The four-year criminal prosecution of Berkeley’s most scandalous family ended in federal court Monday when Judge Claudia Wilken sentenced Prasad Lakireddy, 45, to five years probation, one year under house arrest and a $20,000 fine for his role in his family’s plot to smuggle girls into the country for sex and cheap labor. 

Judge Wilken reluctantly accepted the sentence suggested in a March plea bargain hearing for Lakireddy, the son of Berkeley Real Estate tycoon, Lakireddy Bali Reddy.  

Reddy is believed to control more than 1,000 apartment units in Berkeley and is serving an eight-year sentence for his role in the plot. He has since filed a writ of habeus corpus to overturn his guilty plea. 

Wilken said she had difficulty agreeing to the sentence for Lakireddy, but ultimately decided to abide by the recommendation of the parole officer. 

Last November Lakireddy, who operates the family’s Berkeley restaurant Pasand Madras Cuisine and Gift, pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to employ unauthorized aliens. In return, federal prosecutor Stephen Corrigan dropped the more serious charges that Lakireddy had raped the girls and helped place them under the control of his father.  

Vijay Lakireddy, Prasad’s younger brother, is serving two years in a federal prison after pleading guilty to the same charge. 

Both plea agreements came after revelations that a court-appointed interpreter had encouraged the prosecution witnesses to embellish the stories of their abuse. 

At a sentencing hearing in March, Wilken questioned if the plea bargain proposal for Prasad Lakireddy was too lenient considering other sentences handed down in the case. 

Corrigan, however, assured the judge that the evidence against each of the family members was different and that the government had less evidence against Lakireddy than the other defendants. 

“We have concerns about the credibility of the people who would be testifying to these charges,” Corrigan said. 

Corrigan also concurred with the analysis in a supplemental sentencing report issued by Lakireddy’s defense team arguing in favor of a lighter sentence for Lakireddy. 

On the argument that Lakireddy should be sentenced more harshly because his victims were especially vulnerable, his attorney Susan Raffanti held that Lakireddy had no part in choosing them and once they were at the restaurant, he didn’t victimize them in their employment. 

She told the court that the alleged victims were treated better than indentured servants. They were paid a salary (below minimum wage) given free groceries and free room in board, she said. 

Based on the testimony of defense witnesses, Raffanti added, “they had more financial freedom and ability to save money when the worked at the Reddy family business than they do now.” 

Before the sentence was rendered Lakireddy gave a rambling address to the court. He called the charges against him “silly” and said “Thank God I put up resistance against my family’s wishes. I have good values. I hope I raise my children better than their father was raised.” 

Regarding the victims, he said they “have sympathy for us and my father.” 

On the issue of the interpreter, he said that although he spoke Telegu—the language spoken in the village from where the Reddys hail—he too couldn’t understand all of the witness testimony.  

“This is a difficult case for an attorney to understand,” he said adding that he had sent one of his lawyers to India and had offered to arrange a trip for Judge Wilken as well. 

Prasad Lakireddy is the fifth and final member of his family to be sentenced following the death of 17-year-old Chanti Prattpati, who died of carbon monoxide poisoning Nov. 24, 1999 in a Berkeley apartment owned by the Reddys.  

The girl’s 15-year-old sister survived the gas poisoning, caused by a blocked heating vent, and ultimately told federal authorities that she and her sister were flown to the United States and forced to have sex with members of the Reddy family. In all, prosecutors alleged the family had illegally brought at least 33 men, women and children into the country. 

In addition to Lakireddy’s father and brother, his uncle, Jayprakash Lakireddy and his aunt, Annapuma Lakireddy, pled guilty to immigration fraud, but did not receive jail time. 

In March the Reddy settled a civil case against four victims. They agreed to pay $2 million in criminal restitution and $8.9 million to the family of Chanti Prattipati. Michael Rubin, the attorney for the victims, said after the hearing Monday that the facts discussed weren’t consistent with the facts he believed to be true, but he had to defer to the judge and the criminal justice system. 

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Dozens of Latino students at Berkeley High are working extra hard this finals week to once again save the job of the librarian they lovingly call “La Doña,” the head mistress. 

“She’s like our grandmother,” said Enrique Rojas, a Berkeley High junior. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable going to the library if she’s not there.” 

Rojas was among about 40 demonstrators last week who demanded the school board investigate why “La Doña”—Ernestine Troutman—is losing her job as a part-time library media technician after more than 30 years in the district and why she isn’t being considered for the school’s open full-time librarian position. 

“Something fishy is going on,” said Berkeley Federation of Teachers President Barry Fike, echoing the sentiments of other speakers at last week’s school board meeting. Fike wondered how the district found enough money this year to hire a library consultant and full-time second librarian when the school opened its new library in January, but didn’t have the funds to keep Troutman. 

Next year, Berkeley High will hire a second full-time librarian and eliminate the library media technician post Troutman has held since 1982. Troutman, who received a masters degree in library science in 1973 from UC Berkeley, applied for the librarian job but didn’t make it past the screening process. 

She said the snub was just the latest of indignities Berkeley Unified has dealt her in recent years. Since the district suffered a financial crisis in 2001, Troutman has been reduced from full-time status to just an hour-and-a-half per day. 

The few hours she is paid to work are thanks to the efforts of her Latino students. Last year, when Troutman faced a certain layoff, students wrote a grant proposal to the high school’s site commission for money to pay her reduced hours. 

With the funding unavailable for next year, the students want to know why Troutman isn’t being considered for the librarian position. 

“We need her there,” said Angela Fillingim a member of the class of 2003. “At Berkeley High you realize that there are only a few people who look out for you and she’s one of them.” 

According to Fillingim, Troutman made sure that she (Fillingim) enrolled in the classes needed to graduate. The librarian also took extra time to find books she thought Fillingim would be interested in reading. 

“The students see her as an elder,” said Heidi Webber, who teaches English to English Language Learners at the high school. “She has a moral authority and she’s always willing to work with every kind of student with their projects or research.” 

Despite concerns from the Berkeley Council of Classified Employees, which represents library media technicians, the school board in March decided to drop Troutman’s position in favor of hiring a more expensive certified librarian. 

Pat Calvert, the district’s human resources director for certified employees, and Berkeley High Principal Jim Slemp didn’t return phone calls about Troutman’s application for the librarian position. 

When Troutman asked why she wouldn’t be granted an interview, she said the district told her they couldn’t discuss personnel issues. 

“It’s systematic exclusion,” she said. Troutman insisted the district has been trying to get her out of the high school for years. Earlier this year, she was transferred to Washington Elementary School for three hours a day until the grant came through and she could return to the high school. 

Three years ago, the Berkeley Council of Classified Employees filed a grievance on her behalf charging that the district was using volunteers to pay for cutting back Troutman’s hours. 

“My thing is to be back at the high school one hundred percent with these kids,” Troutman said. “If I couldn’t come back, I’d be devastated. It would be like being severed from family. I’ve bonded with so many people.”›

Berkeley teenagers looking for work this summer face two monumental hurdles: a lagging economy and a job market in which desperate adults are taking the jobs once the preserve of the young. 

“The competition for jobs is very keen right now, and a lot of Berkeley teenagers haven’t been able to find jobs because adults are taking them,” said Juanita McMullen, director of Berkeley Youth Works, the city’s major youth work-training and job-finding program. “The market is very narrow now with the overall employment picture so bleak.”  

“Certainly last summer was widely seen as one of the worst in recent history,” said Stuart Tannock of the UC Berkeley Labor Center. “Over the last five years during the economic downturn, there has been increasing competition for jobs at the low end—places like grocery stores and fast food outlets—with a lot more immigrants, unemployed adults, and retirees getting the kinds of jobs that traditionally went to young people.” 

Jay Verdoorn, communications director for the Sacramento-based California Job Journal, agrees. “Starting two years ago, employers are much less interested in hiring teen workers since they can hire experienced adults for the same jobs,” he said. “Especially in retail, employers are more prone to hire someone with five or six years experience than they are a teenager, and we in the workforce have become a lot more humble in the jobs we’ll take.” 

Nationwide, job chances for teenagers will be the second worst since 1948, topped only by last year’s low ebb, according to Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies. 

In 2000, 52 percent of 16-to-19-year-olds found summer jobs. By 2003, the rate had fallen to 36.5 percent, with this year’s rate expected to be a marginally improved 37 percent. 

Hardest hit are African American youth, according to Northeastern’s Andrew Sum, with more than three out of four high school age youth unemployed last summer, followed by Hispanics with two of three youths unemployed and whites with one in two jobless. 

Tannock said suburban youth from middle class families have far better chances of landing summer jobs than urban youth, where unemployment rates are higher. 

“There’s been a huge shift in the kinds of jobs that are available,” Tannock said. “The explosion of part-time jobs at the low end—the fast food model—has worked its way up the workforce.” 

The end result for young job-seekers is that not only has work become harder to get, but those jobs that are available tend to be “pretty crappy,” he said. 

One result has been that young would-be workers have turned to public and private sector job programs for help. 

“Most of the summer job work permit applications I get come from Youth Works,” said Antoinette Cooks, who processes the permits for Berkeley High School students. 

A city program operated out of basement offices at 1947 Center St., Youth Works trains youths from ages 14 to 22 in the skills needed to seek and retain employment. 

“We do job development and placement, we teach how to prepare resumes, we offer counseling, skills training and job performance evaluation,” said director McMullen. 

McMullen said she expects Youth Works will place at least 310 young city residents in jobs this summer, many with the city and some though a program on the UC Berkeley campus. Most job-seekers come from South and West Berkeley. 

“We get a lot of referrals from the schools, and we also get referrals from courts and from parents’ groups,” McMullen said.  

One Youth Works offering, Clean City, places young workers on crews that clean up debris along city streets. A new offering this year is the city’s Sunrise Energy Youth Program, in which young workers are trained to help residents find low-cost ways to save money by reducing energy use in their homes.  

The Berkeley Biotech Education Program prepares Youth Works candidates for the corporate world, with internships at Emeryville-based Sybase, and the pre-apprenticeship training program with the Cypress-Mandela Employment Center in Oakland prepares trainees for future work in the construction trades.  

For the past three years, Youth Works had administered the city’s Workforce Investment Act funding, but that will end of June 30 when Berkeley Youth Alternative takes over that program. 

“We’ll be losing some staff as a result, so our summer program won’t be as large as in the past,” McMullen said. “But young job-seekers should keep coming here. I arrive early and I stay late.” 



Is anti-Semitism on the rise on the UC Berkeley campus? 

Pro-Zionist students point to a string of incidents, including several this past year, as a clear sign of continued anti-Jewish intolerance at the university.  

But many associated with groups that have been linked to claims of anti-Semitism said that, contrary to the claims, their groups are working to combat anti-Semitism and all forms of racism on campus, but have been targeted because of their Pro-Palestinian political agenda. Claims of anti-Semitism, they said, are a quick and easy way to try to sway the political debate by students who construe any sort of political criticism of Israel as criticism of Jews. 

Additionally, as reports surface, Palestinian solidarity activists on campus point to incidents of hate crimes and discrimination aimed at Muslim, Arab and other communities of color that they say are continually deflated, overlooked or dismissed by a campus they say is being taught to accept certain types of racism in a post-9/11 environment. 

According to UC Berkeley campus police, there were three hate crimes and seven hate incidents reported to police during the year 2003 (hate incidents are reported events that do not fall under a crime already on the books).  

Of the three reported hate crimes last year on campus, one stemmed from the harassment and assault of a Sikh man wearing a turban. Another involved anti-Semitic graffiti spray painted in a lecture hall. One of the hate incidents was a report of two graffiti defacements that insulted people named Mohammed. 

The statistics compiled do not represent all of the hate crimes or incidents on campus, according to the police, but only reflect the ones that get reported. A representative from the police said the department does outreach to groups that may be the target of hate crimes or incidents in order to ensure that group members know they can turn to the police. Still, the police representative admitted, reports are fairly infrequent. 

Anti-Israel is Not Anti-Jew 

Students doing Palestinian solidarity work on UC campus claim that pro-Israel students are conflating incidents as a way to quash pro-Palestinian activism. They point to a long article recently published in the East Bay Express which documented what several students claimed was a spree of anti-Semitism since the second Palestinian Intifada started in 2000. 

One section of the Express article recounted a February incident in which Harvard professorand fervent Israel supporter Daniel Pipes lectured at Pimentel Hall and was met by numerous protesters. The article described the protesters as making physical threats to people who are Israel sympathizers.  

Pipes—the founder of the Campus Watch website which posts dossiers on university professors alleged to be anti-Israel—has been widely criticized for public remarks that many feel are racist towards Muslims and Arabs. 

Lisa Stampnitzky, a graduate student and member of Tzedeck, a Jewish group on campus, was at the Pipes lecture. She not only disputes the claim that the event was filled with anti-Semitic protesters, but also the claim that UC Berkeley has experienced widespread anti-Semitism. 

“As a student, I don’t see [UC] Berkeley as a particularly anti-Semitic place, which is not to say that there are not incidents of anti-Semitism,” she said. But “it doesn’t seem to be a rampant problem.” 

At the Pipes event she said she saw at least one person, who she said was not a UC Berkeley student, carrying an anti-Semitic sign. But for the most part, she said she and others were there to protest Pipe’s political views, not Judaism.  

Stampnitzky said she has never been the victim of anti-Semitism at UC Berkeley, even though she is involved in organizing around the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict. Tzedeck, the group she belongs to, actively supports the right for Israel to exist. However, the group has also worked with pro- Palestinian groups demanding human rights and a viable state for Palestinians. 

Stampnitzky did say, however, that she has seen a trend where Palestinian solidarity activism is construed as anti-Semitic. She said she thinks it’s a tactic used by a few who feel a strong connection to Israel and want to discredit any kind of criticism. Stampnitzky says that strategy doesn’t represent her views as a Jew, nor does it allow for criticism of any real anti-Semitism. 

But those most prominently involved in pro-Israel organizing on the UC campus say there have been instances of anti-Semitism during pro-Palestine events and that some of the political claims made by activists are anti-Semitic. They dispute the claim that anti-Semitism is being used to quash pro-Palestinian activism. 

Gordon Gladstone, the Israel initiatives coordinator for Berkeley Hillel, the Jewish student center at UC Berkeley, said Hillel tries to draw a specific line when classifying anti-Semitism as it relates to Israel. Hillel says one of the group’s main concerns—stated in its charter—is a commitment “to Israel’s right to exist and flourish as a democratic Jewish state within secure and internationally recognized boundaries.” 

When political protests claim Israel does not have a right to exist as a state for Jewish people, Gladstone said he would classify that as anti-Semitism. He said he would also classify claims that Israel is an apartheid state as anti-Semitic because he said those claims de-legitimize Israel as a state.  

Pro-Palestinian groups on campus who have been labeled anti-Semitic say the lines are not drawn so clearly. Chris Cantor, a member of Students for Justice in Palestine, said he would label Israel as an apartheid state because of the way an Israeli minority occupies a Palestinian majority in the West Bank and Gaza strip.  

“When they say Israel is a Jewish state, I have no problem with that, as long as that doesn’t translate into preferential rights for one group of citizens over another,” said Cantor. But in Israel’s case, he said, the occupation does give preferential treatment and therefore critics have the right to label it with the proper political term. 

Others put it more plainly.   

“The problem they have is not everyone is in love with Israel,” said Hatem Bazian, a lecturer at UC Berkeley who has continually spoken out against the Israeli occupation of Palestine and in return received political flack. “They are disturbed that not everybody is towing the line in this country.” 

Bazian said behind all the definitions of what is and isn’t anti-Semitism concerning criticism of Israel is a campaign to stop all criticism of Israel. Israel has consistently violated international law, he said, so it uses anti-Semitism to defray criticism.  

“If you are unable to challenge the content, then smear the messenger as a way to try and win the debate by excluding the other from the debate to begin with,” said Bazian. “There is nothing unique about Israel, there is nothing unique about other nation states. If [Israel is] violating international law, they cannot take a carte blanche exception. There is nothing unique about occupation. They are asking for Israel to be handled as an exception to the norm. They don’t want to hear that message, they want to manage the situation so they are the only ones who have the right to speak about Israel.”  

Hate 

While many question the legitimacy of the claims of anti-Semitism, others question why it gets so much publicity. They said even though it goes unreported, Berkeley is full of hate incidents targeting other groups, including Arab and Muslim students, especially those involved in Palestinian solidarity work.  

According to Afira Vhora, a student at UC Berkeley and a member of the Chancellor’s Task Force on Hate Bias, most hate incidents go unreported. She said students also claim the university puts less emphasis on hate crimes or incidents that target students from Arab or Muslim countries or against students who resemble Arabs or Muslims. 

“Some communities [are] favored over others by the administration,” said Vhora. She said the hate incident reported to the police concerning the Sikh student is just one incident of the how the campus mishandles discrimination and hate. She said that even though the case was reported, the university never met with the Sikh community to do a comprehensive follow-up. 

An official campus representative from the Chancellor’s Task Force on Hate Bias was not available for comment. 

“On the world political scene, we have daily torture and slaughter of Iraqis and Palestinians, we have occupations,” said Jess Ghannam, president of the San Francisco chapter of the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Council. “That is on the foreign front. The domestic manifestation [is the] Patriot Act that targets Arab Americans very aggressively. Generally speaking, there is an awesome movement of hate.” 

As a result, said Ghannam, reports that conflate instances of anti-Semitism, in particularly when they are related to Palestinian solidarity work, only increase that hate toward the Arab and Muslim community. 

“We are not saying anti-Semitism doesn’t exist,” he said, but conflation only “fuels the flame of a climate that is deeply hostile to our community.” 

Other students have personal experience with hate incidents they say are a common occurrence on campus. One student, a member of SJP who wished to remain anonymous, said she is continually told to blow herself up at political rallies.  

The same student, who wears hijab, the covering worn by Muslim women, said she and other women consistently get called names, told they are oppressed and are sometimes harassed with brash sexual comments. 

When she reported these instances to the campus, she said the campus told here to join the Muslim Student Association so she could be around people with similar experiences. Most of the time, however, she said people are afraid to even report these incidents because they don’t want to draw attention. 

“Its very palpable, the hatred,” she said.  



Release of the long-awaited report tallying millions in UC Berkeley’s unreimbursed costs to the city will likely be delayed one week, Assistant City Manager Arrietta Chakos said Monday.  

The report’s findings, gathered by the consulting firm Economic and Planning Systems (at a cost, itself, of $50,000), were scheduled to be released at tonight’s (Tuesday, June 8) City Council meeting. However, with UC Berkeley extending the public comment period on its Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) four days until June 18, Chakos said the city might further fine-tune the report and release it at next Tuesday’s meeting. A final Draft Environmental Impact Report for the LRDP is due to go before the UC Regents in November. 

UC Berkeley currently pays the city $500,000 for services including sewers and public safety. 

One long-awaited item that will go before the council Tuesday is a recommendation from the Citizens Budget Review Commission calling for the city to require its workers to pay the employee portion of their retirement costs, rescind its policy to limit layoffs, and demand that unions reopen their contracts before the November election. 

