Berkeley City Manager Christine Daniel is leaving her post to become an assistant city administrator in Oakland, officials in both cities said today.

Daniel, who has lived in Oakland for 25 years, has been Berkeley's city manager since November 2011 but she will start her new job in Oakland on Aug. 10, according to both cities.

Daniel's appointment in Oakland was announced by Sabrina Landreth, who currently is Emeryville's city manager but will take the top job in Oakland on July 1. 

Daniel will be one of two assistant city administrators in Oakland. Claudia Cappio began work as an assistant city administrator on April 27. 

Landreth also announced that Stephanie Hom, who currently is Moraga's administrative services director and has lived in Oakland for 24 years, will become a deputy city administrator in Oakland effective July 27. 

Landreth said in a statement, "Christine and Stephanie are stellar professionals whose equitable and transparent approach demonstrates respect for staff and community stakeholders alike. Both enjoy outstanding reputations for their dedication to delivering quality customer service and bringing creative solutions to the cities they serve." 

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said, "I am excited to welcome this dynamic, high-caliber team of experienced, forward-thinking professionals -- all of whom are longtime Oaklanders -- to drive this city forward. Their proven commitment to public service, getting things done and passion for Oakland will be instrumental in making Oakland the vibrant, equitable city we all want it to be." 

Daniel said, "I am honored to be joining the Oakland team. I look forward to working in my home city and devoting my skills and experience to a place that I love." 

Hom said, "I love Oakland and I'm extremely honored and excited to be able to work for the Oakland community and alongside City of Oakland employees who work hard every day to help make Oakland better and brighter."

Berkeley City Manager Christine Daniel today announced that she is resigning to take a job as an assistant city manager in Oakland. 

She submitted the following letter to Mayor Tom Bates and the Berkeley City Council: 

"After much consideration I am submitting my resignation from the City of Berkeley, effective July 24, 2015. It has been an honor to have served as your City Manager for the last three and one-half years, and to have spent 15 years of my professional career with this very special community. I am leaving to take the position of Assistant City Administrator with the City of Oakland.

"I want to express my appreciation to Mayor Bates and every member of the City Council, each of whom serve Berkeley with deep commitment. We are fortunate to have such an engaged, thoughtful City Council who are devoted to this community and are willing to address the tough issues facing cities today.  

"Berkeley is filled with creative, passionate people who are not afraid to try something new or to challenge conventional wisdom, while at the same time remaining committed to preserving the unique character of this wonderful place. It has been a pleasure to work with so many. 

"I am grateful to all of the employees of the City of Berkeley I have worked alongside over the years; they are a talented , enthusiastic and courageous group of people. I cannot thank them enough for the excellent work they do. 

"Public service is challenging;Berkeley employees are outstanding. 

"Finally, I want to thank the executive leadership team, especially our Deputy City 1 Manager Dee Williams-Ridley. Each of them holds a special place in my heart. They are a brilliant, dedicated group who I am confident will continue to lead the organization exceptionally well. 

"The news that Berkeley City Manager Christine Daniel is leaving to become Assistant City Administrator in Oakland means that Berkeley will be losing a highly valued, dedicated public servant.  

“But while I’m disappointed for Berkeley’s sake, I want to congratulate Ms. Daniel and am happy that Oakland will be gaining one of the most capable civic administrators I’ve had the pleasure to work with. And I am glad that Ms. Daniel will have the opportunity to apply her skills to new challenges. 

“It has been a great pleasure to work with Ms. Daniel, and I will miss her keen intelligence and extraordinary dedication and perseverance, not to mention her ability to juggle an astonishing number of complex issues and initiatives simultaneously. 

“She took the helm as City Manager in November of 2011, and during her tenure, Berkeley has enjoyed remarkable accomplishments. It’s not easy being the chief administrator of one of the most proactive City governments in the nation. Ms. Daniel met the challenge head-on and has served as an effective partner with the City Council in helping us meet the complex demands of an extraordinary city. 

“The progress that we see in Berkeley today didn’t happen by accident. Ms. Daniel played an important role in helping to foster our thriving Downtown and the burgeoning spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship that animates Berkeley as a leader in technology, arts and culture, artisan food and beverages, and progressive policies aimed at helping those in need, providing equal opportunity for all and protecting the welfare of each individual and the planet as a whole. 

“I will miss her service in Berkeley, and I wish her well in her new role in Oakland.” 

 

A 26-year-old man who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia was committed today to 33 years to life at a state mental hospital for murdering a homeowner in the Berkeley hills three years ago. 

Daniel Jordan Dewitt stood quietly and didn't say anything while family members of the man he killed, 67-year-old Peter Cukor, said the legal system failed because it didn't keep Dewitt institutionalized even though his mental health problems were well-documented. 

Dewitt, who graduated from Alameda High School in 2007 and is the grandson of former Alameda City Councilman Al Dewitt, used a flower pot to kill Cukor, who owned a logistics consulting firm, outside Cukor's home at 2 Park Gate Road at about 9 p.m. on Feb. 18, 2012. 

Cukor's wife, Andrea Cukor, said today that before her husband was killed Dewitt had been arrested nine times for actions related to his mental illness but each time lawyers argued that he should be released from mental institutions and judges approved his release. 

Cukor said Dewitt was "a ticking time bomb sent out into the streets, a clear danger to himself and others." 

On March 22, 2012, a month after the incident, a judge ruled that Dewitt was incompetent to stand trial and shortly after that he was sent to the Napa State Hospital for treatment. 

But last year it was ruled that he was able to understand the criminal proceedings against him and assist his lawyer and he should stand trial. 

Dewitt recently pleaded no contest to first-degree murder and other charges but a judge then ruled that he was not guilty by reason of insanity. 

The outcome of the case means that Dewitt likely will spend the rest of his life at a mental institution unless doctors determine at some future time that he's been restored to sanity. 

Andrea Cukor asked at a hearing today that was packed by her husband's family members and friends how it could be that Dewitt was not guilty by reason of insanity. 

She said, "This is not a game of semantics - lives are at stake." 

Cukor said, "The systems must change. It is time to treat the mentally ill." 

Cukor also complained that Berkeley police were slow to respond when her husband called them to ask for help. 

She said her husband told her that police were on their way but she said, "They weren't sending anyone" and "an officer who inquired was told not to respond." 

Cukor and her two sons, Alexander and Christopher Cukor, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Berkeley, alleging that police were negligent because they didn't send officers right away. The suit was settled in October 2013 for an undisclosed amount. 

The city didn't admit any fault but agreed to change the police communications center's policies in order to improve public safety. 

Andrea Cukor said today that because Dewitt killed her husband, "I no longer have anything resembling the life that I had with Peter for 42 years."  

She said her life is "shattered" and she has since sold their home and moved away from Berkeley. 

Cukor described her husband as "an exceptional man" who was "warm and kind, sweet and gentle, loyal and wise, loving and fun, capable and brilliant." 

Alexander Cukor said his father was "robust, strong, brilliant and funny" and made him feel safe and loved. 

Cukor said his father's murder "was a totally preventable tragedy" and wouldn't have happened if the legal system hadn't failed. 

At the hearing today, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Paul Delucchi said he's been involved in many horrible cases but, "This care really does stand out" because it was so tragic and involved a remarkable chain of events. 

Delucchi said Cukor's family members raised "reasonable and justifiable questions" about the way the legal system handles mentally ill people but he said, "I'm sorry that I don't have an answer and can't guarantee that it won't happen again." 

Dewitt's parents, Al Dewitt Jr. and Candy Dewitt, attended virtually all of his previous court hearings but weren't present today. 

Dewitt's lawyer, Brian Bloom, said they didn't attend out of respect for Cukor's family. 

After the incident, the Dewitts said their son was a good kid who was well-liked by his teachers and fellow students but became mentally ill after he turned 18 and was neglected by the mental health system. 

The parents said in a statement in 2012 that Dewitt "was an all-league football player, a talented writer and a passionate music lover." 

They said Dewitt had been in and out of the hospital the previous four years and, "Unfortunately, the system did not allow Daniel to receive the involuntary treatment that would have helped him because of the qualifications for an involuntary hold, which are being an imminent danger to self, to others or gravely disabled." 

Copyright © 2015 by Bay City News, Inc. -- Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. 

/www/bcn/general/05/newsclip.15.05.29.15.24.00.1.txt

Robert Sherwood Morse, the retired Archbishop of the Anglican Province of Christ The King, died peacefully, at age 91, on Thursday, May 28, at 2:25 a.m. in his house in Berkeley. His wife, Nancy Morse, and their daughter, Nina Gladish, were at his bedside. The cause of death was pancreatic cancer. 

