, trumpet, at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $34-$68. 642-9988. www.calperformances.net 

De Rompe y Raja “Diáspora Negra” at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $13-$15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Yancie Taylor & His Jazztet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Baba Ken & Kotoja at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. African dance lesson at 9 p.m. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Benefit for the Oak Grove Tree Sitters Legal Defense with music by The Funky Nixons, Hali Hammer, Rockin’ Solidarity Labor Heritage Chorus and others at 7 p.m. at Redwood Gardens Community Room, 2901 Derby St. 548-6310. 

Fatlip, Omni at 8 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $12. 548-1159. www.shattuckdownlow.com 

Jon Roniger, Scott Waters at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Danny Maseng and Soul on Fire, a multi-media concert at 8:15 p.m. at Temple Sinai, 28th and Webster, Oakland. Free. 451-3263. 

Ravi Abcarian Group at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Any Old Time String Band at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $20.50-$21.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Jonathan Alford Group with Maria Marquez and Alan Hall at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15-$18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

George Cotsililos Jazz Group at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $3. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Izabella, Cas Luas at 9 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Mark Hummel’s Blues Harmonica Blow Out with John Mayall, Kenny Neal, Fingers Taylor & Lazy Lester and the Blues Survivors at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $22-$30. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SUNDAY, JAN. 27 

FILM 

“The Trial of Joan of Arc” at 3 p.m., “The Passion of Joan of Arc” at 4:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Dorothy Bryant reads from “The Berkeley Pit” at 4 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 559-9500.  

Linda Jon Myers and workshop students read from “Becoming Whole” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

San Francisco Chamber Orchestra “Virtuosi” by Yu-Hui Chang at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Pre-concert talk at 7:30 p.m. Free. 415-248-1640. www.sfchamberorchestra.org 

Christopher Taylor, piano, at 3 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $34. 642-9988. www.calperformances.net 

Prometheus Symphony Orchestra at 3 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 116 Montecito Ave., Oakland. Free, donations suggested. 415-864-2151. www.prometheussymphony.org  

Midsummer Mozart Festival Benefit Concert featuring pianist Seymour Lipkin, at 5:30 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant. Tickets are $75 and include reception. 415-627-9141. lori@midsummermozart.org.  

Grace Woods Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

John Young at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Bandworks at 1:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $5. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Dayna Stephens, tribute to Sonny Rollins, at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15-$18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Cheap Suit Serenaders at 5 and 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $24.50-$25.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Flamenco Night with Dani Torres at 5 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Mark Hummel’s Blues Harmonica Blow Out with John Mayall, Kenny Neal, Fingers Taylor & Lazy Lester and the Blues Survivors at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $22-$30. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

MONDAY, JAN. 28 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Cycle of Life: Awakening” Works by Asian women artists. Opening reception and lecture at 4 p.m. at Institute of East Asian Studies, 2223 Fulton St., 6th flr. Exhibit runs to May 15. 642-2809. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Sylvia Sellers-Garcia reads from her debut novel “When the Ground Turns in its Sleep” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Poetry Express with Nancy Wakeman at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Megan Lynch, bluegrass, at 7 p.m. at Le Bateau Ivre, 2629 Telegraph Ave. 849-1100. www.lebateauivre.net 

Musica ha Disconnesso, traditional Italian music, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Classical at the Freight with S.F. Chamber Orchestra at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $6.50-$7.50. 548-1761 www.freightandsalvage.org 

Kenny Durham Project co-led by Jules Rowell and Bill Belasco with Joel Dorham at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $6-$10. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

As the swipe of hip-hop shifts gears into salsa, solo performer Danny Hoch stalks out on stage in character, under a banner for a festival, Williamsburg “Celebrate Your Community” day, spouting long, loopy lines in thick, nasal Brooklynese, cutting his imaginary friends out where the audience sits before the Berkeley Rep Thrust Stage, doing the dozens on down through the ethnicities—then the 49 other states, working hard on California—then shouting out, “All you American crackers, out of our neighborhood!” 

One hand jamming a mic up to his constantly moving lips, the other gesturing in big curves while dandling a beer bottle—“Everybody’s had a drink; I’m not the only one!”—his passive-aggressive, half threatening, half-apologetic diatribe burns with invective. He catches himself: “I cursed! Kids around here; I’m sorry ... I ain’t gonna hurt nobody. I’m a grad student. An Intellectual!” But continues to deliver the anti-gentrification message: “We survived the crack epidemic! Ronald Reagan was nicer to you than to us ... I can’t walk around like I’m floating on a French pastry, all carefree ...” 