Confusion between commission members and staff kept the controversial recommendation from appearing before the council two weeks ago amid claims that the omission was an effort to keep the politically potent issue away from the council. 

Councilmember Dona Spring called the commission’s recommendation “a reasonable approach,” and said the city should look at it when the union contracts expire. 

Currently the city is demanding that the unions accept a one-year deferral of three percent of their pay increases to help the city close its $10 million budget shortfall. If the unions refuse, the city has threatened to close non-essential city services one day a month to save the needed $1.2 million.  

Also on the City Council agenda is a recommendation from the Transportation Commission demanding that all transportation-related items be referred to that commission. 

Sometimes derided as the “bicycle commission” for its reputation for supporting the interests of pedestrians and bicycle riders over motorists, the Transportation Commission has been kept out of the loop on several key transportation policy initiatives, said Commissioner Wendy Alfsen.  

Last fall, for instance, the council sidestepped the Transportation Commission on a controversial initiative to give free parking spaces near the Ashby BART station for city parking attendants. Alfsen insisted the neighborhood fury over the proposal could have been mollified if the proposal was first discussed at the commission level. 

Councilmember Spring said the City Council has at times deliberately not sent issues to the commission “because they knew they’d raise a fuss.” 

In response to the proposal, City Manager Phil Kamlarz said the city didn’t have enough staff to handle an increased workload. He estimated the proposal would require at least one new employee and more frequent meetings than the current monthly format. 

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SAN FRANCISCO—As a number of water contracts in California’s agriculturally rich Central Valley come up for renewal, two California tribes say the pro-agribusiness Bush administration is reneging on government promises made to restore rivers the tribes depend on. 

The concerns of the Yurok and Hoopa Valley tribes are not always heard, tribal members say, as deals are negotiated in the courts and in government offices to decide how the region’s scarce water resources will be apportioned. Media coverage of California’s “water battles” often leaves tribal voices out as well, the tribes say. 

In a presidential election year, the stakes are high, because water districts are exerting pressure on communities and negotiators to cinch up water deals before a potential new administration with new water policies takes over leadership in the Department of the Interior, says Mike Orcutt, the Hoopa Valley Tribe’s fisheries director. 

In 2002, the death of more than 30,000 salmon along the Klamath River, which is fed by the Hoopa Valley’s Trinity River, attracted a flurry of media coverage that often included tribal voices.  

But in-depth articles are now being written on Pacific Coast water issues without mentioning tribal interests at all. A March 17 story in the Wall Street Journal on water battles in the Central Valley completely overlooked the views of the Hoopa Valley Tribe, says tribal Chairman Clifford Lyle Marshall. 

In a letter to Wall Street Journal editors published April 19, Marshall said the story ignored the huge environmental cost of water diversion schemes designed to provide Central Valley farmers with irrigation: “The fish are dying, threatening our livelihood, and causing economic devastation in Pacific Coast communities from Coos Bay, Ore., to San Francisco Bay.” 

Much of the river water that once coursed naturally from Northern California’s Sierra Mountains to the sea was dammed and diverted in the 1950s for crops in the once-arid Central Valley, now one of the nation’s most lucrative agricultural areas.  

Marshall argues in this letter that U.S. government promises to rehabilitate the Trinity and provide enough water for its salmon are routinely ignored as federal authorities side with “agribusiness giants” and their desire for cheap water.  

The sticking point is a year 2000 agreement, signed by President Clinton’s administration, that said Trinity River water levels were to be brought up to almost half of natural flow—after decades of water levels that dropped to as little as 10 percent of natural flow, due to diversion for hydropower and irrigation. 

But the Westlands Water District—which covers a large swath of the Central Valley—and power suppliers filed a lawsuit, claiming that this change would cause harm to Central Valley residents and businesses.  

That lawsuit is still in the federal court system, and the burden has been put on tribes to prove the drain on water is adversely affecting the river basin and its wildlife. 

The Hoopa tribe, along with the neighboring Yuroks, have put decades of hard scientific research into proving their observations that that low water levels caused by diversion are bad for the fish, says Joseph Orozco, manager of tribal station KIDE 91.3 FM Hoopa Valley Radio.  

The tribes are also weighing in on a related, equally contentious debate concerning the ecological viability of hatchery salmon versus wild salmon stocks.  

Those who say that the Trinity River and other West Coast watersheds are not as threatened as tribes and environmentalists contend base part of their arguments on the fact that hatchery salmon have been successfully introduced into rivers and are living alongside wild salmon stocks.  

Last month, President Bush’s administration proposed, then abandoned, a controversial plan to take many species of West Coast salmon off the Endangered Species list because of the presence of hatchery fish in the rivers.  

Orozco says the tribe is marshaling evidence to prove that hatchery fish are no substitute for wild stock. Plus, he argues wild salmon could be adversely affected by interbreeding with hatchery fish, which are more susceptible to disease and smaller than wild salmon. Worse, he says, the hatchery fish, unused to having to compete for food, also “seem to feed on wild fish eggs.” 

Hupas, who throughout their history have relied on salmon for sustenance, can even taste the difference between the two, an indication of how important healthy salmon stocks are to the tribe’s identity and well being, Orozco says. “Those who have been raised on salmon all their lives can practically tell what creek the fish they eat came from.”  

The tribe has been reaching out to communities with a stake in these water contracts—especially those in the Central Valley—to share their scientific evidence that less water for rivers like the Trinity means starved ecosystems. These efforts contributed to several parties dropping out of the Westlands lawsuit, including the Port of Oakland, the City of Palo Alto and Alameda County, according to Orozco. 

John Fistolera, legislative director of the Northern California Power Agency, one of the lawsuit’s main backers, says the 2000 agreement to restore half the Trinity River’s flow did not fairly account for the adverse effects reduced water would have on agriculture and hydropower in an energy-strapped state.  

The Hoopa tribe, meanwhile, has focused on its own awareness building: One event, begun after the 2002 fish deaths, involves an annual relay-style “fish run” along rivers and streams during spawning season. Students carry batons carved to resemble salmon.  

George Kautsky, deputy director of the neighboring Yurok Tribe Fisheries Department, says the neglect of tribal and environmental interests in Trinity River water negotiations is a long story.  

He says the original 1955 contract dictating use of the Trinity River’s water was a compromise among agriculture, hydroelectric power and local ecosystems.  

“It was a three-legged stool, but the fish and the tribal land were neglected,” Kautsky says. 

Julie Johnson works for NCM, an association of more than 600 print, broadcast and online ethnic media organizations founded in 1996 by Pacific News Service and members of ethnic media. 

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The resignation of George Tenet as CIA director, following a string of disastrous failures at the agency, underscores the greater failure of the U.S. intelligence community to understand a Middle East where allegiances constantly shift, duplicity is considered an honorable political necessity and America is regarded with mixed and extreme emotions of love and loathing. 

A change at the top will be of little consequence at the CIA as long as the same “white bread” brand of espionage based on Western assumptions is practiced in a part of the world where America has staked its global reputation. The CIA, as well as its better-funded, lesser-known counterparts that function mostly under the Pentagon’s command, should go far beyond hiring more Arabic and Farsi linguists and begin to learn the Middle East’s secret language. 

It makes sense from a Western viewpoint—and jibes with a stereotypical image of a Middle East where bakshish (bribe money, to the West) opens all doors—to buy with cold, hard cash “human assets,” an intelligence term for living, breathing spies. Yet, as clearly demonstrated in the case of Ahmad Chalabi, who received millions from Washington over the years, money only buys the slyest, sleaziest and ostensibly least useful of agents. 

The West’s arch-nemeses, the radical, militant organizations that continue to proliferate throughout the region, clearly understand the limitations of money. They know they must appeal mainly to seething religious and national sentiments to recruit agents of such dedication that they would think little of giving their lives for their cause. 

In Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward describes a CIA operation dubbed ROCKSTARS for its perceived spectacular success during the months that led up to the invasion of Iraq. American agents in the northern Kurdish region paid tens of millions of dollars to two Kurdish brothers and their father, who created a network of high-echelon informants within Saddam’s military and civilian ranks. Information, considered to be extremely sensitive, poured in on CD-ROMs and via satellite phones. 

Only today, as Iraq remains an unsettled cauldron, does it seem clear that many of these informants sold for top dollar information they knew to be useless about a regime that had already disengaged itself from Saddam, decided to put up a pro forma resistance to the invasion and was gearing up for protracted guerrilla warfare. 

Also disingenuous was Tenet himself, as he reported to the White House that finding WMDs in Iraq was a “slam-dunk case,” offering Bush and Cheney what they wanted to hear in their monomaniacal march to a war that they thought would secure America’s vested corporate interests in an oil-rich, strategically important country. 

Tenet, the definitive good ol’ boy who served the agency for seven years (the longest term since Allen Dulles, who served for eight) may consider Afghanistan a success story during a tumultuous tenure that also saw America’s costliest intelligence failure with 9/11. In truth, Afghanistan constitutes a case of misspent millions and a bungled message as well. The warlords who were the recipients of Langley’s largesse (“It’s easier to pay them off than to kill them,” one agent reasoned) continue to undermine Kabul’s authority, making Afghanistan a haven for a thriving drug trade and militants of many stripes. 

Ironically, it was in the Middle East that the CIA began to gain its once-storied and notorious reputation, when it overthrew the government of Iran’s Mohamad Mossadegh and restored the Shah to power in 1953. Yet the Iranian coup d’etat also planted the seeds of anti-Americanism in the region, while a politicized Islam began to present itself as a viable alternative to haphazard Westernization. Fundamentalist Islam has failed as a panacea; at the same time, an America whose worst face was bared at Abu Ghraib remains far from attractive. 

Paramount among the lessons learned from half a century of CIA misadventures in the region is that American money and might can no longer buy true friends or intimidate even some of the weakest of foes in the Middle East. Americans, however, are admired for their ingenuity and enterprise, and for the prosperity and liberty they enjoy within their own borders. It will take an administration appreciably more competent and articulate, and appreciably less tainted than present one, to convince Middle Easterners that America has the good faith and the ability to help them achieve the best of America’s values while holding on to their own religious and national traditions. 

A native of Iran, Behrouz Saba writes on American and Middle Eastern political, social and cultural issues. He is a graduate of USC with a Ph.D. in communications. 

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Persistent Chef Keeps Cookin’ as Stove Burns 

Two engine companies raced to a large apartment building at 1945 Berkeley Way early Saturday evening, summoned by an alarm triggered by smoke detectors and greeted by a smoke-filled hallway. 

Conducting a door-to-door search, the firefighters discovered a woman cooking away at a burning electrical stove. Asked to leave, she struggled to keep at her cooking, even with the stove surface ablaze. 

One incandescent burner had fallen through the surface and scorched its way into the range’s interior, but that hadn’t deterred the iron chef, who merely moved her cooking to another burner—stopping only when police hauled her out of the apartment.  

Firefighters discovered that the cook had plucked the batteries from her smoke detectors, with the result that the alarm was raised only after the fumes had oozed out from behind her closed door and set off a hallway detector. 

Deputy Fire Chief David Orth said damage to the stove was estimated at $500, with smoke damage to the apartment running several times more. 

Extension Cord Sparks Bedroom Blaze  

Firefighters were summoned to a home at 2511 Mathews St. shortly before 4 p.m. Sunday, where they found a bedroom engulfed in flames. Extinguishing the blaze within a matter of minutes, they discovered that the cause was damaged extension cord—a frequent cause of domestic fires, said Deputy Chief Orth. 

There were no injuries, and total damage was estimated at $30,000. 

Reignited Cigarette-Spawned Blaze Claims Shed 

A young man inadvertently sparked a blaze when he failed to stub out a cigarette as he worked in a shed behind his parents’ home at 2705 Hillegass Ave. Sunday evening. A small fired ensued, which he then extinguished—or so he thought. 

Then, by 3:20 a.m. Monday, smoldering coals triggered a second blaze. When the Berkeley Fire Department arrived, the shed was fully ablaze. 

By the time the blaze was finally and fully out, the shed was toast and much of an adjoining fence was history. Firefighters estimated the structural damage at $5,000, with lost contents valued at $10,000.  

Photographer Burned in Ice Cream Deception 

When Daily Planet photographer Jakob Schiller shot the picture of a firefighter hosing down an imaginary blaze during a wildfire training exercise for the paper’s June 1 edition, the blaze battler identified himself as “Captain Gary Cates.” 

But Gary Cates he was not—that’s the name of Berkeley’s former fire chief. A little sleuthing disclosed that the gentleman with the hose was none other than Capt. Rich Waters, whom “Deep Hydrant” tells us had offered up the pseudonym to circumvent a firehouse custom which calls for folks identified in press pictures to buy ice cream for the whole station crew. 

And while you’re buying, Cap’n, we suggest you pay for double scoops—and bring a cone by for our chagrined Schiller while you’re at it!

Berkeley Man Slain in Richmond Drive-by 

A 20-year-old Berkeley man died Friday night and two others were lightly wounded after shots erupted from a car that pulled up alongside theirs at a Richmond intersection. 

Andre Foster was rushed to Doctors Hospital in San Pablo, where he was pronounced dead after the 10:38 p.m. drive-by attack. 

Richmond police spokesperson Sgt. Enos Johnson said Foster was driving a blue Chevrolet station wagon on South 23rd Street near Ohio Avenue when a white station wagon—possibly a Chevrolet or Buick—pulled alongside and one or more of its occupants opened fire. 

The driver was described only as an African American male dressed in dark clothing. There may have been other occupants of the car, similarly clad. 

Neither of Foster’s passengers, Oakland residents ages 16 and 20, was seriously injured. 

Johnson requested anyone with information about the crime to call 620-6614. Detective Mitch Peixoto is conducting the investigation. 

Cheesy Heist Ends with Arrest 

A 54-year-old Berkeley man was arrested early Thursday evening after he strong-armed a shopper outside the Berkeley Bowl at 2020 Oregon St. and tried to make off with a bag containing what turned out to be two blocks. 

The irate shopper fought back, and when the dust settled, the shopper had the blocks of cheese and the robber had a new pair of shiny steel bracelets. 

Evades Gang of Four, Keeps Scooter 

When four young males tried to strongarm a scooter from a rider at Eighth Street and Channing Way shortly before 8 p.m. Friday, the resourceful would-be victim made good his escape by fleeing into his nearby home and locking the door. 

Traffic Stop Leads to Really Bad Day 

What began as a routine traffic stop at 63rd and California streets Sunday evening quickly turned into something else when Berkeley police discovered a driver holding a dealer-quantity stash of cocaine. 

The upset driver tried to resist, laying hands on one of the arresting officers. That earned the 31-year-old motorist three criminal charges—possession of cocaine for sale, battery on a police officer and interfering with an officer—and a new temporary home in the Berkeley hoosegow.Q

Last year Ralph and I were invited to a pre-prom party at the Berkeley home of our friends, Laurie, Milton and Sarah. It was a small soiree. We were the only guests. 

Because there are steps to their front and back doors, Ralph and his wheelchair could not get inside the house. Undaunted, Laurie and Milton held the party on their front walkway. They set trays of food on their porch steps: sushi and strawberries, tiny egg rolls, pickles and chocolate cookies. We drank champagne and waited for their daughter, Sarah, who was going to the Head Royce Junior Senior Prom, to come outside and model for us. But Sarah had other plans. We forgot that a 15-year-old doesn’t necessarily want to stand on her front porch in a formal dress waiting for her date, while her parents’ friends gawk at her. But we hung around, hoping that she would give us a sneak preview before her escort arrived. 

No such luck. 

I went upstairs to her bedroom and saw the size 4 prom dress hanging in her closet, waiting until the last moment to be slipped on. Laurie tried to talk Sarah into modeling it for Ralph, but it was of no use. Sarah, an exceedingly good-natured young woman, had definite ideas on how she would make her entrance and those plans did not include a quick preview. We finished off the champagne and made plans to go home. Ralph turned his wheelchair around on the front walkway and wheeled toward the sidewalk, but he miscalculated the angle of the street and began to slide downhill, out of control. 

“Help,” he screamed, just as Sarah appeared on the front porch and her date arrived in his mother’s Volvo station wagon. Ralph sailed past the nervous teenager, who was dressed in a tuxedo and was carrying a corsage box under his arm. 

“Hello,” said the young man. 

“Look out!” shouted Laurie as she ran by him in an effort to catch Ralph. Milton and I followed in a panic. Sarah stood on the porch watching as we sprinted out of sight. There was no way she was going to be of help to us in tiny sling back heels and a strapless ball gown slit up to her thigh. Her date hadn’t seemed to notice us as we ran past him. He was staring in awe at Sarah. 

Laurie, Milton and I managed to halt the wheelchair and push Ralph back up the hill. 

“I think we’ll go now,” I said to Laurie as we reached the front walkway. 

“No offense or anything,” she panted, “but that might be a good idea.” She wiped the sweat from her forehead and tried to compose herself before meeting her daughter’s escort. 

I looked back at the young man and Sarah. She looked beautiful and sophisticated and he looked like a scrawny kid in a suit that was two sizes too big for him. I waved good-bye, pulled Ralph into the van and drove home. 

“I don’t think we’ll be invited to Sarah’s prom next year,” I said to Ralph as I pushed him up the wheelchair ramp. 

“I think you’re probably right,” he answered. 

This year we weren’t asked to send Sarah off to the prom. But Sarah, always a trendsetter, has taken up boxing. So we are going to a boxing match instead of a pre-prom party. Boxing ringsides are far more wheelchair-accessible than narrow sidewalks on steep Berkeley streets. Sarah in boxing gloves and a mouthguard doesn’t look like the Sarah in a floor-length silk Jessica McClintock dress, pointy high heels and plaited hair. But she is just as impressive, determined and poised in the boxing ring as she is on her way to the prom. 

And if Ralph’s wheelchair goes out of control or gets stuck in high gear while he’s watching her at ringside, Sarah will be dressed appropriately for the occasion. She’ll come to his rescue. 

Like just about all of Berkeley, Marcia Poole never knew Chanti Prattipati. 

Graphic designers and sex slaves don’t necessarily cross paths in the normal course of events. But, by sheer coincidence, one November afternoon nearly five years ago, Poole was on the scene when Berkeley police and firefighters yanked open a darkened stairwell door on Bancroft Way and found the 17-year-old Prattipati, slumped over and unconscious. 

Prattipati would soon be pronounced dead at Alta Bates Hospital, the victim of carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a blocked heating vent in the apartment she shared with two other teenage girls also under the control of Berkeley real estate mogul Lakireddy Bali Reddy.  

Prattipati’s death ultimately blew the lid off the Reddy family’s plot to smuggle young Indians into the country for sex and cheap labor, but much to the chagrin of Poole and others, it hasn’t toppled the family’s real estate empire or yielded heavy prison sentences. 

“Justice has not been done,” Poole said. “Chanti was brought in powerless to a country that was supposed to protect her. Instead she was raped, forced into servitude, and when she died no one cared.” 