“All I ever wanted to be was a college chaplain,” he once said, but God had greater plans for him. On Jan. 28, 1978, in Denver he was consecrated Bishop of the newly formed Diocese of Christ The King, an orthodox Anglo-Catholic church body formed in 1977 to ensure the continuation of historic Anglican Christianity in America. This traditional Diocese arose in response to radical changes made in the fundamental faith and practices of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America (ECUSA). 

As other traditional priests and churches joined this movement, the Diocese became a nation-wide Province and he was elected Archbishop. He retired as Archbishop of the Province on January 25, 2008. 

In his 64 years as a priest and bishop, Archbishop Morse created college ministries at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley, founded the York School in Monterey, and established many churches in the Bay Area, including St. Stephen’s in Yountville, St. Thomas’s Church in San Francisco, and St. Ann Chapel in Palo Alto. At the time of his death he was acting provost of the traditional St. Joseph of Arimathea Anglican Theological Seminary in Berkeley, which he founded in 1979. 

The Most Reverend Robert Sherwood Morse was born April 10, 1924, in San Francisco, California, to Carl Lambert Morse and Estelle Scott Morse. He grew up in nearby Burlingame, graduating from Burlingame High School. 

As a young boy, he often accompanied his father to Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton to converse with his father’s mentors. The visits inspired the future Archbishop with a wonder-filled curiosity at the infinite space of the universe. He later said that he “backed into theology” through history while trying to understand “why mankind was so mixed up”. 

In 1942 he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in the Infantry Signal Corps in Alaska until his discharge in 1945. He received his B.A. from Pacific College (now University of the Pacific), Stockton, California, in 1948, where he excelled in intercollegiate forensics. He graduated from Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Illinois in 1950. 

Archbishop Morse was ordained an Episcopal deacon on July 8, 1950, and a priest on February 22, 1951. From 1950 to 1952 he served as an assistant at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Burlingame, California. In 1951 he established St. Elizabeth's Church in South San Francisco and was its Vicar until 1957. He also established the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Stanford University in 1952. And in 1954, he established St. Edmund's Episcopal Church in Pacifica, California. In 1957 he moved to Berkeley and established the Episcopal Chaplaincy at the University of California at Berkeley, working there from 1957 to 1961. 

In 1962 he co-founded York School in Monterey, California, originally as an Episcopal college preparatory school for boys, and was Assistant Headmaster until 1965. In 1966 he was called to be Rector of St. Peter's Church in Oakland, California, where he served until 1984. 

In 1977 the Rev. Morse and other concerned Episcopal clergy and laity gathered in St. Louis, Missouri. They set forth a statement of faith called the ‘Affirmation of Saint Louis,’ which expressed their commitment as Episcopalians to orthodox Christian doctrine and discipline. In separating from ECUSA, they created the Diocese of Christ the King, which included six western parishes. In 1978, Father Morse was consecrated Bishop by The Rt. Rev. Albert A. Chambers, retired Episcopal Bishop of Springfield, Illinois, acting as chief consecrator with two co-consecrators to ensure the transmission of the Apostolic Succession. 

As new congregations were established across the country they petitioned to affiliate with the emerging Diocese. Soon Bishop Morse was responsible for a nation-wide Anglo-Catholic diocese. In 1991, the Diocese of Christ the King voted to divide into three geographical dioceses, and later added a fourth diocese, under a provincial structure creating the Anglican Province of Christ the King. The bishops of the dioceses then elected Bishop Morse as the first Archbishop of the Province. 

Bishop Morse was a charismatic figure. Standing six feet three inches tall, he was crowned with a shock of white hair and his deep voice was resonant. He was an avid reader of T.S. Eliot, Boris Pasternak, and C.S. Lewis and often quoted them in his sermons. His favorite lines from Pasternak’s poem “The Wedding” were: “For life, too, is only an instant,/ Only the dissolving of ourselves/ In the selves of all others/ As if bestowing a gift.” 

The former Episcopal priest and Zen philosopher Alan Watts discerned a passionate spirit in the young Father Morse and wrote in his memoir In My Own Way that “His subsequent success as a priest derives from the fact that he is one of the few people who genuinely feels that God is exuberant love.” 

In 1957, Archbishop Morse married Nancy Burkett Nickel, a beautiful widow with two children, at St. Mary the Virgin Church in San Francisco with 

Bishop Karl Morgan Block officiating. Years later, a young student once asked Archbishop Morse, “How do you separate out the love for your wife and your love for Jesus?” His response: “I don’t.” 

The Archbishop’s love for God would be translated into a medley of friendships with non-believers, seekers, the lonely, and the unloved. His parting words with a friend were nearly always, “All is Grace.” In 2010 the 91-year old architect John Carl Warnecke, a former agnostic who had been diagnosed with cancer, asked his old friend to baptize him. During the ceremony, the Archbishop poured a jug of ice-cold water over his head “To wake him up!” 

In his later years the Archbishop developed a ministry to the oarsmen of the University of California Crew Team, who lived in rooms in buildings of St. Joseph of Arimathea Seminary in Berkeley. Aside from their rent, the oarsmen were required to serve at chapel services. Here they were likely to hear the Archbishop say, “Life is a journey with God, into God.” Just before his death, the crew team named one of their boats Archbishop Robert S. Morse in his honor. 

Archbishop Morse was also the executive director of the American Church Union, editor of American Church News, founder and editor of the New Oxford Review, and a director of St. Dorothy's Rest, a retreat complex near Sebastopol, California. 

He is survived by his wife Nancy, a daughter, Mrs. John (Nina) Gladish, a son Mr. John Nickel, nine grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. 

A funeral mass will be held on Saturday, June 6 at 10:00 a.m. at St. Peter’s Church, 6013 Lawton Avenue, Oakland, CA. Memorial contributions can be sent to the Anglican Province of Christ the King, 2725 Sacramento Street, San Francisco, CA 94115, or to St. Joseph of Arimathea Anglican Theological College, 2316 Bowditch, P.O. Box 40020, Berkeley, CA 94704.

Say what? Did Mayor Tom Bates really say that the purpose of the zoning code requirement for asking “significant community benefits” from the seven allowable extra-tall buildings in Berkeley’s downtown was to “incentivize” [his word, not mine] building some office towers here?  

This is the quote as transcribed from Tuesday's City Council meeting:  

“So the idea was we would incentivize people to--hopefully, we would like to see the buildings constructed but it also-- in the future people look at this-- hoping we are going to incentivize people to build office buildings rather than just build apartments. So there was a thinking in our thoughts that because the downtown needs above anything else, if you look at what our greatest need is -- people may disagree with this -- but in my judgment is we need an office building. We need a first class office building in downtown Berkeley. So in any case that's the thinking. That's what is behind it.”  

Sure, what Berkeley needs is more office jobs for more people who would make more demands on our already stressed housing supply. I don’t think so. 

The dirty little secret is that one reason for the housing crunch in the Bay is that the jobs/housing balance is perpetually out of whack, geographically unfocussed. We’ve ostensibly been tasked by the Association of Bay Area governments with adding more housing near our BART stations, per ABAG’s widely denounced Plan Bay Area. We’ve built a lot of fancy luxury units possibly intended for people who want to BART their way to San Francisco’s high tech jobs, but almost nothing for people who must BART to Berkeley from Richmond and Antioch and San Leandro for low-wage service jobs at UC and elsewhere because they can’t find homes here. 

If Bates gets his high rise office buildings downtown, they’ll empty out in the next inevitable tech bust, exactly as the building formerly known as the Great Western/Power Bar/ CitiBank/the-who-the-hell-knows-what-building has done in the previous busts which I well remember from my previous tech career (which started in the funky loft space above what is now Rasputin’s on Telegraph). And then they’ll be ripe for U.C. Berkeley’s newly-rechristened Real Estate office to pluck off the tax rolls, exactly what happened with the Golden Bear building on University, which was sold to a gullible city council with the promise that it would provide sales tax revenue. Instead it's U.C. offices and finance corporations. The “community benefits” angle was milked on that one too, with the never-fulfilled promise that the YMCA would move to that site. 

Maybe it’s time for Mountain View to add housing for those in its already existing jobs instead. And for Fremont to add more job sites to the acres of strip-mall parking lots which serve its predominantly one-story housing stock—Fremont even has BART. 