And that sets the tone, the stage and the levels for Taking Over, Hoch’s parade of homeboys, homebodies and upscale interlopers, as the Big Apple sprawls over into Brooklyn, and property values soar, with fake French patisseries (just like in Tokyo—or Berkeley) flying in on the coattails. 

Hoch’s act consists of clever impersonations of a Parisian real estate salesman, working the dot-com homeseekers while urging a colleague across the pond to hurry over and buy! buy! buy! (subtitles provided); a revolutionary rapper in camoflage, declaring “We asked for better schools and they give us muffins! This’s unacceptable! Check it out!”; a dispatcher from the Dominican Republic working over his “hick” fellow Latino drivers over the radio: “I can take orders, that’s why I’m a dispatcher!”—then coos to his little girl in English; a yoga-ing developer asserting, “I love people! I should win the Nobel Prize for real estate!”; a middle-aged black mother remarking how she’s invisible to her new neighbors in line at the cafe to buy a $4 almond croissant. 

Some of the faces and voices announce themselves to be the children and grandchildren of Ralph Kramden. Others are from the next block over, another ethnic enclave, the settlement of whatever group Scorsese portrayed in Mean Streets—the real “Last Exit to,” the authentic “Only the Dead Know” Brooklyn. Hoch picks up on that territory, in those neighborhoods, as outsiders move in and stake claim to being locals, like the seraped, Andean-capped art school dropout from Michigan he plays, sitting on the sidewalk selling t-shirts and CDs, spouting in full Universal Valley Girl, “Who the hell wants to stay where they’re from?” 

The New American Dream of make-overs and meta-language sports a professional incomprehension to the sort of recalcitrance—or just recidivism—Hoch portrays. But it’s nothing new. A good deal of modern art begins with handwringing and gratuitous nostalgia over neighborhoods redeveloped and lost. The glories of childhood fled, a Romantic credo, got updated by the likes of Baudelaire, in poems like “The Swan,” contemplating the Second Empire streamlining of the French capital (in part to dislodge hotbeds of working class revolution):“Paris changes! but nothing in my melancholy has budged!”  

Hoch finally comes around to his own spiel, standing before a music stand and reciting his text, “coming clean” (like any real pro, a magician rolling up his sleeve) that he can’t perform his schtick at home, but makes his living any and everywhere else as “an exotic New Yorker ... You think I come here to take a walk in the hills? Or because Chez Panisse is really that good?” 

His act goes full circle. The drunk persona he started out with delivers the valediction, evoking 9/11 across the river, recalling when he spots an ex-girlfriend in the crowd “when the bodega started stocking soy milk, but not because you like it and we asked for it.” 

An accumulation of sketches, impressions of “types” and their accents and mannerisms, at times it seems like Central Casting gone wild. It’s a play on recognition, much of it from the movies and TV. Hoch is never cleverer or more apropo than when he portrays a neighborhood Latino just out of the joint, chumming up to a film crew p.a. for a job, any job:”I’ll do it for free—see, my mother’s watching from the window!”. 

Whatever the local equivalent of Hoch’s Brooklyn is, it couldn’t be rendered as a quick sketch. Bay Area solo acts that summon up past history and local types have to become full-fledged narratives or plays, no monologist’s dream witness Ron Jones or Brian Copeland. If someone did a routine onstage in a Bay Area idiom, they’d have to explain it first. “Back East, we got accents!” So “the Mission Mumble” in San Francisco gets pegged as Brooklynese. Small wonder, in a town where the most famous “local” of the postwar decades based his newspaper columnist’s persona over 40 years on being the New Kid in Town. 

TAKING OVER 

Through Feb. 10 at the Berkeley Rep 

2025 Addison St. 647-2949. 

www.berkeleyrep.org. 

I don’t know how old you have to be to think of Sunset magazine and early 1960s swimming-poolside dioramas whenever you see a Cordyline australis in its other vocation, as a plain old yard or streetside tree. It’s a classic, though, to complete the post-TK look that starts with a turquoise pool, maybe kidney-shaped, and a Weber kettle. Some of us get whiffs of vinyl, chlorine, and firestarter fluid from our subconscious every time.  

It wasn’t just aesthetic, that fad for “cabbage tree.” Certainly it fit that angular, minimalist, post-Thomas Church look. But its practical virtues include toughness—it won’t flinch from regular sloshing with chemical-laden pool water—and big sturdy leaves that don’t disintegrate and clog the pool filter and don’t get shed often anyway.  