Poole has followed closely the criminal case against the Reddys which ended Monday when Reddy’s son, Prasad Lakireddy, received no jail time for his role in the family plot. Lakireddy was the fifth member of his family to accept a plea bargain and the third to avoid prison. 

“It’s part of the same theme,” Poole said. “Money talks and the rich walk.” She said she wasn’t quite so cynical before the November day she happened past the scene she’ll never forget. 

Poole was driving down Bancroft Way past Shattuck Avenue when she spotted a group of Indian men carrying what looked like a carpet towards a van parked at the curb. Something about the scene struck her as strange, so she slowed down and noticed that the load was sagging in the middle. 

“Then, a leg descended from what I thought was the carpet,” she said.  

Poole pulled over and joined the fray. She saw several other men trying to push and pull a hysterical teenage girl who kept trying to fall back on the ground. 

“I ran over and told them to stop and let her go,” she said. Then a man, who Poole later identified as Reddy, approached Poole. He said, “Go away, this is a family affair,” Poole recalled. 

She refused and ultimately managed to get a passing motorist to dial 911. When the sirens first blared, Poole said, “the Reddys melted into the background.” 

Soon thereafter, authorities found Chanti Prattipati in the nearby stairwell. Her sister, who had been wrapped up in her own clothing that Poole thought was a carpet, survived. 

The ensuing police investigation was marred from the beginning. Since most of the witnesses spoke Telugu, an Indian language common in the south-central region, and translators were hard to find, the police picked Reddy as an interpreter. 

Given that Reddy was later charged in the case, it was, of course, an error. 

“We needed someone to translate and he offered his services because we had an emergency situation on the street,” Lt. Cynthia Harris, the former Berkeley Police spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times in 2001. “Of course, in hindsight we should not have done that.” 

Reddy insisted that a colleague was the surviving girl’s father, and that they were rushing the two of them to the hospital when Poole had spotted them. 

Despite Poole’s efforts to tell her side of the events, for more than a month the Reddy tale was the official story.  

Even a highly publicized article that December in the Berkeley High School newspaper from students Megan Greenwell and Iliana Montauk questioning why neither of the sisters was enrolled in school failed to reopen the case. (Greenwell later worked as a reporter for the Berkeley Daily Planet.) 

Finally, in January, federal authorities received a letter from India claiming that the Reddys were running an illegal smuggling operation. 

A renewed investigation with different translators yielded different results. Girls in both America and Reddy’s hometown of Velvadam, India, stated that they were forced to work for Reddy for almost no pay and satisfy his sexual desires. 

Although the victims spoke to investigators, many refused to testify in court. They told investigators they feared the for their safety and for their families in India. 

Last October, six of the 10 plaintiffs originally represented by Michael Rubin dropped out of the civil suit against the Reddy family after conversations with family members in India. All of the plaintiffs had been offered cash settlements by the Reddys before they eventually abandoned the cases. 

“For someone to have gone through years of deposition and then drop out for no money, I’d say that’s pretty unusual,” said Rubin. In a settlement agreed to last March, the Reddy’s agreed to pay $2 million in overall criminal restitution and $8.9 million to the family of Chanti Prattipati. 

With few witnesses willing to testify, prosecutors opted to plea bargain the cases. In 2001 Reddy pled guilty to four counts, including the transportation of minors for illegal sexual activity, and was sentenced to 97 months in jail—nearly two years more than the original plea bargain, but just a fraction of the 38-year maximum sentence he potentially faced. 

The case against Reddy’s sons—prosecuted after their father—unraveled when prosecutors alerted defense attorneys that federal translator Uma Rao had told victims to embellish their claims of abuse. 

Following that revelation the Justice Department dropped all sexual misconduct charges against the sons, Vijay and Prasad Lakireddy. 

Poole blamed prosecutors for “giving up” when the girls refused to testify.  

“They needed to find a way to get to the truth and not let these people get away with it. But the government doesn’t care,” she said.  

Not only did prosecutors plea bargain sentences, but they refused to invoke the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) which has been used to confiscate the property of mobsters and marijuana growers who amass wealth through illegal means. 

However, Lucus Guttentag, who worked on the civil case as part of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants Rights Division, defended the efforts of John Kennedy, who prosecuted Lakireddy Bali Reddy, and blamed the failure to win big sentences on Justice Department brass. 

“The problem is that Washington doesn’t provide the resources for the enormous amount of commitment and understanding that goes into a case like this,” he said.  

One person conspicuously absent from the Reddy case is Assistant District Attorney for Berkeley, John Adams. He never filed charges against the Reddys, which the attorney close to the case said is not unusual, since with high profile cases where state and federal laws are violated, the Justice Department takes over because it has better resources to prosecute. 

“The Reddy’s probably would have preferred to be tried in state court,” Adams said. Still, he added, “that could have been a serious state case no doubt about it.” 

Although the plea bargains on federal charges don’t preclude a state case on rape or involuntary manslaughter charges, Adams said he remembered little of the case and didn’t recall there being sufficient evidence to press charges. 

“What I do remember leads me to believe there was a bunch of speculation, but nothing to substantiate the charges on the state’s side. Otherwise we would have filed,” he said. 

Although Reddy and his sons have faced jail time, their real estate empire remains intact, said Tom Brougham, Senior Management Analyst for the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board. Tracking the family’s properties is always difficult, he said, because they register them under different business names, but the family is still believed to own over 1,000 units worth an estimated $50 million. 

The Reddy empire often found itself in trouble with the rent board for making substandard repairs, and not returning security deposits, especially to foreign tenants, but Brougham said since Reddy was arrested there have been “far fewer” tenant complaints. 

Reddy emigrated to Berkeley in 1960 and started fixing up shabby apartment complexes in the early 1980s and quickly built his fortune partly off the backs of his smuggled employees. 

“He had indentured servants by the scores. That’s a lot of capital,” said Brougham. “If anyone else had so many working for nothing they’d have an empire too.” ˇ

The City of Berkeley’s plan to reduce its $10 million budget deficit relies most heavily on cuts to city services while relying very little on fee and/or tax increases to generate new revenue. Balancing the budget in this way will exacerbate, at the local level, the tremendous economic inequality that exists in California and throughout this country as a result of unbridled military spending, unjust federal and state tax policies, and the erosion of the public sector. 

The United States ranks first in terms of wealth inequality among all industrialized nations. The richest one percent of Americans owns 40 percent of the wealth. In California, during the so-called “boom” of the 1990s, incomes of the poorest 40 percent of California’s families fell approximately five percent. In contrast, the average income of the wealthiest five percent of California’s families increased by 50 percent. This income gap widened despite the fact that the poorest 20 percent of Californians worked 378 hours more per year in the late 1990s than they worked in the late 1970s. Children, tragically, are not sheltered from the storm: Nearly one quarter of California children grow up in poverty. 

The Bush administration, of course, has contributed greatly to the problem of wealth inequality in this country. Bush is spending over one billion dollars each day on the military while ensuring that he bankrupts the country further by giving huge tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. As a result of Bush’s tax cuts, people earning one million dollars a year have seen their incomes go up by $32 an hour, while the increase for those earning $20,000 a year is a meager 21 cents an hour. To make matters worse, a congressional investigation found that, for the years 1996-2000, approximately 60 percent of U.S. corporations paid no income taxes. The effect of Bush’s “tax relief” plan is to send the country spiraling into debt at a rate of one million dollars per minute. And with deficits surging out of control, Bush has the ammunition he needs to justify deep cuts into public services that serve the disabled and working poor, as well as significant cuts in federal funding to state and local governments. California will likely lose $4.5 billion in federal dollars linked to affordable housing, public education, community development, and environmental protection in the next year. 

And how has our governor responded to the budget deficit in California brought about, in part, by Bush’s voodoo economics? By slashing much needed public services, of course, and failing to raise revenues by keeping a highly regressive and unjust state tax system in place. In California, the poorest 20 percent (incomes less than $18,000 per year) pay 11.3 percent of their income in state and local taxes, while the richest one percent (incomes greater than $567,000) pay only 7.2 percent of their income in taxes. And like his counterpart in the White House, the governor tells Californians that we have no choice but to “tighten our belts” and make deep cuts in to public services, which means, among other things, taking money away from cities and counties throughout the state. 

And this brings us to the City of Berkeley, which has already cut $6 million from its budget over the last two years and still faces a $10 million deficit, in large part due to the aforementioned cuts in state funding. The city’s response to the current deficit has been to make 20 percent cuts to city departments and to propose salary reductions for city employees. Only three percent of the $10 million deficit is scheduled to come from fee and/or tax increases. 

As the city grapples with the budget deficit over the next couple months, we must ask ourselves whether we want to be part of the problem, or part of the solution. The problem is staggering wealth inequality that exists throughout this country and, in fact, right here in Berkeley. The solution is to maintain the quality of public services by initiating progressive tax and fee hikes so that wealthiest among us, who have benefited disproportionately from regressive federal and state tax policies, pay their rightful share. I encourage the mayor, the City Council, and the residents of Berkeley to work together to ensure that the city’s budget is balanced in a fair and just manner.  

Michael Marchant works for the City of Berkeley. 

Criticizing the president, the war, or the conduct of the war does not put our troops in danger, rightly claims General Anthony Zinni, former commander-in- chief of the United States Central Command and Bush administration special envoy to the Middle East. He said, “Look, there is one statement that bothers me more than anything else. And that’s the idea that when the troops are in combat, everybody has to shut up. Imagine if we put troops in combat with a faulty rifle, and that rifle was malfunctioning, and troops were dying as a result. 

“I can’t think anyone would allow that to happen, or that they would not speak up. Well, what’s the difference between a faulty plan and a strategy that’s getting just as many troops killed?” 

I, for one, am extremely glad that Nancy Pelosi spoke up about the criminal handling of the war in Iraq for which the Bush Administration is irresponsibly responsible. What I have found hard to believe from the beginning, is that, as a democracy, this country could have allowed this usurping of the presidency to take place at all. Why did anybody buy it that a free state like ours could be purchased by a machine? (If you don’t know what I am referring to, do a little research.) If a little gal like me can see through this administration’s plot, why can’t anyone see through the lies and know that this “Bush machine” is an imperialist demon reminiscent of the Nazi era that is robbing us of the leisure and freedom that allows us to think and realize truth for ourselves, rather than be brainwashed by self-motivated power-mongers? All we have worked for over the years is being destroyed! Like the weekend, minimum wage, a woman’s right to choose, the environment, responsible taxation, medical relief, better education for all children, the list goes on... 

I just can’t believe that the supposedly most liberated and intelligent people on Earth are standing still with closed eyes and mouths for this sad unfolding of the plots of evil men. 

If more folks could only wean themselves from their TV sets, their SUVs, and their routines, (their terror at being basically separated from God—the whole reason for anyone’s misery—and intoxication with these things) and pay even a little attention to what is really going on, they couldn’t possibly stand for what this administration is trying to pull off! 

Know that this administration is trying its best to cut us off from knowing what they are up to—from shutting down newspapers in Iraq, controlling the movie industry, (Disney in particular), as well as Fox news channel, to trying to silence dissenting viewpoints at home in every way they can (without arousing too much suspicion? Ha Ha). This administration is making the U.S. Constitution look like a left-wing idealist joke. What is actually the meaning between “left” and “right”? Think about it. Meaningless labels. Free speech??? The Bush administration only likes free speech when it’s what they want to hear! 

Differing viewpoints are what makes a democracy what it is. Leaders have to be willing take on the challenge of hearing—really hearing—what others have to say. And unless they do this, what is the value of their political work??? Otherwise it all becomes canned. 

All glories to Nancy Pelosi for calling a spade a spade! Pray for more like her, and pray that her example will get people to take the cotton out of their ears, the blinders off their eyes, and open up their mouths to speak out against what they’ve instinctively got to know is a threat to their very happiness. 

Caroline Gay Attri is an Oakland resident. ›

Editors, Daily Planet:  

The article “Cal Grad Proposes Touchscreen Alternative,” Daily Planet, May 7-9) is only another attempt to layer more complexity onto a system. It is like a British motor car. When a problem exists, they tend to layer a solution on top of the problem, but not to solve it. As layer upon layer added with each “step further” obfuscates the original architecture, new solutions will cause inconsistencies with other no longer visible aspects of the system. 

I have spent the last 30-plus years designing, developing, implementing, documenting and maintaining information systems and their components. 

I propose a much simpler solution to the problem of vote authentication, storage, tabulation and verification—simpler than the solution proposed by Daniel Silverstein in your May 7 article. Vote tabulation in a repeatedly verifiable fashion is trivial once vote authentication and storage are solved. I solve them with cooperatively developed open source, commodity hardware, write-once media (CD), a reread verification step to allow the voter to correct errors, and digital signatures. No dead trees are required. 

The first problem to be addressed is authenticity of a vote. The statement: “Once a vote is cast on a computer even the most comprehensive checks sometimes can’t ensure the machine won’t make a switch” is inaccurate given currently available verification and authentication capabilities. We can know that a vote is recorded digitally on a non-modifiable medium exactly as the voter requested it be. 

The keys to this are code transparency for the programs that run the voting machines and recording the votes on a write-once medium like CD. 

The big problem with current touchscreen machines is that Diebold will not let anyone see the program listings for each and every piece of object code in their machines. If we can’t see the code, we cannot know what it is doing. 

The solution to this problem is open source. Program listings for systems much more complicated than this simple single user application have been publicly available and cooperatively maintained for decades. The most obvious instance is the Linux operating system. But, there are open source solutions available for each and every layer of program needed to implement a touchscreen voting application. As reference, I would suggest you take a look at projects tracked by sourceforge.net or even the finished packages at freshmeat.net.  

For hardware, I would recommend commodity components. I’d get multiple manufacturers to build them from well known components such as miniCD writers, Intel processors packaged with a touchscreen into a commodity voting machine. Given the open source nature of all code for such a machine, the market would be worldwide and the units would be cheap. 

I would also cooperatively develop a set of quality assurance (QA) acceptance test suites that could be downloaded and run on any new piece of hardware. The manufacturers could use these in their QA. Election folks could use them to vet any new purchases. 

OK, now the process. Because it is open source, the state could read, verify and digitally sign OS CD’s that each county could download and use as boot CD’s for their machines. The county elections personnel could prepare a ballot XML file for each district that would also be burned onto the CD. The CD could then be digitally signed in any of a number of ways that would reveal any subsequent tampering. 

A “voter-verified paper audit trail” would not be provided on paper. It would be provided on the little CDs the machines use. After the voter has finished selecting their choices for each office and measure and verified their choices on a summary screen, the record would be digitally signed and written to the CD. The record of the vote would then be reread from the CD, and the voter presented with a second summary screen. Should the voter not like what they see, a vote nullification record would be written to the CD, and the voting process would begin again. The voter gets two chances to verify their vote. Once before it is written to CD, and a second time when it is reread from that CD. 

In information systems our mantra is “Garbage in, garbage out.” The time to deal with uncertainty is as close to the source as possible. We like to deal with potentially inaccurate data at the acquisition phase. The tricks employed by Mr. Silverstein do not address this. They are back-end compensation. They increase the load on the election management team at the time they are most burdened. Simplifying the system and vetting its components in advance will make things run much more smoothly on election night. 

Henry Mahon 

ô

REAGAN’S LEGACY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I cannot help but wonder if the media has forgotten President Reagan’s leadership in funding and arming Afghanistan’s “freedom fighter” revolution in the 1980s.  

That immoral gun-running is of course what allowed the Taliban to take control of Afghanistan, oppress Afghani women, and shelter Bin Laden’s terror-training camps. George W. Bush’s $30 million in direct aid to the Taliban in 2001 was merely a token of our support. The World Trade Center destruction and the “war on terrorism” will always be remembered in my heart as the Gipper’s real legacy.  

Lee Wallace 

• 

DAY-GLO GORILLA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The schools, the infrastructure, the social programs are all, most agree, in a severe budget crisis. Few seem to be demanding the obvious solution, the 800-pound day-glo gorilla standing in the middle of the meeting room: Cancel the war! Fund the schools! Fund everything that we, the people, know will benefit ourselves and our country! I do not understand why all public officials and all individuals of good will and common or uncommon sense are not out in the streets screaming that the federal government bring home the surviving troops, stop the theft of our money by corporations and mercenaries, and educate the children, treat the sick, fix the roads, and do the rest of what all sensible people know is necessary. 

Let’s not forget clean air, clean water, and protection for other species as well as our own. 

Ruth Bird 

• 

TACTFUL HUMOR 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I must wholeheartedly disagree with letter writer Sandy Rothman, (Letters, Daily Planet, June 4-7) who takes the Police Blotter columnist Richard Brenneman to task for the creativity he employs in his writing. His style is indeed humorous, but not tactlessly so, and I have not seen the “mean-spiritedness” she claims to be so offended by. Instead, Brenneman manages to impart most of the pertinent details of several incidents that are reported on nowhere else in a manner that is lively, interesting, and contains the occasional wink. To me this is a tremendously welcome change from the stupefyingly repetitive contents of the other local alternative papers. Thanks Richard! 

Douglas Smith 

• 

GADFLY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

We need gadflys. They have different points of view, different concepts, and inventive ideas that no one else has considered. 

The gadflys are a bother, ask off beat questions, and are often persistent.  

Ralph Nader is a gadfly. He observed court sessions at age 4. 

He reads and speaks four other languages: Chinese, Russian, Arabic, and Portuguese. 

He started and has spun off many good projects . 

He is responsible for many good books including Unsafe at an Speed and Civics for Democracy by Katherine Isaacs. 

If he gets in the presidential debate he will ask the questions which the Democrats and Republicans have already agreed not to discuss in violation of the law setting up the debates. 

Let’s give him a chance and see what happens! 

Charles L. Smith 

• 

RETAIL ACTIVITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

According to Malcolm Carden (Letters, Daily Planet, June 4-7), “Folks from the suburbs do not flock into Union Square to shop, except perhaps once a year at Christmas,” and out-of-town shoppers tend to avoid BART. I often take BART to the city on weekends, where I see numerous people (including children) boarding at the Powell Street station, carrying a variety of bulging name-brand shopping bags back to the East Bay. So it’s clear to me that many people will shop by transit when it’s a relatively convenient and cost-effective option. And as we round the top of the bell curve of petroleum extraction while global demand continues to increase rapidly, the “fact of life that retail activity and cars go hand in hand in this country” may soon turn out not to be hardwired into our genes after all. It would be prudent to plan ahead for this epiphany. 

Ken Cheetham 

• 

AC TRANSIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Bus fare hikes are again being considered by AC Transit, not yet six months following the December 2003 fare hike for seniors and disabled persons.  

Despite drastic cuts in services, according to items 9 and 10 on an agenda for last AC Transit board meeting (May 19) those who can least afford a fair increase (disabled people, seniors, and students) may be asked to pay more to ride AC Transit next September 2004.  

AC Transit holds its board meetings first and third Wednesdays at 2 p.m.  

