Last Thursday, the LeConte Neighborhood Association held a meeting together with the Berkeley Police Department and Willard Middle School Safety Officer Andre Kellum to discuss the issue of after-school student vandalism.  

Neighbors estimate 10 to 15 incidents of vandalism in the streets surrounding Willard school over the past few months, including smashed windows, knocked-over trashcans and signs, damage to homes, and other behavior problems among students on their way home from school.  

However, Berkeley Police Department Community Services Local Area Coordinator Stephen Burcham says very few cases have been reported to police. 

“In response to the meeting, we have asked the beat officers to be there around the neighborhood after school to monitor the students,” said Burcham. 

Neighbor and Berkeley Planning Commissioner Patti Dacey said that officers and neighbors held a discussion about streets that students have been targeting. 

“People talked about how students first targeted Stuart,” said Dacey. “Now because the residents of Stuart started watching the students, they have been moving to Russell Street. Students are dancing on cars and denting them. So the police have told residents on Russell to keep an eye out and start taking pictures of kids so that vandalism will cease on that street as well.” 

Karl Reeh, president of the neighborhood association, said communication between the neighbors and the school has been helpful. 

“We have talked to the principal, the vice principal, and the safety officers,” said Reeh. “The safety officer has been helpful in identifying the kids who commit these crimes.” 

Attempts to contact Willard Safety Officer Kellum for this story were unsuccessful. 

“I think that everyone in the neighborhood has been affected by the crime of Willard students,” said Dacey. “I was threatened by a bunch of kids who I was watching, because I thought they were doing vandalism. So they came up to me and yelled at me. In addition, my neighbor was picking up her kids at Stuart and Telegraph one day. When she came back, her window was smashed, probably by Willard students.” 

Robert Itherburn, principal at the middle school, said that the actions of certain students in the neighborhood are unacceptable.  

“I think that it is appalling,” said Willard Principal Robert Itherburn. “We have been in contact with the neighbors and asked them to take pictures of the students when possible. When we can identify the students, that is great. We have a large number of students who walk home, so unless we have specific names, we can’t do much.” 

Kriss Worthington, who represents the Willard neighborhood on the Berkeley City Council, told the Daily Planet the city is watching the discussion and wants to be part of the solution. 

“We want to pay attention to these issues and make sure that the city uses our resources effectively,” said Worthington. 

Reeh said the meeting was successful. 

“Our main goal is to encourage individuals to report crime and go outside around three o’clock to keep an eye on kids,” said Reeh. “The police have been cooperating by making rounds after school and monitoring students.” 

Berkeley High School students showed a sharp decline in 2008 SAT math and verbal scores, but large gains in Advanced Placement tests, according to a report prepared by the Berkeley Unified School District. 

BUSD Director of Student Evaluation and Assessment Dr. Rebecca Cheung and Berkeley High science teacher Aaron Glimme presented an analysis of the school’s Preliminary SAT, SAT and AP scores before the Berkeley Board of Education Wednesday. 

A significantly larger number of sophomores at the high school were able to take the Preliminary SAT (PSAT) last year, Cheung said, because an anonymous donor paid the $13 fee for each of the school’s nearly 900 10th graders. 

All the school’s white 10th graders took the test; 87 percent of Latino students took the test; African-American students had the lowest participation rate at 68 percent. 

The PSAT is a voluntary test co-sponsored by the College Board and National Merit Scholarship Program to help students prepare for the SAT. 

District Superintendent Bill Huyett asked Berkeley High officials why so many African-American students had not taken the test even though the fee was covered. Berkeley High Vice Principal Amy Fry said many students had chosen to arrive at school during lunch, after the tests had been administered. 

“So we had a large number of African-American students not come to school just because they didn’t want to take the test,” Huyett responded. 

Cheung said the district will encourage more 10th graders to take the PSAT next year because the private donor had promised to continue the funding. 

Seventy-six percent of white 10th graders scored in the top 50 percent nationally. Both Cheung and the school board called this a remarkable achievement, praising the students on their success. 

Twenty percent of Latino students scored in the top 50 percent nationwide. Five percent of African-Americans scored in the top 5 percent nationally. 

Participation at Berkeley High’s six small schools varied, as did performance, with 49 percent of students at Berkeley International High School scoring in the top 50 percent nationally, followed by Academic Choice (48 percent), Arts and Humanities Academy (42 percent), School of Social Justice and Ecology (26 percent), Communication Arts and Sciences (22 percent) and Community Partnerships Academy (5 percent). 

Cheung said the 10th grade results came with a caveat because the students who might not otherwise have taken the tests in the absence of a scholarship were competing with a more elite group of students. 

“The distribution might have looked different if the anonymous donor didn’t give us the money for the tests,” she told the Planet. “We are pitting them against kids from all over the nation who are paying for it. These are typically high-achieving kids. So they are competing with other kids who choose to take the test. While that’s not a bad thing, we don’t want to over-penalize our students for low scores. What if there were English learners present?” 

SAT verbal scores for 2007-08 show a 28-point decline from 2003-04, when the average score for 11th graders at Berkeley High was 569. Last year the average score fell to 541, the lowest in five years. 

SAT math scores showed a significant downward trend since 2003-04, when the average score was 586. Last year the average SAT math score was 546, a drop of 40 points. 

Cheung noted that although the school’s average SAT scores were better than the county and the state averages, they were declining over time, especially in math. 

Superintendent Bill Huyett said he was concerned by this negative trend. 

“A 40-point drop over three or four years is precipitous,” he said. “Looks like if it drops next year we will be below the county average.” 

Huyett said the news was surprising, given the various challenging courses students often take, such as calculus and pre-calculus. 

“It looks like kids are not that prepared in math,” he said, adding that he would like school and district officials to investigate the trend. 

Glimme said there could be a number of reasons for the downward trend in math and English, one of them being that perhaps more students were taking the ACT, a different college entrance test, leading to fewer taking the SAT. He added that because the ACT had not reported Berkeley High School’s participation rate to the district for the last two years, there was no way to be sure. 

White 11th graders in every small school scored above the state average. Latino students scored at or below and African-Americans scored below the state average. 

White and multi-ethnic 11th graders also had higher participation than their Latino and African American classmates. 

Over 60 percent of the students who took the SAT last year scored over 1500, higher than the county and the state. 

Advanced Placement tests 

Administered by the College Board, the Advanced Placement program consists of college-level courses in 21 subject areas which are recognized by almost all public and private universities. 

Students at Berkeley High prepare for AP tests by enrolling in AP level courses. The tests are primarily taken by 10th through 12th graders and the scores range from 1 to 5, with a score between 3 and 5 considered to be passing. 

The district’s analysis shows a very strong increase in the number of AP tests taken over the years, from 43 percent in 2003-04 to 68 percent in 2007-08. 

Cheung said the number of passing scores-a student can take any number of AP tests-is up from 273 five years ago to 714 last year for white students, and from 116 for black students to 451 in the same time frame. 

Huyett called the results “remarkable,” and a start toward closing the achievement gap. 

Cheung said that changes in AP course offering-such as the inclusion of subjects like art and art history-had expanded the number of tests taken by students and also the number of students taking them. 

Passing scores were evenly distributed across multiple subject areas, she said. 

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell announced Monday, June 1, that the Obama administration had given the state Department of Education $4.3 million in AP Test Fee Program grants to help low-income students take AP and International Baccalaureate tests. 

Statewide, the number of students enrolled in AP and IB courses grew 112.6 percent from 228,019 to 484,694 in the last decade. 

In 2007-08, schools reported that 96,174 low-income students were taking the AP and IB tests. The number is expected to grow 15 percent-to 110,599-in 2008-09. State education officials said the massive growth indicates the need for assistance by low-income students to offset the cost of higher education. 

AP and IB tests typically cost around $86 to $88 per subject, which the state education office said may be difficult for some families to pay. 

The Advanced Placement Test Fee Program, which the state says has helped increased student participation and achievement in AP tests, allows schools to ask low-income students to pay only $5 for every subject they test in. 

After a lengthy search, police found the man suspected of firing shots from a car in West Berkeley Tuesday afternoon. 

Berkeley police found the shooter hiding in a dumpster in the backyard of an Ashby Avenue apartment building at 6:02 p.m.  

Officers from the Berkeley Police Department cordoned off a two-block square perimeter— including Shattuck Avenue, Ashby Avenue, Russell and Fulton streets—around 3:30 p.m. to look for a suspect seen by a Berkeley police patrol officer firing a gun from a moving car 15 minutes earlier. 

The officer heard gunfire coming from a white Infiniti sedan at Eighth Street and Bancroft Way and pursued the car, finally turning south onto Shattuck, toward Ashby, Berkeley Police Department spokesperson Sgt. Mary Kusmiss said. 

The suspect’s car was slowed by heavy traffic on southbound Shattuck as it approached Ashby, and it collided with a parked, unoccupied car in the 2900 block of Shattuck Avenue, Kusmiss said. 

At that point, the suspect leapt out of the car, ran southbound on Shattuck, then east on Ashby Avenue. Berkeley police closed Shattuck between Ashby and Russell, and started redirecting pedestrians and drivers. They were helped in their search by the Berkeley Police Department SWAT team, who were training nearby, and an Oakland Police Department canine unit. 

Kusmiss discounted earlier reports of people present at the corner of Ashby and Shattuck who said the suspect had fired on police officers after crashing his car. 

SWAT team members found the suspect hiding in a dumpster in the rear yard of an apartment on the 2100 block of Ashby. 

Officers found a parked car at Eighth and Bancroft, a green Mercury Tracer, with bullet holes on the back bumper and two flat tires. 

Police have not found anyone injured by the shooting.  

The Berkeley Police Department is asking for the community’s help with this investigation. Anyone who may have information regarding the crime is urged to call the Berkeley Homicide Detail at 981-5741 (office) or 981-5900 (non-emergency dispatch line). Callers who wish to remain anonymous can call the Bay Area Crime Stoppers Tip Line at 1-800-222-TIPS (8477).  

Three hours after a young man fired shots from a moving car in West Berkeley, police were still searching for the suspect in South Berkeley after chasing him to a neighborhood near the intersection of Ashby and Shattuck avenues. 

Berkeley Police Department spokesperson Mary Kusmiss said that at 3:15 p.m., a Berkeley police patrol officer saw a man fire a gun from a new model Infiniti at Eighth Street and Bancroft Way. Kusmiss was not able to say immediately how many shots were fired. 

The officer, she said, immediately pursued the shooter and chased him through parts of West Berkeley, Central Berkeley and South Berkeley, at which point the suspect slowed down because of traffic and crashed into a parked car on Shattuck just north of Ashby. 

She said the officer “saw and heard gunfire and an arm out of the window” before he alerted the Berkeley Police Department and started chasing the suspect. 

“It’s rare for an officer to witness someone shooting, at least in Berkeley,” she said.  

At least 10 police vehicles with sirens roaring could be seen chasing the suspect’s car down Shattuck Avenue, some of them coming to a halt in front of Roxie Deli at the corner of Shattuck and Ashby avenues.  

Customers at the deli said they saw the suspect get out of his car and fire shots at police before running way. 

Kusmiss said Berkeley police were searching the area with the help of a canine unit from Oakland and the Berkeley Police Department's SWAT team, which happened to be training nearby. The two blocks of Shattuck between Ashby Avenue and Russell Street were closed to traffic, as was part of Ashby east of Shattuck. 

“I believe we are blocking off a larger area than we need,” Kusmiss said. “We are just going through a systemic search. The response was very quick because of the serious nature of the call. We were able to seal the block very quickly.” 

Kusmiss said the suspect could still be armed. Residents are advised to stay inside their homes and notify police if they see anyone resembling the suspect, described as a young black man in his 20s, light complexioned, about 6 feet tall, wearing black pants and a white T-shirt with some gold on it.  

The police action caused quite a stir in the neighborhood, with people coming out of their apartments to watch the action, some taking pictures with their cell phones. Pedestrians in the area were asked by police to keep away from the area. 

Kusmiss said around 4 p.m. that officers had found a car in West Berkeley with some bullet holes in it but had not located any victims. Calls to hospitals by Berkeley police had not led to any information either. 

Berkeley Unified School District spokesperson Mark Coplan said that Rosa Parks Elementary School—which is located in West Berkeley—and LeConte Elementary, which is in South Berkeley—were locked down at 3:15 because of the shooting. Rosa Parks was opened after a time, while LeConte was still closed as of 5 p.m. 

Berkeley police cordoned off two blocks near Shattuck and Ashby avenues at 3:30 p.m. to search for a suspect who fired shots earlier today in West Berkeley. 

Berkeley police officers saw the man fire shots from his car. They chased him to Ashby and Shattuck, at which point, eyewitnesses said, the man crashed his car into another car, fired a shot at an officer and then fled on foot. 

Police are searching the area with the help of dogs and a SWAT team. Shattuck Avenue between Ashby and Russell is closed to traffic, as is part of Ashby east of Shattuck. 

Berkeley Police Department spokesperson Sgt. Mary Kusmiss said the suspect could still be armed. Police are advising residents to stay inside their homes and notify the police if they see anyone resembling the man police are searching for. The suspect was described as a young black man in his 20s, about 6 feet tall, wearing black pants and a white T-shirt with some gold on it. 

On May 26, UC Berkeley began restoration work on Sather Tower (also known as the Campanile) to repair and clean the marble spire, secure the beacon, and repair the roof. The project is expected to be complete by the beginning of the fall semester. 

“We’re trying to do the work at a time that would have the least impact on campus,” says Capital Projects Communications Manager Christine Shaff.  

While the Campanile will be open for most of the summer, for safety reasons there will be three closures when a construction crane will be on site. The first closure began May 26 and will continue until Tuesday, June 9. Two more closures will occur during the summer. The times will be posted at the Campanile as well as on the campus visitors website (http://visitors.berkeley.edu). 

According to a UC Berkeley press release about the construction, “Birge Hall’s western entrance will be blocked during the project; visitors can access the building through a temporary main entrance on the east side.” 

Shattuck Avenue lost an icon Sunday. Owner Gary Cornell confirmed Monday morning that Black Oak Books, one of Berkeley’s best-loved bookstores, is moving out. Cornell has been trying to negotiate a lease with landlord Ruegg and Ellsworth for several months. 

Rumors started circulating in mid-May that Black Oak was leaving its 1491 Shattuck Ave. storefront and moving to San Pablo Avenue and Dwight Way.  

Ruegg and Ellsworth have been advertising the space for sale for at least three months by posting signs on the building and notices on the Internet. The company posted a May 13 advertisement for the single-story 5,666-square-foot space on Craigslist, listing it at $2.60 per square foot. 

Founded by Don Pertari, Bob Brown, Herb Bivins and Jeanne Baldock in 1983, Black Oak soon became a Berkeley institution, its labyrinthine aisles stocked with new and used books, first editions and rare collector’s items. Famous authors and poets from the Bay Area and beyond often appeared for free readings and business boomed through the 1990s, until e-commerce websites made it easier for customers to buy books online rather than from bricks-and-mortar stores. 

In 2007, the owners put the bookstore up for sale, blaming declining sales on sluggish pedestrian traffic and loss of marketshare to Interent giants like Amazon.com. The store’s San Francisco branch closed in early 2008.  

Cornell, a former computer science professor and author from the University of Connecticut who called himself a “long-time friend” of Black Oak, bought the store in July 2008. 

Cornell said he would revamp the store into something more suitable for the 21st century, selling an inventory of more than 100,000 used books from a West Berkeley warehouse via the Web. 

He retained most of the staff, including manager Stephanie Vela, and continued to involve Brown in the business. 

At the time Cornell took over the store, the store’s lease was $16,000 per month. 

It’s the fourth Gourmet Ghetto storefront to go dark in recent months. Starbucks shuttered its north Shattuck outlet earlier this year, as did Cafe de la Paz, and Elephant Pharmacy closed in February. 

For more information on Black Oak Books’ relocation plan, keep checking www.berkeleydailyplanet.com in the coming days.

Teachers, parents and students packed the City Council chambers Wednesday to ask the Berkeley Board of Education to save high school counseling positions threatened by budget cuts. 

The board unanimously approved district Superintendent Bill Huyett’s proposed budget reductions which address the $4.9 million deficit Berkeley Unified School District is facing in 2009-10 in light of the state budget passed by the Legislature in February. Huyett based his recommendations on advice from his Budget Advisory Committee, which consists of educators and community members. 

The district hopes to save $2.9 million with staff and program cuts, including layoffs for 21 teachers and counselors, and with $1.1 million in cuts from categorical funds. 

The budget also uses the $800,000 the district received in Individuals with Disabilities Education Act stimulus funds to help close the deficit. 

The proposal does not take into consideration the additional $4 million gap created by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s subsequent revision of the state budget following the failure of the May 19 special election ballot measures. Huyett told the Daily Planet after the meeting that he plans to present recommendations for a second round of reductions at the June 10 school board meeting. 

“We are obligated to put out a budget that lines up with the one passed in February,” Huyett said of the current proposal. “The state office of education has not given us direction on what to do about the May revision. Those cuts have not been accounted for.” 

The superintendent said he was hopeful that the first allocation of $2.4 million in state stabilization federal stimulus money—which the district has yet to receive—will help the school district in these troubling times. 

“U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has expressed support for California,” Huyett said. “California is an important state for the Obama administration. Duncan has acknowledged that California has high standards.” 

Huyett said the district’s plan was to hold on to the stimulus money until it had a better picture of the final budget and then act accordingly. 

The board is scheduled to approve the final budget for the new school year on June 24. 

In addition to the layoffs, the district is implementing a freeze on new hires, travel, and purchase of any equipment valued above $500. At least 72 custodians, bus drivers and clerks are being laid off and nutrition services are being slashed as well. The district also hopes to save $250,000 once it builds a new shelter in West Berkeley to keep its fleet of school buses. The district currently pays AC Transit about $40,000 every month to park the vehicles at a rented space on Sixth Street when the vehicles are not in use. 

Categorical funds for some programs are being reduced or cut altogether, including the Arts and Music Block Grant, programs for gifted and talented students, and improvements and deferred maintenance for schools and libraries. 

At least four Berkeley High School counselors and one part-time counselor at Berkeley Technology Academy—the only counselor at the school—have received pink slips because of cuts to the district’s general fund. 

Berkeley Federation of Teachers President Cathy Campbell said that in addition to the four on the list proposed by Huyett, one more Berkeley High counselor had been laid off, reducing the total number of counselors at the high school by half. 

At the meeting, Dwayne Byndloss, a counselor at Community Partnerships Academy, one of the small schools at Berkeley High, said that counselors, along with teachers, provide support to all students, especially those from low socio-economic backgrounds. 

“Teachers and counselors function as a team,” he said. “If you cut counselors and teachers, there will be more referrals and suspensions.” 

Another counselor warned the school board that with homicide rates in Oakland and Richmond rising, and crime “pouring” into Berkeley, the role of counselors was becoming even more important by the day. 

“We have a lot more students facing obstacles in life in the small schools than at the big schools,” said Annie Johnston, a teacher at Community Partnerships Academy. “We’d like you to figure out some other places to make the cuts.” 

Ray Cagan, lead teacher for the Arts and Humanities Academy, a small school, said counselors are the heart of his school’s program. 

“I went to Berkeley High at a time when any one counselor had 900 students, and I never saw my counselor in the four years I was there,” he said. “I was able to deal with it and make it through Berkeley High because my family had resources. Counselors help students with their college plans and give them one-on-one time whether or not they have resources at home. They bring equity to schools.” 

B-Tech counselor Amber Lester and Berkeley High counselor Teri Goodman reminded the board of the many critical services counselors provide to students—ranging from writing hundreds of letters of recommendation to crisis- and peer-intervention to monitoring whether students are meeting college entrance requirements. Lester said that at B-tech, many students found her office to be a safe place where they could find respite from all “the crazy things going on in the world.” 

Goodman said that at Berkeley High, counselors had helped to develop a college-going culture by taking 10th-graders on a tour of Bay Area colleges. 

At B-Tech, Lester along with other educators at the school, helped create portfolios for a group of 11 students, helping at least five of them to get accepted at colleges during a black college tour last month. 

Although Lester was laid off this month, Campbell said there was a chance the district might bring her back in the future, albeit with reduced hours.  

Huyett said he agreed with the comments made at the meeting, but that district officials had been forced to make reductions to balance the budget. 

“California is low on counselors,” he said. “...[Saving counselors] came up as a high priority and I am sure it will remain a high priority.” 

Board Director Shirley Issel urged the board to investigate other avenues where reductions could be made. 

“I can think of other places to cut,” said Issel, a mental health worker. “I would rather see a reduction in safety officers than counselors. Nobody wants to cut anything anyhow.” 

Board Vice President Karen Hemphill asked the district to bring back all the counselors if possible, saying that apart from instilling a college-bound culture, counselors also kept the suspension rate down at Berkeley High. 

“There were virtually zero expulsion hearings this year, that’s a first in my three years on the board,” she said, attributing the shift to prevention work by counselors. “There were a lot more expulsions in my first two years on the board, so it’s like ‘where are they?’” 

Board President Nancy Riddle said that although Berkeley Unified was in a better shape than some other school districts, it had not yet been able to rescind all the pink slips sent out to teachers and classified employees earlier this year.

Where there’s smoke—even the sweet-smelling kind—there’s sometimes fire, as the occupants of one Berkeley apartment discovered to their chagrin last week. 

Firefighters got a 911 call at 1:57 a.m. Wednesday, May 27, reporting heavy smoke coming from an apartment building in the 1500 block of Harmon Street. 

Deputy Fire Chief Gil Dong said the arriving emergency crew found smoke pouring from a second-floor apartment and quickly extinguished the blaze, confining the flames to the single unit. 

The deputy chief estimated the fire caused $10,000 in structural damage and another $5,000 in loss to the apartment’s contents. 

Cause of the early morning fire? “Unattended incense, which spread to nearby paper and from there to the bed.”

AC Transit officials took the first step Wednesday toward eliminating or reducing bus lines. The cuts are expected to be implemented later this year. 

While there has been widespread speculation about which lines may be cut, district staff has not yet produced recommendations. 

The AC Transit Board of Directors held a brief public hearing Wednesday on the district’s “Intent to Declare A Fiscal Emergency For the 2009-2010 Fiscal Year.” Consideration of the fiscal emergency declaration, which the board has scheduled for its June 24 meeting, is necessary for the district to implement service cuts without the need of either a full environmental review or a declaration of negative environmental impacts under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). 

In support of the proposed declaration of a fiscal emergency, AC Transit General Counsel Ken Scheidig prepared a memo for the public hearing that included a one-page, 10-figure attachment projecting that the district would have a negative balance of $9.7 million in working capital as of June 30, 2010. 

Only three members of the public spoke at Wednesday’s hearing. None of them challenged AC Transit’s fiscal situation, but instead complained that the district had not given sufficient public notice for the hearing. Oakland transportation advocate Joyce Roy, a frequent AC Transit critic, said that she considered it “a secret public hearing.” District officials said the hearing had been properly noticed, with board member Chris Peeples saying that “instead of procedural issues … we need to focus on the substantive issues,” which Peeples said included “what service cuts are going to be made.” 

Berkeley planning commissioners finished their adjustments to downtown zoning rules Wednesday night (May 27), easing requirements for entrepreneurs setting up shop in the vacancy-plagued city center. 

Commissioners also gave city staff directions on preparing a new General Plan housing element that will meet the requirements of the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), a certification required before the city can receive some of the outside funds allocated by the regional government agency.  

The new zoning rules simplify the application for city permits to open new businesses or change the use of existing businesses in a dozen categories, ranging from department stores to radio, recording and television studios. 

The changes followed a March 10 mandate from the Berkeley City Council directing the commission to find ways to accommodate businesses that will generate more revenue for the city. 

The council had suggested eight business categories. The Planning Commission eliminated one and added five others during its April 29 meeting, the same list the commission approved Wednesday night. 

“Our effort was to see what can happen with minimal staff input,” said Land Use Planning Manager Debra Sanderson. 

“I like anything that’s going to save time,” said commissioner and architect Jim Novosel. 

“Wherever we can do this so that applicants don’t have to go through a long approval process is a good idea. I would like to see it happen in other places than just downtown,” said commissioner Teresa Clarke, a nonprofit housing developer. 

Gene Poschman, a retired professor and the only commissioner not to vote in favor of the package (he abstained), said he was concerned that “there is a kind of pandering factor here. The council may think they’re doing something positive, but there may be unintended consequences.” 

Sanderson said easing the permit process would help a staff which had been reduced by 38 percent, while workloads for each of the remaining city planning staffers had soared by as much as 50 percent in some cases. 

The new zoning code sections will reduce requirements for eight business categories from mandatory use permits with a public hearing before the Zoning Adjustments Board to either administrative use permits (AUPs) or the simpler zoning certificate. The requirements for four business categories were reduced from AUPs to certificates. 

AUPs require a staff level review by the Planning Department, while certificates are by-right permits, handled as over-the-counter transactions. 

Going the full public hearing route can take over a year, a process that has generated complaints from would-be business owners, Sanderson said. 

Businesses that had requirements reduced from hearings to the AUP level included department stores; quick-service restaurants within 200 feet of residential districts; full-service restaurants with a beer or wine license more than 200 feet from residential districts; non-alcohol-serving full-service restaurants within 200 feet of residential districts; gyms and health clubs; theaters; child care centers; and radio/television/recording studios. 

Businesses that had requirements reduced from AUPs to certificates included video and DVD rental outlets; quick-service restaurants more than 200 feet from residential districts; full-service restaurants with no alcohol service more than 200 feet from residential zones; and group class instruction businesses. 

Applicants who want to accelerate the process can do so—at a cost—by hiring city-approved consultants to process their applications. The consultant fees are in addition to the city application fees, but enable the applicant to win faster approval than by relying on the hard-pressed staff, Sanderson told the commission. 

Housing quota  

ABAG is a regional agency comprised of nine Bay Area counties and serves as an intermediary for regional planning and doling out some state funding to county and city governments. 

The Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) is ABAG’s allocation of projected growth assigned to individual cities and counties, which must show their capacity to issue building permits up to the level mandated by ABAG. 

Governments aren’t required to actually build the housing—a process dictated by the market—but they must be willing to issue the permits if developers want to build and meet local code requirements. 

Of the 2,431 units ABAG said the city must be willing to permit by 2014, Berkeley has already built or issued permits for 737 since the current seven-year RHNA term began in 2007, said Associate Planner Jordan Harrison. 

ABAG divides the quota into affordability levels, and of the units also approved, most fall into the “above moderate-income” category, while 34 percent of the extremely and very low-income units have been approved, 18 percent of the low-income units and less than one percent of the moderate-income units. 

The categories are computed on the basis of an area median income (AMI) in Alameda County of $89,300 for a family of four, with extremely low-income classified as up to 30 percent of the AMI; very low-income from 31 to 50 percent of AMI; low-income 51 to 80 percent; and moderate-income, 81 to 120 percent. 

Harrison said the city staff has projected between 500 and 800 units for the downtown and south-of-campus neighborhoods, with the remainder of the new housing to be built along the city’s commercial corridors—University, Shattuck, San Pablo and Telegraph avenues and along Adeline Street. 

Neighborhood activist Steve Wollmer asked commissioners why the allocation didn’t include the so-called accessory dwelling units (also known as mother-in-law apartments) called for in the city’s pending Climate Action Plan. 

“Where is Solano Avenue?” he asked.  

Commissioners also asked the staff to include potential development sites in existing residential neighborhoods as well.

BART directors voted today to adopt three fare hikes that will go into effect July 1. 

At the end of a lengthy discussion, BART directors voted to raise basic train fares by 6.1 percent and to add 25 cents to the minimum fare for short trips. They also voted to charge an extra $2 for trips to the San Francisco International Airport. 

The 25-cent increase in the minimum fare will increase the base fare from $1.50 to $1.75. 

BART directors also voted to begin charging a $1 parking fee at eight additional stations. Parking fees are already in place at some BART stations. 

BART had not been slated to increase its fares until Jan. 1, but directors voted to move up the fare increases by six months because of BART’s large budget deficit.

Community members in Oakland will meet this Sunday to discuss an investment offer made this week to take over the former Parkway Speakeasy Theater in Oakland, which closed earlier this year.  

The offer was made by the Indiana-based group Motion Picture Heritage, according to Peter Prato, spokesman for “I Like The Parkway,” a group that formed in response to the March 22 closure of the theater. 

The Parkway, located just east of Lake Merritt, claimed to be the first theater in California to offer food, beer and wine service in a lounge-style movie theater. 

“I Like the Parkway” is holding a community meeting at 3 p.m. Sunday at Rooz Cafe, located at 1918 Park Blvd., just down the street from the site of the theater, to continue to galvanize support for the theater. 

“The major thrust of the meeting is to get a sense of the community and what they’d like to see in a venue,” said Patsy Eagan, an organizer for the group. 

Bill Dever, manager of the Motion Picture Heritage organization, said he visited the Parkway during a trip to the Bay Area, and is a friend of Will Viharo, a longtime employee at the theater. The Parkway would be the first West Coast theater run by the organization, he said. 

Dever declined to comment on the negotiations to take over the theater, but said his group, which runs a chain of theaters in various Midwest states, is “focused on revitalizing, rehabilitating and running old motion picture houses, and bringing back the culture of film-going.” 

The “I Like the Parkway” group has worked with Oakland City Councilwoman Pat Kernighan, who represents District 2 where the theater is located. 

Prato said the group is working with Kernighan’s office to stay in touch with the landlords of the building, who are mulling the offer from the investors in the Midwest. 

“The most important thing for us is making sure we do our part, so if and when the theater reopens, it stays open,” Prato said. 

The group has a website, www.iliketheparkway.com, that updates the community on upcoming events related to the theater. A Facebook group created by the organizers has more than 6,800 members. 

The previous owners of the Parkway, Kyle and Catherine Fischer, also owned a theater in El Cerrito, the Cerrito Speakeasy Theater. That venue also recently closed. 

The Fischers have posted a message on their website, www.picturepubpizza.com, thanking people “who have enjoyed what we  

have offered, who have shared in our vision and who love the idea of building  

and sharing community.”

A significant drop in the number of immigrant students in the Berkeley Unified School District has resulted in the loss of federal funding for some services and programs meant to help them.  

The district’s 2008-09 Student National Origin Report (SNOR) shows that the district did not have the annual immigrant student growth rate required by the federal No Child Left Behind act to guarantee them funding for the 2010-11 school year. 