The Capitelli-Bates “significant community benefits” calculation scheme leaves a lot of bread on the corporate table. The accepted way of calculating what new development offers a community is to get a professional third party assessment of how much profit up-zoning has added to the building site in question. Instead, Capitelli and Bates, surely math wizards both, claim they’ve done it on the back of the proverbial paper napkin, as Bates recounted on Tuesday: 

“The highest amount we found was $20 a square foot for an entire building. We said that's one thing. But another thing that would be much better would be to go way beyond the $20 a square foot. Because they are doing the whole building and we are just doing a portion above 75 feet. That is how we came up with $20 a square foot. We said five times that. A hundred dollars a square foot. Then from 120 to 180 that's another value so we added another $50 a square foot. So $150.” 

In other words, we just made up the figures. 

At the council meeting and in letters written beforehand, plenty of citizens who are better qualified than Capitelli and Bates to deal with numbers pointed out that such estimates were dramatically off the mark. We posted a few of these analyses, from Kate Harrison and James Hendry and Rob Wrenn, in last week’s Planet. All concluded that many millions more in community benefits could and should be gleaned from the profits on just one project, the proposed Residences at Berkeley Plaza (RatBP) on the corner of Shattuck and Harold Way. That one would set the standard for future highrises, so it should not be undervalued. 

The principal way Councilmember Jesse Arreguin’s alternative significant community benefits proposal was much better than Capitelli/Bates’ is that it called for applicants to submit pro forma cost analyses which would be vetted by competent third party consultants. At least Arreguin is smart enough to know what he doesn’t know. 

But both Bates and Arreguin make a mistake by proposing that agreements to use union labor should be counted as part of the community benefits. Here’s the Bates statement at the meeting: 

"I think there is an extraordinary amount of money that we would collect on apartments and condominiums up to 120 and 150 above that. And then from that figure we will give a credit, because we would like to see people use labor, so we will give them a credit, so we will give them a five percent credit on the amount of the construction costs. And we know the cost. Because when we go into the building permit we have a good idea of what exactly the building cost is going to cost. We think that's a fair figure because what happens when you build these tall buildings, you will build them with steel, concrete. Those members who work in the buildings are going to be labor, people who do those trades. But the other trades, the allied trades that work with them, the people who do the framing and some of the electrical work and HVAC, we want to cover them. So we think this is a sufficient incentive for people to choose to use labor in this way.” 

Translated into standard English, what he’s saying first is that a project labor agreement should be counted as a major part of community benefits. In Polspeak "labor" equates to members of the powerful building trades unions.  

But also, he's saying that tall buildings which require steel and concrete construction methods (as opposed to those 5 stories and under, which can be wood-based) are preferable simply because they employ workers in the unionized building trades (which are incidentally major contributors to political campaigns, including the Measures R). This outdated assumption ignores the fact, well explained by Tim Hansen in the last issue of the Planet, that wood construction is a much better choice when climate change is factored into the equation. It’s time to stop promoting environmentally costly make-work, even for union workers 

Finally, saying that something might be left in the pot to promote the arts is a joke. I previously referred to the Capitelli/Bates plan as a slush fund, and I stand by that opinion.  

Here’s Bates: 

“ …[W]e are saying that if the owners of the building should really put money into the building in arts or in culture and make that kind of a commitment, that we in fact will recognize that commitment. It is not going to be done by anyone except the city council. So what would happen is they would propose something and then it would come to the city council and the city council would make a decision whether we think this is an appropriate use of the money.”  

That’s a slush fund in my book. 

The plan which Bates tried to sell to the Berkeley Arts Commission is that all new buildings would be required to contribute 1% of their cost to fund the arts in Berkeley except for downtown projects. The Commission soundly rejected the exemption for downtown, insisting that the fee should be applied across the board as it has been for years in other cities, and allocated by the experts on the Arts Commission. This is yet another case where Bates and his cronies have bypassed the very commissioners they themselves appointed to advise them—the same thing that happened not long ago to the Homeless Commission. 

And speaking of homelessness and attendant ills, the first half of Tuesday’s meeting was devoted to a pathetic parade of clients from the South Berkeley Drop-In center worried about losing $35,000 in funding if the City Manager’s recommendation was followed. Only $35,000—and the RatBP will be worth many millions in profits to its out of town investors. The gross undervaluation scheme proposed by Capitelli and Bates, along with their questionable reliance on off-site affordable housing if any were to be funded, completely ignores the real needs of Berkeley’s poorest citizens.  

At Tuesday’s meeting the seats in the council chambers were packed, and an equivalent number of citizens who couldn’t get in packed the upstairs hall and the vestibule as the meeting started. As has become standard under Bates, the item which brought the most citizens out was scheduled as the last item on the agenda, and of course even at one minute per speaker they ran out of time. 

I was prepared to do a clever riff on the date to which the community benefits discussion was re-scheduled: June 16, Bloomsday, celebrated as the day Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses walked the streets of Dublin: Mayor Bates’ speaking style is reminiscent of Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness depiction of Bloom and friends. Sadly, as I was finishing this I got word that the meeting for the 16^th has been cancelled, future date To Be Decided. 

Rumor has it that fixer Mark Rhoades “needs” to have the entitlements for RatBP tied down before Council’s recess in late July. The Capitelli/Bates allies among the councilmembers seem to be trying as hard as they can to please Rhoades and his financier principals in L.A., but many of Berkeley’s citizens don’t appear to have gotten the memo. If you’re interested in joining their efforts to slow down the steamroller, they can be contacted at sustainableberkeleycoalition@gmail.com. 

Click here to see the video which cleverly explains the Mission Moratorium on luxury housing.,

On Tuesday, the Berkeley City Council heard public comment on Mayor Tom Bates and Councilmember Laurie Capitelli’s proposal for establishing a community benefits system for five buildings taller than 75 feet located downtown. Vice President Navid, along with her chief-of-staff, Zahra Abadin, spoke against the Bates-Capitelli proposal due to its failure to deliver the “significant community benefits” promised to the residents of Berkeley in the 2012 Downtown Berkeley Plan. 

The Bates-Capitelli proposal would require developers to pay a mitigation fee to the city based on the square footage of residential development above 75 feet, which would in turn be used to pay for affordable housing and arts and cultural benefits. However, in exchange for a Project Labor Agreement, developers would receive the a credit towards the mitigation fee equal to 5% of the total costs of construction. For the project at 2211 Harold Way, this would represent a reduction of nearly 50% of the mitigation fee. Vice President Navid expressed concern that the developer would attempt to reduce the required fee to zero by claiming the preservation of Shattuck Cinemas as an arts and cultural benefit. “Such a situation would represent no community benefits beyond the status quo, and would thus be unacceptable,” said Vice President Navid at Tuesday’s meeting. “My office strongly supports Project Labor Agreements, and encourages the City Council to do everything possible to ensure that they occur, but not at the cost of affordable housing. Similarly, we support the preservation of Shattuck Cinemas, but not at the cost of affordable housing.” 

Instead of adopting the Bates-Capitelli proposal, Vice President Navid encouraged the City Council to adopt the process put forward by Councilmember Arreguin, which was developed from community input at a public meeting. Councilmember Arreguin’s proposal would require downtown developers to meet one of two sets of requirements: 1. Affordable housing, a project labor agreement, arts and cultural benefits, and various other requirements, or 2. A variety of community benefits chosen by the developer and approved by the City Council which are equal or greater in value than those required under the first option. Additionally, Councilmember Arreguin’s proposal would require any project to provide the maximum community benefits feasible for such a project, thus ensuring the “significant community benefits” promised in the Downtown Area Plan are delivered. 

Vice President Navid supports Councilmember Arreguin’s proposal because it would result in the greatest level of community benefits, including supporting Project Labor Agreements without negatively affecting affordable housing in the city.

As yet another Memorial Day another fades away from our consciousness, we should demand far more accountability from our policy makers who send our young men and women to ill-defined battles waged in our name. 

Our elected officials have initiated and sustained these conflicts often over massive public opposition and have rarely suffered personal tragedies on the battlefield. Former President Bush served in the National Guard and his vice-President, Cheney, successfully obtained five deferments. President Obama isn’t a military veteran, nor are many of the presidential hopefuls who have declared or might declare a run for the White House in 2016. We should not only remember our own fallen heroes but offer our prayers and apologies to the millions of our adversaries who perished and continue to die in unnecessary wars based on the deceitful policies of our politicians. With an all-volunteer army, the rich will invariably escape the horrors of war which will increasingly be drawn from a disadvantaged population.

I have been following the debate over significant public benefits as required by for properties over 6 stories in the downtown. Developers are already required by Municipal Code Chapter 22, section 20 to mitigate any negative impacts caused by their development. Thus, significant community benefits must be items that benefit the general public after all the negative impacts have been mitigated. 