Although AC Transit does have a limited if ineffective forum for riders to protest its policies, meetings are always held in small rooms that soon fill, usually at 2 p.m., when working people are least likely to be able to attend. President Wallace, a kindly soft-spoken man, is obviously preempted in meetings by the AC Transit attorney. 

Now is the time to protest fare hikes. Let us not allow a second fare increase in less than a year! AC Transit Riders unite!  

Arlene Merryman 

• 

OHLONE DOG PARK 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It came as a great surprise to learn that once again there is a campaign to curtail or eliminate use of Ohlone Dog Park. Although I no longer have a dog, there was a time when this Berkeley institution was important in my life and I know it is to many Berkeley residents today. I don’t think that current and future dog owners are deprived of the assistance and pleasure I experienced as a frequent visitor to the dog park. Once again, those who would deprive other Berkeley residents of this important resource are neighbors of the park who moved in long after it was well established, well aware of its place in the neighborhood. Many of us live in neighborhoods impacted by activities of outsiders, whether all-day parking because of being near BART or the University Avenue transit corridor or short-term parking for schools, shopping areas or other parks. Should we take down the basketball courts a couple of blocks down Hearst because too many rowdy young boys go there, parking their cars in the neighborhood and making a lot of noise? 

The long-established rules governing the park are reasonable and if they are not being followed the solution is to enforce them, correcting those who break the rules, not punishing everybody. My experience was that most park users helped enforce the rules, reminding others to pick up after their dogs, advising new owners of methods of control, and, certainly, objecting if anyone was irresponsible enough to leave dogs unattended. It was to our own interest to help other users so we all had a positive experience. 

Moving the dog park out of the neighborhood is no solution. Many users can’t drive to the Marina. Shortening the hours would discriminate against those who work and must bring their dogs to the park either before they go to work or after they return home. If neighbors are concerned about there being too many dogs at one time (which is questionable) and too many non-resident cars parked in their neighborhood (which happens to all of us), the obvious solution is to establish more dog parks throughout the city. Don’t Willard Park, San Pablo Park and possibly other areas associated with the BART line have available space? Not a lot is needed; a small space can be advantageous in maintaining supervision of one’s dog. If users had dog parks closer to their homes they would be able to walk and that would alleviate any problem with parking. 

I recall that not long ago, Doris Roberts, one of the earliest proponents of the dog park, was honored by City Council for having the foresight and interest to help establish this very important element of Berkeley life. They recognized it as worthy then, I hope they continue to acknowledge its importance. 

Honor Thompson 

• 

TIME FOR HARDBALL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have lived in Berkeley since I was born 78 years ago, and as yet to see anyone in city government use any common sense about anything; including dealing with the university. No one seems to care about what the tax burden has become to the city’s homeowners. 

One example: A solution to make the university pay its fair share of Berkeley’s sewer fees. The regents have long ago stipulated that the dormitories must be self-supporting. Part of that self-support should be paying their share of the sewer fee. 

The Berkeley homeowners pay a sewer fee based on each toilet they have in their homes. It seems to me that the City Council has only to count the numbers of toilets in each dorm and throughout the university campus and charge the university the same fees that each homeowner is charged. Serve notice to the university officials that they pay the same sewer fee that the homeowner pays. 

If they refuse, then it is time to play hard ball with the university. Simply put, send a crew up to the dorms and locate each sewer outlet coming into the main line. Then proceed to close it off. Dig a hole at that point and install a gate valve. If they still refuse to pay their fair share of the sewer fee—then close the valve. 

Before we concern ourselves with more property tax increases, perhaps the City Council needs to consider this one approach to this one problem first. 

If the City Council hasn’t got the common sense to pursue this and other simple fee approaches, perhaps it is time for the homeowners to consider a new City Council in the next election.  

Andrew Laird 

• 

REALITY TV 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Inside, everyone knows that reality TV is about a different reality than what is on the screen. Knows that, like the marathon in the 1970s era film about the misery of the Great Depression (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?) reality programming works the heartstrings of despair of Americans, creating hope, vicariously, for those who are struggling in their own lives. The sad part is not just the marketing of a Cindarella-like atmosphere but the backdrop fraud behind the mythical paradise—the “other” America that viewers aspire to—there being no such America. Reality TV perfects the myth in which the United States is a paradise, not the marauding superpower, the colonizing imperialist, the greatest purveyor of scientific violence and terror in all history, and the debaucher of its own citizenry. While in the world we live in, the one smoothed out of the picture by Reality TV, a president publicly declares that the United States is at war with much of the world and launches wars that will “never end,” our TV lot is to cheer the young “martyrs” whose coffins we are not supposed to see. Over in that other world, Wall Street uses “America” to steal the world’s food and their resources, to kill their poor and dictate to their governments. Of course, declaring war on the world is not a new idea, invented in the USA. That most of us can’t resist the hell that it portends for us reflects, however, the success of reality TV. 

Marc Sapir 

• 

9/11 COMMISSION 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

Congratulations to KPFA for airing the New York City portion of the Kean Commission 9/11 hearings. No other media organization would touch it, not even CSPAN. 

One issue that has me seriously concerned, if we are to believe Larry Bensky’s unflinching support of the Bush administration’s account of what happened on that day, is the strength of our steel frame buildings. 

On 9/11, two 60-ton jets slammed into the towers near their points of greatest leverage and thinnest steel, yet despite no visible movement of the buildings less than an hour later, the south tower (WTC2—the second building to be hit) collapses, according to the Kean Commission, in 10 seconds. The upper floors, which were on fire and which were lighter and, according to the Bensky/Bushco model, lost all their strength from the fires, traveled through the lower floors, which were constructed of thicker steel and had no fires in seconds. WTC2 was 1,362 feet tall. Freefall in a vacuum from a height of 1,362 feet is 9.2 seconds. This means that the steel structure of the twin towers offered little more resistance than the air surrounding the buildings in it’s vertical direction. 

One can only conclude from the Bensky/Bushco New Physics Order, that steel frame buildings have incredible horizontal strength and almost no vertical strength. I submit that we immediately stop all construction of steel frame buildings as they are prone to instantaneous collapse from the forces of gravity. 

David Heller 

• 

LIBERALS SHOULD REJOICE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

We are in an election year and the country is more politically polarized then any time since the Civil War. Any subject which can be politicized is exaggerated and intensified so it may be exploited before it’s news cycle runs out or a new issue pushes it off the front pages. We must all keep this in mind when we read or hear the news. 

The “torture” photos could just as easily be part of a Mapplethorpe exhibit funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. There are those in the Castro who pay good money to have this done to them. No one was beheaded! 

I believe that all truths and information including photos on controversial subjects should be universally available. But different groups want the light to only shine in certain places. I believe that photos of a partial birth abortion and the moving images of a baby laughing and sucking it’s thumb inside a mothers womb should be shown to those who are about to end that life. But, of course, those gruesome images might have an impact contrary to one group’s agenda. We all need to think for ourselves; no group or side of an issue is completely right or wrong. 

The price of gasoline is high and may go higher. John Kerry is directing the blame to Bush. Logically, this should help Bush with liberals, especially here in Berkeley. High gas prices should be a benefit to health as people walk more and drive those polluting vehicles less. The higher the price of gas, the more competitive and attractive alternative forms of energy become. Congestion on the roads may lessen as people use public transportation. These are all things which the Berkeley liberals should rejoice at, yet, the price of gas will be used as an issue to attack Bush with. The nation has taken on a cult like fanaticism after it has chosen sides. The only hope is for people to analyze an “issue” and not just listen to the spin from their chosen sides. 

Michael Larrick 

As Faye Carol swings from side to side, clapping and grooving, her energy is immediately picked up by the line of young girls standing directly in front of her. Accompanied by a solo piano, each girl—with Carol’s encouragement—belts out their individual part of the tune they are rehearsing. 

“Yeah that’s it!” shouts Carol, smiling wider and wider as the girls gain more confidence as their turns come around again. 

One of the Bay Area’s most famous jazz and blues performers, Carol is training a young group of impressionable singers as part of a program called Music In The Schools. For three years, the program has recruited students from Oakland and Berkeley to be part of a year-long musical training institute.  

“There is talent in every generation that comes along, “said Carol. “It always manifests itself in some way.” She added, however, that it’s not the obvious stars she’s looking for when she auditions people for the program. “I’m not looking for the person who is going to win American Idol. I’m looking for the person who has never explored their talent.” 

Carol, whose accolades stretch way back, said she started the Music In The Schools program because she loves to teach, but also because of the recent drought in music education and opportunities for students. Because music has been such a huge part of her life, Carol said she’s dedicated herself to filling in the gaps so students have the same opportunity to experience and benefit from music. 

Eight students, ages 13-19, went through the program this year, and on June 10 they will be performing at the Black Repertory Group where they’ve been rehearsing thanks to help from the theater and its director, Dr. Mona Scott. The Black Rep has sponsored the program and given Carol space for the rehearsals and performances for the past two years. When the program originally started, it was funded by a grant from the California Arts Council. 

Several of the students this year, said Carol, had no formal musical training, and probably never would if it were not for the program. Most of them, she said, didn’t consider themselves singers until they discovered their talent through Music In The Schools. 

“If it wasn’t for Ms. Faye, I probably would have kept it to myself, because nobody knew,” said Jazmin Noble, 17, from Castlemont High in Oakland. After two years in the program, Noble is an outgoing and confident singer.  

Asked to describe the program she said there was no other way to put it other than “the love.” 

“It’s a catharsis, it’s an obligation, I can’t see myself not doing it,” she said. 

Since they started at the beginning of the school year, the students have been through Musicology 101, with singing lessons, music theory, music history, and anything else Carol thinks will help round out their music education. During the same time, said Carol, the students have blossomed. Their repertoires have grown, and during the performance the students will showcase a number of different musical styles and genres. 

The class also has a style all its own, much of which comes from Carol’s own background as a performer. 

Born in Mississippi but raised in California, Carol grew up singing in church choirs and at school. She continued to sing throughout college around the same time the Motown music was at its height.  

She got her first break when she won a talent show at the Oakland Auditorium and was awarded a two-week stint as a singer performing with Johnny Tolbert at the one of the more well-known black clubs in the area. Just as Carol was gaining notoriety, however, disco came into the mix, displacing the live band and marginalizing the kind of music she was doing. Fortunately, Carol said, she was able to turn to her friend, Martha Young, the niece of the great jazz player Lester Young, and her eventual husband James Gamble, who versed her in other music genres and allowed her to continue performing. 

Carol spent 10 years as a jazz and cabaret singer in the gay neighborhoods in San Francisco. Afterwards she built her own bands, establishing herself as an authority in both the blues and jazz scenes in the Bay Area.  

Her range as a singer, she said, has helped her appreciation of music. And since she’s played so many different kinds of music, she said she’s willing to give anything a chance. 

“We can say we don’t like something as a matter of taste, if a person doesn’t like it that’s their opinion,” she said. “I always teach my students that you at least owe yourself a listen, because you might be missing out on some you might really like.”  

That’s why, in the music history part of the program, students start at the beginning and work their way to the present. “I don’t leave any stone unturned,” said Carol. 

Students usually start around the time of Louis Armstrong and end somewhere around hip-hop, a form of music that Carol credits with re-invigorating an empty scene. 

“By the time the hip-hop generation came along, there wasn’t a whole lot of ways to get music from one generation to the next,” said Carol, unlike the times, she said, when live music was more popular and musicians were people, not icons. “They had to create a way to express what was happening on the streets…and the rhythm of hip-hop, it was infectious.” 

After a year of rehearsing, all the students say they are ready to perform. Each rehearsal is more intense and energetic than the last, as students continually build their confidence in the music and themselves.  

“I’ve found jewels out there,” said Carol. 

The performance by the Music in the Schools group is this Thursday, June 10 at 7 p.m. at the Black Repertory Group, 3201 Adeline St. For more information call 652-2120 or go to www.blackrepertorygroup.org.›

“Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry... When I take you out in the Fringe without a surrey” if you’re looking for early music in Berkeley this month. 

The Oklahoma! lyrics, somewhat modified, come to mind when contemplating the music scene. Until 2002, every other year, for a decade and a half, Cal Performances produced a major summer event, called the Berkeley Festival and Exhibition (BF&E). 

This year, lacking funds, the event has been canceled, but the Berkeley Fringe Festival is alive, kicking, and running, June 9-13. The Fringe, as the name implies, was an add-on, a variation on the theme. Now the theme is dead—either for the time being or indefinitely—but the low-budget, far more modest (but not less dedicated) Fringe is on. 

It will have some 40 public events, mostly concerts, but also master classes, a “great recorder play-in,” and other attractions. Performers include such luminaries as Chanticleer and members of Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. Jonathan Harris, of “Early Music News,” says the difference between academic/official and Fringe concerts is mostly in the ear of the beholder.  

“I have felt privileged to hear quite a few of the Main Stage events over the years, and some were indeed jaw-droppingly wonderful,” Harris said. “But so were some of those on the Fringe. At the 2000 Festival, for instance, my favorite show the entire week was a Fringe concert of 17th-century music by a young ensemble from Southern California called La Monica. There’s no better way to put it: they rocked!” 

There will be music performed on the recorder and the lute, various now-exotic and standard instruments, works by Bach, Purcell, Ockeghem, masters of the Italian and German Baroque, etc. Venues range from St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, to St. Joseph of Arimathea Chapel, to the International House, and the First Congregational Church. Detailed information is available at www.sfems.org. 

Also, at the same time and intertwined with Fringe events and artists, Early Music America is holding a national conference in Berkeley, with a title that should get some kind of award: “The Future of Early Music in America.” 

The conference, say the organizers, is for “anyone who has a stake in the future of early music in America—performers (both professional and amateur); administrators, board members, and volunteers for early music organizations; educators (teachers, professors, workshop directors, collegium directors), and enthusiasts (all who love early music, attend concerts, or buy CDs).” It will take place in the Berkeley City Club, June 10-13. For information, visit www.earlymusic.org. 

Similarly to BF&E, Early Music America offers events and shows besides concerts, lectures and symposia. There will be an exhibition in the First Congregational Church during the three days of the conference, free to the public, and offering an “early-music marketplace,” including book stores and publishers, record stores and companies, instrument makers, national societies, presenters and agents.›

TUESDAY, JUNE 8 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Penelope Grenoble O’Malley introduces her memoir “Malibu Diary: Notes from an Urban Refugee” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Geneen Roth discusses weight-loss in “The Craggy Hole in My Heart and the Cat who Fixed It” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

The Whole Note Poetry Series, with Toby Kaplan and Howard Dycus at 7 p.m. at The Beanery, 2925 College Ave.549-9093. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

2nd Annual June Jazz Jubilee from 3 to 5 p.m. at Salem Lutheran Home, 2361 East 29th St., Oakland. Free, but reservations requested. 434-2871. 

Mimi Fox, solo guitar, at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Jazz House Jam at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Donation $5. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Janis Siegel in a tribute to Broadway at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. Also on Wed. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Stan Ridgeway at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Jazzschool Tuesdays, a weekly showcase of ensembles from Berkeley Jazz-school at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 9 

CHILDREN 

Preschool Storytime, a program introducing books and music to promote early literacy skills, at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library West Branch, 1125 University Ave. 981-6270. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Marc Bojanowski talks about “The Dog Fighter” set in the underworld of 1940s Mexico, at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Peretz Kidron introduces the anthology “Refusenik!: Israel’s Soldiers of Conscience” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Penelope Tzougros talks about “Wealthy Choices: The Seven Competencies of Financial Success” at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-3635. 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with Charles Ellik at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

The Concord Ensemble, a cappella sextet performs “Your Beautiful Eyes,” music from the Renaissance, at 8 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. Tickets are $20. 310-867-9583. www.concordensemble.com  

Coro Ciconia performs “Ockeghem & Son,” late medieval and early Renaissance choral music, at 8 p.m. at Loper Chapel at First Congregational Church, Dana at Durant. Tickets are $10. 843-0450. pcfisher@berkeley.edu  

Billy Dunn and Bluesway at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. West Coast Swing lesson with Nick and Shanna at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Carol Denney, singer, songwriter, activist at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

The Christy Dana Quartet, trumpet-led original jazz, at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $8-$15 sliding scale. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Jules Broussard, Ned Boynton and Bing Nathan at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. www.downtownrestaurant.com 

The Key of Z: Experimental Instruments, and the Music They Make, with Peter Whitehead and his recycled instruments, at 7:30 p.m.at the Pacific Film Archive. Sponsored by Amoeba Records. 642-0808. 

Gaucho Gypsy Jazz at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

ubzorb and Sandhya Sanjana, Indian jazz vocalist at 9 p.m. at The Lucre Lounge, 2086 Allston at Shattuck. Cost is $5. 841-1390. 

THURSDAY, JUNE 10 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“High Fiber” an exhibit exploring the intersection of digital technology and fiber-based artworks. Reception for the artists at 6 p.m. at Kala Art Institute, 1060 Heinz Ave. Gallery hours are Tues.-Fri. noon to 5:30 p.m., Sat. noon to 4:30 p.m. 549-2977. www.kala.org 

“Anatomy of the Artist,” a reception for photographer Hugh Shurley and others at 6 p.m. at NIAD Art Center, 551 23rd St., Richmond. 620-0290. www.niadart.org 

“Interior Dialogues” works by Katherine Boyd, Lisa Bruce and Deborah Drew. Reception at 5:30 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. 848-1228. 

THEATER 

California Shakespeare Theater, “Comedy of Errors,” Tues.-Fri. at 7:30 p.m., Sat at 8 p.m., Sun. at 4 p.m. at the Bruns Memorial Amphitheater, through June 27. Tickets are $13-$32. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

Shotgun Players, “Quills” by Doug Wright at the Julia Morgan Theater. Runs Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. through July 3. Free, donations accepted. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

Wilde Irish Productions, “Eclipsed” by Patricia Burke Brogan, at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Runs Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. through June 27. Tickets are $15-$20. 841-7287. www.wildeirish.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Hari Kunzru reads from his new novel “Transmission” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Kevin Nelson describes “The Golden Game: The Story of California Baseball” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Word Beat Reading Series at 7 p.m. with featured readers Julia Vinograd and George Tirada, followed by an open mic, at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave., near Dwight Way. For information call 526-5985 or 205-1749.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Zoe Vandermeer, harp and soprano and Howard Kadis, lute and theorbo, perform “Terra Antiqua,” a concert of 16th-century lute songs and early 17th-century monody, at noon at Loper Chapel, Dana at Durant. Tickets are $10-$15. 524-2803. www.zoevandermeer.com  

Elaine Thornburgh, harpsichord, performs a late 16th- and early 17th-century keyboard repertoire at 12:10 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana, at Durant. Tickets are $8-$12. 415-387-6890. tsviandilana@mindspring.com  

Healing Muses, Eileen Hadidian, recorder & baroque flute, Maureen Brennan, Celtic harp, Natalie Cox, Celtic harp; and Dan Reiter, cello, perform “Celtic Spirit,” at 3 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana, at Durant. Tickets are $10-$15. 524-5661. www.healingmuses.org 

Elizabeth Brown and Gus Denhard, lutes and Baroque guitars at 1 p.m. at St. Joseph of Arimathea Chapel, Bowditch at Durant. Tickets are $5-$15. 206-297-9507. emg@earlymusicguild.org  

Sheli Nan, harpsichord at 5 p.m. at The Music Studio, 150 Vicente Road, near the Claremont Hotel. Tickets are $10-$15. Limited seating, reservatiosn requested. 841-2860. www.shelinan.com  

Geert van Gele and Letitia Berlin, recorders and Webb Wiggins, harpsichord at 6 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana, at Durant. Tickets are $16-$18, $5 children. 559-4670. tish-feb@mindspring.com 

The Novello Quartet Tekla Cunningham and Cynthia Miller Freivogel, violins; Anthony Martin, viola; and Elisabeth Reed, cello perform Haydn’s Opus 50 string quartets, at 8 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana, at Durant. Tickets are $8-$12. 415-794-1100. www.novelloquartet.org  

Summer Noon Concert with Ten Ton Chicken at the Berkeley BART. Sponsored by the Downtown Berkeley Association. 