The state Department of Education uses the SNOR to determine the annual count of eligible immigrant students—foreign-born K-12 pupils who have been enrolled in a school in the United States for three years or less—as required by Title III of No Child Left Behind.  

Title III money funds immigrant education programs, including basic instructional services, family literacy, parent outreach, and tutoring, mentoring and counseling.  

The state education department receives a grant from the federal Department of Education based on the number of qualified immigrant students enrolled in California and allocates the money to school districts which show a significant growth in immigrant enrollment.  

Data from the 2008-09 SNOR will be used to determine whether school districts statewide can receive funding for subsequent years, starting with 2010-11.  

Berkeley Unified reported a total of 380 immigrant students for the current school year, a decrease of almost 100 students from a year ago.  

The district reported 403 students in 2006-07. That number went up to 469 in 2007-2008, but then dropped again in 2008-09, showing a decrease from the numbers reported in the last two years. A district must show 5 percent growth in the total number of immigrant students over the average of the two previous school years.  

“The numbers are significantly down this year and we won’t get funding in 2010-11,” said district Assistant Superintendent Neil Smith while presenting the report at an April 29 school board meeting.  

The decline will result in a decrease of about $40,000 for 2010-11.  

When Berkeley Board of Education Director John Selawsky asked Smith if the drop indicated a trend in the district, Smith said that it did not. Smith said the loss of funds would affect the district’s English language learner program.  

Selaswky later told the Daily Planet that he would like to investigate the trend in immigrant enrollment for the last five to 10 years.  

“The numbers are all over the place,” he said. “They went up last year and went down this year, so I couldn’t see a trend in the last three years. I am curious if there is a trend and what it is.” Selawsky said that although the amount of money lost was not huge, any reduction in district funds, especially during the current state budget crisis, was problematic.  

“It’s not that much money—it’s only a part of the total funding we receive for immigrant students,” he said. “It’s not going to make that kind of impact, but if it does, I hope we have a plan in place for the reduction.”  

Selawsky said it is hard to pinpoint exactly why the district's immigrant enrollment dropped.  

“It could be an anomaly or maybe it’s the economy,” he said. “The job market is bad right now and people want to stay where they are instead of moving to a new place.”  

Monte Blair, an education programs consultant in the state Department of Education’s Language Policy and Leadership Office, said Berkeley Unified was not the only district losing funding due to a shrinking immigrant population.  

Blair said large districts like Los Angeles Unified did not get funding this year because they did not show growth either.  

Troy Flint, spokesperson for Oakland Unified School District, which has 44,000 students compared to Berkeley Unified’s 9,000, said he was not aware of a drastic decline in immigrant students in his district. “There are cycles of immigration,” said Carmelita Reyes, principal at Oakland International High School. Reyes said that previously Oakland had seen a large number of immigrants coming from Vietnam and Cambodia, but that right now there was an influx of people from Latin America.  

“People come here from other countries depending on what’s going on in their country,” she said. “When America was booming, people wanted to come here, but that’s not the case right now.”  

Last year, Reyes said, her school also got a lot of refugees from Burma, whereas this year the school has a lot of students from Nepal.  

Berkeley’s report shows that the district drew students from 71 countries. The largest number of immigrant students come from Mexico (69), followed by China (24), Germany (21), Nepal (19), Morocco (19), Norway (16) and India (15).

Although the 2008 Base Academic Performance Index (API) report released Thursday, May 21, shows progress for California’s public schools, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell warned that the mounting budget cuts to education could be a major threat to improving student achievement.  

The 2008 Base API takes into account results from spring 2008 testing, mainly the California Standardized Tests (STAR) and the California High School Exit Exam. The 2008 results form the baseline against which the 2009 Growth API—due Sept. 2—is compared.  

Areas tested include English, math and the social sciences.  

This year’s Base API includes public school rankings ranging from 1 to 10 (10 being the highest), which will help parents see how their child’s school is doing in comparison to similar schools statewide.  

API scores are on a scale of 200 to 1,000, and the state Department of Education asks schools to perform at a level of 800.  

Forty percent of California public elementary schools are at or above the state requirement, up 3.3 percentage points from 2007, according to the state education department website.  

Thirty percent of state middle schools are meeting or exceeding the performance target, an increase of 5.7 percentage points over last year. Seventeen percent of high schools meet or exceed the target, a gain of 2.8 percentage points over 2007.  

Schools in the Berkeley Unified School District seem to have met or are well on their way to meeting the state’s performance target, with six of the district’s 11 elementary schools exceeding the mark.  

Cragmont, Emerson, Jefferson, John Muir, Oxford and Malcolm X have already met the statewide performance target of 800 and did not receive a growth target.  

State Department of Education spokesperson Tina Jung said that although this was good news, the state always encourages schools to perform even better. Jung said some schools receive the maximum score of 1,000.  

Of the remaining four elementary schools, Berkeley Arts Magnet is only four points behind the statewide performance target and LeConte, Rosa Parks, Thousand Oaks and Washington elementary schools are each five points behind.  

All three middle schools—Longfellow, King and Willard—showed considerable progress toward reaching their state performance targets, each school falling behind by five points.  

For the third year in a row, according to the state education department website, Berkeley High School did not receive a Base API score because of low student participation.  

District Superintendent Bill Huyett said school officials had done their best to encourage students to take the test this year. 

“The principal and the school leadership talked to students about how important it was, and we hope to see an improvement,” he said. “Over the last few years there has been this notion that the tests are not important, but they are important.” 

Huyett said that a student’s performance in these tests determined whether or not they would have to take remedial math and English classes during their first year in the California State University System. 

Richard Ng, assistant to Berkeley High Principal Jim Slemp, said the school did not have information on the participation rates yet.  

Increasing student participation for the STAR tests has been a long-standing problem at Berkeley High, and district officials and educators have yet to find a solution. Student can—and often do—opt out of the standardized tests by bringing a note from parents.  

Rio Bauce, a recent Berkeley High graduate who is currently attending Pitzer College, said students often avoid taking these tests because they think of them as “boring” or “stupid.”  

“When I was at BHS, many students thought that the STAR tests were as important and less exciting than a student survey,”said Bauce, who occasionally writes for the Daily Planet. “One category of students don’t take them because they feel that they are boring and unimportant for their own individual success. Another category sees the STAR test exemption as a week of no school. Either making these tests mandatory or offering incentives to taking them are the only ways to improve the past couple years of low participation at BHS.”  

Berkeley Technology Academy, the district’s only public continuation school, shows a 2008 Base API score of 596, which is 10 points less than the 2009 API target the state has set for it. 

The state education department website warns that because B-Tech’s API score was based on the participation of a small number of students (23), it might be less reliable.  

B-Tech received a statewide ranking of 1 last year, which places it in the bottom 10 percent of all schools of its type, Jung said.  

O’Connell singled out elementary schools for their “spectacular progress.” Although he was pleased that California schools were meeting the high expectations set for them every year, he stressed it was important to sustain the momentum.  

“This kind of progress happens only through the hard work and focus of dedicated school staff, parents, and students,” he said. “However, I worry that these real gains in student achievement are in serious jeopardy because funding for our public school system is in serious danger,” he told reporters during a teleconference after making the report public. “What kind of education will we be able to offer next year and the year after that with the kind of drastic and unprecedented cuts now under consideration?”  

O’Connell noted that the report pointed out a persistent achievement gap between African-American and Latino students and their peers.  

“When we examine the achievement gap, the truth again is in the numbers,” he said, adding that 70 percent of California public schools were made up of a majority of African-American and Latino students who were lagging behind their peers.  

“We cannot afford to leave a majority of our students behind,” he said. “In fact we can’t afford to leave any of our students behind.” He said that an antidote to closing the glaring gap between low- and high-achieving students was to create “culturally dynamic classrooms” and focus on collecting academic data.  

O’Connell said that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposal to cut $1.4 billion in the last month of the current school year and another $2.3 billion when school starts in the fall could mean larger class sizes, fewer nurses and librarians and another round of teacher layoffs.  

“Schools will be doing all they can to keep the lights on and the doors open,” he said. “It will take a major budget reform to get us back on the right track.”  

The 2008 Base API reports, including school rankings and growth targets are posted on the API Web Page at www.cde.ca.gov/ta/ac/ap/apireports.asp.

Ten Berkeley citizens and leaders of Corporate Accountability International (CAI) protested in front of McDonald’s in downtown Berkeley Tuesday to draw attention to the restaurant’s proximity to schools.  

It was the day before McDonald’s corporation’s annual shareholder meeting, the protesters having timed their demonstration to publicize the fact that there are five schools located within half a mile of the fast food franchise, including Berkeley High, Berkeley Arts Magnet Elementary, and Maybeck High School.  

“This is not coincidental and needs to stop,” said Todd Anderson, CAI member. “In the midst of this health crisis, McDonald’s should do their part and remove franchises that are near these schools.”  

Edith Monk Halberg, a homelessness activist and substitute teacher, said fast food has affected her students.  

“It is important for school-age children to get good nutrition,” said Halberg. “I have noticed that it affects the behavior and learning capabilities of children. While school lunches in Berkeley are nutritious, not every city has these programs. I hope that the fast food industry measures up to some level of corporate accountability.”  

At the demonstration, local registered dietitian Juliette Simms offered her first-hand experience on the effects of fast food on children.  

“I used to do surgery on geriatric patients,” said Simms. “I have seen children with Type 2 diabetes. When I ask them about their eating habits, many of them eat fast food. McDonald’s advertisements to kids often go under the parents’ radar. If McDonald’s cares about customer health, they need to stop advertising to our kids.”  

“Americans are getting wise to their public relations strategy,” said Anderson. “It is now time for McDonald’s to stop playing their public relations game. We need to focus on zoning laws for these franchises.”  

Attempts to contact Nick Vergis, manager of the downtown McDonald’s franchise, were unsuccessful.  

Simms says that the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) should partner with the City of Berkeley to work on some of these issues.  

“Schools in these school districts can and should work with the city to rewrite the zoning laws,” said Simms.  

Berkeley Unified School District spokesperson Mark Coplan said citizens should go to the city if they have ideas.  

“We really count on the city to deal with these kind of issues,” said Coplan. “Many people would like to see the school district be involved in their cause and be carriers for their issue. However, all of our time has been spent on the budget and we really don’t have time for other things. From our standpoint, there are so many good restaurants in the area that the only time students go to McDonald’s is if they don’t have much money.”  

In 1999, the Berkeley City Council passed a moratorium on new “quick service” restaurants and “carry-out” restaurants on University Avenue between Oxford Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way. However, in February 2009, the council revised it to allow construction of new “quick service” restaurants, which include cafes and pizzerias, but continued to ban “carry-out” restaurants, which can include fast food establishments.  

Berkeley Councilmember Jesse Arre-guin said the city is committed to preventing future fast food places on that strip of University Avenue, but can’t remove current franchise establishments.  

“While many people think that McDonald’s should not be there, all the council can do is regulate to make sure that future fast food business don’t construct there,” said Arreguin. “Childhood obesity is a concern and a priority for the city.”  

Corporate Accountability International is a 30-year-old corporate watchdog organization centered in Boston, Mass., that runs campaigns against what they perceive as “the world’s most destructive global corporations.” This campaign is the latest attempt to call on the fast food industry to end their marketing appeals to children, to end their influence on public policy and nutritional science, and to urge them to provide complete nutritional information on all their products.

While Berkeley City Manager Phil Kamlarz has scheduled an update on the city’s budget for next Tuesday’s City Council meeting, that update will probably not include the impacts of last week’s defeats of ballot measures designed to plug holes in the state’s budget deficit. 

With five of six measures defeated in the May 19 special election, California’s state budget deficit is now estimated as approaching $25 billion. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the state legislature are expected to make up that deficit, in part, by siphoning money from local governments, including a proposal being floated by the governor’s office to “borrow” $2 billion in local property taxes. But further details of the possible hits to local governments have not yet surfaced. 

“All we know is rumors,” a somewhat glum Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates told participants in a Berkeley City Council Agenda Committee meeting on June 2. And Kamlarz added that while next week’s city budget update will try to project as much as is known about the state’s fiscal situation and its impact on Berkeley, “we’ll get a real dose of reality when the state comes down with its decisions” on how to handle its deficit. 

Berkeley has so far avoided major cutbacks during the current international financial meltdown and recession, but that may change if substantial amounts of money are shuffled out of the city’s budget and into the state treasury. 

In other notable actions scheduled for Tuesday’s meeting: 

Downtown Area Plan 

The council will conduct a public hearing on the city’s ambitious proposed Downtown Area Plan, which is designed to set the direction for downtown Berkeley development for years to come. At the conclusion of the public hearing, councilmembers are expected to give suggestions for revisions to the plan, which will be modified by staff and returned for further council deliberation on June 9. 

Last week, in a two-hour workshop preceding the regular council meeting, the council got its first formal look at two competing plans, the original one produced by the council-chosen Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee (DAPAC), and the second one, a revision of the DAPAC plan put together by the city Planning Commission. Citizens had only one minute at last week’s workshop to comment on the plan, while Mayor Bates limited councilmember comments to three minutes apiece. Next week’s full council hearing and discussion are likely to take considerably more time. 

Climate Action Plan 

The council will be asked to adopt a proposed negative declaration of environmental effects for the proposed Climate Action Plan (CAP), as well as to formally adopt the plan itself. Adoption of a Negative Declaration would make unnecessary a full environmental impact review (EIR) process of the Climate Action Plan under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), a review that some Berkeley citizens have requested because of the long-term effects the CAP will have on commercial and residential density in the city. 

The proposed Negative Declaration has already drawn fire from Berkeley’s Committee to Minimize Toxic Waste (CMTW), which has been monitoring the environmental effects of the University of California at Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). In a letter to Climate Action Plan coordinator Timothy Burroughs that she presented to Council Agenda Committee members this week, CMTW Project Manager Pamela Sihvola called the city’s study proposing a negative CEQA declaration “totally inadequate, incomplete and deficient” because it does not include the greenhouse gas effects of the nearby UC Berkeley campus and the LBNL. At the Agenda Committee, Mayor Bates called Sihvola’s letter and remarks “an interesting argument,” but made no further comment. Sihvola is expected to renew her argument at Tuesday’s full council deliberation on the CAP. 

The CAP seeks to implement Berkeley’s 2006 Measure G, which set a targeted goal of an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in the city by the year 2050. The CAP was developed by city officials to provide detailed plans through the year 2020 to get the city on track for 2050. 

Traffic calming policy and procedures 

The council has scheduled a discussion of its city Traffic Calming Policy, which includes, among other things, traffic circles and street diversions, blockages, and directions designed to funnel traffic into some streets and areas and away from others. Proposed is a resolution to establish a revised policy, which would include a standard for setting up a waiting list for traffic calming project requests and criteria for setting project priorities.

The defeat of five of the May 19 special election ballot initiatives means trouble for the economic future of California’s universities, colleges and community colleges.  

UC President Mark Yudof announced May 20 that Gov. Schwarzenegger’s revised budget would bring the UC system’s budget shortfall to $531 million, with $322 million in cuts for the 2009-10 academic year.  

“Such a severe budget reduction, following years of chronic underfunding, would force the university to weigh a number of stark choices,” said Yudof in a press release. “Salary reductions, employee furloughs, decreases in enrollment, increases in class sizes, cuts to programs and student services, and, unfortunately, even higher fees—at this point, all options must be placed on the table for consideration at some point in the future.”  

In light of the state’s fiscal crisis, the UC Board of Regents at its May 7 meeting approved a 9.3 percent increase in tuition for 2009-10. The tuition hike includes a 10 percent increase in educational fees and a 4.2 percent increase in registration fees, totaling $152 million.  

The board will reconvene July 14 to discuss budget cuts as a result of the failure of the state ballot initiatives.  

University of California Office of the President spokesman Ricardo Vazquez said administrative cuts and salary freezes are crucial to surviving the economic crisis.  

“Student fee increases were considered only as a last resort, and constitute just one element in a series of actions the university and the campuses have taken to confront continuing cuts in state funding, while working to protect the academic program and student services to the greatest extent possible,” said Vazquez in a press release earlier this month. “These include freezing senior managers’ salaries, restructuring and downsizing the UC Office of the President, curtailing faculty recruitment, and implementing hiring freezes at the campuses, among others.”  

Vazquez said the regents also discussed the possibility of implementing furloughs and salary reductions in the event that additional savings were required.  

UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof told the Daily Planet the university is waiting for direction from the office of the president on how to proceed with the economic situation.  

“Nobody knows what the effects will be like at the local level,” said Mogulof. “If the university system does not do anything about the situation, the hole is going to get a lot bigger.”  

The California State University system (CSU) is also feeling the effects of the budget crunch. Due to the results of the special election, $410 million must be cut from the 2009-10 budget.  

“We know that there will be very challenging and difficult times ahead,” said California State University Chancellor Charles B. Reed. “In the coming weeks, the campus presidents and I will be meeting to address how to move forward to address these fiscal issues and to develop a plan of action in consultation with our Board of Trustees. These are all very hard decisions and there are no good options. We will all need to work together to explore what is feasible with the primary goals of serving our students and preserving as many jobs as possible.”  

Shawn Bibb, vice president of administration and finance for Cal State East Bay, said the effects of the failed state initiatives on the school’s budget is still unclear.  

“As Chancellor Reed indicated in his statement about the impact of the special election on the CSU, the accumulated cuts total $410 million for the 2009-10 budget,” said Bibb. “Cal State East Bay will not know the impact on us until Chancellor Reed meets with President Qayoumi and the other presidents to develop the plan of action for the CSU.”  

Before the election, the CSU system had already made cuts in salary and hiring freezes, as well as passing measures to curb enrollment.  

“CSU has already implemented a number of cost-cutting measures, including a salary freeze for vice president/chancellor level positions; a hiring freeze on non-essential positions; cancellation of all non-critical equipment and supplies purchases and travel restrictions for employees,” said Reed. “In addition, for the first time in its history, CSU declared systemwide impaction to limit the number of new students entering in fall 2009, due to the state’s inability to fully fund enrollment growth and operational needs. CSU currently has more than 450,000 students attending its 23 campuses.”  

Earlier this month, CSU’s board of trustees approved tuition hikes for fall 2009. Undergraduate fees were increased by $306; fees for students in the teaching credential program increased by $354; and fees for graduate students went up $378.  

“It is never an easy choice to raise fees, but we are faced with a dire state budget, and today’s increase is necessary to maintain and operate our university campuses,” said CSU Board Chair Jeffrey Bleich. “It is critical that students get their financial aid requests in. This year, benefits for programs such as the Pell Grant are more generous than ever. Through financial aid and grants, nearly half of our students will see no increase in their fees. In addition, due to financial aid, CSU students with family incomes of $75,000 or less will pay no fees at all.”  

The California Community College system has not been immune from budget cuts either. City College of San Francisco Chancellor Don Griffin was blunt about the effects of proposed cuts on the school’s budget.  

“[The] election results will make it impossible for City College of San Francisco to maintain its current levels of services and student access,” said Griffin. “Our district serves 105,000 students, and if the budget scenarios recently unveiled are enacted, our summer school enrollment will be reduced by up to 85 percent and our student services programs will be dramatically cut by as much as 50 percent. These services include admissions and enrollment and disabled student programs. Major reductions in course offerings will also result in a loss of access for 10,000 students in our district. We will be forced to reduce our hours of operation and there will also be a 15 percent loss of part-time faculty and administrative positions.”  

Calls to H.D. Palmer, the governor’s spokesman in the finance department, were not returned.

San Francisco police arrested at least 150 protesters on Tuesday after a large crowd blocked a major intersection in response to the state Supreme Court’s ruling upholding Proposition 8, the voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage. 

Hundreds of people filled the intersection of Grove Street and Van Ness Avenue in the morning after word spread of the ruling. The court also ruled that roughly 18,000 existing same-sex marriages in California remain valid.  

Around 12:45 p.m., officers were seen placing plastic handcuffs on protesters and leading them to police vans waiting nearby. With each new arrest, the crowd cheered.  

Police Sgt. Lyn Tomioka said the protesters were arrested for failing to obey an officer and being outside a crosswalk.  

At 1 p.m. the intersection was still closed to traffic and hundreds of people remained in the street.  

The state Supreme Court by a 6-1 vote upheld Proposition 8, passed by California voters in November. The initiative was approved by 52 percent of voters as an amendment to the state constitution.  

In its ruling, the court rejected three lawsuits in which same-sex couples and local governments claimed the measure could not be passed simply as an initiative because it was a constitutional revision rather than an amendment.  

News of the ruling ignited passion on both sides of the issue, with gay marriage supporters vowing to renew the fight via a ballot measure in 2010.  

“It is impossible to square the elation we felt just a year ago with the grief that we feel today,” said Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, at a news conference inside City Hall.  

Kendell said it is “impossible to reconcile” the Supreme Court ruling with its previous May 2008 ruling allowing the marriages.  

“As soon as I heard the decision, I started crying,” said Eva Paterson, president of the Equal Justice Society. “It’s just wrong. It’s just wrong.”  

San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera said he was disappointed by the ruling but “grateful” the court allowed the approximately 18,000 same-sex marriages to stand.  

He acknowledged that there would be a lot of sadness and even anger in the gay community, but asked opponents of Proposition 8 not to vilify the judges for their decisions.  

“Courts deserve respect for the difficult job they have to do,” Herrera said.  

Herrera said the final decision won’t happen in the courts, but rather in the “electoral arena.”  

A crowd gathered near the state building on Tuesday to await the court’s decision. Colorful signs bore slogans like “No H8” and “Marriage = One Man + One Woman.”  

The details of the ruling just after 10 a.m. spread through the crowd via cell phones and text messages. Immediately, opponents of Proposition 8 began chanting, “shame on you” to the smaller assemblage of people who support the measure.  

George Popko, 22, held one side of a large sign saying “Celebrate Prop 8.” He said he was expecting today’s decision based on the questions justices asked when they heard arguments on the matter in March.  

Popko said he traveled from Sacramento with a dozen classmates from American River College. Popko said his student body was the first in the state to officially support Proposition 8.  

“I am a Christian, but I’m also here to defend my state constitution,” he said.  

Emotions ran high after the ruling. Several people surrounded Popko and his sign, decrying his position.  

“I expected some hostility,” he said. “Although it’s a little worse today.”

In the wake of the California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Proposition 8, the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, two couples are pursuing a new tactic with a federal court lawsuit. 

A lesbian couple from Berkeley and a gay couple from Burbank filed the lawsuit in federal court in San Francisco on Friday.  

The plaintiffs are Kris Perry and Sandy Stier of Berkeley, who have been together for nine years and have four sons, and Paul Katami and Jeff Zarrillo of Burbank. 

Both couples say they tried to get married last week but were denied marriage licenses by their county clerk’s offices because of Proposition 8.  

The lawsuit claims that Proposition 8, enacted by state voters on Nov. 4, violates the couple’s federal constitutional rights to due process and equal treatment by denying them the right to marry. 

The couples are represented by prominent attorneys Theodore Olson of Washington, D.C., and David Boies of Armonk, N.Y., who argued on opposite sides of the Bush v. Gore case that decided the 2000 presidential election. 

The attorneys filed a motion asking for a hearing on July 2 before Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco on their bid for a preliminary injunction blocking Proposition 8.  

The two couples said in a statement, “We and our relationships should be treated equally under the law. Our goal is to advance the cause of equality for all Americans.” 

Until now, battles over same-sex marriage in California have centered on the state constitution. A year ago, the California Supreme Court said by a 4-3 vote that the state constitution’s guarantee of equal treatment provides a right to gay marriage. 

But state voters overturned that ruling when they enacted Proposition 8 by a 52 percent majority last fall as a state constitutional amendment. On Tuesday, the state high court ruled by a 6–1 vote that Proposition 8 was within voters’ power to amend the state constitution.  

The new lawsuit is based on separate federal constitutional rights. 

Among other cases, the lawsuit cites a 1967 ruling in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Virginia ban on interracial marriage and said the freedom to marry is a “vital personal right.” 

A power outage on the Berkeley-Oakland border near the Claremont Hotel darkened nearly 4,000 homes Wednesday, reports Pacific Gas & Electric. 

Corporate representative Tamar Sarkissian said the outage, which began at 11:53 a.m., initially hit 3,889 homes and businesses, including Berkeley’s Summit Alta Bates Medical Center, where emergency generators immediately restored power. 

Power to half of the darkened customers was restored by 12:30 p.m., Sarkissian said, with all but the hospital back on line an hour later. 

“We’re working on repairs as we speak,” she said later Wednesday afternoon. 

The cause appeared to be a fault in an underground cable, and crews were working to replace it as the Daily Planet went to press. 

It’s not a gas station, yet more than 2,000 people swear by it when it comes to refueling their cars in the East Bay. 

Some do it because they are against the Iraq War. Others because they despise Dick Cheney. But the overwhelming majority of customers filling up their tanks with leftover recycled cooking oil at Berkeley’s BioFuels Oasis do it because of their love for the environment. Even if it means paying a buck or two extra. 

BioFuels Oasis, an all-women cooperative, moved from their old location at Fourth Street and Dwight Way to 1441 Ashby Ave. on May 1, taking over what was once Kandy’s Carwash, an African-American-owned business that had been a fixture in the South Berkeley neighborhood for years. 

Supporters of the carwash turned up at the city’s zoning meetings more than a year ago to try to stop the fueling station from relocating to Ashby and Sacramento Street, arguing that the city should not encourage the displacement of yet another African-American business from a historically black part of town.  

Although the zoning board gave the fueling station and the carwash time to mediate and explore the possibility of co-existing on the same site, nothing ever came out of it. Landlord Craig Hertz testified at a public meeting that the carwash’s owner, Kandy Alford, was facing eviction because he was behind on his rent by six months. 

At that time, Councilmember Jesse Arreguin, who was then a zoning commissioner, expressed hope that BioFuels would usher in a new chapter of community-building in the neighborhood, one that would heal some of the old wounds. 

Today, the co-op’s owners say the healing has already begun. They have toiled over the last nine months to transform the 1930s gas station-turned-carwash back into a fueling station. Wooden canopies adorned with shade-providing shrubs and creepers loom more than 13 feet over the two fuel pump islands. The original brick-and-tile gas station cottage serves as the main office, where people can sign up on the spot for a new membership. Solar panels and a radiant floor heating system, which generates heat from hot water, take care of the PG&E bills. 

“It’s been really good so far,” said Margaret Farrow, one of the co-op’s five worker-owners, while helping one of her clients fill up his Dodge Ram at the station Wednesday. “We have gotten a lot of welcomes from local businesses and residents. Kandy himself has come by here and chatted with us. He’s something of a local fixture himself and always has funny anecdotes to share with us.” 

Started by Jennifer Radtke and Sara Hope Smith in 2003 to give Bay Area residents easy access to biodiesel, BioFuels Oasis currently serves up to 60 cars every day and boasts a membership of 2000. 

“At that time there wasn’t any place to buy biodiesel—people were making their own biodiesel,” said Farrow, who joined the cooperative three years ago. “It’s really a grassroots level movement and we have put our blood, sweat and tears into it.” 

Farrow said the station was the only one of its kind in the East Bay, expanding to urban farming with its new location to help those raising poultry and livestock to buy chicken feed and grain. 

“We are like a family here,” said Ace Anderson, another worker-member who got hooked on biofuels when she started making her own fuel with leftover cooking oil from Blowfish Sushi in San Francisco. “We have cool customers who are willing to spend $10 a month to help protect the environment. They will come in here no matter what the cost of petrol.” 

State law requires biofuel stations to get a variance to operate, Farrow said, and they can only sell to members. Membership is free at BioFuels Oasis and its two pumps are open to anyone with a diesel engine from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. 

When asked about the backlash biofuel has provoked around the world—it has been blamed for everything from environmental damage to displacement of food crop production—Farrow said the co-op does its best to give its patrons all the information they need to be comfortable with their purchase. 

“I think it’s very important for people to find out where the fuel is coming from, what feeds it,” she said, adding that BioFuel Oasis buys recycled vegetable oil only from within a 200-mile radius. “We are very aware that ecosystems are being destroyed to grow food and fuel. Our customers are intelligent people and they often tell us about what is going on out there.” 

Chris Anderson, who teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute, pulled up his Dodge truck into the station’s wide driveway a little after noon to fill up his tank. 

“I hate Dick Cheney,” he said, when asked why he had made the choice to switch over from regular gas to biofuel. “I’d rather put money in here than give it to all the greedy CEOs at the big oil companies. Also, biofuel works way better than diesel. It’s more lubricating and extends engine life.” 

Sara Hughes, who owns Green Dog Pet Care in Berkeley, drove in after Anderson to fill up $70 worth of biofuel into her V-8 turbo diesel van. 

“Sure it’s more expensive but I don’t want to pollute the environment any more,” said Hughes, who drives a couple of hours daily for work. “I made the change a year ago and enjoy the experience.” 

Biodiesel is currently selling for $3.69 a gallon, a dollar more than regular gas at the Chevron gas station just a few blocks up the street and about $1.24 more than diesel. 

Farrow said that one of the reasons why more people were not using biodiesel was because of the price. 

“But there are still enough biofuel stations around that would allow me to drive from here to neighboring states and not be worried about running out of fuel,” she said. “And I can always carry my own biofuel with me because it’s non-toxic.” 

At least eight cars refueled at the station between 11:30 and 12 p.m., and most were from outside Berkeley. 

“These fuel stations are like shrines to me,” said Ross MacDonald, who said he was on a pilgrimage from Washington, and had stopped at BioFuels to refuel his beat-up 1985 Mercedes. “They are so few and far between, but it feels so good. I’d rather do this than spill blood.” 

Across the street, David Dowd of US liquors sat watching the cars take off after spending about five minutes each at the pumps. 

“When Kandy’s was there, there was a lot more people, a lot more noise, and a lot more customers for me,” he said. “But now, people buy gas and go home. It’s very quiet, but I like it.” 

Berkeley High School will allow the public to participate in meetings held by a committee charged with planning a new schedule for the high school, Berkeley Unified School District Superintendent Bill Huyett said Tuesday.  

The first public forum will be held today, Thursday, May 28, at the Berkeley High School Library, giving parents a chance to ask questions about the process, Huyett said.  

The Scheduling Committee was formed in April under direction from the Berkeley Board of Education, when the board approved an organizational redesign for the high school at the beginning of the year.  