That fibrous toughness has brought cordyline halfway ‘round the world: a few years back, I heard a member of a group of visiting Maori artists laughing about how seeing it and New Zealand flax all over the landscaping made her feel right at home.  

Cordyline has been around the block taxonomically speaking, too. In older books it’s a member of the Amaryllis family. The most recent Sunset Garden Book has it in the Agavaceae, as are the dracaenas. In fact it was at one point assigned to the genus Dracaena, along with the dragon tree and all those indoor plants. Now it’s not even in the same family. In the latest classification dracaenas share the family Ruscaceae with lilies-of-the-valley, Solomon’s-seals, and Sansevieria, the house plant variously known as snake plant, bowstring hemp, and mother-in-law’s-tongue. This week, cordylines—including the Hawai’ian ti plant, C. fruticosa—appear to be in the closely related family Laxmanniaceae.  

Plant taxonomy can be brutal—more so since the geneticists got into the act. They’ve really done a job on the monocots, the plant clade that includes lilies, palms, and grasses. The lily family has been shrunk radically, with all kinds of plants that used to be lilies spun off into their own families. True lilies (like tiger lilies and the showy Oriental types), tulips, fritillaries, and fawn lilies are still lilies, and that’s about it. 

One likely reason that agaves, yuccas, and cordylines were lumped together in the first place, apart from their pointy leaves, is that all three groups include woody species. In general, with the great exception of the palms, monocots don’t get woody. Monocot timber, according to Colin Tudge’s The Tree, is highly variable in structure, and not much like either conifer timber (pines and redwoods) or dicot timber (oaks, mahoganies, and other such broadleaf trees).  

Conifers and dicot trees share the phenomenon called secondary thickening, in which a complete cambium sheath, the live underskin of xylem and phloem just beneath the bark, allows a tree to get thicker and thicker, for years or centuries as it relinquishes its circulatory function and lignifies into supportive heartwood. Dragon trees and cabbage trees have reinvented this strategy, but somehow manage it without the cambium sheath. 

C. australis is tree enough to be included in the Collins Handguide to the Native Trees of New Zealand, where it grows in swampy areas and lower montane forests up to 2,000 feet. Just as cacti on the Galapagos Islands evolved tall tree-like forms under pressure from grazing giant tortoises, the cabbage tree may have been spurred to treehood by the moas, the giant flightless birds that took over the role of browsing mammals on those mammal-less (except for the bats, who don’t graze much) islands. 

When the Maori discovered New Zealand, they recognized the cabbage tree—which they called ti rakau, ti kouka, or whanake—as a potential food source. The pith of young stems was eaten raw, boiled, or baked in earth ovens; roots required longer cooking They must have been patient as well as adventurous, culinarily speaking. Ti kouka was a major dietary starch, along with fern roots. After intensive processing, cordyline roots yielded a juice that they used as a sweetener; other extracts made traditional medicines.  

The Maori also fashioned ropes from trunk and root material and used fiber from the leaves, along with those of another of our landscape favorites, New Zealand flax, Phormium tenax, to make clothing and sandals. There’s good evidence that they developed cultivars for different purposes.  

Early European missionaries were said to have “brewed a tolerable beer” from cordyline, although just what an early missionary would tolerate is an open question.  

As “mid-century modern” architecture—those Eichlers and the Thomas Church gardens that, if their owners are incredibly fortunate, accompany them—get dragged back into fashion, maybe we’ll be seeing even more cordylines in the landscape. Until then, just hail every one you see as an historical marker. Let’s refrain from any discussion of giving them landmark status just yet, though.  

Photograph by Ron Sullivan. 

A streetside tree dreams poolside dreams: Cordyline australis. 

TUESDAY, JAN. 22 

Pacific School of Religion Earl Lectures on religion, environment and social justice, with Chandra Muzaffar, Karen Baker-Fletcher and others, Tues.-Thurs. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. For details see www.psr.edu 

“Exploring Mongolia: An American Journalist’s Perspective” A slide presentation with Michael Kohn at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Berkeley PC USers Group meets at 7 p.m. at 25 Dartmouth in the Hiller Highland area above the Claremont Hotel. 841-4411. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

End the Occupation Vigil every Tues. at noon at Oakland Federal Bldg., 1301 Clay St. www.epicalc.org 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704.  

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 548-3991.  