Ducksan Distones, jazz with Duck Bailey on the piano, at 8 and 9:30 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $6-$15 sliding scale. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Brian Kenney Fresno, Amy X Neuberg, Andre La Fosse at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Rebecca Riots, fresh radical folk at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50 in advance, $18.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Monty Alexander and Freddy Cole in a tribute to Nat “King” Cole at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Through Sun. Cost is $12-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Keni El Lebrijano, flamenco guitar, at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

FRIDAY, JUNE 11 

CHILDREN 

Roaring Wild Animals with readings from “The Biggest Bear” and “The Water Hole” at 10:30 a.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-0861. 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“Transition/Exploration” works by five Bay Area artists, reception from 5 to 7 p.m. at A.C.C.I. Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527.  

THEATER 

Berkeley Rep “Master Class” with Rita Moreno at The Roda Theater. Runs through July 18. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Berkeley Rep, “21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com” Thurs., Sun. at 7:30 p.m. and Fri. and Sat. at 8:30 p.m. through July 2. Tickets are $25-$35. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Shotgun Players, “Quills” by Doug Wright at the Julia Morgan Theater. Runs Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. through July 3. Free, donations accepted. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

Wilde Irish Productions, “Eclipsed” by Patricia Burke Brogan, at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Runs Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. through June 27. Tickets are $15-$20. 841-7287. www.wildeirish.org 

FILM 

“The Corporation” Featuring interviews with Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Howard Zinn and many others, opens at Act I and II Theater on Center St. and runs though June 17. 464-5980.www.thecorporation.tv/usa/index.php 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Carol Field introduces her new cookbook “Italy in Small Bites” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

Katherine V. Forrest will read from Kate Delafield’s latest adventure, “Hancock Park” at 7:30 p.m. at Boadecia’s Books. Reservations strongly suggested. 555-9184. boadbks@norcov.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

U of North Texas Colegium Baroque Ensemble, present “Pillars of the Italian Baroque,” a program of vocal and instrumental music from 17th-century Venice and Rome, at 12:30 p.m. at St. Mark's Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way Tickets are $5-$10. www.music.unt.edu/the/Collegium%20Musicum.htm  

Letitia Berlin, recorder, John Dornenberg, viola de gamba, and Katherine Heater at 2:30 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana, at Durant. Tickets are $15-$18. $5 children. 559-4670. tishfeb@mindspring.com 

Ronnee Fullerton, solo viol da gamba music from the Renaissance and baroque periods at 4 p.m. at St. Joseph of Arimathea Chapel, Bowditch at Durant. Tickets are $12-$15. 206-351-3469. 

Flauti Diversi Frances Feldon, recorder/baroque flute; Karolyn Stonefelt, multiple percussion; Christy Dana, Fluegelhorn; Karen Clark, contralto; and guests perform “Wild Thing, You Make My Heart Sing,” at 6 p.m. at The Jazzschool. Tickets are $15-$18. 527-9840. 

Rotem Gilbert and Adam Gilbert, recorder and Mahan Esfahani, harpsichord and organ, “A Due Canti” chamber music from 17th-c. Italy and 18th-c. France at 7 p.m. at St. Joseph of Arimathea Chapel, Bowditch at Durant. Tickets are $5-$15. 650-625-0635. rxg35@po.cwru.edu  

Chanticleer performs Johannes Ockeghem’s “Missa Ecce ancilla domini” at 8 p.m. at St. Mark's Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. Tickets are $30. 415-252-8589. 

Carolyn Mark, Bermuda Triangle Service, Pickin’ Trix at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Women Songwriters Concert at 8 p.m. at Changemakers, 6536 Telegraph Ave. 540-1925. 

Marimba Pacifica with guests Fantuzzi and Emaman & Hadley at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

“The Movement” CD release party for Youth Movement Recods at 8 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5-10. 849-2568. 

DJ and Brook, jazz trio, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Rebecca Riots, fresh radical folk at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50 in advance, $18.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

An Evening with Roger Glenn at 8:30 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Submission Hold, This is my Fist, 1905, Machine Gun Romantics at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

Erik Friedlander, N.Y. cellist in a rare solo performance, at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Hip Bones, instrumental jazz, funk and rock at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

The Katie Jay Band at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

SATURDAY, JUNE 12 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“Visualizing Perspective” featuring Gary De Jong and Chung Ae Kim. Reception for the artists at 7 p.m. at 4th Street Studio, 1717D Fourth St. www.fourthstreetstudio.com 

THEATER 

Acme Players Ensemble “Martha Stewart in Hell” continuation of the serial comedy at 8 p.m. at APE Space, 2525 8th St. at Dwight. Free but donations welcome.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Barry Lopez reads from his new work of fiction, “Resistance,” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books, 1730 Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

Mable Maney, author of the Nancy Clue and Cherry Aimless mystery spoofs at Boadecia’s at 7:30 p.m. Reservations strongly suggested. 398 Colusa Ave. at Colusa Circle, Kensington. 555-9184. www.bookpride.com 

Anita Wells, author of “Notes and Documents of Free Persons of Color” at 3 p.m. at the African American Museum and Library of Oakland, 659 14th St. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Farallon Recorder Quartet performs music from the Renaissance, baroque and today at 1 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way . Tickets are $15-$18, children $5. 559-4670. tish-feb@mindspring.com 

Sarah Eyerly, soprano and Phoebe Craig, harpsichord, “The Anguish and Pleasures of Love” at 1 p.m. St. Joseph of Arimathea Chapel, Bowditch at Durant. Tickets are $15-$18. 415-871-3793. 

Ensemble Krazyat Harry Bower and Rick Wilson, flutes; and Alan Bostrom, piano, perform music by Friedrich Kuhlau and Ernesto Koehler on period instruments, at 3 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana, at Durant. Tickets are $12. 626-792-1369. krazykat@oldflutes.com  

The Camerino Band performs “Alfabeto Soup,” Italian Renaissance songs, at 3 p.m. at First Congregational Church, Dana and Durant. Free. 806-928-6309. 

David Barnett, clarinet, and Janine Johnson, fortepiano, perfrom “The True Sound of Sentiment,” Early Romantic music at 4 p.m. at Music Sources, 1000 The Alameda. Tickets are $15-$18. 707-996-8524. 

Tamara Loring, harpsichord, at 4:30 p.m. at St. Joseph of Arimathea Chapel, Bowditch at Durant. Tickets are $12-$14. 415-663-8398. tloring@svn.net  

Musica Pacifica performs “Baroque Hits with a Twist,” at 5:30 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. 444-4113. info@musicapacifica.org 

Wilcat Viols Joanna Blendulf, treble & bass viols; Julie Jeffrey, tenor & bass viols; and Elisabeth Reed, bass viol, perform English consort music at 5:30 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana at Durant. Tickets are $15. 482-1684. ereed@eskimo.com 

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra Chamber Players at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church, Dana and Durant Sts. Tickets are $25-$35. 415-392-4400. www.philharmonia.org  

Kensington Symphony with Eric Hansen, guest conductor, and Robin Hansen, violin, at 8 p.m. at Northminster Presbyterian Church, 545 Ashbury Ave., El Cerrito. Suggested donation $8-$10. Children free. 524-4335.  

San Francisco Choral Artists “Piece Work/Peace Work” at 8 p.m. at Piedmont Community Church, 400 Highland Ave. Piedmont. Tickets are $13-$20. 415-979-5779. www.sfca.org 

Tom Rigney and Flambeau at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Youth Movement Records Artists at 8 p.m. at Youth Radio Cafe, 1801 University Ave. Cost is $3. 435-5112. 

Moot Davis with Pete Anderson, Real Sippin Whiskeys at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com  

Rebecca Riots, fresh radical folk at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50 in advance, $18.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Bryan Girard and Graham Bruce Quintet at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $10. www.thejazzhouse.org 

Feliz Cumpleaños La Peña with Cuban timba music at 9:30 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org  

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

Rich Hubbard, pianist, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

John Schott’s Typical Orchestra at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Brian Melvin, drummer, at 8:30 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Four Eyes, Try Falling, Teenage Bottlerocket at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926.

Matthew Artz 

Berkeley Resident Norm Hirose tells a Berkeley High School class about his experience at a Japanese internment camp during World War II. Hirose would have graduated with the class of 1944, and this week he and four other Japanese Americans will receive their diplomas with the class of 2004.

The young Southern magnolias (or “bull bays”) strung along Martin Luther King, Jr. Way, from mid-Berkeley through its long run into Oakland, were planted along with flowering locusts to fill empty spots and dress up the street when its name was changed from Grove Street. The idea was good, but some of the trees are clearly struggling. The life of a street tree is a hard one, and they, like most of the world’s creatures, are most vulnerable when they’re small and spindly. A lot of the damage I see is clearly just human boorishness, supplemented by our sometimes sloppy use of motor vehicles. 

Nevertheless, some are bravely starting to bloom. The flowers — for which the tree’s named: Magnolia grandiflora — are almost comically huge on such coltish youngsters, though they’re in scale with the big leathery leaves. They’re fairly substantial themselves, and fragrant, though it’s hard to get much of that from a tree blooming in the exhaust and wind of a busy street. On a senior tree, they present a graceful spectacle, especially if the tree has had room to expand into its natural symmetry. They contrast nicely with the glossy deep green upper surfaces and velvety brown undersides of the leaves. 

Those leaves are so heavy and dense that if you’re near a tree that’s dropping some onto the pavement, you can hear them crash. It’s disconcerting until you figure out what you’re listening to. Unlike some of its congeners, grandiflora never drops them all at once, which I guess is fortunate, as that would make autumn a deafening season. I’ve found them dried and gilded for ornaments; they last for years if you don’t bash them around, and then what happens is that the gilding peels off. In one of his books about walking around Japan, Alan Booth tells of eating a meal including vegetables in miso, grilled at the table on a dried magnolia leaf. He doesn’t specify which magnolia species but I’d imagine grandiflora would be best suited. 

The tree’s favorite living conditions involve nice deep rich loamy streamside soils with decent drainage, but it’s obviously adaptable, both to drought and to the poor drainage typical here. They’re native to forests of the southeastern U.S. like the liquidambars they share the street with, but as a family they make the liquidambars look like parvenus. 

The Magnolia genus is one of seven in the family Magnoliaceae, of the order Magnoliales, class Magnoliopsida, division Magnoliophyta of the plant kingdom. This sounds like being a Carroll of Carrolton in Carroll County, and with good reason. The family is among the oldest of flowering plants. Their fossils are found in really old strata, and their structures show features regarded as “primitive—that conical arrangement of sex organs in the middle of the blossom, for example, and the relatively undifferentiated banners around them, which are called tepals rather than distinct petals and sepals. 

The distribution of magnolias and their near relatives is so odd it can be explained only by continental drift. There are representatives in Asia; some of the most beautiful hail from the Himalayas and thereabouts. Then there’s a spate of them in southern North America, and nothing in between. There’s a whole suite of plant species with that odd pattern, including ginseng, Jack-in-the-pulpit, and mayapple, and they have animal companions like alligators, hellbenders, and paddlefish. 

We used to have native magnolias here, in the Eocene when “here” was a lot different, a bit warmer and a lot wetter all year. We had swamp cypress and tupelo too, as the Southeast has now, and dawn redwood, like China. Well, we didn’t have “we,” as we hadn’t evolved yet, let alone made the three-quarters-of-the-world trek from Africa. There are a few dawn redwoods planted in Berkeley, on the UC campus and some public places (there’s one by the tennis courts at MLK and Russell) and private gardens. 

Now that we’re here, arriving in our variously hued waves, we seem to be arranging several sorts of Old Home Week reunions: the liquidambars with the magnolias of the contemporary Southeast, and the magnolias and dawn redwoods that coexisted here in the distant past. I hope they’re finding the venue congenial.Ã

TUESDAY, JUNE 8 

Organic Produce at low prices sold at the corner of Sacramento and Oregon Streets from 3 to 7 p.m. 843-1307. 

Backpacking 101 with Martin Dickinson at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Phone Banking to ReDefeat Bush on Tuesdays from 6 to 9 p.m. at Cafe de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck Ave. Bring your cell phones. Please RSVP if you can join us. 415-336 8736. dan@redefeatbush.com 

Writer’s Workshop with Teresa Leyung Ryan at 7 p.m. at Boadecia’s Books, 398 Colusa Avenue at Colusa Circle, Kensington. Suggested $5-$20 sliding scale donation. 559-9184. www.bookpride.com 

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. 845-6830. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers We are a few slowpoke seniors who walk between a mile or two each Tuesday, meeting at 9:30 a.m. in the Little Farm parking lot. To join us, call 215-7672.  

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 9 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wed., rain or shine, at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes, sunscreen and a hat. 548-9840. 

Poetry Writing Workshop with Alison Seevak at 7 p.m. in the Edith Stone Room, Albany Public Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 20. 

East Bay Genealogical Society meets at 10 a.m. in the Library Conference Room at the Family History Center, 4700 Lincoln Avenue in Oakland. Ray McFalone will speak about “A Time to Remember.” Guests always welcome. 635-6692. 

Boadecia’s Women’s Book Group meets to discuss Patricia Highsmith’s “The Price of Salt” at 7 p.m. at 398 Colusa Ave., Kensington. Suggested donation $3-$5. www.bookpride.com 

Book Forum with American Society of Journalists and Authors to discuss what publishers are looking for at 7:30 p.m. at the Journalism Library, UC Campus. RSVP to 530-6699. 

Fun with Acting Class every Wednesday at 11 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Free, all are welcome, no experience necessary.  

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Vigil at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.geocities. 

com/vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, JUNE 10 

Medgar Evers Voter Advocacy Summit Thurs. through Sun at St. Paul AME Church, Ashby Ave. Hands-on nonpartisan voter advocacy training by grassroots specialists. Topics include campaign planning; fundraising; message development; GOTV; and campaign finance. The cost is $25, which will include meals, t-shirt, Voter Empowerment Handbook and certificate of completion. RSVP with the Berkeley NAACP Youth Council 435-3101. www.geocities.com/berkeleynaacp  

Voter Registration Training and pot-luck at 6:30 p.m. at Berkeley Friends Church, 1600 Sacramento at Cedar. 415-565-0201, ext. 23. 

Awesome Earthen Buildings from Around the World Slide show and presentation by Janell Kapoor at 7 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave, near Dwight Way. Cost is $5-$15 sliding scale. 548-2220, ext. 233. 

Berkeley Farmer’s Market with all organic produce at Elephant Pharmacy parking lot, 1607 Shattuck Ave., at Cedar from 3 to 7 p.m. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter.org 

Reading Workshop for Parents of 3rd-5th Graders at 8 p.m. at Classroom Mattters, 2607 Seventh St., Suite E. Free, reservations required 540-8646. www.classroommatters.com 

East Bay Mac User Group meets the 2nd Thursday of every month, from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at Expression Center for New Media, 6601 Shellmound St. www.expression.edu  

Grizzly Peak Flyfishers meets at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Community Center, 59 Arlington Ave. for a fly-tying demonstration and slide show by Andy Burk. Cost is $5 for non-members. 547-8629. 

FRIDAY, JUNE 11 

Rachel Corrie’s Parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie, will speak at 7:30 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Benefit for Middle East Children’s Alliance and International Solidarity Movement. Tickets are $20. 548-0542, 234-4250. www.mecaforpeace.org 

Berkeley Critical Mass Bike Ride meets at the Berkeley BART the second Friday of every month at 5:30 p.m. 

Berkeley Chess Club meets Fridays at 7:15 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Players at all levels are welcome. 652-5324. 

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph. wibberkeley@yahoo.com 548-6310, 845-1143. 

Meditation, Peace Vigil and Dialogue, gather at noon on the grass close to the West Entrance to UC Berkeley, on Oxford St. near University Ave. People of all traditions are welcome to join us. Sponsored by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. 655-6169. www.bpf.org 

Overeaters Anonymous meets every Friday at 1:30 p.m. at the Northbrae Church at Solano and The Alameda. Parking is free and is handicapped accessible. For information call Katherine, 525-5231. 

Herbal Tea at Three Learn tea lore, medicinal properties, and taste familiar and exotic varieties. Every Friday from 3 to 4 p.m. at Elephant Pharmacy. 549-9200. www.elephantpharmacy.com 

SATURDAY, JUNE 12 

Berkeley Fire Station Open House from 1 to 4 p.m. at Station 5, 2680 Shattuck Ave. Tour the station, see a safety presentation, and historical display and enjoy hot dogs and cake. Families and children especially welcome. 981-5506. 

Help Shape the Future of San Pablo Avenue Residents are invited to a Public Workshop to re-energize the San Pablo corridor, from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. Oakland Public Library Auditorium, 125 Fourteenth Street in Oakland. Sponsored by Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) District 4, the Association of Bay Area Governments, East Bay Community Foundation, Greenbelt Alliance, and A.C. Transit.  

Greens at Work will assist Aquatic Park EGRET in an old-fashioned radish pull from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. This in support of the habitat restoration efforts of Aquatic Park EGRET. Meet at the Cabin on Middle Pond at the south end of Aquatic Park, one mile south of the bike/ped bridge. The park’s south end can also be reached by heading south from Ashby, west on 67th, and then north on Shellmound to its terminus at the circle where parking is available. AC Transit 19 will take you to 67th and Hollis. Bring a hat, sunblock, something to drink, and a trowel or weeder if you have one. 

Caterpillar Count at the Kid’s Garden Club for ages 7 to 12. Who is eating our leaves? Look for the larva and match their favorite plants to discover their flying forms. From 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area. Fee is $3-$4. Registration required. 525-2233.  

Project Wet Educator’s Academy from the State Water Education Foundation and Water Department. It serves as an introduction to the investigation of water and its uses – from aquatic ecosystems, water conservation, groundwater, and water pollution prevention, to wastewater treatment and the Activity and Curriculum Guide that includes them all. From 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area. Cost is $45-$51. Registration required. 636-1684. 