The development of hundreds of units of apartments, hotel space and condos in downtown will impact the ability of residents of Berkeley neighborhoods to find parking in the downtown area. It is incredible that developers state that people who can afford $3000 to $4000+ a month rent for these new developments will not want to have cars and that they won’t have guests arriving in cars.  

Developers must be required to mitigate this impact by providing additional parking for residents of Berkeley neighborhoods who wish to go downtown. For example, I regularly attend the YMCA and use the downtown library and shop and eat downtown. I drive because there is no public transportation serving my neighborhood. If the developers do not provide additional parking or pay the costs of a shuttle bus to/from downtown and the neighborhoods, Berkeley neighborhood residents will be forced to shop and eat in Walnut Creek or Emeryville where parking exists. Please require developers to mitigate their impacts to prevent making the downtown inaccessible to neighborhood residents. 

Additionally, the development of thousands more units in the City will impact the Berkeley Unified School District. It is unrealistic and illegal to assume that none of these residents will have children. As the Berkeley schools are already at capacity, the developers must be required by Chapter 22, section 20 to mitigate the impact of additional students by paying the costs of constructing new classrooms for these children. 

I ask the Council to ensure that these impacts and other negative impacts are mitigated by the developers by impact fees. Significant community benefits cannot be used to solve the problems that the projects create, but must be for projects that benefit the general community only after the negative impacts have been mitigated.

As your constituent, I urge you to reject the idea of extending Berkeley parking-meter hours beyond 6 pm. On balance, I believe you will find this proposal extremely unpopular, divisive, and counterproductive. 

The unpopularity and divisiveness were clearly apparent in 2009, when Oakland briefly tried extending meter hours to 8 pm. Widespread public outrage soon obliged Oakland elected officials to stage an embarrassing and costly retreat, rolling back meter hours to 6 pm. 

The 5/21 Transportation Commission packet includes a staff report citing West Hollywood's "successful" extension of meter hours. But West Hollywood's acceptance of expanded meter hours has a different context -- namely, the South Coast Air Quality Management District's longstanding efforts to nearly eliminate free parking in urban Los Angeles and Orange Counties, to reduce the L.A. basin's specific smog problems. 

Angelenos have gotten used to this. I believe that Oakland's public rebellion against expanded meter hours is more relevant to Berkeley -- and would likely be repeated, with at least the same fervor, in Berkeley. 

The counterproductiveness of expanding meter hours seems clear in the context of Council's referral: Councilmember Arreguin's Council motion referred only to "the Downtown and Telegraph Avenue," yet somehow the Transportation Commission is eyeing 8 pm meter hours in the Elmwood and Fourth Street. 

More importantly, Councilmember Arreguin specifically proposed "that revenue...be earmarked to fund...new homeless services." Many Berkeley residents would like to see more-effective homeless services. But extending meter hours beyond 6 pm seems almost certain to keep patrons away from businesses at the crucial dinner hour, and beyond. 

That invites yet another replay of our core commercial districts' familiar death spiral: Reduced evening patronage of businesses reduces "active uses" and curtails businesses' hours. That, in turn, abandons more of commercial districts to become nighttime campgrounds and hangouts. The prospect of wading through a homeless encampment repels more patrons. And the vicious cycle spins downward. 

In public perception, even if not in fact, Berkeley would soon end up with a "worse homeless problem." 

There is a more productive, and equitable, way to fund better homeless services -- especially in the downtown: Council is on the verge of approving several very large downtown development projects, which would themselves have negative impacts on existing downtown businesses. 

Rather than further punishing downtown businesses by imposing evening parking fees, it seems far more equitable -- and more productive -- to fund new homeless services by maximizing the community benefit fees that the City receives from the developers of these large properties. 

For all of these reasons, I urge you to reject the idea of expanding parking-meter hours beyond 6 pm. The best way to steer clear of public outrage over this unpopular and counterproductive idea is to avoid triggering that outrage in the first place. Act as wisely as you did in 2013, when you were presented with the same unpopular idea under the "GoBerkeley" rubric: Reject extended parking hours now, at the proposal stage, before they become political Kryptonite. 

I spent yesterday morning in an Oakland courtroom waiting for my 37-year old mentally ill son to appear before a judge for fighting with Berkeley police. He spent four nights in jail and was still in custody with bail set at over $10,000. 

I hadn’t seen Sean for five months, since I finally took out a restraining order to prevent him from coming to my house (usually around midnight) demanding money or to move in with me (my cottage is 900 sq. ft).  

We tried that living arrangement a few years ago and I ended up calling the Oakland Police several times when Sean went into abusive rages. It would take the Oakland PD over three hours to arrive by which time Sean had left the house temporarily. Eventually, I rented him a room elsewhere and changed the locks on my doors. I’ve offered him help to get medical insurance and see a doctor, but Sean has drifted since then and became homeless last year. He kept up his demands for money from me and said if I didn’t help him, I had no reason to be alive. I finally got the restraining order five months ago. 

He insists he’s fine. He’s self-medicating and the street drugs and delay in treatment will just cause more brain damage over time. I don’t believe psych meds always help everyone, but from support groups I’ve been attending for years, I’ve never heard of a patient getting any better without drugs and/or treatment. 

So yesterday, I sat for four hours in a chaotic courtroom until the judge—switching her focus from cases of DUI and petty theft on her left to cases of prisoners-in-custody on her right—called my son’s name. Sean was brought out in prison clothes. 

He looked rough but wasn’t beaten up or comatose, and his nose hadn’t been broken again. He was asking the judge and public defender semi-coherent questions. Watching him showed me how bright and charming he can be when he is desperate. He has a university degree, medical training, and two kids he can’t see because of a restraining order. He’s homeless and can’t keep a job and he still won’t admit to being ill. 

Like so many of the mentally ill, my son has a condition called anosognia or “lack of insight” by which some mechanism or chemistry in the decision-making frontal lobe area won’t allow him to see that there’s something wrong with him. People unfamiliar with the mentally ill, including my son’s estranged father, might call it denial or defiance. This condition of anosognia is often a symptom of schizophrenia. 

Sean is my beloved only child and yet because he is an adult, I can’t get him a diagnosis or treatment without his full cooperation. As the laws stand today, Sean must request treatment (and I would gladly pay for it), or commit a felony to even be psychologically evaluated. My son’s arrest, confinement, and public defense must have cost thousands of dollars. And at this point, I don’t know how many times he’s been arrested. 

Sean can figure out how to apply for and get accepted to nursing school, but he can’t see the one thing that is making his life a living hell--his illness. He will take street drugs with who-knows-what in them, but won’t even consider taking prescribed psychiatric drugs or mood stabilizers (he calls them “crazy pills”) that might make his life manageable and far less dangerous.  

Yesterday Sean was released by the judge on his own recognizance without bail to face another (unknown to me) arrest warrant in San Francisco. After the judge’s order for Sean to return to court in 30 days and Sean’s exit, the public defender approached me. It was clear from my tears and our resemblance that I’m Sean’s mother. 

The first thing the attorney told me was “My client won’t give me permission to speak to you.” 

I told him that my son is mentally ill and needs help and the attorney nodded, but said there was nothing he or I can do without his client’s permission. 

I asked “So he’ll just keep getting arrested?”  

He said yes, probably, and that he saw this kind of thing a lot. I asked about having Sean committed via the 5150 law and he said that is a long way away from where Sean is now. In short, Sean would have to commit a serious crime to be arrested, evaluated, and then (maybe) committed for psychiatric treatment. 

And there is nothing I can do. At least my son is alive, and as long as he’s alive, there’s hope. What I can do is tell my story and listen to the thousands of other family members going through this hell.  

If the current laws are unjust, we must change these laws. By failing to change the laws, county mental health directors are transferring the seriously mentally ill to jails, prisons, shelters, and morgues.  

This could be your child someday. 

Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s criticism of Iraqi forces not having “the will to fight’ closely reflects our own reluctance to send ground forces to the region. The birth of ISIS followed the dismissal of tens of thousands of disgruntled Ba’athist soldiers and police officers by Paul Bremer following the US invasion in 2003. We ensconced our own puppet - the thoroughly corrupt and incompetent Shiite, Nouri Maliki as prime minister who waged a pogrom against the Sunnis and voila - ISIS surged in strength and numbers beckoning radical Sunnis from around the world.  

Following our invasion, the country has proved the perfect breeding ground for Sunni radical Muslims, who have become affiliated with the Islamic State. To heap scorn and derision on the Iraq forces is unfair and unhelpful. If we uncorked the ISIS genie we have a moral responsibility to send in ground troops to degrade and defeat ISIS.