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, JAN. 23 

Golden Gate Audubon Society Field Trip “Lake Merritt and Lakeside Park” with Hilary Powers. Meet at 9:30 a.m. at the large spherical cage near Nature Center at Perkins and Bellevue to look at wintering birds. 843-2222. 

BASIL Seed Library meeting to plan annual Garden Seed Swap and The Library’s future, at 6:30 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo. basil@ecologycenter.org 

“Reel Bad Arabs” A documentary on the degrading images of Arabs in cinematic history, at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donation $5. www.Humanist Hall.org 

“Who’s Putting the Heat on Barry Bonds ... And Why?” A dscussion at 7 p.m. at Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way. 848-1196. 

Early Voting Ballot Discussion with Berkeley Councilmember Kriss Worthington and AFT Local 2121 President Ed Murray, at 1:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. Sponsored by the Berkeley-East Bay Gray Panthers. 

Let It Snow Day Make snow and conduct ice experiments. Storytelling at 11 a.m. at Habitot Children's Museum, 2065 Kittredge St. 647-1111.  

Teen Chess Club from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. at the North Branch Library, 1170 The Alameda at Hopkins. 981-6133. 

“New Year Detox & Weight Loss” at 7 p.m. at Elephant Pharmacy, 1607 Shattuck Ave. 549-9200. 

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 

After-School Program Homework help, drama and music for children ages 8 to 18, every Wed. from 4 to 7:15 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Cost is $5 per week. 845-6830. 

Stitch ‘n Bitch at 6:30 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

THURSDAY, JAN. 24 

“Google and Sources of Information in a Global Age” Lecture by Douglas Merrill, Vice-President of Engineering at Google, at 7 p.m. in the International House Auditorium, 2299 Piedmont Ave. Cost is $5. 642-9460. 

NAACP Youth Council for Berkeley-Albany-Emeryville Kick-Off Mixer and Meeting at 7 p.m. at Spud’s Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. at Alcatraz. 290-9702. baenaacpyouth@gmail.com 

Easy Does It Board of Directors’ Meeting at 6:30 p.m. at 1636 University Ave. 845-5513. 

Berkeley School Volunteers Orientation from 10 to 11 a.m. at 1835 Allston Way. Come learn about volunteer opportunities. 644-8833. 

Babies & Toddlers Storytime at 10:15 and 11:15 a.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043.  

FRIDAY, JAN. 25 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Robert E. Friend on “Permanency for Foster Youth” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925.  

Friday Films for Teens at 3:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 3rd flr., 2090 Kittredge St. For details call 981-6121. 

Kol Hadash Humanistic Tu B’Shvat Seder at 7:30 p.m. at the Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin Ave. Details on what ritual food items to bring are posted at www.kolhadash.org 

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310. 

SATURDAY, JAN. 26 

Bird Rescuers’ Get-Together Celebrate the Bay and join in a thank-you get-together for everyone who helped after the November oil spill. We will see pictures from the spill, celebrate wildlife that was rescued, chat and hear about what others did, remember and reflect on plans to make it better next time, at 3 p.m. at Shorebird Park Nature Center, 160 University Ave. 981-6720. 

Help Plant Natives on Berkeley Paths Please join BPWA and Friends of Five Creeks planting natives and removing weeds on Covert Path, part of a long-term project creating demonstration plantings and an “interpretive trail” from hills to Bay in the Codornices Creek watershed. Meet at 10 a.m. at the top of Covert Path, downhill side of Keeler Ave. a short distance southeast of Twain Ave. 848-9358. www.fivecreeks.org 

Civil Rights Panel and Community Speak-Out with Kris Worthington, Berkeley City Council member, Osha Neumann, Attorney and former Police Review Commissioner, Melvin Dickson, Commemoration Committee for the Black Panther Party, Andrea Prichett, Copwatch, Subcommittee on Evidence Theft Issues, Mike Diehl, Activist and advocate for homeless rights, James Chanin, Attorney, former Police Review Commissioner, from noon to 2 p.m. at 1730 Oregon St. (below MLK Jr. Way. www.berkeleycopwatch.org  

Vegetarian Cooking Class “Healthful Resolutions: Lo-Cal, High Flavor” featuring kale and nori salad, Asian-inspired lettuce wraps, yellow split pea dal, hummus and fruit smoothies, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at First Unitarian Church of Oakland, 685 14th St. at Castro. Cost is $55 plus $5 material fee. to register call 531-COOK. www.compassionatecooks.com 

Benefit for the Oak Grove Tree Sitters Legal Defense with music by The Funky Nixons, Hali Hammer, Rockin’ Solidarity Labor Heritage Chorus and others at 7 p.m. at Redwood Gardens Community Room, 2901 Derby St. 548-6310. 