Live Oak Park Fair from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. with art and crafts, food, jazz performances. Free admission. 898-3282. www.liveoakparkfair.com 

Keeping Chickens in the City David Morris, chicken keeper for over 20 years, will cover the basics of raising chickens, egg production, and using chickens as a central component of your recycling and composting operation. He will also cover the fundamentals of the laws regarding keeping chickens in the city. Class will be held from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at David's chicken coop in Berkeley. Call to pre-register and for location. Cost is $10-$15, no one turned away for lack of funds. 548-2220, ext. 233. beck@ecologycenter.org 

Free Lead-Safe Painting and Remodeling Class Learn how to detect and remedy lead hazards and conduct lead-safe renovations for your older home. From 9 to 11 a.m. at the ACLPPP Training Center, 1017 22nd Ave., Suite #110, Oakland. To make reservations call the Alameda County Lead Poisoning Prevention Program at 567-8280.  

ProArts Open Studios with over 160 participating artists in Berkeley and around the East Bay. For a list see www.mesart.com/openstudiosPA.jsp 

Ardenwood Celtic Festival fom 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Ardenwood Historic Farm, Fremont. Cost is $5-$8.50. 796-0663. www.ebparks.org 

Alternative Materials: Cob and Strawbale Two natural building methods are currently undergoing renewed popularity and gaining building code approval in many communities. Class runs from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Building Education Center, 812 Page St. Cost is $75. 525-7610. 

Let Us Eat Cake Marriage Celebration Inviting all couples - gay or straight - who wish to celebrate the institution of marriage to join us at 1 p.m. at Epworth United Methodist Church, 1953 Hopkins St. We will confirm our Christian commitment to include all who wish to form loving partnerships. Families invited. Cakes for all couples to cut. Rice can be thrown. Register at 524-2921.  

Save the Day Gala A fund-raiser for the American Red Cross Bay Area with cocktails, dinner, dancing with music by Know Jazz & auction at the Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St., Oakland, from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. Ticket are $125. 595-4460. 

Vocal Jazz Workshop with Richard Kalman from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. followed by jam session, at the Albany Community Center. 1249 Marin Ave. 524-9283. 

Introduction to Hawaiian Shamanism with Elizabeth Burke at 2 p.m. at Pharmaca Integrative Pharmacy, 1744 Solano Ave. 527-8929. 

Yoga for Seniors at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St., on Saturdays from 10 to 11 a.m. The class is taught by Rosie Linsky, who at age 72, has practiced yoga for over 40 years. Open to non-members of the club for $8 per class. For further information and to register, call Karen Ray at 848-7800. 

Pet Adoptions, sponsored by Home at Last, from noon to 5 p.m., Hearst and 4th St. 548-9223. 

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. 

Dream Workshop on Saturdays, from 10 a.m. to noon at 2199 Bancroft Way. Cost is $10. www.practicaldreamwork.com 

SUNDAY, JUNE 13 

Rent Board 2004 Election Progressive Slate Nominating Convention Help select the candidates for the pro-Rent Control slate. At 3 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Sponsored by the Committee to Defend Affordable Housing, the Gray Panthers and other community groups. 333-0539. 

Scratch and Itch: Poison Oak Learn how to identify the plant throughout the seasons, avoid it and treat the rash when it appears. For all ages from 11 a.m. to noon at Tilden Nature Center. Registration required. 525-2233. 

Garden Friends at Tilden Nature Center from 2 to 3 pm. for all ages. Summer is beginning and the garden is full of life. We’ll tend to the plants, munch on some snacks, and look for signs of life in the butterfly and Kids Gardens. 525-2233. 

Campfire and Sing-a-Long for the Whole Family at 5:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area. Bring your hot dogs, buns, marshmallows, lo-o-ng sticks, etc. We’ll cook over an open fire, sing old songs and tell stories. Dress for possible fog. We’ll walk uphill to the campfire circle. Disabled accessible, call for transportation 525-2233. 

ProArts Open Studios with over 160 participating artists in Berkeley and around the East Bay. For a list see www.mesart.com/openstudiosPA.jsp 

Hands-On Bike Maintenance Class from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Solar Electricity For Your Home Now you can produce your own electricity and “sell” the excess back to PG&E, running your meter backwards! Plus you can receive thousands of rebate dollars from the State at the same time. Learn how to size, specify and design your own solar electrical generator. A short field trip to a functioning house/system in Berkeley and current catalog of available equipment are also included. From 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Building Education Center, 812 Page St. Cost is $75. 525-7610. 

Golden State Model Railroad Museum open from noon to 5 p.m. Also open on Saturdays and Friday evenings from 7 to 10 p.m. Located in the Miller-Knox Regional Shoreline Park at 900-A Dornan Drive in Pt. Richmond. Admission is $2-$3. 234-4884 or www.gsmrm.org 

“Results” Susan Ochner presents the work of Results, a Unitarian Universalist Association partner organization improving health care, at 9:30 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Road, Kensington. 525-0302.  

Tibetan Buddhism with Lee Nichol on “Conducting New Knowledge” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

MONDAY, JUNE 14 

Live Oak Park Fair from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. with art and crafts, food, jazz performances. Free admission. 898-3282. www.liveoakparkfair.com 

“Food and Insect Borne Diseases” with Dr. Loren McGills at 10:30 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190. 

Balata Refugee Camp Cultural Presentation at 6 p.m. at the Berkeley Main Library, Meeting Room, 3rd fl.  

Sacred Feminine Book Club meets are 7 p.m. at Changemakers, 6536 Telegraph Ave. to discuss “Seven Houses” by Alev Lytle Croutier. 526-6454. 

Women’s Cancer Resource Center, volunteer training, every second Monday of the month, from 6 to 8 p.m. at 5741 Telegraph Ave. To sign up call Emily at 601-4040, ext. 109. emily@wcrc.org 

Fitness for 55+ A total body workout including aerobics, stretching and strengthening at 1:15 p.m. every Monday at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5170. 

Baby Yoga at 11 a.m. and Yoga and Meditation for Children at 2:45 p.m. at Belladonna, 2436 Sacramento St. 883-0600. www.belladonna.ws 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

ONGOING 

Vista College Study Abroad in Mexico Live with a family and learn language skill in a two-week session in July in Guadalajara. For information please call 981-2917 or visit www.peralta.cc.ca.us/interntl/studyabr.htm. 

Berkeley Video and Film Festival is calling for entries. The deadlinel is July 10. For information please call 843-3699. www.berkeleyvideofilmfest.org 

Find a Loving Animal Companion at the Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society Adoption Center, open from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. 2700 Ninth St. 845-7735. www.berkeleyhumane.org  

Medical Care for Your Pet at the Berkeley East Bay Humane Society low-cost veterinary clinic. 2700 Ninth St. For appointments call 845-3633. www.berkeleyhumane.org  

Interesting Backyards Do you have a really cool backyard project or unusual sustainable living practice that you’d like to share with others in the East Bay? Consider becoming a stop on the 5th annual Urban Sustainability Bike Tour on Saturday, July 31. Past sites have included features such as graywater systems, chicken coops, bee hives, solar installations and permaculture gardens. For information call Beck at 548-2220, ext. 233. 

Summer Reading Games at the Albany Public Library, from June 14th through August 14th. For information call 526-3700. 

CITY MEETINGS 

City Council meets Tues., June 8, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers, Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk, 981-6900. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Commission on Disability meets Wed. June 9, at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Paul Church, 981-6342. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/disability 

Homeless Commission meets Wed., June 9, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Jane Micallef, 981-5426. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/homeless 

Planning Commission meets Wed., June 9, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Ruth Grimes, 981-7481. www.ci.berkeley. ca.us/commissions/planning 

Police Review Commission meets Wed. June 9, at 7:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, Barbara Attard, 981-4950. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/policereview 

Waterfront Commission meets Wed., June 9, at 7 p.m., at 201 University Ave. Cliff Marchetti. 644-6376 ext. 224. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/waterfront 

Commission on Early Childhood Education meets Thurs., June 10, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Marianne Graham, 981-5416. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/earlychildhoodeducation  

Community Health Commission meets Thurs, June 10, at 6:45 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. William Rogers, 981-5344. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/health 

West Berkeley Project Area Commission meets Thurs., June 10, at 7 p.m., at the West Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7520. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/westberkeley  

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., June 10, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/zoning

The outgoing president of Berkeley’s Vista College is claiming that a black-orchestrated, racial discrimination conspiracy has cost him his job and is threatening a lawsuit against the Peralta Community College District if his contract is not reopened and renewed before the end of the month.  

Vista College is a member of the Peralta District. 

In a June 1 letter addressed to the district’s Board of Trustees and Chancellor Elihu Harris, Vista President John Garmon, who is white, charged that the five African American members of the seven-member board and Harris, who is also African American, based their decision last month not to renew his contract “on racial grounds and voted as a black majority for race-based reasons.” 

The vote, Garmon said, came in retaliation for his dismissal of an African American researcher as part of a budgetary cut and his failed attempt to dismiss “an underperforming and chronically absent” African American dean. Garmon insists the two employees had close relations with Harris and African American members of the board, and conspired to turn the board against him. 

“I’m sorry to say it, but that’s the way it appears,” Garmon said in an interview Thursday. 

Although he said he couldn’t prove his allegations and that much of his information has come second hand, Garmon said he expects to file a lawsuit against the district for violating his employment rights and civil rights. 

Among other complaints, Garmon wrote in his June 1 letter that the board didn’t give him fair consideration when he applied for Chancellor of the Peralta District and that it failed to let him respond to a critical May 7 letter from the Vista Faculty Senate delivered days before the board voted unanimously not to renew his contract as president. 

Response to Garmon’s letter has been fast and furious. 

“I’m absolutely flabbergasted and shocked,” said Peralta Trustee Darryl Moore, who is African American. “The vote had nothing to do with John’s race and everything to do with his performance.” 

Moore said Garmon—as stated in the May 7 faculty letter—had “dropped the ball” on fundraising for Vista’s new downtown Berkeley campus and failed to build ties to the community for Vista’s 30th anniversary celebration. 

“John is grasping for straws,” added Joan Berezin, co-president of the Faculty Senate, who along with co-president Joseph Bielanski, wrote the May 7 letter to Chancellor Harris and Board President Lynn Baranco. The letter expressed concerns about Vista’s leadership without mentioning Garmon by name. 

The May 7 letter, written without the knowledge of Vista’s classified staff, drove a wedge between the faculty and other staff members. While Berezin said the faculty didn’t want to include the staff because they would be more vulnerable to retaliatory layoffs, some staff members said they felt betrayed. 

“[Garmon] was the nicest person we’ve ever had,” said one classified worker who asked not to be identified. “The faculty senate didn’t ask us anything about this. I feel like they ruined this man.” 

For Vista, Garmon’s departure when his contract expires at the end of the month means the school will be saddled with an interim president for next year while it conducts a nationwide search for a replacement. Garmon’s eventual successor will be the fourth Vista president in seven years and will bear the burden for completing a $2.5 million fundraising effort to outfit its new campus with furniture and equipment.  

Vista has long been considered the stepchild of the Peralta district, which includes Merritt College, Laney College and the College of Alameda. The new campus, scheduled for completion in 2006 was seen as finally placing Vista on equal footing with its sister schools. 

Garmon insists his three-year tenure at Vista has been a success and that his downfall began early last year when he was ordered to slash his budget by 10 percent. He says he attempted to reach that budget-cutting goal by recommending the dismissal Dr. Connie Portero, an education researcher, who is African American. 

The move touched off a revolt among Garmon’s hand-picked management team, said Michael Mills, president of the Peralta Federation of Teachers. “The opposition countered that [Garmon’s] decision was based on race,” Mills said. 

Garmon, who insists he respected the researcher’s work but had to concentrate cuts away from classroom instruction, said his management team had some “heated discussions” over the proposed release. 

Chancellor Harris backed Garmon’s decision, but the board overruled him and reassigned Portero to the district’s main office. 

Shortly thereafter, the board renewed Garmon’s contract for one year, while giving two-year extensions to his management team. The dispute over the dean soon followed. 

Vista staff interviewed described Garmon as a friendly boss, but a subpar administrator. 

“A number of people say he was a very nice man, outgoing affable, but not the kind of leader Vista needed at this time,” said Bielanski. 

“He’s a nice guy,” said Paula Coil, President of the Classified Employee Senate at Vista. “A lot of staff people did appreciate the human touch he brought to things.” 

Miller said the teachers union has received complaints from faculty about the leadership of all of the Peralta school presidents, but nothing specifically bad about Garmon. The other two school presidents up for renewal in May received extensions. 

The Vista job was Garmon’s first stint as a college president after more than three decades working in community colleges, most recently as executive dean at the Florida Community College. 

Despite signs that his job was not secure, Garmon insists he was shocked the board chose not to renew his contract.  

His colleagues, however, were not surprised by his dismissal and said Garmon had been interviewing for jobs outside the district since last fall.  

Garmon said he inquired about other jobs because of the district’s budget turmoil. “Most of the presidents in Peralta were looking for jobs,” he said. “We were all hedging our bets.” 

One job Garmon applied for this year happened to be for district chancellor, held until May on an interim basis by Harris. Though Garmon said he never expected to beat out the former state legislator and former Oakland Mayor for the job, he said the board was set on giving Harris the full-time job and rejected the advice of its consultant to re-advertise the position when only seven candidates applied. 

“I know it didn’t sit well with the board that I had the nerve to run for chancellor,” Garmon explained. 

Moore insists that Chancellor Harris had been talking to Garmon for months about concerns over his performance. 

“John knew he wasn’t going to be renewed,” the Berkeley-based board member said. “Now he can say he was let go because he applied to be chancellor.”ˇ

Any illusions UC officials may have harbored about how the rest of Berkeley views their Long Range Development Plan should have vanished after Tuesday night’s City Council session. 

In other matters, the council approved a request by residents of the proposed Thousand Oaks Heights Applicant Funded Utility Undergrounding District to lower the percentage of votes needed to authorize the $3.08 million project, and took action on several November ballot measures. 

But it was the UC issue that was the highlight of the night. One after another, a parade of angry residents and irate officials from across the political spectrum bared their anger at the university’s expansion plans, all agreeing that UC’s continued development will have a profound impact on the rest of the city. 

The item was for information-gathering purposes only, with no action scheduled by the council. 

While Councilmember Kriss Worthington likened the university to “almost an abusive parent,” his colleague, Miriam Hawley, cited UC’s failure to offer emergency evacuation plans in event of a disaster and Councilmember Dona Spring called on residents to write letters and raise “many voices out there, holding our feet to the fire.” 

But the strongest calls came from a parade of Berkeley residents lamenting the university’s impacts on traffic, taxes, parking and property values. 

Leading off were representatives from Berkeleyans for a Livable University Environment (BLUE), a coalition of neighborhood organizations from across the city. 

Carl Freiberg recounted earlier broken promises by the university, as well as the refusal of school officials to extend the LRDP comment period beyond 60 days—a sore point with councilmembers and city staff as well. 

That was followed by a discussion between Peace and Justice Commissioner and former candidate Anne Wagley and Mayor Tom Bates, when the mayor let slip that he didn’t know that the university wouldn’t be paying the city tax assessments that voters would be called on to increase in the November elections. 

“The manager can correct me,” the mayor said, “but I believe [the university is] subject to the utility user tax.” 

City Manager Phil Kamlarz shook his head. 

“No?” ventured the mayor. “They’re subject to— What are they subject to?” 

“None of the assessments we have in the city,” Kamlarz responded. “No taxes are assessed.” 

It was a peculiar slip by a mayor who has made negotiations with the university over payments to the city one of the centerpieces of his administration. 

Noting that only 30 percent of the UCB budget goes to education and the rest to research and development, Wagley (who works at the Daily Planet) suggested that the city to seek a half-percent overhead on every grant to pay for fire, police, sewers and other city services, a move endorsed by Dona Spring and Linda Maio. 

While all comments targeted the LRDP and EIR as deficient at best, Bates and Councilmember Gordon Wozniak struck a more conciliatory tone. “I really think it does a disservice to this community just to bash the university,” the mayor said. 

But Councilmember Spring called the financial relations between the city and the university “an untenable situation, and we cannot continue to give the university almost a free ride. We have crumbling sewers and storm drains and our streets are wearing out faster than we can replace them, as are our sidewalks. There is a basic, fundamental economic disparity here.”  

Councilmember Betty Olds, a Spring adversary on many issues, joined her in singing the praises of the BLUE activists in criticizing UC. “I think it’s wonderful that you’re doing this,” she told the group. 

City Planning Director Dan Marks offered his own critique of the LRDP. 

Noting that university officials had labeled the document a “general plan,” he said that such plans “are put together with the help and involvement of citizens, It adds legitimacy to the document. We had 60 days to respond to their general plan. . .and we do not know how they will react. We do not know if they will change it in response to our comments. The sense that we get from the university is that they will not.” 

Further complicating the picture, Marks said, is that the university is preparing their LRDP at the same time they’re readying a second LRDP for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 

“We question that approach,” Marks said. “The university owns both the lab and the university. It’s the same regents. . . They divided themselves in order to better conquer the City of Berkeley. . .and make it harder” for the city to respond. 

Assistant City Manager Arietta Chakos criticized the LRDP for the lack of details on the 2,300-2,500 parking spaces UC proposes to add, including 1,900 on property just off campus. 

Chakos said adding the new spaces violated the LRDP’s own precepts, which call for trip reduction and new parking strategies. She also faulted the LRDP’s transportation section for failing to adequately assess the impacts of the additional spaces. 

Grace Maguire, the city staffer assigned to evaluate the LRDP’s fiscal impacts, said she has prepared an analysis that takes into account the plan’s impact on various city services for presentation to the council at next week’s meeting. 

Several citizens offered scathing critiques of the university’s plans to build 100 units of “family suitable” housing in the Hill Campus. 

Though cited just across the Oakland city limit, neighbors on the Berkeley side said the project would severely impact traffic and parking on the narrow winding streets of the adjacent Summit Road and Grizzly Peak neighborhood. 

Thousand Oaks Heights 

On the Thousand Oaks Height Applicant Funded Utility Undergrounding District issue, council voted to drop the needed approval ratio of district property owners from 70 percent to 60 percent. If the district is approved by that new percentage of owners who cast votes in a special 45-day election period tentatively scheduled to begin July 20, electrical, telephone and cable wires would move from poles to underground pipes along Kentucky, Colorado and Florida avenues and portions of Vassar, Maryland, Michigan and Boynton avenues. 

Property owners would be assessed according to a four-part scale, with the highest charges—$32,011—paid by owners of homes with clear street window views of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge and the lowest—$13,917—on vacant lots with non-spectacular vistas. 

Ballot Measures  

Following the LRDP session, the council ironed out language in the November ballot measure calling for publicly financed elections, with the revised version scheduled to reach the council at their next regular session. 