People living in cities around the Bay Area desperately need money to pay for all of the increasingly expensive aspects of living which they encounter, but thank goodness there is a potential source of funding right here in front of us. Huge cash windfalls from initial stock offerings, billions in obscene venture capitalist profits, and the humongous bonuses paid to all the high-tech individuals who are turning our cozy communities into gentrified ghettos, are all large pools of money begging for taxation. This is a lot of money, which can be tapped to help the rest of us ordinary people - we waiters, waitresses, hamburger-flippers, teachers, nurses, gardeners, bums, handicapped, doctors, elderly, lawyers, and accountants - to get off the treadmill. With this Mother Lode we can build or buy a society owned or run by non-profits, trusts, limitless-equity cooperatives, or better still, the government itself. This California Gold Rush need not repeat the errors of 1849. 

INCREASE THE BUSINESS TAX (EVIL TAX) ON ANY ENTITY MAKING LOTS OF MONEY 

It can be done in any city in the Bay Area. Instead of making business taxes a percentage of gross receipts, link the Evil Tax instead to a percentage of the billions in unearned, undeserved, inequitable and entirely unacceptable dollars that these businesses generate for their speculating shareholders; link Evil Taxes as well to a percentage of the excessive salaries these rapacious entities pay their rotten spoiled dotcom employees. Only a simple majority plus one vote is needed for such measures, and certainly we ordinary working folk still outnumber those highfalutin’ brats with their self-driving Tesla cars and their hi-tech America’s Cup boats that don’t even stay in the water. Such ballot measures could involve the creation of a committee of best-qualified experts, such as social welfare counselors, bank tellers, and Robert Reich, to determine how the enormous amounts of confiscated funds could be best distributed amongst the rest of us, in order to ensure we would all become just as wealthy as those other stinkin’ nouveau riche. If required, corresponding ballot measures could be passed, allocating similar dollar amounts from the General Fund, to be distributed directly to “We the People” and "Occupy" thus guaranteeing the treasure chest wasn’t raided by bureaucrats with their pet projects. This is not just a pipe-dream. I personally lived in a country recently where such a program was put in place about 15 years ago, and the results have been impressive. It’s called Venezuela. 

The 58 billion dollar plus current assessed value of just the 2015 Tech IPO Pipeline should give voters a real idea of how much wealth the Bay Area prospectors are planning to grab for themselves just this year! In comparison, the $4 billion yearly rent pittance that Stephen Barton is targeting in his May 22nd piece is hardly worth wasting time on, when the real gold in them thar hills is just one more ballot measure away. If we grab this wealth now and spread it around equitably, then the Bay Area’s lack of “affordable housing” will be solved in one fell swoop. We’ll all be rich enough for Craftsman houses, stately Victorians in chic districts, or 360 degree panoramic view pads above the madding crowd.  

THE TAX WILL BE PAID BY THE FILTHY RICH, NOT BY ANYONE ELSE 

When the Federal income tax was first established, it amounted to 2% and only applied to the richest 10% of the nation’s income earners. We can do better than that now, by imposing 90% tax rates on the excessive income/capital gains of the filthiest top 1% of the Bay Area’s income earners. Of course they will remain disgustingly rich, but at least the rest of us will also be able to dine out occasionally. And as long as we’re not so stupid as to invest our portion of their ill-gotten goods, and make a killing ourselves, we’ll be completely free from the tax burden. 

RECAPTURE THE VALUE WE CREATE AS A COMMUNITY 

Adam Smith himself pointed out, in "The Wealth of Nations" that private individuals should not be able to profit from an internet which was not created by them, but rather by Vice-President Al Gore. Smith wrote: "Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions.” All the residents of the Bay Area, not just capitalist pigs, Steve Jobs, and nerdy engineers, have made the tech world what it is today. Geography, happenstance, weather, and Stanford University, had nothing to do with it whatsoever. We created a diverse, open internet, leveraging it with our jealousies and rivalries in order to bring into existence a high-tech society of unsurpassed inequality. Nothing could be fairer than to eradicate the very environment which made possible such violations of distributive justice which epitomize social inequity. To the barricades and urns we should go, to finally put the Zuckerberg’s of the Bay Area in their place. Let us take most, if not everything, from the rich and distribute it amongst ourselves, since we deserve it far more

Lane splitting is currently and thankfully illegal in the State of California. A bill recently passed the state Assembly to legalize this annoying and dangerous activity. Please don't vote for this legislation. Lane splitting is incredibly dangerous and endangers the lives of bikers and others.  

Most bikers zoom past you coming within inches of your car. You can't even read their plate numbers as the plates are small. They brush your car, sideswipe you and speed off, never to be caught and held accountable. Don't legalize an obviously dangerous impatient method of driving by bikers. 

The rationale for this bill is faulty. They claim they worry about being rear ended if they don't lane split. What about the likelihood of more accidents as you squeeze between cars. Most lane splitters not only engage in this crazy activity, they speed when doing it. Can the CHP catch a speeding lanesplitter, especially one who is fleeing an accident they have caused? 

I am an attorney and practice personal injury law. I can only imagine the vast increase in claims, litigation, and court cases as insurance companies and claimants try to sort out how an accident happened due to lane splitting. Bikers will lie about their speed. They will claim they were only going 10 miles above the flow of traffic. They will never admit they were flying through a narrow space, endangering themselves and others. 

This legislation is poorly thought out and a headache waiting to happen. 

People who drive motorcycles make a choice. If they are in an accident they have little protection and suffer more serious injuries than if they were in a car. This is a choice they have made. Now, under the phony guise of safety, they are asking that they not only endanger their own lives, but further endanger the lives of others by lane splitting, in essence creating a lane of passage that is unsafe for all. 

Their real motive is to alleviate their impatience and not to have to deal with traffic like the rest of us. But at what cost to us and to them?

George Stephanopoulos, ABC News' top anchor, has been rightly held to account for his hitherto close ties and undisclosed $75,000 donation to the Clinton Foundation. He was not only a passive donor but a vigorous advocate for the Clinton Foundation. 

His lack of impartiality, objectivity and integrity has been severely compromised. 

The Clinton Foundation has been under public scrutiny for their lack of transparency regarding donations from foreign organizations and granting special favors to Tony Rodham, Hillary Clinton’s brother. As a board member, his mining company was the recipient of a highly coveted gold mining contract in Haiti orchestrated by the Clinton Foundation. 

ABC’s attempt to brush off the public outcry by claiming that Stephanopoulos’s lack of public disclosure was “an honest mistake” doesn’t pass muster.

As the Republican presidential demolition derby continues, the 2015 GOP candidates have settled on two central themes: hatred for President Obama and desire to send US troops back to Iraq to fight ISIS. While Republicans suffer from short-term memory loss, there’s no reason the rest of us should forget what actually happened in Iraq (and why sending troops back there is a terrible idea). 

1. The Iraq war was a ghastly mistake. Most political observers now believe the March 20, 2003, invasion of Iraq was the worst foreign policy decision in U.S. history. 

The Bush White House had three reasons for invading Iraq. First, the invasion diverted the public’s attention from the failed campaign in Afghanistan, where Dubya’s people hadn’t captured Osama Bin Laden or any of the others responsible for 9/11. In a March 13, 2002, news conference, Bush blurted, “I don’t know where [Osama Bin Laden] is… I truly am not that concerned about him.” 

Because the 2002 mid-term elections were coming, Republicans needed positive momentum on their “war” on terror. They shifted America’s focus from Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan/Pakistan to Saddam Hussein in Iraq. During the first quarter of 2002 the Bush White House decided to invade Iraq. Vice President Cheney began asserting that Iraq had nuclear weapons. In June, Karl Rove and other GOP political operatives said the Republican mid-term election strategy was “war and the economy.” 

Dubya and his pals hated Saddam Hussein because he had once attempted to kill George Bush Senior. As a consequence, the Bush Administration fed Americans a series of lies about Iraq: Saddam Hussein was connected to Al Qaeda, had helped plan the 9/11 attacks, and had “weapons of mass destruction.” 

2. The Iraq war cost $4 trillion plus. The Bush Administration vastly underestimated the cost of the invasion. On September 16, 2002 White House adviser Lawrence Lindsey estimated an Iraq War would cost $200 billion. (On July 2, 2002, White House adviser Richard Perle observed, “Iraq is a very wealthy country [with] enormous oil reserves. They can finance… reconstruction of their own country.”) On November 8, 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld predicted the length of an Iraq War: “Five days or five weeks or five months. It certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.” 