This overhaul—which will introduce advisory programs for smaller learning environments, a new small school, new bell schedules and late-start Mondays geared toward teacher development—is part of the citywide 2020 Vision program, which seeks to close the achievement gap in Berkeley’s public schools. The changes would be implemented for the 2010-11 school year.  

A report by San Francisco-based School Wise Press shows Berkeley Unified as having the highest achievement gap in the state.  

Huyett said the decision to include community members in these scheduling meetings was made by Berkeley High Principal Jim Slemp after the Scheduling Committee’s May 13 meeting in response to parent concerns.  

Now, “anyone can participate,” Superintendent Huyett said. “Of course, the committee will need to do its work and come up with a schedule, but it will be a participatory process.”  

A group of parents, including Berkeley High Parent, Teacher and Student Association President Mark van Krieken, had complained about the lack of transparency and parental involvement in the redesign process. They had said during the formation of the scheduling committee—essentially the second phase of the redesign—that despite promises from Berkeley High administration about a more open approach in the future, school officials were still leaving parents out of the process.  

In a letter to PTSA members Tuesday, May 26, van Krieken described the recent development as “good news.”  

“We would like to thank the principal and superintendent for making the process more open for the BHS community,” he said. “It’s much appreciated.”  

Van Krieken informed parents that from now on, all meetings organized by the scheduling committee will be announced in advance, and that the minutes and agendas from the first three meetings had been posted on the Berkeley High website.  

The committee will be looking at various different scheduling models over the summer and will submit a proposal to the board in the fall, Huyett said.  

Although the high school had initially been interested in pursuing a block schedule, under Huyett’s recommendation the board told school officials to investigate a different schedule from the current six-period model, which would incorporate more courses annually and provide time for advisory programs and academic support.  

Van Krieken also said that he was pleased with the diversity on the 14-member committee, which is comprised of Huyett, Slemp, district Director of Student Evaluation and Assessment Rebecca Cheung and several parents and teachers.  

Cathy Campbell, president of the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, said she was hopeful that a more “open transparent process would benefit everyone.’  

“The last time some people were surprised because they saw the end of the process and missed the earlier part,” Campbell said. “As a result they were not aware of the urgency, the intricacy of some of the problems. But this time, with more information out there, even if they don’t agree with whatever decision the school board makes, at least the process will get more support.”  

The public forum on Berkeley High’s schedule changes for the 2010-11 school year will be held today, Thursday, May 28, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. in the Berkeley High School library.  

• The agendas and minutes of the Scheduling Committee’s first three meetings can be found on the Berkeley High website at bhs.berkeley.net/index.php? page=berkeley-high-redesign-plan, and on the PTSA website at bhs.berkeleypta. org/docs/ redesign/redesign.htm.

Zellerbach Auditorium was filled to capacity Thursday, May 21, for Berkeley City College's 2009 graduation ceremony.  

Two hundred and six graduates walked across the stage to receive their associate degrees.  

“Education is discovering what is in you,” said commencement speaker Harry Le Grande, UC Berkeley's vice chancellor of student affairs. “Education is about finding out your personal desires.”  

The ceremony opened with a few words from Berkeley City College's Associated Students President Tiana Renee Wilkes, who told how she persevered and made it through college after dropping out of high school in her senior year.  

“The biggest thing that has allowed me to grow is all of you,” said Wilkes. “Through this economic crisis, I was able to see BCC emerge as a caring community. ... I encourage everyone here to increase community wherever you go. If I had not had a community here, I might have dropped out again.” Graduating senior Angela Brathwaite won this year’s Chancellor’s Trophy award. According to the Peralta Community College District website, the award “is given at the end of the spring semester to recognize and honor outstanding second-year students who best exemplify leadership, commitment to academic excellence and community service, and who demonstrate clear goals for the future.”  

Upon arriving in Berkeley from Atlanta, Brathwaite found herself homeless. But after a lot of determination, according to one of her teachers, she enrolled at BCC and began an internship in the office of Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates.  

History professor David Johnson encouraged students to reflect upon their years at college.  

“I feel honored to sit before all these splendid students,” said Johnson. “Please understand that you have inspired your other students. You all need to see each other wearing your robes tonight. Not everyone who started with you made it here tonight. You are looking at people around you who are special and who have persevered. On behalf of the faculty, I would like to welcome the class of 2009 to the company of scholars.”  

Perhaps the loudest applause of the evening came when the Berkeley City College Choir performed two songs, including Natasha Bedingfield’s "Feel the Rain on your Skin."  

The star of the night, however, was class valedictorian David McMullen, an East Bay Municipal Utility District retiree who began his higher education career at Laney College in 1978. After many years at EBMUD, he enrolled at BCC in August 2006. He plans to go on to Cal State East Bay and get a bachelor's degree.  

“I love education, and it has afforded me much,” said McMullen. ”I believe I want to major in environmental education, because I like doing things in the outdoors. The outdoors is an aspect of our society that is increasingly diminishing."  

McMullen also expressed his gratitude to Berkeley Community College.  

“Despite its architectural oddities," he said, "BCC has served me very well.”  

Linda Handy, a trustee for the Peralta Community College district, reminded the graduates that their work is not over. “This is an incredible day,” said Handy. “The joy for me is when we see you all walk across the stage. Some of you think that you have finished, but you are just starting. Your education is our gift to you. What you do with your education is your gift to the world.”

A plan to double the number of rail lines through West Berkeley has joined banks and car makers as a casualty of the economic crash. 

Carolyn Clevenger, planner for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), said that “with the current economy, the volume of rail traffic is down significantly, both nationally and in the East Bay. There is less urgency in expansion.” 

The MTC had announced the projected doubling of rail lines following an April 10, 2008, decision by the California Transportation Commission to award the port $74 million to begin the process of upgrading rail service between Martinez and the port. 

“The project has been downscoped significantly,” said Clevenger. 

The biggest beneficiaries of the downsizing are residents of Richmond’s Marina Bay neighborhood, who often find their main access to the freeway and the rest of the city blocked by mile-long freight trains. 

With the need for more rail lines removed by the restrained economy, the MTC and the state have been able to siphon off $18.975 million of the funds to bankroll half the costs of building a grade separation crossing that will allow unimpeded access to the neighborhood. 

Funding for grade separations—overpasses and underpasses in layman’s terms—is hard to find, Clevenger said. “We’re really glad to be able to help.” 

The state funds will cover half of the project’s cost, with the remainder coming from county Measure J bond revenues, City of Richmond developer fees and money from other cities in the county, she said. All of the state revenues come from Proposition 1B bond revenues, she said. 

That measure—the Highway Safety, Traffic Reduction, Air Quality, and Port Security Bond Act of 2006—was approved by California voters on Nov. 7, 2006.  

Preliminary engineering work and an environmental review are now under way, with construction set to begin in December 2010 and conclude by the end of 2013, Clevenger said. 

State transportation commissioners approved the project, officially called the Marina Bay Parkway Grade Separation Project, during their March 12 meeting in a vote that reduced funding for a package of East Bay rail corridor improvements from $175 million to $143.5 million. 

Berkeley planning commissioners had voiced concerns when they were first informed of the proposal to double the number of rail lines through West Berkeley during their May 28, 2008, meeting. 

Commission Chair James Samuels said the project could entail closing some of the streets that cross the railroad lines at grade level, putting more pressure on the existing crossings. 

Land Use Planning Manager Debra Sanderson told commissioners, “It will have a big effect on what happens in West Berkeley and how well we can protect the environment in West Berkeley.”  

In addition to rebuilding the overcrossings at University and Ashby avenues, the project would have had major impacts on roads that cross the tracks at grade level: Gilman, Camellia, Cedar, Virginia and Addison streets and Bancroft Way and Hearst Avenue.  

Word of the project’s cancellation apparently hadn’t reached Berkeley Design Advocates and Berkeley Partners for Parks, groups that have scheduled a Saturday workshop on “Visioning Urban Design and Access” around the rail line expansion. 

The invitation-only event is scheduled to run from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. 

According to the invitation, the two groups “consider the railroad expansion to be a great opportunity to be the first step in reconnecting the city with its waterfront, improving traffic flow, increasing safety and providing better urban design and a better quality of life.” 

A third suspect in a May 16 triple homicide in the East Bay was arrested early Monday in Florida, Berkeley police announced today. 

Samuel Flowers, 21, was arrested on suspicion of grand theft, petty theft and resisting arrest in Bal Harbour, Fla., the FBI told Berkeley police early Monday morning. 

Flowers, an alleged gang member, was wanted in connection with the shooting death of 25-year-old Berkeley resident Charles Davis and a subsequent high-speed chase that ended in a crash that killed two bystanders, 27-year-old Brentwood resident Todd Perea and 41-year-old Berkeley resident Floyd Ross, police said. 

The incident began shortly after 6:30 p.m. when a Berkeley police officer heard gunshots in the area of Allston Way and 10th Street in West Berkeley. 

Officers responded and found Davis on Allston Way west of San Pablo Avenue. He had been shot multiple times and was pronounced dead at the scene, police said. 

As they were arriving, officers saw a Cadillac occupied by four men speeding away from the area and chased it into Oakland. The chase ended when the Cadillac crashed into a Mazda and a pedestrian at Aileen Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way, killing both the driver, Perea, and the pedestrian, Ross. 

After the crash, police arrested 24-year-old Oakland resident Anthony Price and 22-year-old San Leandro resident Stephon Anthony, but Flowers and a fourth suspect, 27-year-old Rafael Campbell, managed to flee the area on foot. 

Campbell remains at large and should be considered armed and dangerous, police said. 

The Alameda County District Attorney's Office charged Anthony, who authorities believe was driving the Cadillac, and Price with three counts each of murder as well as the special circumstance of committing multiple murders, which could make them eligible for the death penalty. 

They were also charged with weapon and gang enhancements. 

Flowers is being held at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center in Miami awaiting extradition, police said. 

The city of Berkeley and Bay Area Crime Stoppers offered a $47,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the suspects.

An Alameda County Superior Court judge said today he won’t allow witnesses to testify that they overheard former BART police Officer Johannes Mehserle mention using his Taser stun gun before he fatally shot Oscar Grant III on New Year’s Day.  

At least one witness for the defense in Mehserle’s preliminary hearing on a murder charge was expected to testify that Mehserle said he planned to use a Taser on Grant.  

The defense has contended that Mehserle, 27, meant to fire his Taser gun when he shot and killed 22-year-old Grant on the platform of the Fruitvale BART station.  

Mehserle’s attorney, Michael Rains, said this morning the testimony should be admissible because it would help show Mehserle’s state of mind at the time of the shooting.  

However, Judge C. Don Clay decided not to allow the testimony, concluding that it would amount to hearsay.  

Clay also opted to allow the defense to present a short segment of a slow-motion video of the interaction between Grant and the BART officers just before the shooting.  

The defense claims the enhanced video will show that Grant was resisting the officers. The prosecution contends Grant was cooperative.  

The shooting occurred after Mehserle and other officers were called to the Fruitvale station to respond to reports of a fight on a train.  

Mehserle’s partner, Officer Jon Woffinden, began testifying last week and was being cross-examined this morning. BART Officer Tony Pirone is expected to testify later today.

Al Winslow’s article “The Art of Aging” (Daily Planet, Dec. 10, 2008) inspired me to add my two cents to this important issue. 

I am 92 years old and am still enjoying life in spite of hearing loss, vision loss, and lower back pain. I live alone and take pretty good care of myself, although having a devoted daughter living upstairs in her own place is a tremendous asset. 

What is the secret of my contentment? I would say it is because I keep my creative juices flowing. All my life I have loved to write and now that I am retired, I have the time to indulge this hobby. For the last 15 years I have belonged to writing groups with titles like “Life Stories.” While attending the weekly group led by George Porter at the Jewish Community Center, I regularly submitted articles based on true incidents in my life. As they accumulated, I realized they were mostly based on turning points in my life. And when arranged chronologically they would make an interesting full-length memoir. And I owed such a book to my children and grandchildren who knew little of my life before they came into it. 

Alan, my son-on-law, a highly qualified computer person, thought it was a splendid idea, but expressed dismay when I announced I would publish it myself. As we both knew, my computer technique was nowhere as advanced as his, so he suggested I hire a professional to do the job. I resisted his advice, and in my own stubborn way felt I could handle it—maybe not as well or as fast as a pro—but that was okay. I had no deadline to meet. 

Actually, I looked forward to publishing it myself, just to prove to him that I could do it, despite the fact that I was not as proficient at the computer as he was. But I could learn from my mistakes, couldn’t I? And I could always phone him for help if I needed it. 

At one point I took him to meet Kish, the owner of the copy shop who would print 50 copies for me. They talked about my submitting the manuscript on a disk, and Kish would do the rest, whatever that was. All this talk was above my head, but I said nothing. My plan was to do an old-fashioned paste-up of my manuscript, number of pages, design the cover and name it “Turning Points”—all in camera-ready format, the way I knew best. 

Well, it took me a month or two but I finally had my paste-up ready for Kish’s copy machines. 

I was very proud of the results, and even Alan was surprised the paperback books turned out so well. I mailed copies to friends and relatives who for the most part praised my effort. No surprise there! 

I also sent one to William Zinsser, whose classic book, “On Writing Well,” had been my Bible in learning more about the art and craft of writing. He too praised it highly and suggested I give copies to certain libraries, which I did. Two copies are now in the main branch of the Berkeley Public Library. And I may have the distinction of being one of the oldest authors on their shelves. I was 90 years old when I published it. And if I can do it, other oldsters surely can. 

In Spring 2008 as I prepared to produce a fall choral concert benefiting Berkeley High School, I went looking for student singers to feature in the concert, only to painfully realize that hardly anyone knew who to ask. Berkeley High, a school of 3,300 kids, hadn’t had a choral arts program for three years, after having enjoyed as many as five separate choirs through the 1990s and early 2000s. California has been hovering at 48th place in state ranking for money spent per student. Choral arts had taken a big hit at Berkeley High. 

As a BHS parent and a 21-year member of the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir, I can’t imagine what it might be like not to know in my bones the refuge and inspiration of music. Performing arts engage us physically, mentally, emotionally and socially. Choral arts engenders an even more intimate connection to our physical selves and our relationship to others because of the relaxation and attunement to others inherent in singing “as a body.” There’s even scientific research that now documents how music changes us—our metabolic heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, it even increases our ability to process higher order information, including mathematics. 

When we put the word out about a choir forming, 35 kids responded within a week. On Oct. 4, 2008, a three-week-old BHS chorus of 25 students opened the Oakland Interfaith Gospel benefit concert at BHS’s Schwimley Theatre. Michael Morgan, Oakland East Bay Symphony’s lively, funny and beloved conductor, came to introduce the new choir and offered his comments: “I can understand when public schools don’t have orchestras, because instruments can cost an arm and a leg. But no choirs? ...Let me know how I can help.”  

That same month, our committee of nine pushy women applied for and ultimately received grants from the Berkeley Public Education Foundation and the BHS Development Group to pay for a director and sheet music for a new Berkeley High Chorus Club. Students had organizational meetings to determine what they’d like in a chorus, auditioned four separate director candidates, and voted for their director: Trelawny Rose, a Jazzschool and private voice instructor with a knockout voice of her own. They’ve been happily meeting weekly since November, and have already performed at several school functions (BHS Junior Ian Farnkopf has been ongoing student chorus organizer this year, and is student point person for this concert as part of his Troop 6 Berkeley Eagle Scout project). 

On Monday June 1 at 7 p.m., the Berkeley High Chorus Club will host its first concert, showcasing its work this year and featuring other voices from Berkeley High. There’ll be music from many genres, improvised circle singing, highlights from Abby Simons and Nathan Kersey-Wilson’s original musical Double Digits, plus vocalist/songwriter Sydney Reeves, and others. There is internal and external support—yes, even joy—for this venture. An active and well-supported Choral Club can help pave the way for chorus to again become a regular class offering in the Berkeley High Curriculum in 2010 or 2011. 

I entered into this project with a certain amount of outrage that there had been no choir for several years at a school of our size, then boggled when at first almost no one answered my e-mail and phone overtures. But BHS is a small snapshot of the rest of the world—full of miracles, tremendous vitality, and chock full of hard economics and social conundrums. When I started showing up at the school and waiting until folks could talk to me in between tasks in their ridiculously crammed work load, they saw I wasn’t just complaining or “phoning it in,” and pulled out the stops to help. Teachers and administrators made time they didn’t really have to offer advice, print mailing stickers, write sponsoring letters, draw up posters on the spot when ticketing information changed, and more. They were grateful for a vision. I just had to ask in person, with focus, respect, a rationale and a plan. 

The best way to predict the future is to create it. It’s not always easy or fun to wade into the politics and often bleak landscapes in our current public sector And it all takes time—something at least as valuable as money. But I can assure you that it is profoundly satisfying. So, while you’re thinking over any recipes for addressing the thing in your environment that’s bugging you, come over on Monday night, June 1, and listen to some kids sing their hearts out, and help us get singing back into the official curriculum at Berkeley High.  

Mary Ford is a BHS graduating senior’s mom, a proud wife of a math teacher, as well as a vocalist, psychologist, writer and activist in Berkeley. 

Berkeley High Sings! 

Monday, June 1. $10 general admission, $5 for students and kids. No one turned away for lack of funds. Tickets through brownpapertickets.com or at the door. Schwimley Theater, Allston Way at Martin Luther King, Jr. Way.  

Can you help support the Chorus Club through donation or volunteering? Contact mary_ford@sbcglobal.net. Checks to Berkeley Public Education Foundation with BHS Chorus in the subject line, 1835 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA 94703.

Never thought I’d hear the word “empathy” used as a pejorative. (Definitions, for the one or two Republicans who might be be reading this: “Empathy: …the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another” and “pejorative: having negative connotations; especially: tending to disparage or belittle.” ) 

A Republican congressional pooh-bah was heard to say last week that if President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee exhibited any tendency to empathy, the GOP would just have to filibuster. Say what you will about the two major parties, only the Republicans would try to get away with promoting insensitivity as a virtue.  

Nonetheless, Sonia Sotomayor has gotten the nod, and even though she’s a member of a suspect category in the empathy arena (a female) it looks like she’ll make it to the court. Barring any unexpected revelations about her past, she’ll be the next member of the Supreme Court of the United States. 

Apparently no one did an empathy check before the current cast of characters took their seats in the California Supreme Court. Their pre-Prop. 8 decision which allowed 18,000 gay marriages demonstrated a commendable degree of empathy for the plight of those who were denied equal rights. But this empathy thing evidently can’t be taken too far, since yesterday the court ended up ruling in favor of the callous majority of California voters. 

That decision can be and will be criticized on legal grounds, but on human grounds (there’s that empathy again) it can most quickly be remedied at the ballot box. “Sensitivity training” was big in the 1970s, and it’s time to bring it back before same-sex marriage goes on the ballot again.  

The court’s decision was announced at 10 a.m. Tuesday, and by the time I got to the Derby Street farmer’s market at 2 p.m., the signature table, with an energetic recruiter, was already in place, and people were standing in line to sign. This means the vote will probably be sooner rather than later, so we’ve got our work cut out for us.  

The reason Proposition 8 won in the first place is that those of us who take same sex marriage for granted were too complacent. It’s encouraging to remember that the no-on-8 campaign was actually pretty perfunctory. We can do better. 

It’s tempting to say “take it to the streets!”, but trying to fight this fight with demonstrations and picket lines again would be counter-productive. Same-sex couples, especially those with children, have a story that’s not hard to sell, from a marketing perspective. It’s just a matter of soft-focus TV commercials of happy families chatting at the dinner table and tossing frisbees at the beach, and of neighborhood coffee hours where people of goodwill get together and share. 

It is hard to—here’s that word again—empathize with people who are sincerely frightened that they’ll lose something if gay people are allowed to marry. But the job at hand is to help them calm down a bit, to remind them that their world won’t end just because Sally and Marge, who already live down the street with their kids anyway, stand up in front of the preacher of their choice and promise to love and support one another. 

That preacher business, by the way … the unchurched among us can’t help wondering exactly why the state of California needs to tangle with the religious view of marriage. Devotees of any kind of religion have the constitutional right to refuse to bless the union of anyone they don’t like, but they shouldn’t be allowed to force their dogma on outsiders.  

The Catholic Church, for example, has traditionally refused to bless the remarriage of divorced people (not, of course, without a lot of fancy footwork around the definition of annulment.) But if the Catholics tried to extend this prohibition to cover members of other churches, there would be an uproar. So why is so much house room given to the equally sectarian desire to ban marriages between gay people, which are already allowed by several mainstream denominations no less respectable than Catholics? 

Perhaps times have changed, but in my youth at Catholic schools we were taught that marriage was a contract between the two parties before God, that the priest was only a witness, and that the state’s role was a legal matter outside the religious contract. In many countries still, e.g. France, this doctrine led to devout couples having two ceremonies, one at city hall and the other in church. Why do today’s bishops now think they have the right to impose their own prejudices even on people who don’t belong to their church? In this matter, as in many others, Catholic lay people are miles ahead of their supposed shepherds.  

Lawyers might look into challenging the right of organizations which benefit from the religious tax exemption to attempt to sway public policy at the ballot box. That’s a two-edged sword which should be approached cautiously, however, since the IRS has recently gone after an Episcopal church whose priest preached a sermon opposing the Iraq invasion, the kind of religious involvement many would support. 

One solution would be a ballot proposition to end the state’s participation in endorsing religious marriages. Everyone, religious or not, could get a state license to enter a civil contract which gave equal rights and privileges to all participants, and they’d also have the option of entering into the religious relationship of their choice without needing state approval. This could be a fallback if the attempt to repeal Proposition 8 fails. 

The rerun is likely to be on the ballot in 2010. Every recent poll indicates that the tide is turning—that it’s just a matter of harvesting the votes of those who didn’t connect with the no-on-8 campaign the last time. Sally and Marge, Jack and Frank and even Susie and Tom have got to make time in their schedules to walk precincts and host barbeques in the hinterlands to combat the pervasive fear of the unknown which put 8 over the top last time. If gay citizens and their family and friends just do all the conventional get-out-the-vote activities this time that they skipped last time, they have an excellent chance of winning the next round.  

MEMORIAL DAY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Memorial Day was created to honor the Union soldiers of the American Civil War. It was originally called Decoration Day, and was the creation of freed blacks, who on May 30, 1868, returned to the Charleston Union Graveyard, and decorated with flowers the individual graves of Union soldiers lying in rest. 

A few years earlier, at the end of the war, these freed slaves had opened the mass graves of the confederate prison and transferred the dead union soldiers to honorable single graves. In 1868, on the first Memorial day, a parade of thousands of freed blacks and Union soldiers from the area was followed by patriotic singing and a picnic. 

Memorial Day was created by Charleston blacks to honor those who fought and suffered in a war that ended slavery. This celebration emerged from the deep personal experience of a people who honored an indisputable just cause at the center, of the Civil War: the end of slavery. 

The true way of honoring the fallen is to prevent further death. Let’s work to end all wars. Let’s pray for justice, peace and understanding. Let’s reflect on what all those lives lost could have been if war had been prevented. 

Jovanka Beckles 

Richmond 

• 

PAYING FOR THE NEWS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Your current editorial, “Paying for the News Upfront, Part 2,” examining the financial plight of your publication, and explanation of your experimental solutions, triggered some memories. 

Many years ago, I was involved with another community weekly newspaper, the Berkeley Barb. At the time, individuals could purchase small quantities of these at “wholesale” pricing and then “retail” directly to the public at a modest margin. 

I noted that you’ve included a somewhat similar arrangement for your intended distribution location donation-based plan, including what you’ve identified as “homes where someone can take collection responsibility.” Why limit this to “homes”? It sounds as though the “donation” basis anticipates revenues to you only after collection from the end-user, rather than upfront from the distributor. Can’t you just reverse that procedure? 

When and where should I show up to obtain my first bundle, and at what cost? Just leave it to me exactly where they will be distributed, at a home or otherwise. 

Christopher Kohler 

• 

PALESTINIANS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Issues concerning Israel and Palestinians do neglect some history of the region. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem met with and supported Hitler and the Holocaust. Jews were murdered by Arabs in the middle east before and during WW2. The creation of Israel by the U.N. did not alter the behavior of Palestinians. Islam, as practiced by the Moors in Spain, under which Jews, Christians and Islamic cultures flourished, should again be cultivated, to the benefit of all. 

Harry Gans 

• 

NO, WE CAN’T ALL  

JUST GET ALONG 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Pete Najarian and Randall Broder don’t get it; wildlife and off-leash dogs cannot safely share open space in the meadow. Most dog guardians are as clueless as these two, and the planet can’t wait. 

Carol Denney 

• 

TODD PEREA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Before Saturday, May 16, I would not have publicly expressed my concern with the issue of crime in Oakland. After last Saturday, I feel need to, even though I have no idea how to fix the problem. The young man driving the Mazda the night of May 16 was my cousin, Todd Perea. Tomorrow, my dear cousin Larry will be burying his son. Larry ... who has dedicated over half of his life to helping people—as an ambulance driver and in the field of law enforcement. And Todd, who was going about his own business that night and was so loved by everyone who was lucky enough to have their lives touched by him. Nothing good has come out of this tragedy and I really don’t see anything positive coming out of it in the future.  

I was born in Oakland but moved to Washington State as a young child. Oakland was bad then. It is certainly worse now. How can we take these streets back again? How can we make these streets safer for our families? I wish I knew. I wish I had the answer. All I know is that my cousin is gone and his father, to whom he was so close, has a broken heart. As the mother of four, I cannot fathom the thought of burying one of my children. Thanks to the thoughtless actions of four individuals, my cousin Larry will have first-hand experience. 

Nancy M. Hein 

Washington State  

• 

THEOLOGICAL MCCARTHYISM 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The well documented history of Catholicism and the Catholic church is one long litany of violence, suppression, cruelty, bigotry, hypocrisy and sexual repression.  

“Be Afraid and Suffer! But if you give us everything you have including your soul and obey us in everything, it will be all right when you die.” 

We are all taught to respect other people’s religions and faiths, but frankly, when a so-called responsible grown man, a pillar of society tells me that he has a blind faith in an imaginary talking dead friend whose mother was a virgin and the custodians of that faith are nothing more than centuries-long crooks and terrorists, torturers and abusers, I am incapable of finding anything to respect, nevermind take seriously. He is either a charlatan, a hypocrite or a fool. The Catholic Church has always and will likely always be the incarnation of all that is evil in the hearts and minds of Mankind. The odd exceptions are called Saints. I might even suggest that it is for Obama to give Notre Dame a miss. 

Christopher Osborn 

• 

AIDING AND ABETTING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It’s disappointing to see your cartoonist aiding and abetting Gingrich and Limbaugh in deflecting attention from the Bush administration torture program by mocking Nancy Pelosi. 

Pat Cody 

• 

BERKELEY MEADOW 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Pete Najarian loved the Berkeley Meadow as it was. The meadow changed and he has lost something that he loved. I am sympathetic to this. It is difficult when the world around us changes and we do not understand why. However, Mr. Najarian is misinformed about many things and directing his anger at the wrong targets. I offer this letter to clarify. 

First, Citizens for East Shore Parks (CESP) does not administer the East Shore State Park, nor did it make the decision to fence off the Berkeley Meadow. The East Bay Regional Park District administers East Shore State Park on behalf of California State Parks. The decision to fence off the meadow was made through the public planning process that preceded the opening of the park. The process included 24 public meetings, design charettes, and other opportunities for public input. Mr. Najarian did not attend any of these meetings and seemed unaware that they even existed when he came to voice his complaints at a recent CESP meeting. It is this public process that established the Berkeley Meadow as a restoration site, just as it established other parts of the park for bike trails, soccer fields, picnic areas, parking lots, and other non-wildlife uses. 

Second, the Berkeley Meadow is 72 acres, not 174 acres as Mr. Najarian claims. Not all of that is fenced. The meadow comprises less than four percent of the more than 1,800 acres that make up East Shore State Park.  

Third, contrary to Mr. Najarian’s statements, Norman LaForce is not a director of the East Bay Regional Park District.  

Finally and most significantly, dogs and certain types of wildlife do not peacefully co-exist. I say this not only as a restoration planner and a board member of CESP and Golden Gate Audubon, but also as an off-leash dog owner. I am well aware of the damage my dog can do to ground-nesting birds, squirrels, rabbits, rodents, and other wildlife deserving of protection. She is a terrier and can easily navigate through thick brush to sniff out nests, burrows, and dens. It is what she and many other dogs were bred to do. As a dog owner, I am content with the abundance of designated off-leash dog areas in the adjacent Cesar Chavez Park, at Pt. Isabel, and the informal access available at the Albany Bulb. The East Bay is home to millions of people and the East Shore Park must serve many purposes. It provides a balance of wildlife protection, playing fields, dog areas, and other park amenities. 

Restoration projects often disappoint people in their first year or so. Whatever was there before is gone, and what will be there in the future has not grown in yet. Complaints are common. But in just a few years, Berkeley Meadow will be a gorgeous coastal prairie, home to all kinds of plants and wildlife that were not able to live there when it was a patch of fennel, pampas grass, and encampments.  

Again, I am sorry that Mr. Najarian lost a place that he loved. For better or worse, our cities are constantly evolving around us. I just wish that Mr. Najarian’s comments and critiques were more consistent with the facts. 

Rich Walkling 

• 

0-BLAH-BLAH’S BLUNDER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I like Barack O-Blah-Blah. He’s an intelligent, cool dude, and a pretty nifty basketball player. But hey, it’s time to take this guy on ... one on one. “Bringing people together” is a fine and dandy idea. But the real question is: What are you bringing people together around? What principle is being honored in the process of synthesizing our differences into amenable policy? In the case of the recent credit card reform legislation Obama has endorsed a piggyback provision permitting gun owners to carry concealed weapons in our national parks. 

Compromise does not imply surrender. But that’s exactly what the president has done by allowing this pernicious piece of statutory nonsense to be codified into our experience within the great outdoor expanse of our national parks. But next time folks in the adjacent campsite keep the music blaring past midnight you’d better think twice about asking them to “turn it down.” One beer too many and they might just dismiss your complaint with a bullet through your brain. In urban America, people often get shot for less, and there’s no reason to believe that nihilistic sensibility won’t be brought into our national parks. 

What do we get for this capitulation to “compromise”? A credit card bill that is essentially a slap on the wrist to the corporations that have already ripped into our quality of life with their avarice and blunders. Nothing in the bill prevents them from charging whatever interest rate they choose. It simply demands of them a bit more etiquette in doing so. 