Play Around the Bay Symposium on the disappearance of children’s play, and proposals for postitive change, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Doubletree Hotel, 200 Marina Blvd. Cost is $40-$55. 647-111 ext. 35. www.habitot.org  

Scalky Sleepers Learn how scales help animals weather the cold at 10:30 a.m. at the Oakland Zoo, 9777 Golf Links Rd. Cost is $7.50-$10. Registration required. 632-9525. www.oaklandzoo.org 

Kids Go Green Activities centered on ecology and climate change from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Chabot Space and Science Center, 10000 Skyline Blvd., Oakland. Cost is $9-$13. 336-7373.  

Preschool Storytime, for ages 3-5, at 11 a.m. at Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

“The Music of Kurt Weill: September Songs” A film of staged and choreographed dramatizations of Brecht-Weill songs set in an old warehouse, at 5 p.m. at the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library, 6501 Telegraph at Alcatraz, Oakland. 527-9584. 

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.  

Oakland Artisans Marketplace Sat. from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Jack London Square. 238-4948. 

SUNDAY, JAN. 27 

“End the Occupation” A discussion with Max Elbaum, editor of War Times, at 11 a.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donations accepted. www.Humanist Hall.org 

Films for a Future: “The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil” at 2 p.m., followed by a discussion, at Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

People’s Park Anniversary Planning Meeting at 5:30 p.m. at Cafe Med Telegraph, north of Dwight New people encouraged to come. 658-9178. 

“Elections: Not how Leaders are Chosen, Not how Decisions are made and Not how you can make a difference” with Larry Everest at 7 p.m. at Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way. 848-1196. www.revolutionbooks.org 

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 

Sew Your Own Open Studio Come learn to use our industrial and domestic machines, or work on your own projects, from 5 to 9 p.m. at 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. Cost is $3 per hour. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

MONDAY, JAN. 28 

“Exploring Jazz with Len Lyons” A course to explore the basic building blocks of this unique musical language Mon. from 6 to 8 p.m. through March 10. at 2199 Addison St. For information contact Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, a continuing education program for people 50 and over. 642-9934. olli.berkeley.edu 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

Dragonboating Year round classes at the Berkeley Marina, Dock M. Meets Mon, Wed., Thurs. at 6 p.m. Sat. at 10:30 a.m. For details see www.dragonmax.org 

ONGOING 

E-Waste Recycling St. Vincent de Paul of Alameda County accepts electronic waste including computers, dvd players, cell phones, fax machines and many other ewaste products for disposal free of charge at many of its locations throughout Alameda County. Free bulk pick-up available. 638-7600. www.svdp-alameda.org 

Help a Newt Cross the Road Every year newts migrate across Hillside Drive to reach their breeding pools in Castro Creek. Volunteers prevent many of these creatures from being crushed by cars. We need volunteers every evening during January and February in El Sobrante. The newts are most active on rainy nights. annabelle11_3@yahoo.com 

Free Tax Help If your 2007 household income was less than $42,000, you are eligible for free tax preparation from United Way's Earn it! Keep It! Save It! Sites are open now through April 15 in Alameda and Contra Costa counties. To find a site near you, call 800-358-8832. www.EarnItKeepItSaveIt.org 

CITY MEETINGS 

Council Agenda Committee meets Tues, Jan. 22, at 2:30 p.m., at 2180 Milvia St. 981-6900. 

Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board meets Tues., Jan. 22, at 7 p.m. in City Council Chambers. 981-7368.  

Civic Arts Commission meets Tues., Jan. 22 , at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7533.  

Commission on Labor meets Wed., Jan. 23, at 6:45 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7550.  

Disaster and Fire Safety Commission meets Wed., Jan. 23, at 7 p.m., at 997 Cedar St. 981-5502.  

Planning Commission meets Wed., Jan. 23, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7484.  

Police Review Commission meets Wed. Jan. 23 at 7 p.m. at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-4950. 

Housing Advisory Commission meets Thurs., Jan. 24, at 7 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5400.  

Mental Health Commission meets Thurs. Jan. 24, at 5 p.m. at 2640 MLK Jr. Way, at Derby. 981-5213.  

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., Jan. 24, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. 981-7410.