The Iraq War lasted more than eight years (from March 20, 2003, to December 18, 2011.) In March of 2008, Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz released a study estimating war cost as more than $3 trillion. (In current estimates the war will cost “$4 trillion to $6 trillion.”) This includes not only the direct costs of the war but also the interest on the money borrowed to finance the war plus the “medical care and disability benefits to about 70,000 soldiers injured in the conflict.” 

To put “$4 trillion to $6 trillion” in perspective, the US debt is estimated at $18 trillion. Guaranteeing every American a basic income at the poverty level is estimated to cost $2.1 trillion annually. (The Congressional Budget Office estimates the cost of Obamacare over ten years [2016-2025] to be $1.2 trillion.) 

3. The Iraq war was mismanaged. It’s no secret that George W. Bush was a failed businessman. In the 2000 campaign, Republicans attempted to shield Dubya by claiming he would be surrounded by seasoned managers, such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. But the reality is that Cheney and Rumsfeld were also failed managers, who made a series of awful decisions. 

Not enough troops were sent into Iraq. As a result the immediate result of the fall of the Saddam Hussein government was widespread looting and unnecessary damage to the civil infrastructure. Instead of turning control of Iraqi civil society over to Iraqis, the Bush Administration formed the Coalition Provisional Authority. In May of 2003, L. Pail Bremer, CEO of the Provisional Authority disbanded the ruling Ba’ath Party (and banned members from future employment in the public sector – effectively firing all educated teachers) and the army. This alienated most Iraqis, particularly Sunnis. 

4. A bad US management team installed a bad Iraqi management team. Following the dissolution of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the US installed a Shiite, Nuri Al-Maliki, as prime minister (who served from 2006-2014). Al-Maliki, a Shiite, systematically repressed the already repressed Sunnis. He, in effect, spawned Isis. 

5. In 2011, the Iraqi management team we installed asked us to leave the country. As Time Magazine explained at the time: “ending the U.S. troop presence in Iraq was an overwhelmingly popular demand among Iraqis, and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki appears to have been unwilling to take the political risk of extending it.” Obama wanted to leave troops in Iraq but al-Maliki fought this by insisting on an unacceptable State of Forces agreement. 

In summary, Republicans, and their progeny, are responsible for every piece of the Iraq debacle. Now they are asking us to forget that. 

On Friday night, May 1st, to Saturday morning, May 2nd, labor supporters and protestors against police violence nationally, roamed Oakland’s downtown breaking glass fronts of banks and a few other businesses, and systematically smashing the windshields of rows of vehicles at one car lot. Unfortunately, the media focus and Oakland’s response was on the damage caused by the protestors rather than their message. 

Oakland responded to the May Day protest with a policy banning nighttime demonstrations without a permit, which costs $300 and takes up to 30 days to obtain. On the evening of May 21st, demonstrators marched in downtown Oakland against this new get-tough policy. In response, the the Oakland Police Department (OPD) immediately forced demonstrators off the street onto the sidewalks, encircled them, and used amplified sound to interfere with the march against police killings of Black women and trans persons. Was the Oakland policy against nighttime protests reasonable? And did the OPD use reasonable force under the circumstances? And was their response in violation of their crowd management and crowd control policy? These are questions still to be resolved possibly with a lawsuit. 

In the United States, we have the right to speak out. Both the California Constitution and the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protect our right to free expression. Generally what we say cannot be regulated but how we say it can. If you organize a protest that causes violence or unnecessary disruption, your event may be disbanded. Every city has the right to enact regulations on the time, place, and manner of a protest.  

The OPD does have a crowd management and crowd control policy which was enacted on October 28, 2005 as part of a settlement of a 2003 lawsuit where the OPD allegedly used an abundance of violence against peaceful demonstration against the U.S. invasion of Iraq.  

Later, the City of Oakland agreed to pay approximately $1 million to end a class action lawsuit filed by National Lawyers Guild in 2011 in coordination with the ACLU on behalf of 150 Occupy Oakland demonstrators alleging police misconduct during a 2010 mass arrest. Under the settlement the ACLU now must be consulted before the OPD can alter their crowd control policy. 

The riots in Ferguson, Missouri may be instructive. In the riots following the killing of teenager Michael Brown by Darren Wilson, a white Ferguson, Missouri police officer, 80 arrests were made, 13 people were injured, 25 businesses were burned, 12 vehicles were destroyed, and hundreds of shots were fired. 

On May 15, 2015, the legislature ended its session having passed virtually none of the reforms activists sought in the aftermath of the shooting of Michael Brown. Activists had been tracking more than 100 bills related to criminal justice and policing, but only one of substance made its way out of the legislature. Was this because legislators were focused on the damage caused by the demonstrators rather than listening to the demonstrators. Hopefully Oakland is not Ferguson and California is not Missouri. 

The danger is that the Oakland May Day riots and the subsequent demonstrations may have created an unwanted backlash. When hooligans use what was meant to be a peaceful event to wreak havoc on public and private property, the possibility of positive change may be lost. Government may just focus on preventing future havoc instead of listening.  

And the majority of the citizenry may react to the destruction caused by the vandals with horror thus losing their support for positive change.

When serious medication side effects are merely hypothetical, it makes it easy to be an advocate for medication "compliance." After all, psychiatric disorders are real diseases that need real treatment--if we are to be well. The medications available are a better choice than trying to tough it out, go without medication, and end up with a very bad outcome, such as repeat hospitalizations, incarceration due to behavior caused by psychosis, and a deterioration in basic functioning.  

However, taking medication comes at a heavy price. I have a friend who gained over a hundred pounds in a short time period due to psychiatric medication, has lived with this weight for about two decades and is unable to get back to a normal weight. Many psychiatric medications affect metabolism, and make it much harder to exercise due to their sedating effects.  

(Psychiatric consumers can’t take appetite suppressants because they are stimulants, which therefore can cause us to have severe symptoms of mental illness and can trigger a manic or psychotic episode.)  

Yet, other than weight gain, there is another side-effect of antipsychotic medication, called "Tardive Dyskinesia." Psychiatrists claim inaccurately that this is a rare effect of taking antipsychotics; I was told it occurs in about one percent of those who take antipsychotic meds.  

It begins with an uncontrollable "rolling" of the tongue. And then this worsens, spreads to the face, causing facial contortions, and eventually affects the person's neck and upper body. This side effect not only causes a lot of suffering due to movements that the person cannot control--it is also very disfiguring.  

I was told by a psychiatrist that Tardive Dyskinesia is sometimes irreversible, and can actually worsen when and if the antipsychotic medications are discontinued.  

"Atypical antipsychotics," when they first became available, were promoted as the latest and greatest thing, and were accompanied by claims that they didn't have the same side effects as the older medications. The newer medications, such as Olanzapine, Risperdal, Seroquel, and Abilify, are stronger than their predecessors. The advent of the newer medications seems to have coincided with the falling apart of much of the psychiatric consumer/survivor movement.  

Contrary to initial claims that these medications were better and didn't have the same side effects, these newer, stronger medications also can cause Tardive Dyskinesia, perhaps more frequently than did the older medications.  

When a medication first hits the market, its long term side effects are essentially unknown until people have been ingesting them for ten years or so. This is applicable to all medications and not just psychiatric ones. The American public is one big pool of experimental subjects for the drug companies.  

The claims of the drug companies that "Atypical" antipsychotics didn't cause the same side effects as the older ones came at a time when the side effects were unknown due to the drugs being new. 

My friend who gained all of that weight also developed early stages of Tardive Dyskinesia. That person had taken antipsychotic medications only in small dosages, primarily for sleep. This individual stopped the antipsychotic. (She was able to stop the antipsychotic because she has a bipolar diagnosis. People with a schizophrenic diagnosis are not usually at liberty to stop an antipsychotic unless it is replaced by another, similar-acting drug.)  

It is still unknown if this woman's tardive dyskinesia will go away. So far, this symptom seems to have partially subsided.  

This week's column is not intended to make people with psychosis go off medication. We have an actual disease that will get worse without treatment. In some instances, switching medications to a different antipsychotic might be an option. Different people react to different medications differently. While one person could take Prolixin and get this side effect, someone else could have this reaction from Risperdal. I am not encouraging noncompliance with treatment for people with severe psychiatric disorders. I encourage working with a psychiatrist who is hopefully one of the conscientious ones, and together arriving at the best solutions.  

When I took Risperdal for a number of years, I eventually became unable to tolerate it. The muscles in my neck tightened and gave me a pinched nerve, causing extreme pain in my arm. It took a number of months of trial and error before I could figure out that Risperdal was doing this to me. I switched to something else and haven't had that problem since then.  