Members showed less unanimity when it came to reviewing the eight proposed taxes scheduled to go before voters in November. Councilmember Wozniak said he thought the proposed increases were too much, and proposed eliminating any revenues earmarked for new programs, a move Miriam Hawley supported. 

“What about the paramedics?” declared Mayor Bates. “It would be worth paying more to have paramedics available on every call.” The $1.2 million-a-year Emergency Medical Services Tax would place a paramedic in every station, up from the current three. 

“I’m particularly worried we’ll lose the youth programs,” Hawley said. Under the ballot proposals, that funding would be funded by a half-percent real estate transfer tax on home sales of between $600,000 and $1 million and a full percent on sales of more than $1 million. 

“They’ll be covered by 250 homebuyers at these inflated prices,” said Bates. 

Wozniak objected, saying increased housing prices would force more potential buyers out of the Berkeley housing market. He threw his support behind the proposed boost in the city Utility User’s Tax, which calls for a boost from 7.5 percent to 9 percent on all gas, electric, cable, telephone and cell phone charges. 

“I favor the utility tax because it promotes conservation and supports our Kyoto goals,” Wozniak said. 

Bates said he favored the real estate transfer tax “because it’s a runaway market and it won’t deter people” from buying. 

“We have to decide what taxes to put on the ballot” on June 15, Kamlarz said, with a first vote on the final draft due by July 13 and a final vote on the 22nd.›

Larry Picus stood center stage before about 75 parents Tuesday at the Longfellow Middle School Theater Tuesday as he auditioned for the leading role in Berkeley Unified’s great school funding adventure. 

After his presentation, Superintendent Michele Lawrence said she had big plans for Picus, her former school finance professor at the University of Southern California. 

“I’d like him to be involved,” she said. “He has expertise and we don’t want to do this alone.” 

Picus, the director of USC’s Center for Research in Education Finance, is a leader in what in education circles is called the “adequacy movement.” Its central tenet is that when plotting school finance, the goal must be to examine the essential components of a good education, determine the costs, and then figure out how to pay for it. That would be opposite the general procedure of districts waiting to see what money is coming in from state and local sources, and then figuring out how to spend it. 

After several years of finding herself at the mercy of state budget cuts with no promise of brighter times ahead, Lawrence has decided that the district needs Picus’ brand of strategic planning before it returns to voters in 2006 for an extension of Berkeley Schools Excellence Project (BSEP)—its signature parcel tax that promises to bring in at least $18 million annually. 

“This seems to me the only option I can present to you right now,” Lawrence told the assembled community members. After three years of struggling to break free of budget deficits, she warned that the district would soon find itself back in the same morass of debt unless it figured out how to fund its top priorities in an era of declining state resources. 

“The only way to get out of this spiral is to look at our systems and structures and determine which things are most critical for our kids,” Lawrence said. She envisions a task force led by someone of Picus’ ilk, with community members and education experts included to guide the study. 

For Picus, taking on the Berkeley job wouldn’t just turn the district’s system of funding schools on its head, it would revolutionize the adequacy movement. 

Until now, adequacy studies have only been performed on the state level, where legislators have the power to tax raise the revenues needed to boost education. 

Picus insisted Berkeley was the perfect testing ground for a study. Displaying a sound knowledge of the district’s schools and at one point referring to the community as “we,” Picus said Berkeley Unified was just the right size to guarantee that the superintendent could keep tabs on principals while the schools could experiment somewhat with ways to meet standards. 

His preferred approach is to develop prototype schools and then allocate the resources needed to ensure that all students have the tools to meet state education requirements. 

“It’s a simple model that allows for transparency and is easy to understand,” he said. 

Picus last employed the model for the state of Arkansas, which paid him and his partner $400,000 for their services. 

Lawrence said Berkeley Unified wouldn’t pay as well as Arkansas, and that she hoped Picus could lead a team of graduate students, which could reduce the price tag. 

“These things are not cheap to do, but I think it’s worth the investment,” Lawrence said. She added she would search the district to find funds to pay for the study, but hadn’t earmarked any yet. 

Although adequacy studies universally result in a request for more taxpayer money—Picus requested $800 million for the Arkansas schools—synergies with local agencies including the city, county and UC Berkeley were the buzzwords Tuesday. 

Picus argued that by teaming up with different agencies, Berkeley could boost its spending per student from below $10,000 to around $20,000. 

Asked by a community member how the district’s partnerships were going, Lawrence said Berkeley Unified had made progress, but still lacked the accounting sophistication to fully connect with service agencies. 

By and large, residents at the meeting were prepared to support Lawrence’s plan. “The superintendent deserves our support in putting together a unified agreement of our priorities,” said Nina Robinson, a parent with two children in the district. 

Another parent, Gloria Soto, said she expected more concrete details on ideas for alternative funding, but was “totally confident that it’s worth the try.” 

Wanda Steward, a parent at Longfellow Middle School, said she assumed the process would yield the same priorities—small class sizes and well trained teachers—but “if a process makes everyone buy into it, then it’s good.” 

Derrick Miller, a parent at Jefferson Elementary School and former candidate for the Berkeley school board said the task force had promise but also faced pitfalls. Noting that Berkeley has a complex set of funding streams including a lot of volunteer energy, a good process could build on those resources, but if the process proceeds in the wrong way, the district runs the risk of people pulling out, Miller said.›

FRIDAY, JUNE 4 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Paola Timora, Prof., emeritus, Dept. of Mole- 

cular and Cell Biology, UCB, on “Aging Gracefully.” Luncheon 11:45 a.m. for $12.50. Speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. 526-2925.  

“Ancient Wisdom for Racial Healing” A workshop with Aaeeshah and Kokomon Klottey from 1 to 5 p.m. at Naropa University Oakland, 2141 Broadway. Cost is $30-$50. 835-4827, ext. 19. 

By the Light of the Moon Open Mic and Salon for Women hosted by Karen Broder, at 7:30 p.m. at Changemakers Bookstore, 6536 Telegraph Ave. Cost is $3-$7 sliding scale. 482-1315. www.changemakersforwomen.com 

Berkeley Chess Club meets Fridays at 7:15 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Players at all levels are welcome. 652-5324. 

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph. wibberkeley@yahoo.com 548-6310, 845-1143. 

Meditation, Peace Vigil and Dialogue, gather at noon on the grass close to the West Entrance to UC Berkeley, on Oxford St. near University Ave. Sponsored by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. 655-6169. www.bpf.org 

Overeaters Anonymous meets at 1:30 p.m. at the Northbrae Church at Solano and The Alameda. 525-5231. 

SATURDAY, JUNE 5 

Berkeley Poetry Festival and Community Fair from 11:15 to 5 p.m. at Civic Center Park, with live music, and a poetry slam from 2 to 4 p.m. www.mothershen.com 

Ladybirds and Ladybugs We’ll collect and release as many adult and larval forms as we can find. We’ll talk about the good these beetles do and learn about the ones who have turned to the dark side. From 10 a.m. to noon at Tilden Nature Center. 525-2233. 

Ponds are Places Where Babies Grow Up Meet nymphs, naiads, larvae and the real “Phantom Menace” as we look at pond creatures with the 14-power Discovery Scope. From 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center. 525-2233. 

Sick Plant Clinic The first Sat. of every month, UC plant apthologist Dr. Robert Raabe, UC entomologist Dr. Nick Mills, and their team of experts will diagnose what ails your plants. From 9 a.m. to noon at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Dr. Free. 643-2755. 

Good Night Little Farm Rain or shine, the animals on the farm need to be fed and tucked in for the night. Round up the chickens, slop the hog, feed the cows and say “sleep tight.” Wear boots if you’ve got them. For all ages from 3 to 4 p.m. at the Tilden Little Farm. 525-2233. 

Make a Cornhusk Doll Bookmark at the Albany Library from noon to 2 p.m. Free and open to all ages. 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 20. 

LeConte Elementary School Yard Sale from 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at 2241 Russell St. Great furniture, gear, plants, etc. and food and beverages, and a good way to support our public school. To donate items in advance, call 649-0419. 

Berkeley Historical Society Walking Tour of the city’s corporation yard and the Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club led by Patrick Keilch. 848-0181. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/histsoc/ 

Prof. Marshall Windmiller on the Iraq War “How did we get in and How do we get out?” at 7 p.m. at the Home of truth Spiritual Center, 1300 Grand St., Alameda. Sponsored by the Alameda Public Affairs Forum. 

Carpentry Basics for Women A two-day introduction to basic carpentry tools and skills for women with little or no pre-vious hands-on experience. After a morning lecture and demonstration, you will build your own bookshelf unit (materials included with class fee). Please bring your own hand tools. From 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Building Education Center, 812 Page St. Cost is $225. 525-7610. 

Pee Wee Basketball for boys and girls ages 6 to 8 is offered by Berkeley Youth Alternatives every Saturday from 10 a.m. to noon at 1255 Allston Way. Fee for six week session is $25 for residents, $35 for non-residents. 845-9066. sports@byaonline.org 

ProArts Open Studios with over 160 participating artists in Berkeley and around the East Bay. For a list see www.mesart. 

com/openstudiosPA.jsp 

Artists for Change Fundraiser to benefit John Kerry for President and MoveOn.org from 6 to 8 p.m. at Nexus Gallery, 2701 Eighth St. Light refreshments and live music. Cost is $25.  

Benefit for Berkeley Liberation Radio 104.1FM at 8 p.m. at The Longhaul Info Shop, 3124 Shattuck Ave. 595-0190. 

"Green Threads in the Urban Fabric," a walk exploring nature in the city, restored creeks, and planned restoration from El Cerrito to Berkeley. From 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Meet at El Cerrito BART for the 5-mile hike (includes fording creeks and climbing Albany Hill) ends at North Berkeley BART. Bring water, snacks, and sun protection. Sponsored by Friends of Five Creeks and Greenbelt Alliance. 848-9358. www.greenbelt.org, f5creeks@aol.com  

Drip Irrigation A do-it-yourself class covering benefits, supplies and tools needed. Taught by John Bauer, and held at a home-owner installed drip irrigation site in North Oakland. Cost is $15-$25. To register call 548-2220, ext. 233. 

Light Search and Rescue Class offered by the City of Berkeley from 1 to 5 p.m. at 997 Cedar St. To register call 981-5506. 

Propagating Natives with Cuttings from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Regional Parks Botanical Garden, Tilden Park. Cost is $40-$45, advance registration recommended. 845-4116. www.nativeplants.org 

REI Service Project at Dry Creek Pioneer Regional Park, Hayward, from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Pre-registration recommended. 527-4140. 

Stem Cell Research and Advocacy Conference Leaders in stem cell research and policy will speak about the California initiative to support stem cell research and offer practical ways for promoting this measure. Sat. and Sun. in the Pauley Ballroom, UC Campus. Open to the public. Details available at www.fisca.info  

Women’s Fitness Day at the YMCA of Oakland with free fun activities for the entire family from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., 1515 Webster St. 451-7910. 

California Writers Club meets at 10 a.m. with readings by three student winners of the Fifth-Grade Writing Contest at Barnes and Noble, 2352 Shattuck Ave. www.berkeleywritersclub.org 

Vocal Jazz Workshop with Richard Kalman at 12:30 p.m. followed by jam session, at the Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin Ave. 524-9283. 

Primordial Meditation with Peter Kingsley at 7 p.m. at Belladonna, 2436 Sacramento St. Cost is $15. 883-0600. www.belladonna.ws 

Yoga for Seniors at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St., from 10 to 11 a.m. Open to non-members of the club for $8 per class. 848-7800. 

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 6 

Neotropical Migrants Birdwalk from 8 to 10 a.m. Up close views of birds from far away. Learn their habits and habitats, and stay for a great cup of coffee that’s for the birds-- shade tree coffee plantation birds, that is; pastries too. Cost is $5-$7. Registration required. 525-2233. 

Laurel Canyon Hike The heart of our park is this wooded canyon. We’ll see birds, blooms, berries and learn the role that each plays in the life of this place. Some steep parts, so wear good walking shoes. From 1 to 3:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area. 525-2233. 

Mini Gardeners “Farm Tales” We’ll make up stories about our garden and the animals that live there, then make drawings and paintings to go along with them. For ages 4-6 accompanied by an adult, from 2 to 3 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area. Cost is $3-$4. Registration required. 525-2233. 

Rosa Parks School 7th Annual Ice Cream Social including ice cream, food, games, quilt raffle, silent auction, and talent show, from noon to 4 p.m. at Rosa Parks Elementary School, 920 Allston Way. 644-8812. 

ProArts Open Studios with over 160 participating artists in Berkeley and around the East Bay. For a list see www.mesart. 

com/openstudiosPA.jsp 

Dragonflies of the Bay Area from 9:45 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. at the Regional Parks Botanical Garden, Tilden Park. Cost is $25-$30, advance registration recommended. 845-4116. www.nativeplants.org 

A Tea Cup Give Away Storytelling Tea Party with Rhiannon and Janet Koike from 4 to 6 p.m. at the Addison St. Windows, 2018 Addison St. Cost is sliding scale $10-$25. To register see www.urbancreeks.org/ 

events.html 

Free Sailboat Rides between 1 and 4 p.m. at the Cal Sailing Club in the Berkeley Marina. Bring warm waterproof clothes. www.cal-sailing.org 

Peace Empowerment Process A two-day training from 1 to 4 p.m., with the second session on June 13, at the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, Bonita St. at Cedar. Donations $10-$25, no one turned away. to register call Carolyna at 527-2356, or Cynthia at 528-5403. 

“The Patriot Act” with Sanjeev Bery, of the ACLU at 9:30 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Road, Kensington. 525-0302.  

A Taste of Albany A culinary tour of the town from 5 to 9 p.m. Tickets are $20-$25. for information call 525-1771. www.albanychamber.org 

Aquatic Celebration at the Downtown Berkeley YMCA, with mind-body classes in the Shallow Pool. 665-3258. 

Boadecia’s Reunion Party for all who met their sweetie at the bookstore at 3 p.m. at Boadecia’s Books, 398 Colusa Ave. at Colusa Circle, Kensington. 559-9184. www.bookpride.com  

Tibetan Buddhism, with Syliva Gretchen on “Managing Pain Through Meditation” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

MONDAY, JUNE 7 

Community Meeting on the City Budget at 7 p.m. at the South Berkeley Senior Center. Sponsored by the City Managers Office. 981-7000. 

“Creek Restoration History” Ann Riley, creek-restoration pioneer and author of “Restoring Streams in Cities,” gives a slide presentation on lessons learned and changing methods in urban creek restoration, at 7 p.m. at the Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin, Albany. 848-9358. f5creeks@aol.com 

“From the Prisons in Iraq to the Prisons in the US” a discussion and organizing meeting to build a march in October under the banner of “Stop the War on the Black Community!” At 7 p.m. at the Oakland Public Library, Temescal Branch, 5205 Telegraph at Claremont. Sponsored by the African People’s Solidarity Committee. 625-1106.  

Benefit for Humanitarian Aid to Cuba Clogging, Lindy, Knockdown and Running Sets, with some surprises, at 8 p.m. at Glenview Performing Arts Center, 1318 Glenfield Ave. near Park Blvd. Cost is $15-$40 sliding scale, no one turned away for lack of funds. Humanitarian aid to be delivered by the Berkeley Group of the Cuban American Alliance Education Fund, Inc. 548-6914.  

National Organization for Women, Oakland/East Bay Chapter meets at 6 p.m. the first Monday of each month at the Oakland YWCA, 1515 Webster St. Our June speaker will be Margo Smith from The Gray Panthers. 287-8948.  

Baby Yoga at 11 a.m. and Yoga and Meditation for Children at 2:45 p.m. at Belladonna, 2436 Sacramento St. 883-0600. www.belladonna.ws 

Fitness for 55+ A total body workout including aerobics, stretching and strengthening at 1:15 p.m. at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5170. 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

TUESDAY, JUNE 8 

Organic Produce at low prices sold at the corner of Sacramento and Oregon Streets from 3 to 7 p.m. 843-1307. 

Backpacking 101 with Martin Dickinson at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Phone Banking to ReDefeat Bush on Tuesdays from 6 to 9 p.m. at Cafe de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck Ave. Bring your cell phones. Please RSVP if you can join us. 415-336 8736. dan@redefeatbush.com 

Writer’s Workshop with Teresa Leyung Ryan at 7 p.m. at Boadecia’s Books, 398 Colusa Avenue at Colusa Circle, Kensington. Suggested $5-$20 sliding scale donation. 559-9184. www.bookpride.com 

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. 845-6830. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers We are a few slowpoke seniors who walk between a mile or two each Tuesday, meeting at 9:30 a.m. in the Little Farm parking lot. To join us, call 215-7672.  

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 9 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wed., rain or shine, at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes, sunscreen and a hat. 548-9840. 

Poetry Writing Workshop with Alison Seevak at 7 p.m. in the Edith Stone Room, Albany Public Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 20. 

East Bay Genealogical Society meets at 10 a.m. in the Library Conference Room at the Family History Center, 4700 Lincoln Avenue in Oakland. Ray McFalone will speak about “A Time to Remember.” Guests always welcome. 635-6692. 

Boadecia’s Women’s Book Group meets to discuss Patricia Highsmith’s “The Price of Salt” at 7 p.m. at 398 Colusa Ave., Kensington. Suggested donation $3-$5. www.bookpride.com 

Book Forum with American Society of Journalists and Authors to discuss what publishers are looking for at 7:30 p.m. at the Journalism Library, UC Campus. RSVP to 530-6699. 

Fun with Acting Class every Wednesday at 11 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Free, all are welcome, no experience necessary.  

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Vigil at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.geocities. 

com/vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, JUNE 10 

Awesome Earthen Buildings from Around the World Slide show and presentation by Janell Kapoor at 7 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave, near Dwight Way. Cost is $5-$15 sliding scale. 548-2220, ext. 233. 

Medgar Evers Voter Advocacy Summit Thurs. through Sun at St. Paul AME Church, Ashby Ave. Hands-on nonpartisan voter advocacy training by grassroots specialists. Topics include campaign planning; fundraising; message development; GOTV; and campaign finance. The cost is $25, which will include meals, t-shirt, Voter Empowerment Handbook and certificate of completion. RSVP with the Berkeley NAACP Youth Council 435-3101. www.geocities.com/berkeleynaacp  

Voter Registration Training and pot-luck at 6:30 p.m. at Berkeley Friends Church, 1600 Sacramento at Cedar. 415-565-0201, ext. 23. 

Berkeley Farmer’s Market with all organic produce at Elephant Pharmacy parking lot, 1607 Shattuck Ave., at Cedar from 3 to 7 p.m. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter.org 

Reading Workshop for Parents of 3rd-5th Graders at 8 p.m. at Classroom Mattters, 2607 Seventh St., Suite E. Free, reservations required 540-8646. www.classroommatters.com 

East Bay Mac User Group meets the 2nd Thursday of every month, from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at Expression Center for New Media, 6601 Shellmound St. www.expression.edu  

Grizzly Peak Flyfishers meets at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Community Center, 59 Arlington Ave. for a fly-tying demonstration and slide show by Andy Burk. Cost is $5 for non-members. 547-8629. 