What’s happened to the principled leadership our new automotive CEO, Obama, went on and on about in the campaign? Apparently it’s been relegated to the trash heap of rhetoric that has characterized our political culture and leadership for far too long. 

Marc Winokur 

Oakland 

• 

UNCLAIMED CHECKS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I realize the law requires public notice of unclaimed government checks (posted by the City of Berkeley on page nine of the May 21 Daily Planet). With all due respect, though, a number of entries suggest lack of basic bookkeeping follow-up by city employees (or by their counterparts at the payees’ offices): is “Alameda—Treasurer, County of” really waiting for a $28,828.80 check, issued July 1, 1999, from the City of Berkeley? Or Fidelity National Title for a $1712.50 check issued June 3, 2003? These are two of several for an office or business which could easily be contacted if someone picked up the phone. 

If the real issue is that city employees, constantly pressured in this budget-challenged period to do more with less, do not have the time for this type of follow-up, perhaps someone could arrange for a group of high school students to take follow-up on as a civics project. Students might find the research process very instructive, and useful for future job references, in checking public record information to locate persons and businesses whom the city may still owe. 

Keeping unclaimed funds on the books for almost 10 years (some entries go back to July 1999) leaves funds needed for current services in limbo, and not so incidentally, creates a backlog of work for the city, which continually has to reconcile these old, outstanding checks against current records. Surely, even in difficult budget times, a way can be found to clear these years-old outstanding checks off the books, without waiting almost ten years to post a legal notice. 

Pam Rolph 

South San Francisco 

• 

INCREASED REFUSE RATES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am a Berkeley resident and a home owner. For the past three or four years I have worked hard to reduce my footprint on the landscape by drastically reducing how much garbage I produce every week. I now only put my small garbage can out for collection twice a month instead of every week. I have accomplished this by 1) Recycling everything that can be recycled. 2) Composting everything that can be composted. 3) Buying primarily fresh produce and not processed foods. 4) By carefully purchasing only what I really need. 

Despite the fact that I use the refuse services only twice a month, I pay the same rate as a person using the refuse services four times a month. The notice sent out by the city clearly shows that commercial entities are not only charged by the size of the dumpsters, but also by the number of times a month that they use the city services. Namely a dumpster picked up four times a month costs twice as much as one picked up twice a month. 

The rates for the commercial users are determined by size of the refuse container multiplied by the number of times the container is collected. I believe the same formula needs to be used for the residential user. If it is fair for the city to charge the commercial user by the frequency of use that same fairness needs to be extended to the residential user. 

Adjusting the rate of the residential user according to how often the resident uses the refuse collection services will encourage residents of the city to generate less garbage. 

I urge the City Council to send this proposal back and ask that the formula suggested above be applied to the residential users. This is not only fair, but of great benefit in terms of reducing the amount of garbage each household will produce. 

Edith Hillinger 

• 

PRINT MEDIA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

When I heard that print media appears to be on its was out, I laughed. You are kidding, right? There will always be room for newspapers and the multi-cultural magazines. However I found myself asking what print media I rely on and currently trust to provide me with accurate information on a regular basis.  

My first thoughts included childhood. My dad required the person who got up first to bring the newspaper inside. This ritual soon became a daily part of my household’s routine, and included reading the funnies, local contests, family discussions that centered around the newspapers. I did my very first written paper for school on how the newspapers were one of the first to implement and maintain a trust system for the purchase of its products through the use of vendor machines without restricted access. High school teachers gave extra credit in world history or current affair to students’ use of newspaper clippings relevant to study topic.  

The old black and white and Technocolor movies made newspapers and reporting appear very glamorous, showing reporters dictating via phone stories directly to the newspaper for the next day. The effort of telling a good provocative story was found in the facial expression, wording used and most important the facts, at least in the Hollywood movies. Spider Man gave of us photographer Peter Parker and Superman, Clark Kent, both embellished versions of the “man of the street.”  

However, how relevant are these feelings to the current status of print media? What role do they play in where I get my news from? When did I stop reading the newspaper on a regular basis and was I alone in my reasoning? There was a time in my adult life I read the paper we subscribed to, USA Today, Parents’ Press, Berkeley Daily Planet, and periodically went to the library to read other newspapers to compare the translations of local news stories, and learn of worldwide events through foreign cable channels directly from other countries: CNN, The United Nations News and trial broadcasts, Ted Turner news network, the morning news and nightly local news without question.  

Since we have always had a number of TVs in our home, often watching different stations reporting on or at the same events was a family choice. The newspapers, however, remained a member of the family. I felt cheated when the newspaper was not delivered and or cared for properly. 

Oh no, I got it, “not cared for properly,” that was it the first clue to what came between me and my newspapers. 

Allainyaha-Charlene M K Matthews 

• 

POLITICAL POSTURING? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It’s time for Obama to declare victory in Afghanistan and get our fighting heroes the hell out of that quagmire. America hasn’t the stomach for this war and so it ends in military defeat with lots of ruined American lives. There will be no military victory without killing untold numbers of Afghan civilians and America will not do this. So why are we there? And why the deafening silence from Congresswoman Barbara Lee? In the end, was her “courageous” opposition to Bush war policies just posturing for political gain? When will we see bumperstickers saying “Barbara Lee No Longer Speaks For Me”? 

Nathaniel Hardin 

El Cerrito 

• 

SAVO ISLAND 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I live at Savo Island Cooperative Homes, Inc, a HUD-sponsored housing project here in south Berkeley, located right across the street from the Berkeley Bowl. There is a housing project similar to Savo Island in every city and town in America, all built in 1979—under the guidance of President Jimmy Carter. But that was then and this is now. 

Right now, our little housing co-op is pretty much falling apart. The siding is falling off, the roofs leak, etc. “How come Savo looks so trashy?” a neighbor asked me the other day. 

“Because HUD, our various management companies and several residents here have been trying to get the place re-habbed for over eight years now—and every time we almost get the re-hab going, our board of directors seems to drop the ball.” The latest nail in our re-hab’s coffin was pounded in last week when our lending bank withdrew their offer to give us a re-hab loan. The bank officially cited their reason for backing out as being because of “the passage of time since this project was engaged.” But perhaps the bank also withdrew because Savo’s board had just fired yet another management company, this one being the 13th or 14th one the board has gone through, averaging a different management company approximately every two years. Never a good idea to change horses in mid-stream. And now Savo Island not only has to scramble around looking for another lender—they also have to find another management company too (the one the board had lined up next has not been approved by HUD).  

In addition, HUD has recently required that our board of directors be supplemented by two outside financial and/or housing experts. Maybe this will finally help get our re-hab back on track. But in the meantime Savo Island continues to look like it was built in 1879 instead of 1979, developers are apparently hoping our re-hab will fail so that they can swoop in and construct yet another Berkeley high-rise condo on this site, and our whole neighborhood is beginning to panic about what will happen here next. And I’m panicked too—as the possibility of homelessness begins to stare me in the face. 

So. What action do I want the readers of the Berkeley Daily Planet to take regarding this matter? That’s easy. Please, please, please don’t anyone tell Jimmy Carter what has befallen his wonderful fair-and-affordable housing dream for Berkeley. 

Jane Stillwater 

• 

AHMADINEJAD’S SPEECH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

If the preponderance of Iranians and the preponderance of Israelis belong to different races, that news has not yet reached modern science. The definition of words shifts according to their common usage, hence “racist” now means “someone I hate and wish to destroy.” Only naifs think that the Arab-Israeli conflict is about land. It is specifically about—and both interested parties understand this perfectly—about survival versus hate. 

Dick Bagwell 

• 

BRT ELIMINATES  

LOCAL SERVICE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) Policy Steering Committee met on Friday, May 15, to discuss the future of local service on the BRT route. The committee is comprised of three members of the AC Transit Board and several other local officials, including Tom Bates and Kriss Worthington. 

The question under discussion was whether to eliminate Route 1 service, the local service on Telegraph Avenue and International Boulevard if BRT is implemented. Using his customary verbal legerdemain, AC Transit’s Jim Cunradi dismissed the local service as irrelevant. He has invented a new name for his plan to ax the local buses. He now calls it the “all-in-one” plan. I guess “BRT only” was too explicit—people could figure out what it meant.  

With the exception of Kriss Worthington, who has consistently shown concern for the riders in danger of losing their local bus stops, committee members beamed with enthusiasm over this invitation to drop the local stops. Tom Bates was so enthused that he wanted to take a vote that day, but voting on this matter wasn’t on the agenda. The vote will therefore occur at the next Policy Steering Committee meeting, which will take place on June 19. 

Gale Garcia 

• 

RESPONSE TO SPITZER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In his anti-KPFA, anti-Daily Planet letter of May 20, in the East Bay Express, Dan Spitzer asserts that Berkeley’s population is “about 20 percent Jewish.” In a commentary published in the Planet on July 29, 2005, the same John Gertz whom Spitzer praises for his meticulous research announced that Berkeley’s Jewish community comprises “about 25 percent of voters.” Of course residents and voters are two different things, which may account for the discrepancy. But how realistic is either of these figures? The U.S. Jewish population can only be estimated (mostly by extrapolation from surveys), but most sources agree that it is about 2 percent and dropping. The highest concentration is in New York City in particular and the northeast in general, followed by Washington D.C., with south Florida and California pretty much tied for a distant third place. Sources available online put the Bay Area Jewish population at approximately 220,000. With an overall population of 7.2 million, that makes the density of Jews 3 percent, which is about what one might guess. Even if Berkeley has a slightly higher concentration of Jews than, say, Richmond, the Jewish population of Berkeley, whether counted as citizens or voters, cannot be higher than 4 percent and is unlikely to be that high. 

Of course many of us, whether Jewish or not, may feel that Spitzer’s and Gertz’s numbers seem plausible, even if far removed from fact. How can such a tiny population be so constantly present? It takes dedication to a single cause, excellent organization, and lots and lots of money—not to mention help from a foreign government. But despite Spitzer/Gertz et al., the 3 percent of the population that’s Jewish doesn’t all speak with one voice anyway. When you factor in that polls show that the great majority of U.S. Jews favor a two-state solution; that Bay Area Jews, like the rest of the Bay Area population, are more likely to be liberal than the rest of the U.S.; and that among younger Jews any form of interest in Israel is dropping off drastically enough to set off major alarm bells, then, boys and girls, take out a pencil and paper and figure out just what percentage of Berkeley’s or the greater Bay Area’s population agrees with Dan Spitzer and John Gertz. 

Joanna Graham 

• 

CHENEY AND TORTURE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Former Vice President Cheney wants the public to believe that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” sanctioned by the Bush administration are not torture and dismisses criticism as “contrived indignation and phony moralizing.” Cheney is engaging in a familiar Goebbels-type technique. That is, you tell a whopper—the larger the better—often enough and most people will come to accept it as the truth. Unfortunately, too many Americans are believing this big lie. Those in the Bush administration who sanctioned torture either don’t know the law, or advocated flaunting the law. Human torture is not only morally unacceptable—it is also a crime. Waterboarding, for example, is explicitly prohibited by the Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions.  

Using torture places us in the same company as history’s infamous torturers. Waterboarding, for example, dates back to the Dark Ages. By using torture, we lost any ideological advantage we might have had—the promotion of democracy, freedom and human rights. We became the thugs our enemies say we are. I for one urge those who authorized torture be prosecuted. No one, not even a former president or vice president, is above the law. 

Ralph E. Stone 

San Francisco 

• 

NORTH KOREA’S  

ATOMIC BOMB TESTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Has anyone else noticed the hypocrisy shown by the United States, as well as by all of the other members of the Security Council of the United Nations, about the outrage over North Korea's testing of a low-level atomic weapon? The United States is the only country to have used atomic weapons to kill people, having killed probably 200,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Furthermore, the United States, and all the other Security Council members, as well as China and India, following World War II, repeatedly tested atomic and thermonuclear weapons in the atmosphere, spreading radiation all over the world. Our country also uprooted whole native populations from their homelands, e.g. Eniwetok and Bikini Atolls, so that we could use their homelands to test thermonuclear bombs. All the members of the Security Council have atomic and thermonuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. What right have they to forbid North Korea from developing such weapons? 

Now, consider the situation from the point of view of North Korea. President Bush labeled North Korea, Iran and Iraq as “the axis of evil” and then proceeded to invade one of them (Iraq) and has made no secret of contingency plans to invade Iran. If you were in the government of the third member of the “axis of evil” what would you do? The North Koreans know perfectly well that if they possessed atomic weapons and the means to deliver them the United States or any other power would at least think twice before attacking. Seems to me that going ahead with developing a nuclear capability is not the work of some nut cases, as our government likes to portray the North Korean government, but is rather a rational decision to avoid being attacked. Instead of using sanctions and threats, diplomacy and aid would be a more effective means of persuading North Korea to abandon its nuclear program. 

Krehe Ritter 

Will policies proposed to turn Berkeley “green” eventually eliminate real local green spaces, particularly our backyards and private gardens? If the proposed Climate Action Plan (CAP) doesn’t change, it’s quite possible. 

The CAP draft proposed for City Council approval on June 2 has numerous provisions about gardens, grouped under this policy: “Increase access to healthy and affordable foods ... by supporting efforts to build more complete and sustainable local food production and distribution systems.” 

Fine words, but when you review the 17 “Implementing Actions,” most apply only to “community gardens,” school gardens, farmers markets and the like.  

Community gardens are great and are very popular. Most current ones in Berkeley have waiting lists; there should be more gardens. I’m part of a volunteer group working right now to establish a new one. But they provide only a small percentage of the space in Berkeley that can be gardened for food and/or horticultural pleasure, not to mention carbon sequestration. And they will never provide much more. 

More than a century ago, Charles Keeler famously observed that the ideal Berkeley residence should consist of “landscape gardening with a few rooms for use in case of rain.” Despite the city’s considerable growth since then, that spirit endures. 

The vast majority of Berkeley’s garden and green spaces are in our private yards, maintained at great civic benefit but no municipal cost. Most residential properties in Berkeley, including multi-unit structures, have backyards, gardens and front yards along the street.  

These airsheds allow for trees, daylight and fresh air around even densely built units. This minimizes the need for electrical lighting and ventilation. 

In Berkeley it’s possible to garden for food or pleasure almost year-round. Our gardens produce a bounty of vegetables, fruit, and other harvestable products.  

Ironically, the policy push to reduce private gardens in Berkeley comes at a time of considerable resident interest in home gardening for economic and environmental reasons. Berkeleyans—both homeowners and renters—are already enthusiastically practicing the principles of local food production and sustainability, yard by yard. In my neighborhood, one household is trying to grow everything they eat on their duplex lot. In a nearby triplex’s garden space, chickens and graywater-irrigated vegetables and fruit trees thrive. It’s the same in neigborhoods throughout Berkeley. 

Despite our high residential density, Berkeley’s beautiful and useful home gardens are featured in more spring garden tours than any other community in our region, and in recent years local edible gardens have become a fixture of these events.  

Local gardens also serve, as Keeler observed, as an important annex to private living space. Unlike most regions of the United States, where being outdoors means being bedeviled by heat, humidity, cold and snow, or swarms of biting insects much of the year, most Berkeley homes can have real outdoor “rooms” that supply pleasant living space without adding more built structure to a house. 

None of this impresses Berkeley’s Climate Action mandarins, who think globally in terms of millions of tons of carbon and whole regional ecosystems to be saved but can’t propose a local policy that places any value on the nine fruit trees, or the bumper berry crop now starting to ripen on my tiny, multi-unit, southeast Berkeley lot. 

There is a definite Manhattan-centric focus in the Climate Action Plan. The only acceptable urban future, the plan appears to presuppose, is one of mid-rise to tall buildings, built wall to wall, extending to the sidewalk, crowding in residential units with only a tiny patio or balcony to represent private open space. 

Actual local “green” would, in this worldview, be limited to urban parks (although the CAP proposes no plausible measures to expand them), an occasional community garden, and street trees.  

How unimaginative. How narrowly focused. How poor a fit for Berkeley. 

Even in neighborhoods where the CAP grudgingly acknowledges that some freestanding houses might be allowed to remain, the plan promotes zoning changes to allow larger “accessory units” that would gobble up backyards with buildings and off-street parking.  

I’m a fan and former resident of both in-law units and garden cottages, but come over to my neighborhood where a three-story backyard behemoth, recently allowed under existing zoning, towers over and shadows the Le Conte school play yard literally a few feet away. It’s neither cottage, nor a garden. And something similar might be coming to a backyard near yours, soon. 

With backyards gone, you’ll need to retreat to one of those community gardens, if any lot is spared development. There, a lucky few dozen people, out of thousands per neighborhood, can sign up for a 4 x 8 plot to grow tomatoes and zucchini, mulched with ground-up street tree remains from the city. 

That ought to do for gardens in Berkeley, seems to be the CAP rationale. 

This is shortsighted, silly, and wrong. Berkeley can have both considerable residential density and a “garden city character,” and the Climate Action Plan needs to say so.  

Steve Finacom is a Berkeley resident.

The City Council is scheduled to open the discussion of the Citizens’ Sunshine Ordinance at the June 2 Council Meeting. Mayor Bates has said that the discussion will be restricted to the fiscal impact the proposed ordinance would have on the city budget. 

While this aspect of the ordinance is important and should be discussed, the real issue is open government. President Obama has stated that open government is essential to a democracy, but his administration has been having difficulty living up to the principle when trying to govern. Governor Schwarzenegger and the legislative leaders attempted to force the state budget solutions onto the public behind closed doors. Since that it didn’t work, they are calling for an open process. 

What is the point of this? While elected officials and staffs talk about open government, they find it a nuisance and an obstruction to their work. 

The Citizens’ Sunshine Ordinance has three goals: 

1. Agendas and supporting materials should be published well in advance of public meetings. 

2. The city should reply quickly to all requests under the Public Records Act. 

3. There should be a quick and economical way to resolve disputes under the Brown Act or the Sunshine ordinance. 

The Citizens’ Sunshine Ordinance was put together to accomplish those goals. A comparison with the city attorney’s Sunshine Ordinance shows that it does not address these issues, but, rather, keeps the status quo. You can see the comparison matrix at berkeleysunshine.org/matrix and decide for yourself. 

The League of Women Voters says they support open government. Their LWVBAE comments at the Sunshine Ordinance Panel Workshop on Mar. 20, 2007, state: “That means that the public knows what their elected officials are doing, that meetings are open to the public, that public records are accessible, and that the public has a way or ways to make their views known between elections.” 

Their president at that time also said, “I never thought I would recommend adding yet another board or commission to our already long list, but Oakland has created a Public Ethics Commission to do just that, and it is working quite well.” Since then we have learned that it is not working so well because there is no enforcement policy in place. 

While the Citizens’ Sunshine Ordinance recognizes there is a cost to open government, it also believes there are savings that offset those costs. Sunshine means fewer lawsuits, which translates into fewer legal costs. Sunshine means a more efficient government, because the issues are thoroughly discussed in public before decisions are made. Sunshine means public records are organized and readily available to the public. 

All that is asked of the City Council is that it accomplishes the goals of the Citizens’ Sunshine Ordinance. Please call your City Council member and ask him or her to support those goals. 

Dean Metzger is a resident of Berkeley.

In 1964, Stanley Kubrick produced the Cold War film Dr. Strangelove, or “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” By upholding Proposition 8, the California Supreme Court has learned to stop worrying and love the initiative process. It’s an apt analogy, because yesterday’s decision leaves an unchecked power of the voters to strike a “bomb” through our basic Constitutional protections. Not only did the court minimize Prop. 8’s effect on the right to marry, using logic that contradicted last year’s decision on the same subject. It set up a dubious distinction between “amendments” and “revisions” to the state Constitution, which will allow virtually any ballot measure to pass as a mere “amendment.” Without adequate safeguards that a “revision” was meant to place, equal protection is no longer sacred—because the power of the ballot is supreme. At the same time, the court ruled that the 18,000 same-sex couples who legally wed last year are still married—because to invalidate these licenses would be an undue violation of due process and property rights. While that was a wise decision, it remains a mystery why such a right is more important than equal protection. 

California is famous for its wacky initiative process—where the voters get to decide on a myriad of complicated matters, much of which could arguably be better left to elected leaders. But the grounds for overturning Prop. 8 was not about the 48 percent of voters who disagreed with taking marriage rights away from same-sex couples. It was that some rights are too important to be stricken by mob rule, and the state Supreme Court’s job is to protect these constitutional protections—even if a bare majority of the electorate (without safeguards) wants to change the Constitution. the court has declared “open season” on the rights of all minorities, setting a dangerous precedent for future elections. Here’s why … 

Court contradicts itself on the term “marriage” 

In May 2008, the state Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry—as a natural extension of the right to privacy, due process and the right to raise a family. Now, the same Court says Prop. 8 is not unconstitutional because it carves out a “narrow exception” to these rights. It only changes the definition of “marriage,” not the rights or benefits that committed same-sex couples enjoy with domestic partnership—nor does it alter the right to raise a family. 

This opinion clearly contradicts last year’s ruling—where the court said the very term “marriage” was a necessary component, so that same-sex couples can have their family relationships accorded the “same dignity, respect and stature of others.” What the court effectively said today is that gay people didn’t really lose anything substantive with the passage of Prop. 8. But if true, they also did not gain anything important from last year’s Court decision. Back then, the court made it clear it was a crucial right. 

The unchecked power of voters to change the constitution 

Granted, the court will say Prop. 8 changed the state Constitution—and thus last year’s interpretation is irrelevant and obsolete. But while the people have “sovereign power” and can “alter or reform” the Constitution as they see fit, our framework does not allow them to make all changes to the state Constitution. A minimum threshold of voters can collect signatures to put an “amendment” on the ballot, but only the state legislature—or a constitutional convention—can initiate a major “revision.” And the court failed to understand both the history and basic structure of this distinction. 

Before 1911, California did not have an initiative process—and all “amendments” had to come from the state legislature. Every state that distinguishes between “amendments” and “revisions” (and California based its constitution off New York) has a common thread—none of them allow the people alone to make the most profound changes. An “amendment” to the California Constitution is there to “improve” the existing framework, but a “revision” would substantially alter its “substance and integrity.” Even states that passed equivalents of Prop. 8 only generally did so after the legislature put it on the ballot. 

The court said Prop. 8 was not a revision because it “simply changes the substantive content of … one specific subject area—the … designation of ‘marriage.’” It did not alter the “scope” of the Constitution, and only has a “limited effect on the fundamental rights of privacy, due process and equal protection.” the court even implied that only changes affecting a wide spectrum of our Constitution are protected from the whims of the public opinion—and explicitly said that a revision is not anything that “abrogates a foundational constitutional principle of law.” Based upon the court’s narrow definition, it is hard to see how any change to the Constitution would qualify as a “revision.” 

Open season on the rights of minorities 

Prop. 8 is a major change to the Constitution that cannot just be left to the voters, because it deprives equal protection to a specific minority group. But the court quietly dismissed this concern, because it was not the first time in California history that a majority took rights away from a minority. In 1964, the voters passed a measure allowing homeowners to racially discriminate when selling their property—which was struck down in federal court. In 1996, California passed Prop 209 to repeal affirmative action. And in 1894, the state passed a measure to deprive voting rights for anyone who didn’t speak English. 

How did the court conclude that none of these ballot measures were revisions? At the time, no one sued to have them repealed for that particular reason—a dubious basis to conclude that they were therefore proper “amendments.” According to this Court, it is acceptable for the voters—without any scrutiny by the legislature or a constitutional convention—to amend the Constitution to repeal basic rights from a minority group.  

This creates a dangerous precedent. What if, after 9/11, California had passed an amendment requiring Muslims to travel with passes? the court dismissed such concerns as a “dubious factual premise of a highly unrealistic scenario of future events.” 

But property rights are protected … 

If there is one bright spot from yesterday’s Court decision, the 18,000 same-sex couples who wed before Nov. 4 are still legally married—despite efforts by Kenneth Starr to convince the court otherwise. California law presumes that ballot measures are not retroactive, without clear and unambiguous proof that it was the voters’ intent. But the court also pointed out that these couples had acquired “vested property rights as lawfully married spouses,” and to suddenly take their licenses away would be a blatant violation of due process. 

It is unclear why the court believes the “will of the people” is more important than the equal protection rights of minorities, but not the due process of property owners. If we are to take the court’s logic on what constitutes a valid “amendment” and uphold the validity of Prop. 8, anything that doesn’t obviously change the “scope” of the California Constitution can be enacted by the voters—without any restrictions. By that rationale, due process would take a back seat—and the 18,000 marriage licenses would be null and void. 

Paul Hogarth writes for BeyondChron.org, where this piece first appeared.

From time to time I receive alerts, usually by email, from the Berkeley Police Department and neighborhood groups, about criminal activity in Berkeley. I like getting this information. It helps me be on the lookout for criminals and is a good reminder to lock my doors and windows. 

Last week the Grizzly Peak neighbors of John Yoo received a “Neighborhood Alert” regarding Professor Yoo, in the form of a flyer letting them know he lives among them and providing information about his crimes, namely providing unethical and shoddy legal advice and cover to Bybee, Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, etc. for illegal interrogation methods and the inhumane, degrading treatment of detainees—“unethical” because Yoo advocates breaking the law and “shoddy” because the memos were so ineptly crafted that they were repudiated and rescinded. 

Unlike a sexual predator or burglar, Mr. Yoo is a criminal whom the police are not likely to point out to Berkeley citizens, though his crimes are horrific. Why am I calling him a criminal when he hasn’t (yet) been prosecuted?  

As the National Lawyers Guild says: “As shown in the Nuremberg trials, powerful leaders can and do engage in illegal acts and inhumane treatment of others. These leaders rely on lawyers and the legal system to give the appearance of legitimacy to an illegal agenda. Sadly, there always seem to be lawyers willing to do the bidding of powerful rulers.”  

Like the lawyers who were found guilty and convicted at Nuremburg, Yoo enabled policies that caused untold agony to hundreds of human beings caught in the net of our “War on Terror.” Because of Yoo’s actions perhaps a hundred or more detainees have been killed, many of them completely innocent of any wrongdoing. We’ve all heard about the “enhanced techniques” which Yoo said are legal—stripping men naked, forcing them to stand for 40 hours chained to the ceiling, sexual degradations, sensory deprivation, “walling” (slamming against a wall), waterboarding.  

Yoo is dead wrong, of course. All of these are completely illegal under United States law, not even the President is exempt if he practices these “techniques” by sanctioning them. 

Contrary to Yoo’s frequent public assertions that he was helping to prevent another attack after 9/11, evidence shows that detainees such as Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi were tortured to get intelligence linking al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein in order to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq. A bipartisan report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that al-Libi “lied [about the Iraq link] to avoid torture.” Thus Yoo directly helped Cheney and Bush make the false claims that lead us into the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, which in turn has lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries, displaced populations, and cost billions of dollars we could have spent instead on health care, environmental protection, education, and infrastructure. 

This is all on John Yoo’s head, a man who smirks about the “People’s Republic of Berkeley,” implying that Berkeley’s values of peace and justice are nutty, is unapologetic about his role in this tragedy, and who has tenure at our public university, where we are paying him more than $200,000 a year to teach our future lawyers, and who lives in our community as if this is perfectly normal and acceptable. 

I question the acceptability of sheltering a war criminal in Berkeley. I don’t feel safe living in the vicinity of someone who believes torture is legal. Furthermore, Yoo has made all of our lives even more unsafe by inflaming hatred worldwide against our country and endangering American lives everywhere. I resent Yoo immensely for making me feel so ashamed of what has been done in my name. He has robbed me of my pride in my country and alma mater. Shame on UC! I won’t give another penny to the university as long as Yoo works there, but I’d write a check immediately to help buy out Yoo’s contract. 

I asked myself what I could do with my shame and anger and I decided that I could assist the huge efforts underway to have him disbarred, fired and prosecuted. 

Both The National Lawyers Guild and Voters for Peace have filed ethics complaints with Pennsylvania State Bar asking them to investigate him. A Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility report recommends that state bar associations conduct a review of his legal work for possible disciplinary action, including disbarment. 

A number of groups, including students, alumni, professors and staff, are working to have him fired from UC. Dean Edley of the law school should ask Yoo to leave now. Yoo doesn’t have to be convicted or disbarred first. Also there’s a national campaign calling for Yoo to be fired by the Philadelphia Inquirer (see firejohnyoo.org). 

Members of Congress and the public are asking for a special prosecutor and/or a commission to investigate and bring charges. Berkeley City Council passed a resolution asking the DOJ to prosecute him. Yoo is the defendant in a civil lawsuit in the Northern District of California brought by Jose Padilla, who argues that he was tortured and abused as a result of Yoo’s memoranda. Spanish jurist Baltazar Garzon is pushing for criminal prosecutions of Yoo and other “torture lawyers.” 

Numerous groups are working on accountability for Yoo, among them People for the American Way, ACLU, Act Against Torture, Human Rights First, National Religious Campaign Against Torture, MoveOn, democrats.com, CREDO, World Can’t Wait, the National Lawyers Guild Committee Against Torture, CODEPINK, Progressive Democrats of America, Voters for Peace, Common Cause, and afterdowningstreet.org. 

Finally, there is a growing group of Berkeley citizens who are standing in witness in front of Yoo’s house on a weekly basis, starting this Sunday, May 31, at 2 p.m. Join this group on Grizzly Peak for an hour or so. If there’s any justice in this world John Yoo is going to have problems living a normal life now, unless he apologizes to us all. 

Cynthia Papermaster is a Berkeley resident. 

In the old movie Three Days of the Condor Robert Redford discovers renegade CIA agents plotting a cover up of one of their crimes. Confronted in the street by the CIA agents Redford is told there is no where he can run to and there is nothing he can do about it. He is told to remain silent and pray that he does not have an accident. 

Redford points across the street. 

“See that building (brick and mortar) it is the office of the New York Times. I’m going over there right now and I am going to tell them the whole truth. If the New York Times prints it you are finished. The world will know of your plot! 

Bingo! 

Now imagine there were no New York Times. Redford points to his computer.  

“See this laptop? I’m going to start a blog and tell the whole world the truth!” How would that play out? 

A free press has protected our liberties for over a hundred years. Today, however, too many Americans do not care about, or even seem to know about, their liberties. They care more about the freedom to watch sporting events and mindless TV programs. 