When a potential side effect of a medication is merely hypothetical, it is far easier to dismiss compared to when it actually takes place.  

These are serious medications intended to treat serious illnesses. If I had an alternative to taking these medications, I would opt for it. It is important for people to realize that many of us who must take psychiatric medications are brave people, often making a huge sacrifice.  

The medical establishment, that profits substantially from our illnesses, owes it to us to do research for a treatment that will fix tardive dyskinesia, and, furthermore, owes it to us to create medications for mental illness that do not ruin our lives.

Opens May 29 at the Landmark Shattuck

After sitting through Claudia Llosa's snow-crossed saga of family alienation in a land of perpetual chill, poverty, and buried emotions, I found myself thinking a better title for the film might have been Adrift.

While the cinematography is gorgeous and the acting is forthright and deeply felt (with compelling performances by Jennifer Connelly, Cillian Murphy, and the young Zen McGrath), the story is sometimes as hard to follow as footprints in a snow bank on windy day.

 

For starters, Aloft opens with an extended set-piece that looks like it belongs in a dystopian sci-fi movie. Long queues of shabbily dressed, desperate-looking people assemble in the woods to draw lots in some kind of unexplained healing ritual. Is this happening in the past or in some imaginary, fictitious future? And where are we—on the fifth moon of Saturn or somewhere in Manitoba? (A subtitle or two would have helped.) 

In addition to the performances, Aloft has two major ingredients that distinguish it: lots of ice and falcons. 

For most of the time, the camera hovers close—uncomfortably close—to the characters with an in-your-face intensity. All the while, the soundtrack is breaking loose all around. While the screen obsesses on close-ups, the sounds of bodies, hands and feet wrestling through cloaks, gloves, and boots, banging against furniture, slamming documents on tabletops, are mostly heard but only partially seen, at best. It's a disconcerting approach to filmmaking apparently designed to put an audience on edge. 

While Aloft is abrasively claustrophobic in its interior shots, outside it's often a case of individuals lost in a terrain of snowy, wind-raked vastness. The story (what there is of it) sometimes seems as impenetrable as a blizzard. Near "white-out conditions" in the screenplay made it difficult for this viewer to get his bearings or to know where things were headed. 

There are a few clear elements that tether this winter's tale, however. There is Nana (Connelly), a mother with two sons. Her younger child suffers from some dread, unnamed disease. As Nana becomes an increasingly desperate, angry person, she also becomes (with insufficient backstory or explication) both a gifted artist (or so we are told) and a natural healer (again, we are told this more than we are shown this). 

When Ivan, the older and healthier of the two children takes some unexplained offense at his mother's naturopathic preoccupations, his inexplicably reckless response leads to tragedy. His mother is heartbroken. She goes weeks without speaking and Ivan refuses to offer any comfort. An attempt at breaking down the barriers ends in a new and final episode of estrangement. The child storms off in anger and the mother signs off on her maternal duties to pursue a solitary life in search of… Art? 

Finally, well into the film, the director throws in a single, helpful title card that let's us know it is now "20 years later." 

A French documentary filmmaker (Melanie Laurent) shows up in the frozen north to make a documentary about the now-famous artist named Nana. Showing up at Ivan's door she has a contract ready for his signature but (again inexplicably) she has no film crew. Again, inexplicably, Ivan (who is still seething with an repressed anger over the breach with his mother) agrees to accompany the filmmaker on a long jaunt even further into the cold North to an ice-bound encampment where Nana is engaged in some kind of epic artistic creation. (From what the film showed me, I hadn't a clue as to what Nana's art project might have involved.) 

In one of the film's most unnerving segments, Ivan and the young filmmaker find their northward journey unexpectedly blocked. A large semi-truck stands partially submerged on a road that crosses the frozen ice ahead of them. Everyone on the road is told they will have to turn their vehicles around and head back. 

Instead (against all odds and all logic), Ivan and the filmmaker set off to cross the distant, unmarked horizon on foot. The wind whips about their faces and night falls as they stumble forward into a darkness lit only by the small flashlights they carry. And, throughout this long ordeal, the soundtrack swells with the ominous sounds of ice getting ready to crack open. 

So what happens to them? Well, somehow in the middle of nowhere they find a single parked car with its headlights on, occupied by a solitary helpful stranger who offers them a ride, food and a warm bed. (Perhaps Ivan called ahead? I don't know, I didn't see anyone shouting desperately into a cell phone.) 

By the way, I neglected to mention that, through this entire desolate trek, Ivan is hauling a large wooden crate on his back. It's not filled with snacks, blankets, or whiskey, however. It apparently contains one of Ivan's pet falcons (presumably one very cold falcon). 

And finally, we get the long-awaited consummation: the meeting, after all these years, of estranged Child and distant (literally) Mother. 

The filmmaker meticulously arranges her recording devices and then (inexplicably) does nothing as Nana walks over and turns off the recorder. You might think the filmmaker's greatest concern at this point would be to capture this cathartic moment of reconciliation on tape. Instead, the she simply walks out of the room—apparently to give mother and son some "private time." 

Ivan pours out a world of hurt to his mother, hurling accusations of abandonment (apparently forgetting that he was the one who originally caused the disaffection). Nana responds with a few quiet words of comfort, cradles Ivan's sobbing head in her arms and, and … all is well. 

And how do we know this? Because in the final, closing scenes, we see Ivan, now out on the snowy earth, releasing his presumably chilled-to-the-bone falcon into the Arctic air. Without benefit of an extended dialog to shape and cement the "mother-and-child reunion," Aloft ends with nothing more than a shot of Ivan's face, looking relieved and beaming towards the wintry heavens. 

While it may be hard to care about the human protagonists in Llosa's film, I will grant you this: the falcons are magnificent.

For years, Mary Sano--an exquisite dancer and choreographer--has been teaching and performing Isadora Duncan's style of dance in Mary's studio on 5th Street in San Francisco, not far from where Isadora was born on May 27th, 138 years ago. 

And for the past 18 years, Mary's celebrated her idol's birthday with the Dionysian Festival, this year featuring her and her Duncan Dancers, Benjamin Akelea Belew playing neo-classical piano, Tony Chapman with contemporary piano and voice, Ricardo Diaz and Koko de la Isla with flamenco guitar and dance, Adriana Ratsch-Rivera on classical guitar and Saman Mahmaudi on santour, tombak, voice. 

A true celebration--for everyone. 

Saturday at 8, Sunday at 5 at the Mary Sano Studio of Duncan Dance, 245 Fifth Street (between Howard and Folsom), #314, San Francisco. *18 & $20. duncandance.org

There's been a great profusion of international theater and related music events springing up all over the Bay Area the past few weeks, some of it by touring groups, some by residential companies--and the biggest producer for them, the San Francisco International Arts Festival, which presents moire than 70 ensembles and individual performers over three weeks, has shows continuing through this weekend and next, until Sunday, June 7th, at Fort Mason, including performers from Berkeley as well as from all over the world. 

The SFIAF continues to feature theater inspired by the performances, training and dramaturgy of Jerzy Grotowski (1933-99), whose influences went from great early modern innovators in stylized and experimental physical theater (Jacques Copeau, V. S. Meyerhold) to folk and religious rituals and singing from around the world. Last year the Festival presented the remarkable work of director Piotr Borowski's Studium Teatralne, from Warsaw, 'The King of Hearts is Off Again,' from a novel based on the real-life experiences of Izolda Regensberg, who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto during Nazi occupation, reentering it to get her husband and her family out, too--an unusual premise for a Grotowskian staging, but a great triumph of physical theatrics by the company of four, lifting its profusion of gesture and athletic--even acrobatic--movement above the least hint of Expressionism to what may be a new definition of Epic Theater. (A trailer with tableaux from 'King of Hearts,' 'Krol Kier ... ,' is online on their YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwok8gppAPA ) 

Right now, Teatr Zar, from Wroclaw, is presenting their long-term project commemorating another holocaust, the Armenian Genocide of a century ago this year, 'Armine, Sister,' its final shows at 9 tonight (Friday) and tomorrow at the Herbst Pavilion in Fort Mason. In contrast to the maelstrom of movement of Studium Teatralne, Zar envelopes the audience, seated around their specially-realized space, with extraordinary music and singing from the Caucasus and beyond in Central Asia: Armenian liturgical music and Persian-Kurdish singing ... while among stout pillars--sometimes moved by block and tackle, sometimes showering sand on the performers--figures move in dim, allusive lighting from above and the side, making tableaux reminiscent of the motifs of side panels of Counter-Reformation altar paintings of the Passion of Christ and the martyrdom of saints, male and female bodies in physical travail and suffering, attitudes of hope and hopelessness, displaying some of the hallmarks--and maybe a few of the cliches--of Grotowskian staging in an intense program, ending with the audience's silent exit into an expansive room with glowing projections of old Armenia. 