Perhaps the decline of the dailies represents another nail in the coffin of the middle-class and the Republic. 

Do not imagine that the Internet can replace the city daily. The screen on your laptop can never replace the bold headline and front page. The Internet can never replace the billboard that grabs the attention of every citizen that passes a newsstand.  

On the laptop we mark our favorites and live in a nice little secure world that causes us no discomfort. We rarely monitor web sites that we disagree with. Headlines on the other hand are like billboards that inform us of important events whether we like it or not. 

Headlines speak louder than a thousand hits on your blog because a headline cannot be deleted with stroke of a key. A headline cannot easily be ignored. To delete the headlines of a city daily you would need an army of men racing from one newsstand to another throughout the city snatching up tens of thousands of newspapers and burning them. 

(San Franciscans will remember the incident when thousands of a “give away weekly” were pulled from the news boxes across the city. It turned out to be disaster for the perpetrators.)  

The Internet can do many fine things but one thing it cannot do is create a sense of living community.  

A virtual community is not a real community. 

How would you confront someone who lies about you or endangers you or your family with false information on the Internet? A big city newspaper usually is located in a building (brick and mortar) easily found. Where is the Internet web site located? In what building do you find them? In what office are they located? 

Imagine a world where you could not face your accuser. Isn’t that the world of totalitarianism?  

The Chron must be saved. Not because the Chronicle is a great paper. But it must be saved because it is the only daily we have left. 

Despite its faults the Chronicle has published many unpopular journalists and writers over the years. Randy Shilts and Robert Scheer for example. Many years ago the Chronicle even published, and paid for, several of my op-ed’s. 

The daily paper is the only institution that can afford to maintain a core of professional journalists capable of investigating wrong doings in high places. 

The big city daily newspaper has been with us for over hundred years and has proven essential to maintain any semblance or illusion of democracy. 

If daily newspapers disappear there will be no watchdog to protect the interests of the ordinary citizen. No watchdog to investigate and expose corruption in high places. You’ll have only the watchmen! And who will watch the watchmen? 

Petition the government to subsidize the newspaper. God knows the government subsidizes the most worthless junk. Let them subsidize something of value—like the daily press.  

Let the advertisers know that if they abandon the Chronicle they are abandoning their own country. Appeal to their patriotism. Even the most shortsighted capitalist may have a drop of patriotism left in his greedy ignorant heart.  

Give a big tax break to businesses that advertise in the Chronicle.  

Do the right thing. Save the city daily. 

I love the Internet. I use the Internet. But the Internet must not be used to help destroy the daily newspapers. 

Ultimately, however, it is the citizens of a nation that decide whether or not they want a free press. If through laziness, lack of imagination, and plain old cowardice they decide entertainment is more important than a free press then they will, slowly but surely, lose their republic and their freedom.  

Leon Cyens is a San Francisco resident.

Since Jan. 21 the Obama team has been struggling—with mixed success—to stabilize the ship of state, to plug its leaks, to change its direction and set a new course. The ship our 44th president took command of cannot be righted easily or quickly; it is foundering due to two terms of venal management by its previous captain.  

I, and many who voted for Obama, applaud his efforts; we like him, we like his family, we believe he has a good heart. But while our affection is strong, doubts and suspicions creep in. Where, we wonder, is Obama actually taking us? 

During the campaign he told us he wanted to take the nation to a place where transparency of government replaces secrecy, a place where our damaged reputation abroad gets repaired, where legislative attention is directed away from the powerful and toward the powerless. By meeting and surmounting the many difficulties and obstacles encountered in that costly and elongated campaign, Obama erased our doubt that he could do the job. And he marked the route he followed with eloquent speeches. 

Fourteen months ago in “A More Perfect Union,” a nationally televised speech, Democratic presidential candidate Obama, in a brilliant rhetorical stroke, quieted a media-generated swirl of negativism focused on extracts from a sermon by his former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.  

Last Nov. 4, as president-elect, Obama delivered a victory speech in Chicago’s Grant Park that outlined his plans and aroused universal jubilation. 

Two and a half months later the whole world watched the inauguration ceremony and heard Obama pledge in the final words of his speech that together “we [will carry] forth that great gift of freedom and deliver[…] it safely to future generations.” 

Obama’s early executive actions demonstrate an overarching concern for ness; he invited dialogue with Ahmadinejad and shook hands with Hugo Chavez. 

All this leads me to conclude that Obama will do anything, however small—and cooperate with anyone—that he believes will take him closer to where he wants to go. But where is that?  

Bush appointee, Robert Gates, stays on as Defense secretary. (Anyone who replaces Rumsfeld is bound to look good.) Formidable former rival Hillary Clinton takes over the Department of State. (By thus rewarding her failure Obama imitates George W.) Rahm Emanuel, Timothy Geitner and Lawrence Summers, whose resumes are comparably impressive but similarly marred, are close enough to give advice in a whisper. (Tom Daschle was forced to withdraw.) Thus, at the top of the new administration, old battle scarred politicos are in the majority. The change we were promised begins to looks more like a regression, a flashback to the future.  

I am delighted that the 44th president can not only give a good speech but actually write books, good books. However, to do what needs doing will require much more than literary gifts.  

I am delighted to have a president who listens ardently, but I’m beginning to wonder what he’s hearing. 

Everyone, not just sitting presidents, prefers to focus on the future rather than the past, but justice requires that we not give in to our preferences. Torture is a crime and crimes have perpetrators who ought not be absolved en masse. And those who provided legal cover for torture and others at the top who signed off on it must not go scot-free.  

It’s hard to believe that our intellectually endowed president, who is dedicated to transparent government, would seek to block the release of photos of torture. How does publicizing snapshots of crimes increase their initial grievousness, and by what magic do horrible images make our world more dangerous?  

Constructing a U.S. Embassy in Baghdad larger than any in the world does not promote democracy any more than leaving 50,000 troops in Iraq can be properly deemed a military withdrawal from that benighted country. Nor does it foster Iraq’s sovereignty.  

If Obama actually believes, as he has said, that the problems in Afghanistan cannot be solved by military means, then why send more troops?  

Does setting up a military tribunal, albeit one a bit more responsive to the rights of prisoners than Bush W allowed, hasten or delay the closing of that extra-legal prison, that justice-mocking concentration camp at Guantanamo? 

These are just a few of the questions I have for Obama, and I admit that they are over-simplified and that my own answers are too categorical and self-righteous. But I can no more understand how Obama answers them than I could if he expressed himself in Swahili. To my mind, for instance, it is itself a new crime to compromise or hesitate to prosecute old crimes.  

No one should expect Obama to erase all the negative things Bush and Cheney did but he has the unique opportunity—and I think also the responsibility—to change the culture that produced them. He certainly can’t do that alone, and I very much doubt if he can do it surrounded as he is by a crowd of battle-weakened politicos.  

Marvin Chachere is a San Pablo resident.

I have a confession to make. I have fruit trees and vegetable beds in my front yard and on the median strip in front of my house. My neighbors and I think this is gorgeous, but Berkeley’s code-enforcement officers disagree. These compliance “enforcers” think my gardens are code-violations worthy of fines of $3,000 dollars a day, $90,000.00 dollars a month. (These fines are substantially larger than the development fees paid by Berkeley’s multimillion dollar development projects!) 

I learned about social justice and ecology as a Berkeley youth, in Berkeley’s public schools. As a child I also learned that I could collect fruit from street-side trees as my friends and I walked home from Berkeley Arts Magnet Middle School. Growing naturally everywhere, free fruit was good, better than junk food, and inspired in me an awareness of our community’s abundance. 

Even as a child, I could tell that nature’s gifts were not appreciated by our consumer culture because there were too few fruit trees on every block, but I found every one of them, and I had my favorites. The more fresh, free fruit we picked, the more energy the trees could invest in producing a new flush of lush, rich fruit. Just a few days later our foundling fruit trees would be alive all over again with ripe juicy goodness. I cared about those trees, and, as a child, I felt the trees took care of me. These roadside fruit trees taught me that if we steward our earthly realm, it would provide for all our needs.  

That said, free, street-side, fruit trees are not without their problems. Even as a child I shared some concerns older folk had, specifically about giant trees that couldn’t be easily harvested; too often those trees simply dropped their abundance everywhere. Fortunately, there is an easy solution to that problem. The amazing dwarf fruit trees! If you graft a delicious fruit tree onto the trunk of a dwarf-bred fruit tree, you get small, harvestable-sized fruit trees whose bounty can be reached without ladders.  

I have passed on the gifts of my youth in Berkeley to the next generations by planting dwarf fruit trees all along my sidewalk in front of my home in West Berkeley. Unlike trees all over the city, my trees are pruned eighteen inches off the curb and to the sidewalk edge in order to make safe passage down the street and easy egress from parked cars. I did this out of concern for the safety of my community, and, as it happens, these are exactly the standards, as explained to me by current Parks and Rec Commissioner Lisa Stephens and past Parks and Rec Commissioner Steve Paskowitz, that the city of Berkeley requires for unpermitted fruit trees. I asked these friendly knowledgeable experts because the city’s compliance enforcers insist that I must get permits from the Parks and Recs Commission for my fruit trees and garden beds. These knowledgeable experts and concerned enviromentalists also said that they don’t give permits for individual fruit trees and garden beds: I just have to keep them pruned and maintained for safe access to cars, and pedestrians, etc.  

So I won’t be removing my garden gems; I won’t be replacing these dwarf fruit trees and raised vegetable beds with rolled out sod. In fact I’ll be planting more dwarf fruit trees in my front yard, back yard, and any yard of a neighbor who wants to join me. 

The city of Berkeley’s perverted “code enforcement” action has reminded my of my first inspiration to social and environmental justice—the abundance of our urban garden scape. It wasn’t till the Code Enforcement Director Gregory Daniel told my roomates that the frontyard was supposed to be a lawn, that I realized that sustainable Berkeley needed some organizing support. I intend to fundraise $500 a day to build demonstration victory gardens in front yards all across Berkeley. I commit to $500 a day because that’s the amount of the first round of fines I was threatened with by Greg Daniel, and it’s more than enough to run a crew of urban farmers to fully re-green our city. I’m committing $500 of my own money to the pot to plant fruit trees in your yard. 

Every Sunday starting now, my household will plant new gardens across Berkeley. If you want to join us, email fruit-jam-renegades@googlegroups.com. 

Asa Dodsworth is a Berkeley resident and recently ran for City Council.

In a recent commentary, Richard Phelps attacks me and several others as “responsible for this crisis” at our sister station, WBAI in New York. I am a reporter and not prone to hyperbole: so please believe me when I tell you that the man’s rambling attack is nothing short of delusional. 

I have served as the Treasurer of KPFA’s Local Station Board for the past four years, with the support of the “Concerned Listeners” group that Phelps maligns. That position gives me a seat on Pacifica’s National Finance Committee. From that position, I have publicly raised concerns about WBAI’s yawning deficits for years. You don’t need to take my word for it—the audio of all prior meetings is archived at kpftx.org. 

During that tenure: 

• I have repeatedly criticized WBAI’s proposed budgets and voted against them. 

• I have reported my concerns about financial management at WBAI and Pacifica National, both on KPFA’s airwaves (during our Local Station Board report to the listener), during public comment at meetings of the Pacifica National Board, and during report-backs to KPFA’s Local Station Board. 

• At the local level, I have, with the support of the people Mr. Phelps maligns, won approval of nearly a dozen resolutions calling for greater financial oversight and discipline from Pacifica’s National Office. 

• Last summer, when I led the Pacifica National Board’s budgeting process, we secured hundreds of thousands of dollars in spending cuts at WBAI and over $1 million dollars in cuts across the rest of the network. And I still withheld my approval from WBAI’s proposed budget because I thought it made unrealistic assumptions about how much money the station would raise. I was supported in that work by Sherry Gendelman—chair of the Pacifica National Board at the time and another one of the people Phelps attacks as somehow colluding in creating the crisis at WBAI. 

The truth is the “Concerned Listeners” coalition, that I have endorsed in past elections and will happily endorse again in this one, has the best track record on financial accountability of any group on KPFA’s Local Station Board. Together we have repeatedly called for stricter financial controls in Pacifica, responsible budgeting, more restraints on national spending, and we have repeatedly stood against financial deals crafted to benefit members of the Pacifica National Board and their friends. To its credit, the faction Mr. Phelps is more supportive of (the name changes every year) has supported some of those positions. However, since its allies installed a new regime at the Pacifica National Office, the members of that faction have changed their tune—or at least muted their criticism—even though many of the same problems persist. Most recently, they have withheld their support from a resolution seeking to end the practice of handing out jobs to board members.  

The Concerned Listeners members of KPFA’s Local Station Board do not change their positions so easily: we’ve stood for financial transparency, accountability and spending discipline—and will continue to do so, regardless of who’s in charge of the network. And we will continue to press those concerns as matters of policy based on principle—not as personal attacks prosecuted for political gain.  

The attack-dog style of politics in Phelps’ commentary is already too prevalent throughout Pacifica, and too often directed inward. We stand for something better at KPFA and Pacifica: rejeuvenated programming, an expanding listener base, and an end to petty sectarianism. 

The station has made tentative steps in that direction: experimenting with national broadcasts such as its live coverage of the Winter Soldier hearings last spring, spearheading the Pacifica Network’s coverage of the 2008 presidential election, launching a new national series—“Letters to Washington”—to cover the new administration, bringing on a much-needed left-economics show in the form of Doug Henwood’s Behind the News to cover the financial crisis and expanding KPFA’s news operation through new partnerships with its sister stations in Fresno and Los Angeles. I look forward to more progress in the months to come.  

I’m reserving judgement on the most recent shakeup at WBAI: time will tell whether or not it pushed the station in a positive direction. From out here, we can’t do much to fix things in New York—but at least we can be an example. 

Brian Edwards-Tiekert is staff representative and treasurer of the KPFA Local Station Board.

On May 6, College Preparatory High School—a private high school located in Oakland on Broadway between Brookside and Golden Gate Avenues—presented its three-year expansion plans to neighbors and a couple of Rockridge Community Planning Council (RCPC) members. Unfortunately, the invitations arrived two days before the meeting, and many neighbors whose lives would be directly impacted by the development were unable to attend. Of those who did attend, many were seriously troubled by what they heard.  

The wildly ambitious plans involve adding 25,000 sq. ft. of new buildings and increasing the high school’s student enrollment. The plans also call for removal of old-growth trees, which are protected by City ordinance and the original permit. By way of several neighborhood meetings, neighbors have defined their major areas of concern: 

Parking, Traffic. Though the school has technically enough “permitted” campus parking for all its students and faculty, Brookside, Golden Gate and Eustice Avenue are packed with student’s and teacher’s cars during the week. This not only creates a parking problem for residents and visitors, but is hazardous because emergency vehicles need these passageways to reach homes further up the hill. Traffic is so congested in the morning that some neighbors have difficulty getting out of their driveways to get to work. 

Size and rental of 10,000 sq. ft. Performing Arts building. Considering the size of the school grounds and the tight neighborhood setting, this huge building would be an eyesore, and, when rented out, the night time and weekend congestion and noise could be formidable. 

Future unregulated growth. The school plans to add 20/40 students forthwith, but there is no guarantee to the neighborhood that enrollment will not continue to increase. The City of Oakland doesn’t have the staff to monitor adherence to permits. For instance, another private high school in Oakland now enrolls over 50 percent more students than its legal permit allows. Given the present parking, traffic and noise problems, the impact of any increase in population is seen by most neighbors as extremely problematic. 

Removal of Old-Growth Trees. The trees, far more than the administration, have been the bridge between this exclusive private school and its neighbors. These trees have blocked the sight of school buildings, muted some of the noise of rallies, dances and assemblies and have kept the air much cleaner for everybody than it would have been without them. 

On May 7, the Rockridge Community Planning Council, voted to not-oppose the school’s development application. However, the City’s deadline for comments has been extended to June 30, and the RCPC has agreed to meet with a few members of the community on May 28 to learn more about the issues and, hopefully, at that time RCPC will come into compliance with its own conflict-of-interest matters on this issue by asking its members with ties to the school—trustees, former parents, current parents, etc.—to recuse themselves from voting on this issue. 

In an effort to become a part of the process that will impact their lives, neighbors will also be meeting with City of Oakland reps to present their suggestions. “We want all the players to remember that we are the taxpayers, not the school,” said one neighbor. “However, our goal is to become partners, not victims in this venture.”  

The school seems to be listening. In response to a letter from another neighbor, College Prep High School Principal Murray Cohen responded, “I understand your point about not paying enough attention to establishing and maintaining good relationships with our neighbors. Now that we are alert to that failure we will, with your understanding and help, repair that damage.” 

Hopefully, this new good-neighbor policy will lead to a workable compromise. Neighbors are holding their collective breath. 

Laura Santina is an Oakland resident.

After Barack Obama’s victory in the November presidential election, the Republican Party attempted to re-brand itself, but hasn’t come up with compelling ideas or attractive leaders. So far, the GOP has been unwilling to modify its conservative credo. That’s good news for Democrats. 

Since the Regan era, there have been four pillars of Republican ideology: provision of a gargantuan military, smaller government, reduced taxes, and competent management. While the Bush-Cheney regime promoted a bloated defense budget, they undermined the other three notions. The federal bureaucracy grew, as did the budget deficit. While wealthy Americans got massive tax cuts, working families saw real income decrease. Most important, Bush-Cheney were revealed as incompetent managers. Most voters recognized that because Republicans don’t believe in government they aren’t psychologically prepared to manage it. 

The Republican Party lacks leadership. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have been discredited as national leaders, as has 2008 GOP presidential nominee John McCain. That leaves a flock of second-rate politicians competing to be head of the Republican Party: John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, Sarah Palin, and Michael Steele. At the moment, hate-radio host Rush Limbaugh is filling the GOP leadership void. 

None of these Republicans has near the popularity of Barack Obama. That wouldn’t be a crippling problem if Republicans had a coherent positive ideology they could offer as a counter to Obama’s. But they don’t. Their core principles were eviscerated by the Bush-Cheney presidency. 

Republicans have lost national security as their signature issue. Obama retained the respected Republican Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates. And the president continued many defense initiatives, such as the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most important, Obama developed a strong base of support among military personnel and their families. 

Republicans should be able to use the “big government” shibboleth against Obama, but this hasn’t proved effective for two reasons. First, voters understand that Bush-Cheney grew the government and the federal deficit to its present humongous size. Second, because of Bush-Cheney’s recession, Americans currently want more government, not less. They like Obama’s stimulus package and want the feds to straighten out the financial industry and provide health care, education, clean energy, and a host of other needed services. 

Shortly after taking office, Obama provided tax cuts for 95 percent of Americans—everyone but the wealthy. Republicans not only lost the tax issue, they’ve been reduced to whining that the rich aren’t getting their fair share of the pie. 

So far, the GOP rebranding effort has been a dismal failure. If the mid-term elections were to be held today, Democrats would increase their majorities in the House and Senate. Nonetheless, 18 months is a long time in politics and it’s possible Republicans can reverse the tide. 

To maintain their momentum Democrats have to stay on course. Obama has to continue to govern in his calm methodical manner. And he must work his list of issues in order of their priority to the American people. For example, getting a healthcare plan through Congress is more important than securing a new immigration plan. In the process, Obama has to continue to ignore insults from the right or complaints from the left that he isn’t moving their pet issue fast enough. He must stay focused. 

Between now and Nov. 2, 2010, Republicans are likely to continue to thrash as they search for leadership and a compelling raison d’être. For Democrats to win bigger congressional majorities in the mid-term elections, President Obama has to accomplish five things. First, he has to continue to keep America safe. Another terrorist attack would be a devastating injury to the country’s psyche and would shatter the administration’s veneer of competence. 

Second, he has to show progress in Iraq and has to get most of our troops out of Iraq by election day. We also have to appear to be on the right track in Afghanistan and Pakistan. 

Third, Americans have to believe the worst of the recession is over and the economy is returning to normal. In November 2010, unemployment may still be high, but working-class Americans must feel that the United States is headed in the right direction. 

Fourth, Obama has to deliver on healt hcare. He’s made it his signature issue and there has to be substantial progress. Obama’s solution doesn’t have to be perfect—he doesn’t have to deliver a single-payer system—but it has to be perceived as moving in the right direction, solving the most egregious problems. 

Finally, Obama has to stay cool. While they have radically different ideologies, there are interesting similarities between Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan. Americans continued to trust Reagan even when they disliked his policies. Now Obama has that élan. So long as he maintains it, Democrats will strengthen their hand in Washington while Republicans stagger into the political wilderness. 

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

We are so easily distracted, aren’t we, so often allowing the trivial and the unimportant to take the center stage of our attention while serious issues are left unattended in the outer wings of our collective consciousness, often to die without even a comment. 

And when that happens, and the solutions to the most serious of our problems go unexplored, the problems themselves left to fester and grow, who do we have to blame except ourselves, my friends? 

In the afternoon of March 21 of this year, a young man named Lovelle Mixon shot and killed two Oakland motorcycle officers during a traffic stop in the East Oakland foothills, and then later shot and killed two Oakland SWAT officers—and was killed himself—in the shootout that occurred when a SWAT team stormed the apartment where Mr. Mixon was hiding. 

In the immediate aftermath of the violent death of five men in an East Oakland neighborhood in the space of two hours—four of them police officers—there are a number of serious questions that we might have pursued. Why are some parts of Oakland so violent? Why was Lovelle Mixon considered a folk hero in some parts of the city and, as Joseph Anderson wrote in an April 2 Daily Planet reader commentary, his killing of four police officers “karmic justice?” What is actually happening between police and young African-American people in the mean streets of Oakland that might have led to the events of March 21? And, finally, was there anything in the training, attitude, performance, or command within the Oakland Police Department that might have led to the four police officers’ deaths? The question is posed not to place blame but to determine if and where any police mistakes might have been made, in order to correct those mistakes so that similar mistakes—and similar police deaths—do not occur in the future? 

All of these were legitimate questions, the kinds of questions adults sit down among themselves and discuss and resolve, in the wake of such a community trauma and tragedy. 

We did not have such a discussion. 

Instead, much time was spent condemning Mr. Anderson for his “karmic justice” sentiments, or KPFA commentator Cleveland Valrey Jr. (“JR”), who wrote in a March 24 BayView article (“Police 2, Oakland Residents 4”) that “Lovelle turned out to be a suicide sniper who used a gun instead of a bomb to take out enemies of the community.” While condemnation was fair—Mr. Anderson and Mr. Valrey, after all, had to know that their articles would be considered outrageous, and therefore cannot complain when some people are outraged—but the discussion left out the most pertinent fact, which is that the Anderson and Valrey sentiments reflected the views coming out of many East Bay inner city neighborhoods. On the day after the March 21 shootings, I overheard two young African-American men at the Berkeley Flea Market referring to Mr. Mixon with awe, saying that “he’s going to go down in history, man; took four cops down at once!” How widespread is that sentiment? I don’t know, but I suspect it is much wider—in these inner city neighborhoods—than many leaders and newspapers would like to think. 

But more vacuous than the Anderson and Valrey condemnations—vacuous because they condemned these men’s words without much curiosity over why the words were written or where the sentiments came from—was the long imbroglio over what Oakland Mayor Dellums did on the day of the Mixon shootings. 

As I wrote in an April 9 “Under- 

Currents” column, this topic seemed to obsess many local journalists in the immediate aftermath of the shootings. San Francisco Chronicle political gossip columnists Philip Matier and Andrew Ross wrote in a March 29 column (“Mayor Dellums Persona Non Grata By Oakland Police”) that “after the March 21 killings Dellums was a no-show for several hours, before finally holding a short press conference—while others, including state Attorney General and ex-Mayor Jerry Brown and East Oakland City Council members Larry Reid and Desley Brooks, spent hours with shell-shocked cops at police union headquarters.” The Chronicle’s East Bay columnist, Chip Johnson wrote in a March 31 column that on the day of the shootings “Dellums arrived at the police officers’ union hall five hours after the shooting. A council member said the mayor—by his own inaction—has become “irrelevant and of no use.” (“Dellums’ Presence as Risky as His Performance”). And columnist Tammerlin Drummond, writing in the April 4 Contra Costa Times and Oakland Tribune (“Ron Dellums Didn’t Speak At Police Funeral For Fear He Would Botch Names”), said that “For several hours after the [March 21] shootings, Dellums was missing in action. He didn’t show up at the police substation at Eastmont Mall—blocks from the scene of the first shooting—for a police briefing. Councilwoman Desley Brooks, D-Eastmont-Seminary—the shootings occurred in her district—was there. So was Councilman Larry Reid, D-Elmhurst-East Oakland, who represents the neighboring district. Nor did Dellums go to Highland Hospital where the wounded officers were taken for treatment. Or to any of the shooting scenes. The city’s top elected official was nowhere to be found. Dellums did not surface until much later at the Oakland Police Officer’s Association downtown where grieving, dazed officers had gathered along with city officials and a police chaplain. How on earth could Dellums have thought that monitoring a tragedy of this magnitude by telephone was the right thing to do?” 

The drumbeat over “what did Dellums do?” on the day of the shootings got so loud that in the same April 9 column, I released an hour-by-hour timeline, compiled by the mayor’s staff, on what he actually did do that day, detailing the extent of the mayor’s involvement. That should have settled the question. 

But more important, I believe, was the question that wasn’t asked by most local columnists in the wake of the Lovelle Mixon police shootings. While our columnist friends seemed overly obsessed by the actions or purported inactions on March 21 of Mr. Dellums—who had no command authority over the police actions of that day—these same columnists seemed strangely incurious about the actions of the police officials who were running the show. 

In a followup column the week after the April 9 column, I wrote “So one hopes that now they have taken what has become the obligatory run at the mayor, the … local columnists will use their considerable influence to help get answered two of the most important questions that surround the March 21 events: who gave the orders for the SWAT officers to storm the 74th Avenue apartment where Lovelle Mixon was hiding and why was that order given? It is those questions that lead to the most important question of that day, which is not what did Dellums do but what caused the deaths of the two SWAT officers in the apartment shootout.” 

I also suggested that the Public Safety Committee of the Oakland City Council—chaired by East Oakland Councilmember Larry Reid—convene a public investigation into the shootings to determine “whether the two SWAT officers, Mr. Sakai and Mr. Romans, lost their lives in the apartment on 74th Avenue because there was no reasonable alternative to storming the apartment, or whether it was either caused by an improper command decision, a lack of proper procedures or training, or a lack of proper command.” 

Neither my fellow local newspaper columnists nor Mr. Reid took me up on those suggestions. In the month and a half since the second column was written, they have been silent on the issue. But clearly, some rank-and-file members of the Oakland Police Department—and perhaps some in OPD leadership as well—were wondering the same things as I about what caused the SWAT officers’ deaths. 

On May 12, the Oakland Tribune reported that “members of the Police Department’s SWAT team have asked that the unit’s commander be reassigned over concerns about his leadership abilities in the wake of the fatal shootings of two SWAT officers March 21, law enforcement sources said Tuesday.” (“Oakland SWAT team members ask that commander be reassigned”) The sources told Tribune reporters Harry Harris and Josh Richman that Captain Ed Tracey, who commanded both the SWAT squad and the OPD traffic unit, “chose to be at Highland Hospital, where two traffic officers had been taken after being mortally wounded by parolee Lovelle Mixon during a traffic stop, rather than commanding the operation that led to the raid on an East Oakland apartment during which Mixon and two SWAT officers were killed in a gunbattle.” 

With this week comes an even more explosive charge about police command responsibility on the day of the Mixon shootings. 

In a May 27 Tribune article (“OPD commanders under investigation in case where SWAT sergeants were shot to death”), we learn that Oakland police commanders are currently under internal investigation by the Oakland Police Department for their actions surrounding the shooting deaths of the two SWAT officers in the final Mixon shootout. The four commanders being investigated in addition to Mr. Tracey are Deputy Chief David Kozicki, Capt. Rick Orozco, Lt. Chris Mufarreh, and Lt. Drennon Lindsey. 

The Tribune article, a joint effort by reporters Thomas Peele, Kelly Rayburn, and Bob Butler, reports that “critical information about the location of Lovelle Mixon, who already had fatally shot two motorcycle officers as the SWAT team assembled, didn’t reach SWAT team leaders preparing to enter an apartment building where the gunman lay in wait with an assault rifle, officers said. No formal command post was set up from which the operation could be coordinated. … Commanders are being investigated on discrepancies in statements about how the search for Mixon unfolded…Deputy Chief David Kozicki, Capt. Rick Orozco and Lt. Chris Mufarreh are being investigated for the truthfulness of their statements about the events. … Lt. Drennon Lindsey is being investigated for issues involving her reporting and documentation of the events. Capt. Ed Tracey, the SWAT commander widely criticized for staying with the motorcycle officers at Highland Hospital rather than leading the search for Mixon, is being investigated for interfering with the initial internal affairs probe.” 

This is major. 

We now hope that Mr. Matier, Mr. Ross, Mr. Johnson, and Ms. Drummond pursue the question of what the police commanders did on the day of the shooting with the same zeal and fervor they pursued the question of what Dellums did. And the Oakland City Council—which mourned the police deaths without using their oversight powers to determine why and how they died—will perhaps be goaded into joining the discussion, and the investigation. 

We are so easily distracted by the trivial. But now that the serious has been placed in front of our faces, we no longer have the luxury of avoiding our responsibilities to find out what happened—exactly—on an East Oakland street on the afternoon of March 21.

Berkeley flatland citizens have turned those odd “traffic calming” circles that the city plunked into various intersections a few years back into showcases of gardening art and dedication. Volunteering their time, energy, skills, and plants, they’ve created something more than beauty: these breaks in the asphalt function to catch, slow, and filter rainwater before it hits the storm sewers, to filter pollutants as do all urban plants, and to nurture the local wildlife so many of us fail to notice.  

“These 16- to 20-foot wide areas serve as ‘breathing holes’ for the street surface below,” writes Karl Reeh, president of the LeConte Neighborhood Association. “With watering and abundant plant life, these small but conspicuous gardens can play a major role in both the quality of life above and the quantity of biological life both above and below.” 

What happens when a circle garden is vandalized? Do the neighbors who invested so much of their time, energy, and love have any legal recourse? Unfortunately, that’s not just a hypothetical question. 

Early last month, someone—he was seen in the act, but his identity remains uncertain, and no arrests have been made—trashed the garden at Russell and Ellsworth. He reportedly claimed he was just pruning the plants to make the intersection safer for bicyclists, and was verbally abusive to residents who tried to stop him. Although there’s a long-running neighborhood feud in the background, it’s not clear what triggered the April incident. But it’s having some interesting consequences. 

The bicycle-safety angle is one of many ironies in this story. Dave Campbell, president of the Bicycle Friendly Berkeley Coalition, says he really likes the planted traffic circles.  

“The main thing they do for bikers is to slow down traffic and create the incentive for motorists to choose alternate streets if they’re cutting through an area,” Campbell said. “The vegetation creates a visual look that doesn’t entice motorists to go down that street.”  

Campbell said he had heard no concerns from bikers about the circles as hazards, and no specific feedback about the vandalized circle. 

As it happens, that garden, planted and nurtured by LeConte resident Andy Liu, was a thriving butterfly nursery. Liu had filled it with the larval-food plants preferred by most of the butterflies that occur in Berkeley: fennel for the showy black-and-yellow anise swallowtails, mallows for the painted ladies, milkweed for the monarchs, pellitory for the red admirals, and other plants, most of them California natives. So far, 21 species have laid their eggs in the circle. 

Most of these food plants were lopped short or stomped flat. Many of the mallows, including some uncommon species, were killed. Dozens to hundreds of butterfly eggs, larvae, and chrysalids were destroyed, and adult butterflies were killed in the act of egg-laying. A whole generation was lost. 

Police told outraged witnesses there was nothing they could do, as the traffic circle gardens had no legal protection. A closer reading of the law produced alternatives, though, and the neighborhood group is signing a written agreement with Berkeley Parks and Waterfront to get explicit, exclusive rights to plant and maintain the circle. 

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second in a series on Cloyne Court. 

Daley’s Scenic Park, commonly known as Northside, is the oldest residential neighborhood in the north Berkeley Hills. Subdivided in 1889 by San Diego businessman Thomas J. Daley, it was acquired in 1891 for $4,000 in gold by Chicago banker Frank M. Wilson. Wilson began selling lots immediately, but the tract did not come into its own until 1904. 

It was on May 16 of that year that the San Francisco Call proclaimed it as the dernier cri in fashionable addresses: “From Berkeley comes news of a tract that has suddenly been seized upon as one of the most desirable locations in the town for residences. It had been almost overlooked until lately, but its many advantages have been noticed by intending purchasers and now many lots are being bought. The property lies along the foothills, ten blocks above the university grounds. It is picturesque, full of grand old oak trees and commands a grand view of the bay.” 

The article went on to enumerate the upscale houses going up in the area, among them those of Professor Jacques Loeb, UC supervising architect John Galen Howard, businessman Allen Freeman, and builder Frank Armstrong. 

Only two weeks earlier, the newspaper announced the imminent construction of a hotel on the corner of Le Roy Avenue and Ridge Road, to contain 200 rooms and cost $50,000 (the final cost would be $80,000). By the end of May, a construction contract had been signed. The hotel’s developer, incorporated as the University Land and Improvement Company, published a four-page promotional brochure titled “Cloyne Court: A High Class Modern Apartment House in Berkeley, California.” 

The brochure promised a building “conveniently and beautifully situated, well constructed, and carefully planned for the comfort and privacy of its tenants. It will offer nearly all, if not all, of the advantages of housekeeping without its vexations, cares, and heavy expenses.” 

The building, it was promised, “is being constructed in the best possible manner after the plans and under supervision of John Galen Howard, of New York, the Supervising Architect of the University. […] Cloyne Court will have thirty suites, varying in size from two to five rooms. Each suite will be roomy, sunny, and well lighted, and will constitute a unit in itself, with all the necessities, such as bathroom, etc. The suites will not be entered from a common hall, but there will be a number of small halls, or rather vestibules, entered directly from the open air. In general not more than two suites on the same floor will open into the same vestibule.” 

The suites were to be unfurnished, with the exception of a few furnished rooms for transients or guests of the tenants. The standard of cuisine and service in the dining room was to be high, while the cost of board would be comparable to that charged in the good boarding houses of Berkeley. Cloyne Court was scheduled to open on Oct. 15, 1904. Interested parties were directed to the manager, Mr. J.M. Pierce, 2401 Le Conte Ave. 

Although the promotional brochure confidently touted Mr. and Mrs. Pierce’s long and successful experience, it didn’t specify their field of experience. As it happens, the experience had nothing to do with innkeeping. 

James Manning Pierce (1838-1929) was born to Lucy Valentine Hathaway and Levi Pierce in Freetown, Mass. Two of his maternal uncles, Dr. Edmund Valentine Hathaway and Charles Wesley Hathaway, sailed to California in 1849. They entered the warehouse business in San Francisco and were early supporters of Thomas Starr King’s Unitarian Church. Charles was one of the founders of the Republican Party in California, as well as a member of the San Francisco city council. 

Following his uncles to California in 1859, James Pierce worked as a salesman for Bray Bros., the San Francisco grain merchants. In 1869, he married Margaret Cameron (1855-1921), a gifted lyric soprano. The two produced four children: Mary Eugenia “Molly” (1872-1964), Elliott Hathaway (1874-1939), Virginia Cameron (1882-1963) and Lucy Valentine (1886-1974). 

When Molly and Elliott reached college age, the Pierce family moved its home from San Francisco to Berkeley. In January 1894, James and Margaret purchased from Frank M. Wilson two lots on the north side of Daley Avenue (now Ridge Road) between Euclid and Le Roy Avenues. They quickly built a house on one of the lots, at 2527 Ridge Road. It was a turreted Victorian, not unlike its surviving next-door neighbor at 2531 Ridge. 

James Pierce kept his business in San Francisco—he was now a warehouse owner. In 1898, he established the Pierce & Taylor Storage Company at 733 Market St. A few years later, he founded with Elliott the Students’ Wood & Coal Company, whose office and yard were located at 2030 Addison St., Berkeley. The company delivered wood, coal, hay, and grain to all parts of Berkeley and Oakland. 

When the University Land and Improvement Co. incorporated for the purpose of building Cloyne Court, James Pierce was one of its investors, alongside prominent UC and Mills College professors (Charles M. Bakewell, John Fryer, John Galen Howard, Louis Lisser, Kasper Pischel); notable San Francisco and Oakland businessmen (Charles Harvey Bentley, F.W. Dohrmann, John L. Howard, James K. Moffitt); jurists and politicians (Warren Olney and his son); university patrons (Phoebe Apperson Hearst, Jane K. Sather); and capitalists (Louis Titus, Frank M. Wilson). 

In 1903, the Pierces sold their Ridge Road home to John Freuler, the Swiss vice-consul. That house would be torn down in 1927 to make way for the Hotel Slocum, now known as the Stebbins Hall co-op. While waiting for Cloyne Court to be built, the Pierce family lived at 2401 Le Conte Ave., across the street from Frank Wilson’s house. 

Their temporary home, a rambling, turreted, and shingled affair, had been constructed in 1897 by George Frederick Estey for William and Mary Henry, parents of future Mills College president Aurelia Henry Reinhardt. In 1902, when the Henrys built their Northgate Hotel on Euclid Avenue, they sold 2401 Le Conte to Phoebe Apperson Hearst, whose own house stood across the intersection, at 2368 Le Conte Ave. The former Henry house was acquired to house Mrs. Hearst’s servants. When she embarked on a worldwide trip in 1903, it became available for the future managers of Cloyne Court. (The house burned down in 1923, and the University Christian Church was built on its site in 1931.) 

Cloyne Court opened on Dec. 4, 1904. Almost immediately, the building became a social magnet. In February 1905, Mrs. Thomas Rickard (now living in Phoebe Hearst’s home with her husband, the president of Berkeley’s Town Board of Trustees) and Mrs. Almeric Coxhead (whose husband and his brother were the architects of the Hearst home) founded a new dancing club, whose first ball was to take place at the Cloyne Court assembly hall. The Oakland Tribune opined, “this large reception room […] bids fair to become a most popular rendezvous for entertainment of every kind.” The death of Mrs. Frank M. Wilson postponed the ball indefinitely. The club was resurrected the following year, after the opening of the Hillside Club. 

In July 1905, the visiting Susan B. Anthony was entertained at Cloyne Court. The very same day, the Pierces’ daughter Virginia sang in concert at the Greek Theatre. “The Greek theater was filled, this afternoon, the announcement of Miss Pierce’s reappearance having attracted a great multitude to the university campus,” reported the San Francisco Call on July 24. Trained in Boston, Virginia would launch a professional singing career, making her debut at the Boston Opera House, touring with the Lombardi Italian Grand Opera Company, and performing on the Orpheum circuit. The youngest Pierce child, Lucy, would go on to become a well-known painter and printmaker. 

In running Cloyne Court, the Pierces’ principle was “to give everyone what they want, set an attractive table and keep charges within reason.” Soon they decided to expand their holdings. On the block below the hotel, they still owned a vacant lot adjacent to their former home. In December 1909, Pierce took out a permit to build a four-story, 88-room apartment building for $40,000. George W. Patton was the designer and builder. 

Treehaven Apartments opened in October 1910. The San Francisco Call proclaimed it “perhaps the most modern structure of the kind built in Berkeley.” The building was “modeled after New York apartment houses, combining the best features of several of the largest type. There is a roof garden, hot and cold water, as well as iced drinking water piped to each apartment, of which there are 29.” Each apartment was “a model of compactness and convenience, with wall beds, patent closets for both men and women and other features, such as an especially constructed shaving stands for men and electric lighted closets for women.” 

Treehaven still stands, looking as it did a hundred years ago. Only the window boxes and the oak trees that grew in the street are missing. 

In 1914, the Pierces purchased Cloyne Court from the other stockholders. The same year, their daughter Virginia, having returned from Europe after the outbreak of World War I, surprised them by marrying Los Angeles surgeon John C.N. Burrows in a secret ceremony. The marriage was extremely brief—while on their honeymoon, the bridegroom was accused of passing a fraudulent check for $1,000. Virginia returned to Europe and in 1917 married the Italian-born singer Umberto Rovere, eight years her junior. Rovere is remembered as a long-distance swimmer and a beloved Los Angeles restaurateur. One of his establishments, the Paris Inn, was famous for its singing waiters. 

Cloyne Court remained the Pierce family’s home for 42 years. Elliott took over the hotel’s management in 1929, and following his own death a decade later, Molly carried on through World War II. She was 74 when she sold the building to the University Students’ Cooperative Association. It has been a residential co-op since 1946. Owned by the university since 1970 and listed in the National Register of Historic Places, Cloyne Court is currently undergoing a seismic upgrade. 

Daniella Thompson publishes www.berkeleyheritage.com for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA). 

Mr. and Mrs. American Home Buyer, are you suffering from Stinky House Syndrome? Do strangers cover their noses and flee your dwelling soon after entering? Do relatives plan family gatherings at the homes of family members who are less scintillating than you? Are you engaging in microbial experiments without possession of the pertinent advanced degree? Does your house smell bad? If you answered yes to any of the above, you may be a candidate for dehumidifier ownership. 

As property values and rents increase, more and more people find themselves living in or using basements or backyard sheds that do not provide adequate protection against damp conditions. Even just a damp basement below your living space can subject you to elevated humidity levels that can make your entire home feel clammy and cold. This is a complex area of home care about which a great deal may be said. But let’s just cut to the chase: There is a formidable tool in the war on mold, and that’s our friend the dehumidifier. 

A dehumidifier is essentially an air conditioner—with a few notable differences. The technology that’s used to chill air in your refrigerator or air conditioner chills a set of coils and then pumps the waste heat to another set of coils for discharge. In the case of an A/C, those heat-discharging coils are on the outside: If you put your hand over them, you can feel the heat. Since moisture tends to condense on a cold surface—just as it does on your windows when you have the heat turned on—the cold coils also gather moisture from the air. 

When a dehumidifier condenses moisture in the atmosphere on those cold coils, it then allows it to drip into a pan. Rather than being placed on the outside, the humidifier’s cold coils are placed just past the chilling and dripping business in the system. They re-warm the air before releasing it into the room. This way, a humidifier is able to remove the moisture without cooling the room. Simply running an air conditioner will cool a room, but it is less efficient at removing moisture since it is not designed to provide this as its sole function. 

Now, what to do with all that gathered water? First keep in mind that the water gathered from a cold system like this isn’t safe to drink, since it is likely to contain fungal matter and dust. So it’s best to simply discharge it down a drain or out to the garden. Small, inexpensive dehumidifiers fill a small trough or tray which must be taken out and emptied from time to time, but larger ones are provided with drain pipes and can be set up to run with almost no maintenance for very long periods. Dehumidifiers are rated in terms of “pints per day”: Small models are less than 10 PPD and large ones can be over 40 PPD. You can expect the larger ones to cost well over $1,000, but they may be well worth it if you’re experiencing real distress. 

Every year I meet a few people who have a bad situation that calls out for a dehumidifier. One couple that I met last year had a tenant living in a basement apartment. Part of the tenant’s space was getting wet from a leak and featured a lovely zoological menagerie of fungi and protists (part of the mildew family). Everybody gets freaked when this is happening and all sorts of allegations of devil worship and bad genetics get hurled about, but the simple truth is that it’s just nature doing what it always does when some basic requirements are met. Nature loves growing stuff. Fungi love moisture.  

They also need oxygen and food, but those are available at everybody’s house. I haven’t seen any houses that don’t have nice sources of sugar and oxygen. A damp 2 x 4 will work nicely, thank you very much, but paper-surfaced sheetrock will work even better. We line the inside of our houses with paper, so it should be no shock when stuff starts growing on the surface. (We really ought to quit this odd habit and it is happening slowly. Alternatives to paper surface gypsum drywall have been around for some time and, in these litigious times, they’re really surging. I suspect that we won’t be able to find the paper type in another 10 years—but I digress.) 

So we have food and air, and only need water. How much water do we need to grow mold and/or mildew? The answer varies with the organism, but it’s about 70 percent to 100 percent humidity, although most growth occurs when humidity is above 85 percent. Few of these things grow below 60 percent. Basement walls often are damp enough to easily meet the requirement. When moisture is present on the surfaces it evaporates and becomes part of the atmosphere. If there is enough of this, the entire house can achieve levels where fungi begin to propagate. While rare, it is not unusual to have portions of basement, window sills, closets and spots on ceilings where little farms are a-growin’. 

Although it may seem almost too easy to find plausible, the simple deprivation of an adequate level of moisture is all that is needed to prevent fungi from growing. They just stop growing when things dry out. True, the dead spores remain and can affect the immune systems of some allergic persons, but for the most part, when things dry out, the ill effects vanish. It is wise to clean the surfaces and possibly to replace damaged or deeply infested materials such as sheetrock if these have become filled or covered with culture. (Ah, culture. Doesn’t all the Bay Area have that problem?) Once the level of required dampness is gone, there just won’t be more growth. If you want to clean and kill mold spores, a dilution of bleach works nicely. One quarter cup of bleach in a gallon of warm water is what is generally recommended and is quite deadly to most fungus. 

There are many things that one can do to prevent future mold infestation, including creating proper drainage, venting the spaces below the house, and using plastic barriers and sealants. For situations that are currently unmanageable, a dehumidifier is a quick, simple and relatively inexpensive fix. Downside? They use electricity. Like their cousins, the air conditioners, dehumidifiers use a fair amount of electricity but given the important job they do, it’s worth it. If you’re thinking of getting one, especially a “whole crawlspace” or “whole house” model, check out the energystar.gov website. You can get a rebate for making the right choice and you can help to control your electric bill. I would make sure I bought enough but not too much capacity so as to control the energy cost. Better models have humidistatic controls that allow you to set the percentage of moisture you like. Don’t set them too low. It’s not comfortable and will only cost you more money. 

The use of a dehumidifier can be a lifesaver. It may save your hacking lungs, the frame of your lovely old Victorian, or the precious relationship you have with the nice young man who lives down in the basement. 

ASK MATT 

Got a question about home repairs and inspections? Send them to Matt Cantor at mgcantor@pacbell.net.

THURSDAY, MAY 28 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash with Steven Nightingale at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Michelle Richmond and Meg Waite Clayton read at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Jeff Schonberg, photographer and author, on “Righteous Dopefiend” at 6 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Kleptograss at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Danny Caron Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ.  

JL Stiles, The Stone Foxes at 9 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082.  

Speak the Music with Soulati and Infinite, Syzygy, Eachbox, Monkstilo, Karam and many others, at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $8. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

The Sacred Profanities at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

FRIDAY, MAY 29 

THEATER 

Altarena Playhouse “A Streetcar Named Desire” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Altarena Playhouse, 1409 High St., Alameda, through June 7. Tickets are $17-$20. 523-1553. www.altarena.org 

Berkeley Rep “You, Nero” at 2025 Addison St., through June 28. Tickets are $13.50-$71. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Central Works “Misanthrope” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., through June 21. Tickets are $14-$25. 558-1381. centralworks.org 

Impact Theatre “Impact Briefs: Puberty” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave., through June 6. Tickets are $10-$17. impacttheatre.com 

Masquers Playhouse “Lady Windermere’s Fan” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2:30 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond, and runs through July 4. Tickets are $18. 232-4031. www.masquers.org 

Shotgun Players “Faust, Part 1” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. through June 28. Tickets are $18-$25. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Winds Across the Bay “Impressionsism” by youth wind ensemble at 8 p.m. at The Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$15. 800-838-3006. www.brownpapertickets.com 

Artists’ Vocal Ensemble “California Fusion” with guest artist Daniel Zinn, soprano saxophone, at 8 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. Tickets are $10-$20. 848-5107. www.ave-music.org 

Tito La Rosa, Peruvian sound healer and musician at 8 p.m. at Unity Church of Berkeley, Ecumenical Center, 2401 Le Conte Ave. Tickets are $20-$25. 415-272-8517. www.ayniprojects.com/tickets 

The Invaders Trio, and Matt Small’s Chamber Ensemble, at 8 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Tickets are $10-$15. 848-3227.  

Eclipse Dance Theater “Magdalene: Priestess or Prostitute?” Fri.-Sun. at 8 p.m. at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St. at Telegraph, Oakland. Tickets are $10-$20. 326-8471. www.eclipsedancetheater.org 

Jon Fromer & Francisco Herrera at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Stephanie Crawford at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Hayward State College Jazz Ensembles at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Youssoupha Sidibe at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Birdmonster, Winters Fall, The Mumlers at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

The P-PL at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Christie Winn and The Lowdowns at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

SATURDAY, MAY 30 

CHILDREN  

Owen Baker Flynn’s “Act in a Box” Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave., Oakland. Cost is $7. 452-2259. www.fairyland.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“The Illuminated Corridor” public art, live music and film from 7 to 9:30 p.m. in Middle Harbor Shoreline Park, 7th St. and Middle Harbor Rd., West Oakland. www.illuminatedcorridor.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Bay Area Youth Harp Ensemble “Music from Around the World” with Triskela, Celtic harp trio, and Teed Rockwell at 2 p.m. at St. Mary Magdalene Church, 2005 Berryman St. Suggested $10-$15. 548-3326. multiculturalmusicfellowship.org  

San Francisco Girls Chorus “I Hear Sweet Music” at 2:30 p.m. at The Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$17. 800-838-3006. www.brownpapertickets.com 

Voci Women’s Vocal Ensemble “Mountains of Memory, Rivers of Time” at 4 p.m. at Lake Merritt United Methodist Church, 1330 Lakeshore Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $17-$20. 531-8714. www.vocisings.com 

Musae “The Road Home” Women’s vocal ensemble with Bossa Five-O at 8 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. Tickets are $15-$25. www.musae.org  

Ross Dance Company “To Evolve & Stay Young” contemporary jazz ensemble at 7:30 p.m. at Laney College Theater, 900 Fallon St., Oakland. Tickets are $15-$20. www.rossdance.com 

Eclipse Dance Theater “Magdalene: Priestess or Prostitute?” Sat. and Sun at 8 p.m. at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St. at Telegraph, Oakland. Tickets are $10-$20. 326-8471. www.eclipsedancetheater.org 

Robin Gregory & Her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

The New Monomono, Kotoja, CK Ladzekpo’s African Music and Dance Ensemble at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12-$15. 525-5054.  

Wake the Dead at 3 p.m. at Wisteria Ways, Rockridge, Oakland. Outdoors, bring hat and something to sit on. Suggested donation $15-$20. Reservations recommended. info@WisteriaWays.org 

Ira Marlowe and Robert Temple at Sadie Dey’s Cafe, 4210 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $5-$10. 601-7378. 

Rebecca Riots, Amanda West at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Laurie Antonioli at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $18. 845-5373.  

George Cotsirilos Jazz Trio at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $3. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

GG Tenaka and the Attractors at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Riley Bandy Quartet at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

SUNDAY, MAY 31 

CHILDREN 

The Sippy Cups at Ashkenaz at 3 p.m. Cost is $4-$6. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Political Art & Activism A discussion with Lincoln Cushing, Ivan Rubio, Favianna Rodriguez and Susie Lundy at 4:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Reception 3:30. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Tom Standage reads from “An Edible History of Humanity” at 3 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

A Jazz Blast jazz concert performed by Charles Hamilton & Friends, as well as Paul “Hutch” Jones & Tenacity, at 1 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5, two youth, ages 5-17, admitted free with each paying adult. 981-6690. 

Oakland Civic Orchestra “Soundscapes” at 4 p.m. at Lake Merritt United Methodist Church, 1330 Lakeshore Ave., Oakland. Free. 238-7275. 

Berkeley Akademie Ensemble with Kent Nagano, artistic director, at 7 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $20-$60. 841-2800. www.berkeleysymphony.org 

“Organ, Oratorio, Opera and Rag” The music of John Partridge, in a benefit for St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church, at 4 p.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. Tickets are $15-$20. 525-0302. www.uucb.org 

Ross Dance Company “To Evolve & Stay Young” contemporary jazz ensemble at 2 p.m. at Laney College Theater, 900 Fallon St., Oakland. Tickets are $15-$20. www.rossdance.com 

Soli Deo Gloria and Orchestra Gloria “Bach à la carte” at 3:30 p.m. at Christ Episcopal, 1700 Santa Clara, Alameda. Tickets are $20-$25. www.sdgloria.org 

Kelly Takuna Orphan, farewell concert at 6 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Oakland, 2501 Harrison St. at 27th. Cost is $25, no one turned away. 444-8511, ext. 17. brownpapertickets.com 

Heather Klein’s Inextinguishable Trio at 8 p.m., Klezmer dance lesson at 7 p.m. at JCC East Bay, 1414 Walnut St. Cost is $10-$20, children $5. 848-0237. www.klezcalifornia.org 

Red Hot Chachkas at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Americana Unplugged: Devine’s Jug Band at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Albany High School Jazz Band, Rhythm Bound at 7 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Benefits AHS music program. Cost is $10-$15. 525-5054.  

Middle School Jazz Band Invitational at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $5. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Graham Parker at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $24.50-$25.50. 548-1761.  

MONDAY, JUNE 1 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Subterranean Shakespeare Theater Company “Cymbeline” Staged reading at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Unitarian Fellowship, 1924 Cedar at Bonita. Cost is $8. 276-3871. 

Wendy Markel will show images and talk about her new book on Berkeley postcards at 7:30 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Donation $5. 848-3227. 

Poetry Express with Kirya Traber at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley High Sings! Choral and solo music ranging from Stevie Wonder, Earth Wind & Fire, the Beatles, to highlights from student composers Abby Simon/Nathan Kersey’s recent musical “Double Digits” at 7 p.m. at Florence Schwimley Little Theater on Allston Way. Tickets are $5-$10, no one turned away. 526-4506. www.brownpapertickets.com/event/68185  

TUESDAY, JUNE 2 

EXHIBITIONS 

Seamus Berkeley will discuss his new series of paintings “Passages” at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Fine Art Studio, at Studio 40, 933 Parker St. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Frances Dinkelspiel on her book “Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California” at 10:30 a.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Lesli Dalaba trio with Fred Frith, Jason Hoopes and duo with Gail Brand at 8 p.m. at Studio 1510, 1510 8th St., Oakland. TIckets are $6-$100. www.myspace.com/studio1510 

Motordude Zydeco at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Singers’ Open Mic with Ellen Hoffman at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Up Against the Wall: Berkeley Posters from the 1960s” at the Berkeley Historical Society, Veterans Memorial Building, 1931 Center St. Exhibit runs to Sept. 26. 848-0181. 

“Mystery Made Manifest” New work by Susan Dunhan Felix at the Bade Museum, Pacific School of Religion, 1798 Scenic Ave. and runs through July 21. 848-0528. www.susandunhanfelix.com 

“Squeak Carnwath: Painting is no Ordinary Object” exhibition runs through Aug. 23, at Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak at 10th, Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

“What We Can Live With” The 39th Annual UCB Maser of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition on display at Berkeley Art Museum through June 21. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“Urban Beast or Urbane Beauty: Planning the City Beautiful” An exhibit exploring the City Beautiful Movement as manifested in the San Francisco Bay Area. Through Sept. 15 at Environmental Design Library: Volkmann Reading Room, 210 Wurster Hall, UC campus. 642-4818. 

FILM 

Independent Filmmakers Screening Night Bring your 5 - 10 minute shorts & selects to screen every Wed. at 6:30 p.m. at Café of the Dead, 3208 Grand Ave., next to the Grand Lake Theater. Oakland. 931-7945. cafedeadscreening@gmail.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Carol Denney at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Kelly Park Trio and Kelly’s Birthday Party at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Turlu at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Balkan dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054.  

Ellis Island, kletzmer, at 7 p.m. at Le Bateau Ivre, 2629 Telegraph Ave. www.lebateauivre.net 

Celu and Friends at 7 p.m. at Chester's Bayview Cafe, 1508 B Walnut Square. 849-9995. 

THURSDAY, JUNE 4 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Artist Talk in Conjunction with “Co-Motion” An installation about movement by Cheryl Calleri and Thekla Hammond at 5:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. RSVP to 644-6893. info@berkeleyartcenter.org  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School Jazz Band Fundraiser Concert at 8 p.m. in the Auditorium at 1781 Rose St., Berkeley. Free, but all donations will go towards helping the jazz band program. 658-3100. 

Go Van Gogh, California Klezmer, at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $TBA. 525-5054.  

BabShad Jazzz at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Diana Jones at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Five Cent Coffee at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

FRIDAY, JUNE 5 

THEATER 

Altarena Playhouse “A Streetcar Named Desire” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Altarena Playhouse, 1409 High St., Alameda, through June 7. Tickets are $17-$20. 523-1553. www.altarena.org 

Berkeley Rep “You, Nero” at 2025 Addison St., through June 28. Tickets are $13.50-$71. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Central Works “Misanthrope” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., through June 21. Tickets are $14-$25. 558-1381. centralworks.org 

Impact Theatre “Impact Briefs: Puberty” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave., through June 6. Tickets are $10-$17. impacttheatre.com 

Masquers Playhouse “Lady Windermere’s Fan” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2:30 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond, and runs through July 4. Tickets are $18. 232-4031. www.masquers.org 

Michael Gene Sullivan & headRush, political satire and premiere of the play “AlieNation” at 8 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $7-$10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Shotgun Players “Faust, Part 1” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. through June 28. Tickets are $18-$25. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

Kensington First Friday Art Walk from 6 to 9 p.m. with street musicians, free refreshments at participating businesses on Colusa Circle, as well as talented, local artisans. 525-6155.  

“Art Roots Here” A recession remedy art exhibit by the students from the Laney College EcoArt Matters class. Reception at 4 p.m. at Big Daddy’s Community Garden, 3601 Peralta St., Emeryville.  

“Flip Side” sculptures, drawings, and photography of Chad Anderson, Brian Caraway, and Paz de la Calzada. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, 25 Grand Ave., upper level, Oakland. Exhibit runs to Aug. 1. 415-577-7537. www.chandracerrito.com 

“Landscapes of Our Souls” Sculptors Susan Almazol and Lorraine Bonner explore an array of raw emotions. Opening reception at 5:30 p.m.at Joyce Gordon Gallery, Lower Gallery, 406 14th St., Oakland. 465-8928. www.joycegordongallery.com 

“Altars, Icons and Drawings” by Stanley C. Wilson. Opening reception at 5:30 p.m. at Joyce Gordon Gallery, Main Floor, 406 14th St., Oakland. 465-8928. www.joycegordongallery.com 

Aaron Geman “Five to Nine Thoughts and Some Shit that Sells” and David Seiler “NeWork/Muwekma” Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Mercury 20 Gallery, 25 Grand Ave., Oakland. 701-4620. www.mercurytwenty.com 

FILM 

Disability Film Festival Superfest Kids Classics, films geared for teenagers, from noon to 4 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 3rd Fl. Community Rm. 2090 Kittredge St. Free. 845-5576. www.culturedisabilitytalent.org/superfest 

“Croatian Stories” a documentary on Croatian heritage in California at 8 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Admission is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Confound, Confront and Connect” A discussion and slide show of the work of photographer Tony Gleaton at 2 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. 238-2200. Admission is $5-$8. www.museumca.org 

Squeak Carnwath: Painting Is No Ordinary Object, gallery tour with curator at 7 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Admission is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

“Narratives of the Unforeseen” Bay Area Writers Launch (BAWL) features new works of local writers, poets and actors in the neighborhood, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at East Bay Dance Center, 1318 Glenfield Ave., Oakland. Donations accepted. bayareawriterslaunch@gmail.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

First Fridays After Five with music and exhibition tours from 5 to 9 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Admission is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

Ustad Aashish Khan and Pandit Anindo Chatterjee, sarod and tabla at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $15-$33. www.butahproductions.com 

Gail Brand solo, duos, trios, quartets, quintets and sextets with Gino Robair, Morgan Guberman, John Shiurba, Tim Perkis and Tom Djll at 8 p.m. at Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Tickets are $15. www.hillsideclub.org 

Eric and Suzy Thompson at Utunes Coffe House at 8 p.m. at First Unitarian Church of Oakland, 685 14th St., Oakland. Tickets are $10-$18. www.brownpapertickets.com 

Rhonda Benin & Soulful Strut at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Jeannine Bonstelle “Search for Peace” at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Rupa & the April Fishes, Ginger Ninjas at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13, $8 with bicycle. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Lost Weekend at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Nine Wives at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

SATURDAY, JUNE 6 

CHILDREN  

Jose-Luis Orozco, in a bilingual children’s concert benefiting Centro VIDA Children’s Center, a non-profit bilingual preschool in Berkeley at 10 and 11:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5-$12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

THEATER 

Stone Soup Improv Comedy at 8 p.m. at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St. at Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $7-$10. www.stonesoupimprov.com 

EXHIBITIONS 

Lowell Darling’s “Secret” Sat. and Sun. from 1 to 5 p.m. at Garage Gallery, 3110 Wheeler St. www.berkeleyoutlet.com 

CCA Design for Disability: Alternative Ways of Making” Reception at 2 p.m. at NIAD, 551 23rd St. 620-0290. www.niadart.org 

Flying Kite Man Group Art Show Opening reception with Japanese dance performer, Kouichi & Hiroko Tamano at 7 p.m. at Subterranean Arthouse, 2179 Bancroft Way. subterraneanarthouse@gmail.com 

“Moments of Inspiration: Wild World Animals & Human Dreams” mixed media drawings and collage. Artists’ reception from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at A Different Day Gallery, 1233 Solano Ave., Albany. 868-4904. 