(A trailer, 'Armine, Sister--Vehicle of Memory,' is online at: https://youtube.com/watch?v=tCNV3KZ8Q_w ) Golden Thread Productions, the Bay Area's theater for plays from and about the Middle East, which just presented their founder Torange Yeghiazarian's new play 'Isfahan Blues,' about Duke Ellington's band in the Shah's Iran of the 60s, with African American Shakespeare, was also a co-sponsor for Zar. 

And Berkeley's Inferno Theatre continues performing their founder Giulio Cesare Perrone's new work, 'Quantum Love,' through this weekend. Fresh from their own Diasporas Festival at the South Berkeley Community Church, but with an hour-long version showing more breadth and depth than the intriguing "preview" at Diasporas, 'Quantum Love' is a six person show (founding Inferno member Simone Bloch, new member--but recognizable to Berkeley theatergoers--Jody Christian, another newcomer--G. Scott Heath, veteran physical theater actor Michael Needham, violinist and actor Emmy Pierce, and actor-dancer Tenya Spillman) that goes from meditations on physics to rash acts of attraction, at times like an ecstatic Laocoön of interwoven actions by couples and individuals of the troupe. ( infernotheatre.org/ ) 

--Just a few of the events in the continuing Fest, others coming up this weekend including on Saturday, Berkeley's Sarah Cahill, playing solo piano works by Pauline Oliveros and young SF composer Danny Clay at 4:30 in the Firehouse and Francis Wong, brilliant jazz saxophonist, with shamizen player and dancer performing his suite Wong Wei's Gamble, about a jockey reopening a racetrack in Japanese-occupied China, at 7 in Festival Central hall; on Sunday exceptional classical music on the oldest Chinese stringed instrument, the Guqin, by famed player and teacher Wang Fei and her teacher, Li Xiangting, honoring the 120th anniversary of Lu's teacher, Zha Fuxi, in the Chapel at 5 (Wang Fei on YouTube: https:www.youtube.com/watch?v=zptY64M_EsY --and more info at guqin.org), Kurdish storytelling to music by Dengbesz Kazo with Murat Iclinalca (who participated in Teatr Zar's show) at 8, also in the Chapel; Irish storyteller Aine Riley's solo performance, also at 8, in the Southside Theater (she's performing for the duration of the Festival)--and next week, co-founder of Berkeley's great Blake Street Hawkeyes, Bob Ernst, performing solo in the Firehouse at 9:30 on Saturday, 3:30 Sunday--and much, much more ...  

www.sfiaf.org; (800) 838-3006 for tickets

Coming just four months after the American Bach Soloists performed a concert version of Handel’s short opera Acis and Galatea at venues throughout the Bay Area in late January, Chora Nova, a choral group founded in 2006 by Paul Flight, offered a concert version of Acis and Galatea in a single performance, Saturday evening May 23 at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church. Handel’s Acis and Galatea, a brief two-act opera, (or, as it was originally called, a masque), is a charming example of George Friedrich Handel’s musical artistry. First performed in 1718 at Cannons, the country mansion of James Bridges, Earl of Carnarvon, Acis and Galatea is set to a libretto fashioned by eminent poets such as John Gay, Alexander Pope and John Hughes, who took the basic plot from a story in Book XIII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  

Handel’s first dramatic work in English, Acis and Galatea was revived by its composer in 1732 at the King’s Theatre in London, then was re-staged by Handel in 1742 in Dublin, Ireland, where it was presented in the version usually performed today. For Chora Nova’s performance, Artistic Director Paul Flight deleted one character, the shepherd Damon, who offers philosophical advice to both his friend Acis and the monstrous Polyphemus, the villain of the piece. Thus trimmed of one of its important if minor characters, this Acis and Galatea nevertheless presented the basic storyline in concisely effective fashion.  

It is a story in the pastoral tradition, set in a world of shepherds, nymphs and mythological characters (such as Polyphemus, the notorious one-eyed Cyclops). It opens with a bright, lively Sinfonia, following which the sixty-member chorus of Chora Nova sang of the pleasures of pastoral life. Then Galatea, a semi-divine sea-nymph, stepped forward, sung by soprano Ann Moss. She praises the verdant plains and woody mountains, lauds the purling streams and bubbling fountains, yet proclaims them unable to cool her love for Acis. As Galatea, Ann Moss then launched her first aria, in which she seeks to hush the warbling birds and invites them instead to bring back to her the absent Acis. Possessed of a silvery tone with bright high notes, Ann Moss delivered this aria beautifully, while the orchestra imitated the sound of birdcalls in strings, recorder, and oboes.  

Next Acis stepped forward, sung by tenor Mark Alexander Bonney. Tempor-arily separated from his beloved Galatea, Acis is tending his flocks, but his attention wanders as he asks where he might look for Galatea. In the role of Acis, Mark Alex-ander Bonney was a revelation! This is a tenor with a perfect voice for Baroque music! He sings with silken tone, great clarity of diction, and seemingly effortless breath control. Moreover, Bonney has plenty of power. Bonney’s rendition of the aria “Love in her eyes sits playing” was exquisitely sung. 

When Acis and Galatea reunite, Galatea sings another aria evoking birdcalls, this time likening herself to a female dove, which, reunited with her mate, spends the live-long day “billing, cooing, panting wooing.” Now Acis and Galatea join in a delightful duet, “Happy we!” This duet is soon taken up by the entire chorus, as Act I of Handel’s Acis and Galatea comes to an end. 

After intermission, Act II begins with a dark note of caution. The chorus sings that “Fate has passed this sad decree: no joy shall last.” They also note the forbidding approach of giant Polyphemus. This latter, sung by baritone Ben Kazez, enters in a rage. His first words, in fact, are “I rage – I melt – I burn!” It soon becomes clear that Polyphemus, like Acis, is enamored of fair Galatea. He launches into a lively aria in which he sings the praises of the maid he longs for. She, how-ever, wants nothing to do with this monster. When Polyphemus invites her to join him for a feast in his warm cave, Galatea rejects him in no uncertain terms. “Of infant limbs to make my food, and swill full draughts of human blood!” sings Galatea in horror, adding, “Go, monster, bid some other guest! I loathe the host, I loathe the feast.” 

Observing Polyphemus’s attempts to woo Galatea, Acis becomes enraged, and he readies himself to fight. As sung by tenor Mark Alexander Bonney, the aria “Love sounds the alarm” was for me the highlight of the evening, featuring a dazzling display of Bonney’s vocal agility, Handelian coloratura and sheer power. Alarmed, Galatea tries to calm Acis, reassuring him of her love. Then Acis and Galatea begin a duet pledging each other their unending love; but the duet soon becomes a trio as Polyphemus enters sounding an ominous note by singing “Torture! Fury! Rage! Despair!” This trio, which has been likened to some of Mozart’s vocal ensembles, proceeds with different emotions expressed simultaneously in strict counterpoint by different characters. It comes to an abrupt and unhappy end, however, when Polyphemus hurls a huge boulder at Acis, crushing him beneath its massive bulk. The dying Acis sings of Hades in a softly descending murmur.  

The chorus now offers a lament for gentle Acis. Overwhelmed with grief, Galatea begins a call-and-response duet between herself and the chorus, in which the latter tries to persuade Galatea to cease her grieving and use her semi-divine powers to grant Acis eternal life. This is eventually accomplished when Galatea transforms Acis into an immortal spring, as violins and oboes echo the murmuring, bubbling brook. The chorus then brings the opera to a close with a song celebrating the apotheosis of Acis brought about by the love of Galatea. 

While the focus of the evening was definitely on Handel’s Acis and Galatea, the program actually opened with two settings of religious anthems by 17^th century English composer Henry Purcell. The first anthem, “Beati omnes qui tement Dominium,” may have served Purcell as a wedding song upon his marriage to Frances Peters. In this work, baritone Ben Kezaz and soprano Ann Moss sang alternate verses interspersed among verses sung by the entire chorus. The second anthem, “Jehovah, quam multi sunt hostes mei,” featured tenor Mark Alexander Bonney and baritone Ben Kezaz. Conductor Paul Flight led his soloists, orchestra and chorus in fine, crisp interpretations of these short works by Purcell, as he also did in the brief two-act rendition of Handel’s Acis and Galatea.