FILM 

Disability Film Festival Adult Classics (all still PG) from noon to 4 p.m., repeated 5 to 9 p.m. at Gaia Arts Center, 2120 Allston Way. Tickets are $5-$20 sliding scale at the door. 845-5576. www.culturedisabilitytalent.org/superfest 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Berkeley Poetry Festival with featured readers and open mic from 1 to 4 p.m. in front of the former Cody’s Books, Telegraph at Haste. www.mothershen.com  

Bay Area Poets Coalition open reading from 3 to 5 pm. at Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison St. Park on the street. 527-9905. 

“Narratives of the Unforeseen” Bay Area Writers Launch (BAWL) features new works of local writers, poets and actors in the neighborhood, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at East Bay Dance Center, 1318 Glenfield Ave., Oakland. Donations accepted. bayareawriterslaunch@gmail.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Free 6th Annual Berkeley World Music Festival offers continuous music from noon to 9 p.m. in Telegraph Ave. cafes and shops, near UC campus, plus concert in People’s Park. For performance schedules and artist information, visit www.berkeleyworldmusic.org 

Anna de Leon and others in a fundraiser for Bay Area Children First, a children’s mental health agency at 4 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Tickets are $25-and up. 883-9312. 

San Francisco Chamber Orchestra “Dance to the Music” performances at 11:00 a.m. and noon at Crowden Music Center, 1475 Rose St. Free. 559-2941. concerts@crowden.org 

Chinese Arts Gala folk dances and live music performances at 2 p.m. at The Julia Morgan 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $12-$15. chineseartsprogram@yahoo.com 

Jerry Kuderna, piano, performs music of Nin-Culmell, Mompou, Villa-Lobos, Chopin, and others at 8 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana St. Tickets are $8-$12. 549-3864. www.trinitychamberconcerts.com 

Kensington Symphony with Daniel Glover, piano soloist, performs Khachaturian, Rossini, Beethoven at 8 p.m. at Unitarian-Universalist Church, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. Suggested donation $12-$15, children free. 524-9912. Kensingtonsymphonyorchestra.org 

“Applause for the Cause” Charity concert featuring Dionne Warwick and Sinbad at 7:30 p.m. at The Oakland Convention Center, 463 11th St., Oakland. Tickets are $65 and up. www.tix.com 

Kenny Washington & His Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Marty Dread with Reggae Angels at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Andrea Claburn “Keys to Life” at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

The Bobs at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $22.50-$23.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Guns for San Sebastian at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

SUNDAY, JUNE 7 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Altars, Icons and Drawings” by Stanley C. Wilson. Artist talk and slide presentation at 3 p.m. at Joyce Gordon Gallery, Main Floor, 406 14th St., Oakland. 465-8928. www.joycegordongallery.com 

Squeak Carnwath: Painting is no Ordinary Object Docent tour at 2 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Admission is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Masquers Playhouse “All Is Above Grace” Staged reading at 7 p.m. at Masquers Playhouse, 105 Park Place, Point Richmond. Cost is $5. 232-4031. masquers.org  

“Getting Our Hands Dirty: What we do best at Paulson Press” on printmaking and working with artists at 7:30 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Admission is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

Randy Rucker reads from his works of science fiction at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Poetry Flash reading for “Lyric Modernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries” at 3 p.m. at Diesel, 5433 College Ave. Oakland. 525-5476. 

Wendy Markel will show images and talk about her new book on Berkeley postcards at 7:30 p.m. at 4 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Pocket Opera “The Barber of Seville” at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $20-$37. 415-346-7805. www.pocketopera.org 

St. John’s Presbyterian Church Organ Recital David Hunsberger performs works by Bull, Bach and Mendelssohn at 4 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$20 . 684-7563. www.brownpapertickets.com 

Mozart in the Garden Fundraiser The Midsummer Mozart Orchestra previews selections from the 2009 season, with food and live an dsilent auctions, from 3 to 5:30 p.m. at the El Cerrito Community Center, 7007 Moeser Lane, El Cerrito. Tickets are $75. 1-800-838-3006. www.midsummermozart.org 

Dada Nabhaniilananda and Steve Taylor-Ramirez at 7 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $14-$16. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Benny Watson Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Bandworks at 1 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $5. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Samora and Elena Pinderhughes at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

The Rose Tattoo at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Soul Jazz Sundays with the Howard Wiley Organ Trio at 5 p.m. at The Aqua Lounge, 311 Broadway, Oakland. Donation $5. 625-9601. 

Rough Waters at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

“I myself poisoned thousands. ...” Faust, Goethe’s hero—and one of the great figures drawn by European modernity—gives his cynical, unsolicited confession to his assistant, Wagner, rejecting the tokens of love and respect Wagner reminds him that the people have given Faust and his physician father since their ministrations during an outbreak of the plague. Faust’s withering reply is to expose the charlatanism of his own medicine, the emptiness of his knowledge, his egotism. 

Shotgun Players are presenting Faust, Part I through June 28. Director-adaptor Mark Jackson plays the title role; Phil Lowery plays Wagner. 

To put it colloquially—and there’s a touch of colloquialism to this production—Faust can only see the half-empty glass. “Come down to me, earthly crystal,” Jackson intones, almost in mock heroics, as he reaches for a bucket glass shelved on a rung of the excellent metal-frame articulated screen over the proscenium—at once the bookcases of his library and the walls that hold him back from life, like a segmented spread-sheet of steel. 

Soon, he’s approached by Mephistopheles, whom Faust mistakes at first for one of the itinerant scholars who come to him, like moths around a candle. Peter Ruocco plays Faust’s devil with a droll, sad-eyed demeanor, a deadpan comedian to Jackson’s eye-rolling, doubletaking straight man. 

In fact, it’s the struggle throughout this first part of Goethe’s play: Faust’s quest for the power and knowledge to come to grips with reality—and his realization that he’s not in charge, nor are his appetites and desires the measure of life.  

Jackson’s adaptation, simplifying the text and focusing on the romance between Faust and Gretchen (Blythe Foster), moves from farce—even a kind of burlesque—to melodrama without much transition. As the accents are right on the beat, gestures and delivery have to be pumped up to be expressive; the tone is a blurry one. Good theatrical strokes, good tableaux, are preceded or followed immediately by kitsch: a lot of dancing, scurrying (or staggering, as in the case of Dara Yazdani’s mortally wounded Valentin) around treetrunks is capped by Mephistopheles stepping out from behind the upstage curtain Valentin lurched through, taking his place. A real theatrical image succeeds a hackneyed one. 

It’s always interesting to see the performance of a playwright or director in one of his own shows, like hearing a composer play his tunes. When the metal screen parts after Faust signs on with the devil, Jackson trips an awkward dance in the woods—clumsy academic or Pinocchio? There’s something of the puppet show to some of Jackson’s stylizations, and an arch earnestness that is reminiscent of the puppet who wanted to be a boy: “I cannot tell a lie.” Or is that George Washington, caught with hatchet? 

Overall, there’s a storybook feel, not just Pinocchio, say, but Don Quixote. The action has a flattened-out sense, like storybook pictures, or the Classics Comicbook Faust I remember poring over as a kid. Jackson seems to want to get down to the bare narrative; the good stroke of playing it straight through, one scene flowing into the next, uninterrupted, gives the sense of a narrative flow, or of the images and sounds of broadcast, fading away like ghosts into the next immediate images and sounds. 

In Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, part of the “joke” is having a scholar summon up evil spirits, only to get them to enable him to carry out schoolboy pranks, sensational escapades. Goethe takes the seduction of Gretchen, barely more than a schoolgirl (and, moreover, willing), and turns it from middle-aging romantic silliness to the depths of irresponsible destruction. An empty wheelchair Mephistopheles rolls past Valentin with a half-meaningful glance, in which Valentin and Gretchen’s mother once sat, brings it home a little as image—but, again, the image trembles on the brink of triteness, especially after the buffa presentation of the mother (Zehra Berkman, who does the job) amid the constant, caterwauling theme of scraping strings. (The last stroke, when she’s wheeled out to die of an overdose of sleeping medicine, attains a mournful quality, though not through contrast or counter-irritation.) 

In the sense of a simplified, acted-out story, vaudevillized a little, there’s a quality like that of Anime, naive but not always playful, to this production, though Peer Gynt might have been a better choice. Answering the question, whether he’s contemplating putting up Faust, Part II, Jackson writes in the program that the audience completes the performance. Faust, Part I, can stand alone. The second part—urbane, wise beyond urbanity—radically expands the horizons of part one, lending new perspective to its more intensive story. It’s not easy to stage, but it definitively spurs a spectator’s sensibilities past the nostalgia for stories alone, with or without moral—that kind of nostalgia showered on old movies by talking heads on TV. Ambiguity (much less irony) isn’t the same as uncertainty; Goethe didn’t write a treatment for It’s A Wonderful ... Faust! 

FAUST, PART I 

Presented by Shotgun Players at 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday; 5 p.m. Sundays through June 28. Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. $18-25. 841-6500. shotgunplayers.org.

Charles Hamilton, retiring music director of the Berkeley High Jazz Ensemble, will play this Sunday afternoon, 1-3 p.m., at A Jazz Blast in Live Oak Theater with his group, Charles Hamilton and Friends.  

Tenacity and Paul “Hutch” Jones, an East Bay saxophonist who has played with various artists, from funk bands to Sun Ra and His Arkestra, and are also on the bill.  

“I was invited to play over there about a month ago,” Hamilton said. “When I was looking forward to Jazz On Fourth [Festival]. I needed to get some players quick, so thought of some of my alums—Ravi Apcarian, bass; Mike Spencer, drums; Robbie Boykin, guitar; and me on trombone. Then thought of Leon Wilson to come in with me on tenor sax. We’ll play mostly standards, with some originals of mine.” 

Next Friday, June 5, at 6:30 p.m. in the Schwimley Little Theatre at Berkeley High, Hamilton will lead the Ensemble, combos and lab bands. The concert will be his last local appearance before his retirement—though in July, Hamilton will accompany the Ensemble to play the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. 

Hamilton, born in San Francisco, grew up in Louisiana. “I ended up in Baton Rouge with my father’s family; started my music education in 7th grade. By the 10th grade, I was playing trumpet with the Titans, a rhythm and blues band that became very popular; we were working. I thought I could really play the trumpet, till I came to California at 18—then had to learn how to play!” 

Hamilton went to San Francisco State, “a new world for me, coming straight from the South, thrown right in the middle of State, with people from all over the world,” he said. “Baton Rouge is the state capital, but compared to California, it’s a backwoods place.” 

At SFSU, Hamilton studied with musicians of the caliber of John Handy—“I went through that program, worked really hard, in ear training, theory. A lot of the people were really patient. Just being around them, in their presence, I picked up a lot. People that possess those qualities, who are able to pass them on. I was fortunate Handy was there, teaching jazz history and a workshop where you could go write tunes”—and Bennett Friedman, whose popular Big Band played around the bay. “Bennett was really sophisticated, ahead of his time. His charts are real tasty; we even play them now. They’re right on time.” 

Hamilton took up trombone. “There were too many trumpet players around; I just wanted to be different. It was harder to coordinate my tongue and wrist. It wasn’t like playing the trumpet.”  

He recalls clubs in San Francisco like The Jukebox and the Both/And (”everybody came through there, Monk, Coltrane with Miles Davis ...”), The Half-Note (”the young George Duke played every Friday night—and occasionally Al Jarreau would come there in his white outfit, an orderly, on his way home after work ... I’d run from one club to the next, down the street.”) 

Soon, Hamilton was gigging in some of those places, playing jazz and sometimes R & B. He recalls playing with tenor saxophonist Sonny Lewis, in David Hardiman’s Big Band, with Bishop Norman Williams and a host of others. “I was in and around what was going on, in the heart of it. I put myself there; music was what I was all about—the improvisation ...” 

When he came to teach in the East Bay at 23, Hamilton “became acquainted with Ed Kelly, who had his session at Mr. Major’s Lounge. Pharaoh Sanders and Eddie Henderson would show up. And later I remember another kid—Benny Green—who couldn’t get in, who just wanted to play. I just knew him as a little redheaded kid with hair in his face.” 

Hamilton started teaching in the Berkeley School District in 1971, at Columbus Elementary School, now Rosa Parks.  

“I knew very little about the jazz program Herb Wong had started,” he said. “Later, Herb became a friend of mine. He knew all the jazz musicians. I was a new guy, coming into the school district, trying to do my job and play music outside of work. In ’71, I started Josh Jones out on drums in fourth grade, just one kid of many. Ten years later, I had moved up to middle school, at Longfellow, and had heard more about the jazz program. It still hadn’t registered.” 

Then in 1981, Berkeley High Jazz Band director Phil Hardymon became ill, and Hamilton was asked to step in. “I was shocked how talented these kids were; they played on the level I was at!” Hamilton spent two summers at North Texas State at Denton, and two more in the jazz division of the University of Nevada at Reno, “just to get on track. It took me about five years to get my footing, just to catch up with where my students were. I was 33 at the start, and it was a new thing for me, teaching jazz, jazz ensemble. When I really became aware, I became excited. I wanted to be there, get in step. And they know if you know your stuff!” 

Hamilton reflected on the continuing success of the program and the bands: “I still don’t know what it is. The talent is constant, ongoing. It just doesn’t stop. It has to be the environment. The kids are sharp, well-informed. They know what’s going on. The environment is half the battle.” 

Hamilton talked about the End Of the Year Concert on June 5: “It’ll be an all-out extravaganza; the ensemble, along with two combos, the lab band—and beginning lab is going to play ... we’re pretty much hosting the entire program at Berkeley High. And for me, this is going to be it!” 

At the close of Jazz On Fourth, notable Berkeley High Jazz alumnus Peter Apfelbaum, sitting in with the current Ensemble, asked for around of applause for Hamilton and spoke of his profound influence on the world of music. “About 20 percent of the people you hear through iPods came through him. I’m serious! Jukeboxes, too!” 

A Jazz Blast 

1-3 p.m. Sunday at Live Oak Theatre, 1301 Shattuck Ave. $5. Up to two youths, ages 5-17, free with each paying adult.  

Information: Eugene Evans, 981-6690. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/communitycalendar.  

For the End of the Year Concert,  

see berkeleyhighjazz.org.

Berkeley Akademie will feature the final performance of the season this Sunday evening at First Congregational Church, with Bach’s Italian Concerto (in a modern arrangement for chamber orchestra by Joachim F. W. Schneider); Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 3 (“Camp-Meeting”) and Beethoven’s Septet in E-flat Major, Opus 20. 

It will be Kent Nagano’s final performance as music director of Berkeley Symphony, though he’ll continue to lead the Akademie. 

The Bach concerto was originally composed for solo harpsichord, probably in the mid- to late 1720s. Joachim Schneider arranged it for chamber orchestra this year; the Akademie performance will be its premiere—in Schneider’s words, “not ... a historically oriented transcription but rather a translation of the time-honored text using the ‘vocabulary’ of our time” 

Ives’ Symphony has three subtitles, “Old Folks Gatherin’,” “Children’s Day” and “Communion”—but the approach is more abstract than programmatic in exploring hymn tunes. “Oh For a Thousand Tongues to Sing” has, as countermelody in the first movement, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” The movement ends with strings playing in one meter, the flute in another. Ives’ Third Symphony was completed in 1904, and then revised it five years later. 

Beethoven’s Septet was premiered at a benefit concert in Vienna in 1800. In the Septet, Beethoven explores nontraditional solo and accompanying combinations, giving the violin a major role. The Septet inspired Schubert’s great Octet.  

Franklyn D’Antonio, Berkeley Symphony concertmaster, who will be featured in the Akademie performance, spoke about playing under Nagano’s baton. 

“Every size group offers its own kind of reward,” said D’Antonio of the Akademie’s programming, which features chamber groups (without conductor) with orchestra alternating. “And each has its own difficulties. But everything has to be beautiful. It’s important to transfer focus from technical flawlessness to musical expression. That’s why I’ll work hours on the fingerings and bowings, trying to do something different. I put a lot of time and thought into comparing how a phrase might reoccur during a piece. Even if the listener doesn’t recognize the difference in expression, there’s a subliminal recognition: why am I feeling tedious? Because the repetitions are played in exactly the same way. In concerts like the Akademie’s, everything is like a solo.” 

D’Antonio recalled the last Akademie concert: “It was very meaningful how Kent, conducting, looked at things slightly differently, gave a slightly different slant—say, to the apex of a phrase, making it a little bit earlier or later. Every time he’d stop the rehearsal, he’d share a new insight with me.” 

D’Antonio characterized Nagano’s style of conducting: “A reserved enthusiasm emanates from the podium and his baton. When a piece is finished, he walks off to the side and joins us on our level on the stage. He has so much sincerity, whereas most conductors have so much ego. His baton technique and physical gestures are so meaningful, so spontaneous—a very rewarding kind of communication. 

Speaking of Nagano’s stepping down as music director of the symphony, D’Antonio said, “I’m very saddened, yet he’s still involved with the Akademie. His tenure, the length of time he’s had here, as appreciated as it is, is almost incredible. He’s grown in stature, become world-renowned—and sticks to his roots in Berkeley. It speaks of his emotional commitment, which is so rare.” 

Berkeley Akademie Ensemble 

7 p.m. Sunday at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. $20-60.  

841-2800. www.berkeleysymphony.org.

In the 1960s, artists, disenchanted with the commercialization of art reached beyond the White Cube. Animated by the compelling masculine power of Abstract Expressionism, they went to isolated deserts and mountains and moved the earth, creating monumental works on a high plateau in New Mexico, in Great Salt Lake, in the Nevada desert. These enterprises, grandiose as they were, also indicated an entropic disregard of nature. 

In the 1970s, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison employed maps, photographs, drawings and poetic dialogue to define ecosystems and feasible solutions. Agnes Denes planted wheat in Lower Manhattan and trees on a man-made mountain in Finland addressing ecological concern and human values. Christo and Jeanne-Claude dealt with political systems to create temporary structures which yield insights into the sheer beauty of a valley in the Rocky Mountains, the hills in California’s Sonoma County, the islands of Florida’s Biscayne Bay and the Arkansas River. These projects, important as they are, did not directly engage the people living in the places.  

The artists in the current Human/Nature enterprise projected their ecological concerns into artworks by engaging with the people in diverse UNESCO World Heritage sites, creating new work which was inspired and informed by both their experiences in the natural areas and their interaction with the people inhabiting these region. Among the eight artists in the exhibition, three have made the most significant contributions to art interacting with the human/nature nexus.  

Rigo 23 (nomme de guerre for Ricardo Gouveia) was born in Portugal’s Madeira Island and has been committed to political work—the Mexican Indian Movement, the Black Panthers—for a good many years, keeping his distance from the art-world. But he welcomed the Human/Nature project largely because it was not art-world specific and went to the coastal village of Cananéia and the surrounding forested areas in Southern Brazil, inhabited by mesticos, mostly descendants of African slaves. Between 2006 and 2008 he made five trips to form strong connections with the communities in the area and was able to enlist local craftsmen and craftswomen, farmers, fishermen and children to work with him. They created two monumental sculptures using traditional materials and building methods. They made replicas of contemporary weapons of mass destruction—a cluster bomb and a nuclear submarine and turned them into celebrations of life instead of death. The simulated submarine of clay is 30 feet long and is modeled after the submarines built by Lockhead-Martin. It has become an Arc of Noah or, perhaps a Yellow Submarine and is populated by lots of little people and animals with the audio transmitting their songs—a vessel of peace and joy.  

When former Secretary of State Colin Powell missinformed the UN Security Council about putative portable means of mass destruction in Iraq, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle produced a phantom truck to transport make-believe deadly weapons. The same year he received a McArthur award. For Human/Nature, he went to the largest nature preserve in Mexico, the El Vizcaino Biosphere Reserve in Baja California, a spawning place for gray and blue whales, harbor seals and sea lions. With the assistance of local individuals he produced a multi-sensory video installation of the huge salt flats, set against an infinite sky. In his Juggernaut (2008) we see a white expanse which appears like clouds seen from an airplane, we hear the song of the whales and then this is all interrupted by the juggernaut of the underbelly of large black trucks which mine the salt—a powerful metaphor for the violent destruction of nature. 

Dario Robleto is basically involved in creating art which uses a multiplicity of mediums and investigates history, both geological and human, to find a way to rescue nature and mankind: not an easy undertaking. In 2005 he took his first trip to Waterton Glacier International Peace Park on the border between Montana and Alberta. There he worked with glaciologists, geologists and botanists to learn about the effect of meltdown of landlocked glaciers and as an artist inclined toward narration, he was also imbued by the romantic American response to the landscape by writers such as Thoreau and Whitman. He designed and crafted wooden cabinets for a number of displays. One of them shows 50,000-year-old bear claws juxtaposed to human hand bones, another exhibits over 2,000 blown glass vials and a 19th century bloodletting cupping glass. We can hear recordings of the sound of extinct animals and extinct languages. One display case exhibits nineteenth century braided hair of various lovers, intertwined with glacially released woolly mammoth hair and is framed by 50,000-year-old woolly mammoth tusks. His work is a deeply felt discourse which underscores the nature of loss.  

Dario Robleto and many of the artists in the Human/Nature project are engaged in the critical problems now faced by humanity. They do not believe in the cynical stance of postmodern deconstructivists who question the place of art in the late capitalist system. They feel that the authentic artist has a moral obligation to act when confronted by environmental destruction. The glaciers are melting, species of animals and plants are extinct. But as scientists know and as artists can demonstrate with their visual metaphors, life does continue.  

In the back room of a mansion, a Pepto Bismol-swigging investigative reporter complains to his artist buddy that he hates parties, like the one still raging outside that he has fled. In fact, he hates a society that doesn’t “speak from the heart.” 

His Machiavellian friend, clutching a cocktail and clad in a big, shiny suit and a wig showering ringlets (a tip of the hat to the fashions of the Sun King’s court?) replies that some things are better lied about—and calls the reporter a misanthrope. 

Central Works is reviving Gary Graves’ adaptation of Moliere’s Misanthrope. Graves, who also directs, first staged his version almost seven years ago. In its current incarnation, two of the cast of three are originals from that first premiere; the production team is also substantially the same. 

Graves’ adaptation, on which he colloborated with the actors and production team, brings Moliere’s comedy—which has strong elements of farce—into present-day life. It also focuses on the love triangle between Alan, the reporter; Phil, his friend the artist; and Celia, the wealthy, widowed party girl both are stuck on. 

Alan and Celia are played—and were originated—by Darren Bridgett and Deb Fink, two of the best farceurs in the Bay Area. They are ably assisted by Michael Navarra (who played in Central Works’ Shadow Crossing a few years ago), who is not exactly a straight man, but more an eccentric than a clown (though his later entrance in bandages and the resulting funny gestures start to rival some of Fink and Bridgett’s skillful schtick). Navarra also delivers a good, droll monologue on a spurned loanshark’s revenge.  

As ever, Central Works uses the Berkeley City Club salon theater adroitly. The 75-minute play is an unbroken set of humor, including some sleights of repetition (and a comic cross-examination) that parallel Moliere’s classicist comic form. Graves’ staging is deft, exploiting the comic virtues of his cast.  

It’s a tight little show, without a minute’s letdown—excellent entertainment. It also subtlely changes form somewhat, partly from its updating, and becomes a bit like an old screwball romantic comedy. Greg Scharpen’s flavoring of the action and anecdotes with sound and music gives it a hint of cinema. Graves designed the lighting and Tammy Berlin, the costumes; both are spot on. 

There are also a few, telling touches that not only modernize Moliere, but reflect, painfully, current-day fast-track “manners” (and cluelessness). When Alan exhorts Celia to join him and “leave all this,” she’s puzzled. “All what?”  

And then their cellphones commence to sound. 

MISANTHROPE 

8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday; 5 p.m. Sunday through June 21 at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. $14-25. 558-1381. centralworks.org.

An unusually good production of A Streetcar Named Desire goes into its final performances at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and at 2 p.m. Sunday, at Altarena Playhouse. Director Sue Trigg and her cast stage Tennessee Williams’ masterwork in the round, and do it justice by making every detail build on the last. The final scenes are indelible. 1409 High St., Alameda. $17-20. 764-9718. www.altarena.org. 

Oscar Wilde’s wry predecessor to Earnest-ness, Lady Windemere’s Fan, is onstage now at the Masquers Playhouse, updated by director Patricia Inabnet to the status-seeking 1950s. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Sundays. 105 Park Place, Point Richmond. $18. 232-4031. www.masquers.org. 

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second in a series on Cloyne Court. 

Daley’s Scenic Park, commonly known as Northside, is the oldest residential neighborhood in the north Berkeley Hills. Subdivided in 1889 by San Diego businessman Thomas J. Daley, it was acquired in 1891 for $4,000 in gold by Chicago banker Frank M. Wilson. Wilson began selling lots immediately, but the tract did not come into its own until 1904. 

It was on May 16 of that year that the San Francisco Call proclaimed it as the dernier cri in fashionable addresses: “From Berkeley comes news of a tract that has suddenly been seized upon as one of the most desirable locations in the town for residences. It had been almost overlooked until lately, but its many advantages have been noticed by intending purchasers and now many lots are being bought. The property lies along the foothills, ten blocks above the university grounds. It is picturesque, full of grand old oak trees and commands a grand view of the bay.” 

The article went on to enumerate the upscale houses going up in the area, among them those of Professor Jacques Loeb, UC supervising architect John Galen Howard, businessman Allen Freeman, and builder Frank Armstrong. 

Only two weeks earlier, the newspaper announced the imminent construction of a hotel on the corner of Le Roy Avenue and Ridge Road, to contain 200 rooms and cost $50,000 (the final cost would be $80,000). By the end of May, a construction contract had been signed. The hotel’s developer, incorporated as the University Land and Improvement Company, published a four-page promotional brochure titled “Cloyne Court: A High Class Modern Apartment House in Berkeley, California.” 

The brochure promised a building “conveniently and beautifully situated, well constructed, and carefully planned for the comfort and privacy of its tenants. It will offer nearly all, if not all, of the advantages of housekeeping without its vexations, cares, and heavy expenses.” 

The building, it was promised, “is being constructed in the best possible manner after the plans and under supervision of John Galen Howard, of New York, the Supervising Architect of the University. […] Cloyne Court will have thirty suites, varying in size from two to five rooms. Each suite will be roomy, sunny, and well lighted, and will constitute a unit in itself, with all the necessities, such as bathroom, etc. The suites will not be entered from a common hall, but there will be a number of small halls, or rather vestibules, entered directly from the open air. In general not more than two suites on the same floor will open into the same vestibule.” 

The suites were to be unfurnished, with the exception of a few furnished rooms for transients or guests of the tenants. The standard of cuisine and service in the dining room was to be high, while the cost of board would be comparable to that charged in the good boarding houses of Berkeley. Cloyne Court was scheduled to open on Oct. 15, 1904. Interested parties were directed to the manager, Mr. J.M. Pierce, 2401 Le Conte Ave. 

Although the promotional brochure confidently touted Mr. and Mrs. Pierce’s long and successful experience, it didn’t specify their field of experience. As it happens, the experience had nothing to do with innkeeping. 

James Manning Pierce (1838-1929) was born to Lucy Valentine Hathaway and Levi Pierce in Freetown, Mass. Two of his maternal uncles, Dr. Edmund Valentine Hathaway and Charles Wesley Hathaway, sailed to California in 1849. They entered the warehouse business in San Francisco and were early supporters of Thomas Starr King’s Unitarian Church. Charles was one of the founders of the Republican Party in California, as well as a member of the San Francisco city council. 

Following his uncles to California in 1859, James Pierce worked as a salesman for Bray Bros., the San Francisco grain merchants. In 1869, he married Margaret Cameron (1855-1921), a gifted lyric soprano. The two produced four children: Mary Eugenia “Molly” (1872-1964), Elliott Hathaway (1874-1939), Virginia Cameron (1882-1963) and Lucy Valentine (1886-1974). 

When Molly and Elliott reached college age, the Pierce family moved its home from San Francisco to Berkeley. In January 1894, James and Margaret purchased from Frank M. Wilson two lots on the north side of Daley Avenue (now Ridge Road) between Euclid and Le Roy Avenues. They quickly built a house on one of the lots, at 2527 Ridge Road. It was a turreted Victorian, not unlike its surviving next-door neighbor at 2531 Ridge. 

James Pierce kept his business in San Francisco—he was now a warehouse owner. In 1898, he established the Pierce & Taylor Storage Company at 733 Market St. A few years later, he founded with Elliott the Students’ Wood & Coal Company, whose office and yard were located at 2030 Addison St., Berkeley. The company delivered wood, coal, hay, and grain to all parts of Berkeley and Oakland. 

When the University Land and Improvement Co. incorporated for the purpose of building Cloyne Court, James Pierce was one of its investors, alongside prominent UC and Mills College professors (Charles M. Bakewell, John Fryer, John Galen Howard, Louis Lisser, Kasper Pischel); notable San Francisco and Oakland businessmen (Charles Harvey Bentley, F.W. Dohrmann, John L. Howard, James K. Moffitt); jurists and politicians (Warren Olney and his son); university patrons (Phoebe Apperson Hearst, Jane K. Sather); and capitalists (Louis Titus, Frank M. Wilson). 

In 1903, the Pierces sold their Ridge Road home to John Freuler, the Swiss vice-consul. That house would be torn down in 1927 to make way for the Hotel Slocum, now known as the Stebbins Hall co-op. While waiting for Cloyne Court to be built, the Pierce family lived at 2401 Le Conte Ave., across the street from Frank Wilson’s house. 

Their temporary home, a rambling, turreted, and shingled affair, had been constructed in 1897 by George Frederick Estey for William and Mary Henry, parents of future Mills College president Aurelia Henry Reinhardt. In 1902, when the Henrys built their Northgate Hotel on Euclid Avenue, they sold 2401 Le Conte to Phoebe Apperson Hearst, whose own house stood across the intersection, at 2368 Le Conte Ave. The former Henry house was acquired to house Mrs. Hearst’s servants. When she embarked on a worldwide trip in 1903, it became available for the future managers of Cloyne Court. (The house burned down in 1923, and the University Christian Church was built on its site in 1931.) 

Cloyne Court opened on Dec. 4, 1904. Almost immediately, the building became a social magnet. In February 1905, Mrs. Thomas Rickard (now living in Phoebe Hearst’s home with her husband, the president of Berkeley’s Town Board of Trustees) and Mrs. Almeric Coxhead (whose husband and his brother were the architects of the Hearst home) founded a new dancing club, whose first ball was to take place at the Cloyne Court assembly hall. The Oakland Tribune opined, “this large reception room […] bids fair to become a most popular rendezvous for entertainment of every kind.” The death of Mrs. Frank M. Wilson postponed the ball indefinitely. The club was resurrected the following year, after the opening of the Hillside Club. 

In July 1905, the visiting Susan B. Anthony was entertained at Cloyne Court. The very same day, the Pierces’ daughter Virginia sang in concert at the Greek Theatre. “The Greek theater was filled, this afternoon, the announcement of Miss Pierce’s reappearance having attracted a great multitude to the university campus,” reported the San Francisco Call on July 24. Trained in Boston, Virginia would launch a professional singing career, making her debut at the Boston Opera House, touring with the Lombardi Italian Grand Opera Company, and performing on the Orpheum circuit. The youngest Pierce child, Lucy, would go on to become a well-known painter and printmaker. 

In running Cloyne Court, the Pierces’ principle was “to give everyone what they want, set an attractive table and keep charges within reason.” Soon they decided to expand their holdings. On the block below the hotel, they still owned a vacant lot adjacent to their former home. In December 1909, Pierce took out a permit to build a four-story, 88-room apartment building for $40,000. George W. Patton was the designer and builder. 

Treehaven Apartments opened in October 1910. The San Francisco Call proclaimed it “perhaps the most modern structure of the kind built in Berkeley.” The building was “modeled after New York apartment houses, combining the best features of several of the largest type. There is a roof garden, hot and cold water, as well as iced drinking water piped to each apartment, of which there are 29.” Each apartment was “a model of compactness and convenience, with wall beds, patent closets for both men and women and other features, such as an especially constructed shaving stands for men and electric lighted closets for women.” 

Treehaven still stands, looking as it did a hundred years ago. Only the window boxes and the oak trees that grew in the street are missing. 

In 1914, the Pierces purchased Cloyne Court from the other stockholders. The same year, their daughter Virginia, having returned from Europe after the outbreak of World War I, surprised them by marrying Los Angeles surgeon John C.N. Burrows in a secret ceremony. The marriage was extremely brief—while on their honeymoon, the bridegroom was accused of passing a fraudulent check for $1,000. Virginia returned to Europe and in 1917 married the Italian-born singer Umberto Rovere, eight years her junior. Rovere is remembered as a long-distance swimmer and a beloved Los Angeles restaurateur. One of his establishments, the Paris Inn, was famous for its singing waiters. 

Cloyne Court remained the Pierce family’s home for 42 years. Elliott took over the hotel’s management in 1929, and following his own death a decade later, Molly carried on through World War II. She was 74 when she sold the building to the University Students’ Cooperative Association. It has been a residential co-op since 1946. Owned by the university since 1970 and listed in the National Register of Historic Places, Cloyne Court is currently undergoing a seismic upgrade. 

Daniella Thompson publishes www.berkeleyheritage.com for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA). 

Mr. and Mrs. American Home Buyer, are you suffering from Stinky House Syndrome? Do strangers cover their noses and flee your dwelling soon after entering? Do relatives plan family gatherings at the homes of family members who are less scintillating than you? Are you engaging in microbial experiments without possession of the pertinent advanced degree? Does your house smell bad? If you answered yes to any of the above, you may be a candidate for dehumidifier ownership. 

As property values and rents increase, more and more people find themselves living in or using basements or backyard sheds that do not provide adequate protection against damp conditions. Even just a damp basement below your living space can subject you to elevated humidity levels that can make your entire home feel clammy and cold. This is a complex area of home care about which a great deal may be said. But let’s just cut to the chase: There is a formidable tool in the war on mold, and that’s our friend the dehumidifier. 

A dehumidifier is essentially an air conditioner—with a few notable differences. The technology that’s used to chill air in your refrigerator or air conditioner chills a set of coils and then pumps the waste heat to another set of coils for discharge. In the case of an A/C, those heat-discharging coils are on the outside: If you put your hand over them, you can feel the heat. Since moisture tends to condense on a cold surface—just as it does on your windows when you have the heat turned on—the cold coils also gather moisture from the air. 

When a dehumidifier condenses moisture in the atmosphere on those cold coils, it then allows it to drip into a pan. Rather than being placed on the outside, the humidifier’s cold coils are placed just past the chilling and dripping business in the system. They re-warm the air before releasing it into the room. This way, a humidifier is able to remove the moisture without cooling the room. Simply running an air conditioner will cool a room, but it is less efficient at removing moisture since it is not designed to provide this as its sole function. 

Now, what to do with all that gathered water? First keep in mind that the water gathered from a cold system like this isn’t safe to drink, since it is likely to contain fungal matter and dust. So it’s best to simply discharge it down a drain or out to the garden. Small, inexpensive dehumidifiers fill a small trough or tray which must be taken out and emptied from time to time, but larger ones are provided with drain pipes and can be set up to run with almost no maintenance for very long periods. Dehumidifiers are rated in terms of “pints per day”: Small models are less than 10 PPD and large ones can be over 40 PPD. You can expect the larger ones to cost well over $1,000, but they may be well worth it if you’re experiencing real distress. 

Every year I meet a few people who have a bad situation that calls out for a dehumidifier. One couple that I met last year had a tenant living in a basement apartment. Part of the tenant’s space was getting wet from a leak and featured a lovely zoological menagerie of fungi and protists (part of the mildew family). Everybody gets freaked when this is happening and all sorts of allegations of devil worship and bad genetics get hurled about, but the simple truth is that it’s just nature doing what it always does when some basic requirements are met. Nature loves growing stuff. Fungi love moisture.  

They also need oxygen and food, but those are available at everybody’s house. I haven’t seen any houses that don’t have nice sources of sugar and oxygen. A damp 2 x 4 will work nicely, thank you very much, but paper-surfaced sheetrock will work even better. We line the inside of our houses with paper, so it should be no shock when stuff starts growing on the surface. (We really ought to quit this odd habit and it is happening slowly. Alternatives to paper surface gypsum drywall have been around for some time and, in these litigious times, they’re really surging. I suspect that we won’t be able to find the paper type in another 10 years—but I digress.) 

So we have food and air, and only need water. How much water do we need to grow mold and/or mildew? The answer varies with the organism, but it’s about 70 percent to 100 percent humidity, although most growth occurs when humidity is above 85 percent. Few of these things grow below 60 percent. Basement walls often are damp enough to easily meet the requirement. When moisture is present on the surfaces it evaporates and becomes part of the atmosphere. If there is enough of this, the entire house can achieve levels where fungi begin to propagate. While rare, it is not unusual to have portions of basement, window sills, closets and spots on ceilings where little farms are a-growin’. 

Although it may seem almost too easy to find plausible, the simple deprivation of an adequate level of moisture is all that is needed to prevent fungi from growing. They just stop growing when things dry out. True, the dead spores remain and can affect the immune systems of some allergic persons, but for the most part, when things dry out, the ill effects vanish. It is wise to clean the surfaces and possibly to replace damaged or deeply infested materials such as sheetrock if these have become filled or covered with culture. (Ah, culture. Doesn’t all the Bay Area have that problem?) Once the level of required dampness is gone, there just won’t be more growth. If you want to clean and kill mold spores, a dilution of bleach works nicely. One quarter cup of bleach in a gallon of warm water is what is generally recommended and is quite deadly to most fungus. 

There are many things that one can do to prevent future mold infestation, including creating proper drainage, venting the spaces below the house, and using plastic barriers and sealants. For situations that are currently unmanageable, a dehumidifier is a quick, simple and relatively inexpensive fix. Downside? They use electricity. Like their cousins, the air conditioners, dehumidifiers use a fair amount of electricity but given the important job they do, it’s worth it. If you’re thinking of getting one, especially a “whole crawlspace” or “whole house” model, check out the energystar.gov website. You can get a rebate for making the right choice and you can help to control your electric bill. I would make sure I bought enough but not too much capacity so as to control the energy cost. Better models have humidistatic controls that allow you to set the percentage of moisture you like. Don’t set them too low. It’s not comfortable and will only cost you more money. 

The use of a dehumidifier can be a lifesaver. It may save your hacking lungs, the frame of your lovely old Victorian, or the precious relationship you have with the nice young man who lives down in the basement. 

ASK MATT 

Got a question about home repairs and inspections? Send them to Matt Cantor at mgcantor@pacbell.net.

THURSDAY, MAY 28 

Blue Star Memorial Marker Dedication As a tribute to all veterans, the El Cerrito Garden Club and the City of El Cerrito will proudly dedicate a National Garden Clubs, Inc. Blue Star Memorial Marker at Arlington Park at 10 a.m. at Arlington Clubhouse, 1120 Arlington Blvd., El Cerrito. 

“An International Perspective on America's Health Care Options” with Dr. Claudia Chaufan, vice-president of California Physicians Alliance which advocates for a social insurance, single payer system in the United States, at 6:45 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Pot luck at 6 p.m. Sponsored by Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club.  

Take-Up-the-Streets Think Tank on ways to change our relationship to space usage in the city at 7 p.m. Sponsored by The Institute for Urban Homesteading. Please email for location iuh@sparkybeegirl.com 

1st Pan-Am University Taekwondo Championship through the 30th at Haas Pavillion, UC campus. For details call 642-3268.www.ucmap/pan-am/ 

The Art of Comfort & Joy: A Tribute to End-of-Life Care Providers and an opportunity for the public to learn about care options and speak individually with end-of-life providers, at 7 p.m. at Piedmont Community Hall, 711 Highland Ave., Piedmont. RSVP to 866-825-8967. admin@compassionandchoicesnca.org  

Babies & Toddlers Storytime at 10:15 and 11:15 a.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. 524-3043. 

Association for Women in Science East Bay Chapter “Focus on Careers: From Science to Sales” at 6:30 p.m. at Novartis, Building 4, Room 104, 5300 Chiron Way, Emeryville, Cost is $5-$10. Register at http://ebawis.eventbrite.com 

Circle of Concern Vigil meets on West Lawn of UC campus across from Addison and Oxford, Thurs. at noon and Sun. at 1 p.m. to oppose UC weapons labs contracts. 848-8055. 

Tikkun Leyl Shavuot with rabbis and scholars from throughout the East Bay at 6:30 p.m. at Jewish Community Center of the East Bay, 1414 Walnut St. tikkun@jfed.org  

Fitness Class for 55+ at 9:15 a.m. at Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237. 

Buddhist Class on Shikan Meditation at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, Cedar at Bonita. http://caltendai.org 

FRIDAY, MAY 29 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Kim Polese on “Recent Developments in Computer Technology” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $15, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 527-2173. www.citycommonsclub.org 

Jewish Humanistic Forum: Dr. Booker Holton speaks on water and marine resource management in Israel and the Middle East at 7 p.m. at Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin Ave. at Masonic, Albany. www.kolhadash.org 

Circle Dancing, simple folk dancing with instruction at 7:30 p.m. at Finnish Brotherhood Hall, 1970 Chestnut St at University. Donation of $5 requested. 528-4253. www.circledancing.com 

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. 

Three Beats for Nothing Mostly ancient part music for fun and practice meets every Fri. at 10 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, Hearst at MLK. 655-8863. asiecker@sbcglobal 

Berkeley Chess Club meets every Fri. at 7 p.m. at the Hillside School, 1581 Le Roy Ave. 843-0150. 

SATURDAY, MAY 30 

Thorsen House Spring Centennial Celebration with Friends of Piedmont Way, from 2 to 5 p.m. at 2307 Piedmont Ave. Tickets are $15-$34. www.thorsenspring100.eventbrite.com 

Thousand Oaks School 34th Carnival and Silent Auction Featuring games, food, ice cream and a cake walk, the Carnival culminates in a quilt raffle and Silent Auction. Noon to 4 p.m. at 840 Colusa Ave. http://to.berkeleypta.org 

Berkeley Historical Society Spring Walking Tour “Berkeley Woods” led by Paul Grunland, from 10 a.m. to noon. Cost is $8-$10. For reservations and starting point call 848-0181. 

Help Restore Eastshore State Park Help Friends of Five Creeks transform former garbage dump into wildlife-friendly parkland near the mouth of Schoolhouse Creek from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Follow signs from the small parking turnout on West Frontage Road between University and Gilman. 848-9358. www.fivecreeks.org 

Chocolate & Chalk Art Festival from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. North Shattuck Ave., Gourmet Ghetto. 548-5335. 

Rally For Social Security Fairness for Teachers at 11 a.m. at Berkeley Community Theater, Berkeley High School, Allston Way. www.socialsecurityfairness.com 

Walking Tour of Chinatown Meet at 10 a.m. at the fountain of Pacific Renaissance Plaza, Ninth St., between Webster and Frainklin. 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

California NOW’s State Conference with Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner “Running for Public Office” and workshops on Safe Cosmetics; Homophobia in Sports; and Media, Body Image & Self-Esteem, from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Doubletree Berkeley Marina, 200 Marina Blvd. Cost is $45-$60. Register online canoworg/2009-ca-now-annual-membership-meetingstate-conference.html 

“How to Think About Achieving Nuclear Disarmament in the 21st Century” with Randy Rydell, Senior Political Affairs Officer, Office of the High Representative, UN Office for Disarmament Affairs at 7 p.m. at Alameda Free Library, 1550 Oak St., Alameda. Co-sponsored by the Alameda Public Affairs Forum and the United Nations Association East Bay. Suggested donation $5. www.alamedaforum.org 

Mini-Farmers in Tilden A farm exploration program, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. for ages 4-6 years, accompanied by an adult. We will explore the Little Farm, care for animals, do crafts and farm chores. Wear boots and dress to get dirty! Fee is $6-$8. Registration required. 1-888-EBPARKS. 

Awakening the Healing in Your Hands Open house at the Acupressure Institute with bodywork demonstrations, calligraphy and face painting, music and food from noon to 8 p.m. at 1533 Shattuck Ave. 845-1059. www.AcupressureInstitute.com  

“The Spirit of Persussion” A workshop with Arito Moreira at 3 p.m. at Ed Kelly Hall, Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, 1616 Franklin St. Cost is $17-$35, no one turned away. RSVP to 836-4649, ext. 112. 

Beginning Internet Class “Newspaper and Magazine Articles” at 10 a.m. at El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Ave., El Cerrito. Free, but call to sign up 526-7512. 

Women’s Daytime Drop-In Center “Chances for Change” Fundraising event with music, wine, hors d’oeuvres and a live and silent auction at 6 p.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, One Lawson Rd., Kensington. Tickets are $25-$45. 548-2884. 

“She Shines” a day event with Alameda County Junior Commission on the Status of Women from 8:30 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. at Bishop O’Dowd High School, Oakland. Free, includes lunch. To register or sponsor call 259-3871. 

Playland’s One Year Anniversary Sat. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 10979 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. Cost is $10-$15. 232-4264 ext. 25.  

Buddha’s Birth Celebration with Sylvia Gretchen on “Prayer to Shakyamuni Buddha” at 7 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 809-1000.  

Psyche and Cinema “La Belle et la Bete” Workshop on using symbols from 1 to 6 p.m. at The Dream Institute, 1672 University at McGee. Cost is $45-$75. 845-1767.  

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.  

Lawn Bowling on the green at the corner of Acton St. and Bancroft Way every Wed. and Sat. at 10 a.m. for ages 12 and up. Wear flat soled shoes, no heels. Free lessons. 841-2174.  

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, held every Sat. from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552. 

SUNDAY, MAY 31 

Little Farm Goat Hike Join a short hike with the goats as we explore the historic connections between humans and our ungulate friends at 11 a.m. at the Little Farm, Tilden Park. For ages 6 and up. Children, please bring your adults along. 544-3265. tnarea@ebparks.org 

Bricks, Wheat and Gold! Join a five-mile hike to explore the ghostly pilings of the once-big town of Port Costa, from 2 to 5 p.m. For information call 544-3265. 

“La Place du Marché” Ecole Bilingue de Berkeley’s annual spring fair with bistro-style food, children’s games, a wide variety of craft vendors, and a raffle for a trip to Paris, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 1009 Heinz Ave., at Ninth St. 549-3895. 

Berkeley Opera’s Annual Gala and auction with sopranos Heidi Melton and Nicolle Foland and bass Kenneth Kellogg at 4 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes at 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $65. 841-1903. 

“Responsibility to Prevent” with Bob Alpern, former field secretary for the Friends Committee on National Legislation in Washington, D.C. on approaches to the peaceful prevention of deadly conflict at 1 p.m. at Berkeley Friends Meeting House, 2151 Vine St.  

A Report Back from the UN Conference on Racism, Durban, and the IADL Tribunal on Agent Orange with Judge Claudia Morcom of Detroit at 5 p.m. at 1419 Grant St. For information call Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute. 848-0599. 

“Animal Reiki” with Kathleen Prasad at 4 p.m. at Rabbit Ears, 377 Colusa Ave., Kensington. 525-6155. 

Tibetan Buddhism with Santosh Philip on “Tibetan Yoga for the West” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 809-1000. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

MONDAY, JUNE 1 

Berkeley Path Wanderers “Albany Hill At Dusk” We will cross Cerrito Creek on stepping stones, note Native American grinding stones, and climb Albany Hill on a narrow, fairly steep trail, gaining 300 ft. We’ll enjoy snacks and sunset views and return on via a gentler route. Wear shoes with good traction and long pants and sleeves to avoid poison oak. Meet at 7 p.m. at El Cerrito's Creekside Park at the south end of Santa Clara Ave. 848 9358. ww.berkeleypaths.org 

Castoffs Knitting Group meets at 7 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. 524-3043. 

Community Yoga Class Mon. and Thurs. at 10 a.m. at James Kenney Parks and Rec. Center at Virginia and 8th. Seniors and beginners welcome. Cost is $6. 207-4501. 

Three Beats for Nothing South Mostly ancient part music for fun and practice meets every Mon. at 3 p.m. at the South Berkeley Senior Center, Ellis at Ashby. 655-8863. asiecker@sbcglobal 

Morning Meditation Every Mon., Wed., and Fri. at 7:45 a.m. at Rudramandir, 830 Bancroft Way at 6th. 486-8700. 

Small-Business Counseling Free one-hour one-on-one counseling to help you start and run your small business with a volunteer from Service Core of Retired Executives, Mon. evenings by appointment at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. For appointment call 981-6148. www.eastbayscore.org 

World Affairs/Politics Discussion Group, for people 60 years and over, meets at 9:45 a.m. at Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave, Albany. Cost is $3.  

Free Boatbuilding Classes for Youth from 10 a.m. to noon and 1 to 5 p.m. at Berkeley Boathouse, 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. Classes cover woodworking, boatbuilding, and boat repair. 644-2577.  

TUESDAY, JUNE 2 

Brewcraft: Mead Learn the badic process of making wine from honey, from 7 to 9:30 p.m. Sponsored by Institute of Urban Homesteading East Bay. location of class will be given upon registration. Cost is $30-50. 927-3252. 

Lawyer in the Library at 6 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. Cosponsored by the Alameda County Bar Association. Advance registration required. 526-3720 ext. 5. 

Family Storytime for preschoolers and up at 7 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. 524-3043. 

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., Sat. and Sun. from 2 to 6 p.m. at at 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

Bridge for beginners from 12:30 to 2:15 p.m., all others 12:30 to 4 p.m. Sing-A-Long at 2:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190. 

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland Explore the 9th and Washington St. district. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of Ratto’s, 821 Washington St. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

“What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire” A film on the impact of our petroleum-powered lifestyle at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donation $5. www.Humanist Hall.org 

“Changing Your Life in a Changing Economy” with presentations by real estate and financial planning advisors at 2:30 p.m. at Salem Lutheran Home, 2361 East 29th St., Oakland. Free. 434-2871. 

”Archetype & Identity” A Personal Statement writing workshop at 4:15 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 266-2069. ecBerkeley.org 

Backpacking 101 at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

“Dogs at Play” visual educational presentation of dogs interacting in play, narrated by professional dog trainer at 7 p.m. RSVP required for location. 524-1058. www.chacodogtraining.com 

“The Root and Fruits of Meditation” by Laurent Valosek, long-time teacher of Transcendental Meditation at 7:30 p.m. at Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 526-3805. 

Red Cross Blood Services Volunteer Orientation from 10 a.m. to noon at 6230 Claremont Ave., Oakland. Registration required. 594-5165. 

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. 548-9840. 

Theraputic Recreation at the Berkeley Warm Pool, Wed. at 3:30 p.m. and Sat. at 10 a.m. at the Berkeley Warm Pool, 2245 Milvia St. Cost is $4-$5. Bring a towel. 632-9369. 

Teen Chess Club from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. at the North Branch Library, 1170 The Alameda at Hopkins. 981-6133. 

Berkeley CopWatch Drop-in office hours from 6 to 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. 548-0425. 

Stitch ‘n Bitch at 6:30 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

THURSDAY, JUNE 4 

Berkeley School Volunteers New volunteer orientation from 2 to 3 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. Volunteer opportunities in the summer or during the regular school year. 644-8833. bsv@berkeley.k12.ca.us 

“Globalization and the New Possibilities for Social Justice” with Andrew Barlow, Professor of Sociology, U.C. Berkeley at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar at Bonita. Donation $5. 841-4824. 

Children’s Fairyland Fundraising Gala “One Enchanted Evening” with food, performances and silent auction, from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. a tChildren’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave. Tickets are $75-$125. 452-2259. 

Babies & Toddlers Storytime at 10:15 and 11:15 a.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. 524-3043. 

Red Cross Blood Drive from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Metro PCS Inc. Conference Room, 1080 Marina Village Pkwy., Alameda. To make an appointment call 800-448-3543. www.beadonor.com 

Circle of Concern Vigil meets on West Lawn of UC campus across from Addison and Oxford, Thurs. at noon and Sun. at 1 p.m. to oppose UC weapons labs contracts. 848-8055. 

Fitness Class for 55+ at 9:15 a.m. at Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237. 

FRIDAY, JUNE 5 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Dr. Kenneth Lajoie, USGS, retired on “The Origin of San Francisco Bay: The Natural and Unnatural History of an Urban Estuary” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $15, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 527-2173. www.citycommonsclub.org 

Disability Film Festival Superfest Kids Classics, films geared for teenagers, from noon to 4 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 3rd Fl. Community Rm. 2090 Kittredge St. Free. 845-5576. www.culturedisabilitytalent.org/superfest 

“The Living Universe: Where Are We? Where Are We Going?” with author Duane Elgin at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship Unitarian Universalists Hall, 1924 Cedar at Bonita. 841-4824. www.bfuu.org 

“Croatian Stories” a documentary on Croatian heritage in California at 8 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Admission is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.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, JUNE 6 

Free 6th Annual Berkeley World Music Festival offers continuous music from noon to 9 p.m. in Telegraph Ave. cafes and shops, near UC campus, plus concert in People’s Park. For performance schedules and artist information, visit www.berkeleyworldmusic.org 

WriterCoach Connection Read-and-Write-a-thon Non-stop peotry, prose, drama and fiction from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. at King Middle School Library, 1781 Rose St. Staged reading of “A Raisin in the Sun” by students at 1 p.m.All welcome. For more information and to donate see www.firstgiving/writercoachconnection 

Project Peace East Bay's Day of Peace Choose between two East Bay community-service opportunities: Help beautify Claremont Middle School, 5750 College Ave., Oakland, or help remove invasive plant species from the shoreline of Berkeley Aquatic Park, 80 Bolivar Dr., from 9 a.m. to noon. RSVP at www.projectpeaceeastbay.org 

Family Fun Festival with performances, hands-on activities and information booths from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, Civic Center Park. 548-2220, ext. 227. 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around Preservation Park to see Victorian architecture. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of Preservation Park at 13th St. and MLK, Jr. Way. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

East Bay Open Studios Sat. and Sun. from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. For details see www.proartsgallery.org 

“Summer Splash” A free community event with kayaking, rowing, and dragon boating from noon to 4 p.m. at Jack London Aquatic Center, 115 Embarcadero, in Estuary Park, on the Embarcadero, between Oak St. and 5th Ave. 208-6060. www.jlac.org 

“Running for Office 101” For potential candidates about the realities of running for an elected office, and help them create a work plan for their own campaign, from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., check in at 8:30 a.m. at Peralta Community College District Boardroom, 333 East 8th, across from Laney College Football Field., Oakland. Sponsored by Training Institute for Leadership Enrichment. Cost is $45-$75. 763-9523. staff@bwopa.org 

Bob Schildgen, author of “Hey Mr. Green” a collection of popular environmental advice columns originally written for Sierra Magazine, will talk about his book at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge at Shattuck, in the 3rd floor Community Meeting Room. 981-6233. 

Disability Film Festival Adult Classics (all still PG) from noon to 4 p.m., repeated 5 to 9 p.m. at Gaia Arts Center, 2120 Allston Way. Tickets are $5-$20 sliding scale at the door. 845-5576. www.culturedisabilitytalent.org/superfest 

E-waste Collection Event Recycle Your Electronics! E-waste accepted: computer monitors, computers/computer components, televisions, VCR & DVD players, toner cartridges, printers, fax machines, copiers, telephone equipment, cell phones, MP3 players. NO appliances, batteries, microwaves, paints, pesticides, etc. Sat. and Sun. from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at El Cerrito DMV, 6400 Manila Ave., El Cerrito. For more details, visit www.unwaste.com or call 1-888-832-9839. 

“34 Years in Murals” Open house at La Peña from 3 to 5 p.m. with muralists and artists Ray Patlan, Susie Lundy, Tirso Gonzalez and Juana, Alicia Montoya, performances at 6 p.m. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Friends of the Bay Trail in Richmond Celebrating both the 20th anniversary of the San Francisco Bay Trail and the 10th anniversary of TRAC, the Trails for Richmond Action Committee with guided walks and bicycling trips along Richmond’s shoreline. Details at www.pointrichmond.com/baytrail/calendar.htm.  

Master Gardeners at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market Get advice on watering, plant selection and pest management from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Center St., between MLK and Milvia. 639-1275. http://amcg.ucdavis.edu 

Pinball Weekend at Playland Sat. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 10979 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. Cost is $10-$15. 232-4264 ext. 25. www.playland-not-at-the-beach.org 

“US Labor in the Global Economy” A discussion led by Scott Marshall, Chair, Labor Commission of CPUSA at 10 a.m at the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave., between Alcatraz & 66th. Hard copies of suggested readings available at the Library. 595-7417. www.marxistlibr.org 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Lawn Bowling on the green at the corner of Acton St. and Bancroft Way every Wed. and Sat. at 10 a.m. for ages 12 and up. Wear flat soled shoes, no heels. Free lessons. 841-2174.  

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, held every Sat. from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552. 

SUNDAY, JUNE 7 

Rosa Parks Elementary Kids’ Carnival with entertainment, activities and food, from noon to 4 p.m. at 920 Allston Way. Free. 644-8812. 

Sequoias Family Day A family exploration day with interactive exhibits, science and art activities from 1 to 4 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Admission is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

Temescal Street Fair from noon to 6 p.m. from 45th-51st Telegraph Ave., North Oakland, with food and drink from local businesses, live music and activities for children, arts, crafts and community booths. Sponsored by the Temescal Telegraph Business Improvement District. 830-7327. www.temescaldistrict.org 

Localize! Environmetnal Action at the Grassroots with examples of worm composting, greywater systems, recycled art, bike repair, and more from 11 a.m. to 3p.m. at BAM/PFA Sculpture Garden. bampfa.berkeley.edu/community_day 

MarketPlace Dinner Prepare and share a gourmet vegan dinner with chef Barry Schenker, from 4 to 9 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Cost is $25-$30. Reservations required. www.marketplacedinners.org 

Berkeley Rep Family Series “Summer Fun” from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Nevo Education Center, 2071 Addison St. Recommended for age four and up. Free, but bring a book to donate to a school library. 647-2973. 

Social Action Forum with Prof. Chris O’Sullivan talking about the Middle East at 10 a.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302, ext. 306. 

Free Sailboat Rides from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Cal Sailing Club, Berkeley Marina. Wear warm, waterproof clothing and bring a change of clothes in case you get wet. Children 5 and over welcome with parent or guardian. www.cal-sailing.org 

Memorial for John Havard, 1949-2009, of the Saturday Night Band from 3 to 6 p.m. at Starry Plough, 3101 Shattuck Ave. 

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 

Tibetan Buddhism with Sylvia Gretchen on “The Light of Asia in the World Today” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 809-1000. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

Sew Your Own Open Studio Come learn to use our industrial and domestic machines, or work on your own projects, from 2 to 6 p.m. at 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. Also on Thurs. from 2 to 6 p.m. Cost is $5 per hour. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

CITY MEETINGS 

Mental Health Commission meets Thurs., May 28, at 5 p.m. at 2640 MLK Jr. Way, at Derby. 981-5217. 

Council Agenda Committee meets Mon., June 1, at 2:30 p.m., at 2180 Milvia St. 981-6900. 

www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil/agenda-committee 

City Council meets Tues., June 2, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers. 981-6900. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Community Environmental Advisory Commission meets Thurs., June 4, at 7 p.m., at 2118 Milvia St. Nabil Al-Hadithy, 981-7460.  

Landmarks Preservation Commission meets Thurs., June 4, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7429. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/landmarks 

West Berkeley Project Area Commission meets Thurs., June 4, at 7 p.m. at the James Kenney Recreation Center, 8th & Virginia. 981-7418.