CITY MEETINGS 

Council Agenda Committee meets Mon., June 7, at 2:30 p.m., at 2180 Milvia St., Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk, 981-6900. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil/agenda-committee 

Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board meets Mon. June 7, at 7 p.m. in City Council Chambers, Pam Wyche 644-6128 ext. 113. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/rent 

Landmarks Preservation Commission meets Mon. June 7, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Gisele Sorensen, 981-7419. ww.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/landmarks 

Peace and Justice Commission meets Mon., June 7, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Manuel Hector, 981-5510. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/peaceandjustice 

Youth Commission meets Mon., June 7, at 6:30 p.m., at 1730 Oregon St. Philip Harper-Cotton, 981-6670. www.ci.ber- 

keley.ca.us/commissions/youth 

City Council meets Tues., June 8, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers, Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk, 981-6900. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Commission on Disability meets Wed. June 9, at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Paul Church, 981-6342. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/disability 

Homeless Commission meets Wed., June 9, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Jane Micallef, 981-5426. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/homeless 

Planning Commission meets Wed., June 9, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Ruth Grimes, 981-7481. www.ci.berkeley. ca.us/commissions/planning 

Police Review Commission meets Wed. June 9, at 7:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, Barbara Attard, 981-4950. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/policereview 

Waterfront Commission meets Wed., June 9, at 7 p.m., at 201 University Ave. Cliff Marchetti. 644-6376 ext. 224. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/waterfront 

Commission on Early Childhood Education meets Thurs., June 10, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Marianne Graham, 981-5416. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/earlychildhoodeducation  

Community Health Commission meets Thurs, June 10, at 6:45 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. William Rogers, 981-5344. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/health 

West Berkeley Project Area Commission meets Thurs., June 10, at 7 p.m., at the West Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7520. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/westberkeley  

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., June 10, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/zoningw

The day laborers gather on Berkeley’s Hearst corridor early in the morning, hours before most of the high-priced shops and trendy cafes in the nearby Fourth Street commercial district open for business. The first to arrive is Hector Castillo, a 51-year old Honduran who sleeps in his car on a nearby side street. 

Hoping to catch an early job with one of the small building contractors or homeowners who cruise the corridor searching for cheap temporary labor, Castillo stations himself near the Truitt & White lumberyard at Second and Hearst. 

Castillo, a round-faced, friendly man wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, is looking for a small room to sleep and shower in, but says he can’t afford to pay rent because he goes to the Western Union office each week to send most of his earnings home to his wife and nine children in Honduras. He gets by for now living in his car. 

“My life is on the street, looking for work,” he said. 

Castillo is one of a growing number of day laborers (called jornaleros in Spanish)—mostly immigrants from Mexico and Central America, many undocumented—who seek work each day on Hearst Avenue in West Berkeley. Faced with declining job opportunities, low wages, and frequent abuse by unscrupulous employers, they struggle to survive on the margins of the economy.  

On a morning in late March, more than 150 men stand in small groups or sit on curbs along a 10-block stretch of Hearst extending east from the Interstate 80 frontage road to the residential neighborhood between Sixth Street and San Pablo Avenue. Aside from a small group of African-Americans on the corner of Hearst and Second Street and one white man with long hair and a beard standing near the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks just east of the Truitt & White lumberyard, all of the men appear to be Latinos. There are no women.  

They talk quietly, looking up expectantly at each passing motorist, sometimes waving in an attempt to make eye contact with potential employers. An occasional truck or car pulls over to the curb. After a brief conversation, terms are agreed upon, and the men hired for the day get in the vehicle to be driven to their place of work. Their employers seldom identify themselves, and their wages are paid in cash. 

Most will wait all day for work. Not more than 20 percent are likely to find jobs on an average day, says Father Rigoberto Caloca-Rivas, executive director of the Multicultural Institute, a nonprofit organization working with the City of Berkeley to provide services to the day laborers.  

Castillo has supported his family with money earned in the United States for over 20 years, working previously as a dishwasher in Miami and a hospital maintenance man in New York City. He has worked as a jornalero on Hearst for three years. 

He earns $10-$15 per hour for carpentry work, painting, landscaping or digging trenches for foundations. He usually gets at least one or two jobs per week, and sometimes works every day. But other weeks Castillo gets no work at all. 

Too many workers competing for too few jobs keep wages on the Hearst corridor low. Medical benefits are non-existent, and legally required protections like overtime pay, regular breaks and workers compensation for job-related injuries are seldom provided. 

With help from the Multicultural Institute, the jornaleros have attempted to establish an unofficial minimum wage rate of $10 for their work, but so far have had little success. The contractors usually start out offering $7 or $8 per hour, and there is no way to prevent other jornaleros from accepting the lower wage if they are hungry enough, says Sergio Granados, a 22-year old Guatemalan. “We have tried to convince them not to work for less than $10, but some of them just don’t understand,” he said. 

One of the biggest problems, says Martin Ibarra, a Multicultural Institute staff member, is that many of the jornaleros are vulnerable to employer exploitation because they are in the United States illegally. Although legal experts say most state and federal labor laws protect undocumented immigrants, many are reluctant to call attention to themselves and risk deportation by filing legal claims. 

“If the contractor knows you have no legal documents, he’s more likely to take advantage of you because he knows you will be afraid to complain,” said Francisco Raudelas, a 35-year old Honduran. In a recent case cited by Castillo, a jornalero was picked up on Hearst by a contractor who drove him to Sacramento and then refused to pay him or provide him with transportation back to Berkeley. “He didn’t make a complaint because he didn’t have papers,” Castillo added. 

Fernando Martinez, a small, intense man in a blue sweatshirt and black pants, also complained of unfair treatment on the job. Employers often lie about the kind of work that will be required or hire too few men to get it done, he said. “When you get there, you find out that they want you to move concrete blocks or carry heavy furniture up six flights of stairs for $7 or $8 per hour.” 

The jornaleros put up with these conditions because they can’t find permanent jobs, said Raudales, a tall man wearing paint-stained white pants, a leather jacket, wrap-around sunglasses and a San Francisco Giants cap. “I wouldn’t be out here wasting my time if I had a regular job,” he added. 

Raudales says the jornaleros all come here to work for the same reason: their families. “The older ones send money home to support their wives and children, and the younger ones are trying to earn money to go back and start their own families,” he said. 

Castillo says he gets lonely, particularly at night when he has nothing to do but return to his car to sleep. He hopes to earn enough money this summer to bring his wife and children to this country. But eventually, he would like to return to Honduras to live in the house he has built for his family. 

Martinez, who came here to work because the economic situation in Mexico City made it impossible for him to support his wife and children, also thinks often of going home. “Mexico is always on my mind,” he said. 

But Raudales, who has not been home for two years, would like to find a steady job that pays enough to enable him to move his wife and children here permanently. “In Honduras, you have very little chance to get a good job, an education, a house,” he said. “If you are poor, you are poor. Here you have a chance.” 

The key to improving the lives of the jornaleros, says Caloca-Rivas, is education and job training to help them make the transition to better-paid permanent jobs. The Multicultural Institute conducts weekend English as a Second Language (ESL) classes and General Educational Development (GED) classes for the jornaleros and is looking for a site to provide them with job skills workshops. It has also arranged for monthly visits by a mobile health unit that provides them with free medical screening and referrals. 

These programs have improved the situation on the Hearst corridor, said Granados. But the harsh day-to-day economic reality of life on the street looking for work remains largely unchanged. 

There may be no easy answers to the problems faced by the jornaleros, but Martinez thinks the first step is relatively simple. “When they treat us as human beings, with respect, as people trying to make a life for themselves, then things might change,” he said. “We just want to be equal, to be treated like everyone else.” 

The four teachers involuntarily transferred last week from Rosa Parks Elementary School will file a grievance seeking monetary compensation, the Berkeley Federation of Teachers announced Tuesday. 

Calling Superintendent Michele Lawrence’s decision “an attack on our union,” BFT President Barry Fike said the transfers violated the teachers’ contract and were issued punitively in place of a proper performance review. 

The four teachers set to be transferred next year were among the more than three-quarters of the faculty that signed a letter to the superintendent asking for the transfer from the school of second-year Rosa Parks principal Shirley Herrera. Lawrence, instead opted to keep Herrera—the first principal to last two years at the school since 1999—and instead transfer members of the faculty. 

In addition to the four teachers being involuntarily transferred, others are being allowed to leave voluntarily. An exact tally on the exodus from Rosa Parks is unknown, but Fike put the number between seven and 13 teachers at the school which has 16 classroom teachers. 

Fike chastised Lawrence for refusing to bridge the gap between Herrera and the teachers and said he warned Lawrence that involuntarily transferring teachers could “do more than just rip apart Rosa Parks school, it could very well harm relationships between teachers and principals at other Berkeley schools.” 

Under the teachers contract, involuntary transfers are permissible only in cases when there are “irreconcilable differences” or a poor classroom learning environment. 

Since it’s doubtful that the teachers would be reinstated, Fike said they would seek monetary damages for emotional distress. 

Rosa Parks, which serves some of Berkeley’s poorest children, has repeatedly failed to meet state standards on standardized tests. Teachers, who chose not to give their names, last week said they believed the pressure to improve test scores further damaged their relationship with Herrera. 

Last Friday, Superintendent Lawrence met with 12 parents about the school. She told them she was considering hiring a mentor for Herrera, organizing diversity training for the new staff, and pumping in additional resources for the school, most likely in the form of increased staffing. 

Lawrence also promised to find a new science teacher for Rosa Parks—which is billed as an Environmental Sciences Magnate School—after the school’s dedicated science teacher was among those transferred. 

Finding new teachers from within the district could be tough, Lawrence said after a group of parents, staff and teachers— called Concerned Citizens of Rosa Parks School— vented their frustrations with Herrera. 

Not all parents opposed Lawrence’s decision or Herrera’s work at the school. 

Julie Holcomb, who attended the Friday meeting with Lawrence, praised Herrera as a responsive and committed principal and said the transfers were difficult but necessary. Holcomb said the superintendent told the parents that the overall behavior of children at Rosa Parks was markedly worse than at other district schools and that the culture of the school needed to be overhauled. 

Lawrence and Herrera are scheduled to attend a PTA meeting at 6:30 p.m. Monday at the school. 

d

The lights will not go out on Berkeley after school programs this fall, though they might flicker a bit.  

All seven district schools passed over last week for prized 21st Century Community Learning Center five-year grants will get some renewed funding after all, California Department of Education After School Program Coordinator Pat Rainey told the Daily Planet Wednesday. 

Rainey said the education department planned to announce the names of additional schools slated for funding in 2004-2005 in the coming days, but noted that Longfellow Middle School, King Middle School, Leconte Elementary, Oxford Elementary, Thousand Oaks Elementary, and Berkeley Arts Magnet were on the list. 

“That is welcome news,” said Superintendent Michele Lawrence. The seven schools were among 10 that had applied for renewed funding in the 2003-2004 cycle announced last week, but only Cragmont, Rosa Parks and Washington elementary schools had received the grants. 

At $1 billion, the 21st Century Community Learning Centers are the federal government’s largest distributors of after school programs and one of the biggest contributors to Berkeley Unified’s school-based programs. New state funding rules, however, promise to diminish the size of the grants.  

Prior to this week’s announcement, Lawrence said the district had not received any indication if the other schools would be included, and had started making contingency plans to preserve its after school programs if the money had not materialized. The district had already given layoff notices to its after school employees. 

Julie Sinai, an aide to Mayor Tom Bates, said the city had offered to try to come through with emergency assistance if any of the programs were in danger of closing and that funding for the programs could be included on a proposed $2.2 million ballot initiative to fund youth services. 

As part of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the federal government handed over management of the 21st Century program to the states, with strict guidance to give priority to schools labeled failing under the federal education law and with a large proportion of poor students. 

With $92 million in grant requests and only $27 million to hand out to elementary and middle schools in the 2003-2004 cycle, Rainey said the state could only fund failing schools. The three Berkeley schools that already had their funding renewed have begun “program improvement” as required under No Child Left Behind. 

Now the state has decided to use some of the $49 million it will get for 2004-2005 to fund schools that otherwise had strong applications, Rainey said. Assuming the state budget is finalized before the summer, the Berkeley schools should get their upfront funding before the start of the 2004 school year, said Rainey. 

She couldn’t provide specific allocations to Berkeley schools but said the three which received renewed funding for 2003-2004 would receive a total sum of $228,150 and the seven schools scheduled to be renewed for 2004-2005 would receive a total sum of $494,000. 

That will still be a cut for most Berkeley schools. When the federal government oversaw the program, schools could apply for their determined need, but California has opted to give smaller grants to a greater number of schools, Rainey said. 

The state has imposed maximum grants of $75,000 for elementary schools and $100,000 for middle schools, basing much of the money on daily attendance at a rate of $5 per student per day. 

Longfellow Middle School had previously received $135,000 under its grant, about one-third of the total money to fund its after school program, said Principal Rebecca Cheung. 

Parents at the school have organized fundraisers to compensate for lost federal dollars. If the school has a shortfall, Cheung said, it would likely transfer some of its discretionary site funds to the after school program at the expense of other services. 

Some of the district’s after school programs have poor attendance and that district management will consider ways to improve accountability so it doesn’t lose grant money, Superintendent Lawrence said. 

A report issued last year on the federal program found that nationwide, the community learning centers did not raise test scores and needed to be better aligned with state curriculum standards.

Nearly one year after their contract expired, the Berkeley Federation of Teachers (BFT) announced Tuesday they have unilaterally declared that negotiations with the Berkeley Unified School District are at an impasse. 

BFT President Barry Fike said he expected the Public Employees Relations Board (PERB) to appoint a mediator to meet with negotiating teams from both sides of the dispute over the summer. 

The district is not budgeted to approve any wage increases over the next three years. Recent contracts signed with two of the district’s classified unions included no pay raises, but maintained full medical benefits, the cost of which increased by about 12 percent last year. 

The teachers’ previous contract had tied salary increases to a composite of salaries at 31 area school districts to ensure that Berkeley teachers achieved the median pay of the other districts. 

Depending on experience and education level, a Berkeley teacher makes between $33,848 and $70,358. 

—Matthew Artz

Carbs have been taking a beating lately, and the news isn’t getting any better. A pending lawsuit filed against fast food mega-corps McDonald’s and Burger King may leave one of America’s most beloved junk foods with a cigarette-like warning label: “May cause cancer.”  

Acrylamide, a chemical produced when carbohydrate-rich foods like french fries or potato chips are heated to very high temperatures, was discovered in 2002 by Swedish researchers to cause cancer and reproductive harm in high doses. Scientists in the UK, Switzerland, and Japan have all since reached the same conclusion. The FDA, along with the World Health Organization (WHO), considers acrylamide in food to be a “major concern.”  

Unsurprisingly, acrylamide is found in especially high levels in McDonalds’ and Burger King’s best-selling side order, cooked by both at unusually high temperatures to achieve that admittedly yummy crisp. Problem is: The higher the temperature, the more acrylamide you get. According to an article in the Guardian UK, “Americans nowadays eat on average some 30 pounds of fries a year and...35 micrograms of acrylamide a day—many hundreds of times what the WHO judges to be safe.” These facts, and the lawsuit filed to publicize them, has the fast food giants concerned that sales of the high-profit products may plummet.  

So how do all the new discoveries affect the average consumer and their kids? While no government or state agency seeks to pull the beloved french fry from the shelves, they all agree on one thing: Americans should be informed of the risks.  

California’s voter-approved Proposition 65 uses labels to “help consumers make informed choices about products,” which let the buyer beware of chemicals in food and consumer products that are “known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects or other reproductive harm.” Unfortunately for consumers, there is no practical enforcement of the rule.  

Alan Hirsch, a spokesman for California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), explains. “Acrylamide has actually been listed on Prop. 65 since 1990, for the hazard associated with occupational uses of the chemical, but its presence in food has only been known for about two years. Labeling of chemicals on the list, although required, is not enforced. “  

That’s precisely why McDonald’s and Burger King are being sued. “Though it’s the responsibility of individual businesses to have a warning for products on the list,” Hirsch says, “Prop. 65 allows any member of the public to enforce a warning if there isn’t one in place.” If the world’s largest fry sellers lose, as many suspect they will, they’ll be under court order to place acrylamide warnings in their California restaurants, if not directly on their packaging. Because fast food restaurants do about 60 percent of their business in the drive-through window, packaging labels may be preferred.  

Enter Raphael Metzger of Long Beach, the tort lawyer representing the Council for Education and Research on Toxics (CERT) in the Prop. 65 suit. “By targeting these two companies, the largest market share (of fry sellers) are represented. Addressing this issue with them means that the problem will be remedied in a large portion of the fast food supply, in foods that are highest in acrylamide.” Currently, Metzger is waiting for the OEHHA to draft the language that will put people off their fries and chips.  

From May 17-20, 2004, the National Institutes of Health convened a special panel to look specifically at the risks of acrylamide to reproductive health, ignoring its carcinogenic properties altogether. Though independent scientists found that there was a “minimal concern” that acrylamide levels could cause serious reproductive harm, chromosomal sperm damage was found in mice exposed to high doses of acrylamide (affecting the fertility of their offspring as well). The study concluded, however, that human reproductive health probably wouldn’t suffer much damage.  

“But,” as the famous Simpson’s line goes, “what about the children?” In 1996 it was recognized by the Environmental Protection Agency that children often metabolize chemicals and react to them differently than adults. According to Dr. Michael Shelby, Director of the National Toxicology Program at the Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction, “Kids get proportionately two to three times the level of exposure to acrylamide as an adult.” Unfortunately, nobody has yet studied the effects of acrylamide on younger bodies, despite the fact that children are clearly targeted by the industry—Ronald McDonald anyone?  

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), whose aegis the issue falls under, has been studying acrylamide’s affects on both cancer levels and reproductive health since the Swedish studies came out two years ago. Unsurprisingly, the embattled, and increasingly pro-business, agency has yet to release any data or warnings more specific than it’s fuzzy comment that acrylamide in food represents a “major concern.” McDonald’s, refusing to return phone calls, had no comment on the case or the studies.  

Starre Vartan is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in E Magazine. 

›

Cop Hit (Again) 

A Berkeley motorcycle cop struck by a car while on duty less than a year ago was struck again Wednesday when a motorist hit his motorcycle in downtown Berkeley.  

Officer Ben Cardoza did not sustain any major injuries from this week’s accident, unlike the previous one last August, which sent him to the hospital with broken bones in his leg and foot and large cuts on his arms and face. This time Cardoza came away with bruises and scratches and was able to return to work the same day—at his desk, though, not on his motorcycle, which was damaged in the accident. By Thursday, he was medically cleared for full duty.   

According to police, Cardoza was headed east on Allston Way when a motorist heading south on Milvia Street hit the back of his motorcycle. Cardoza was thrown to the ground and slid into another parked motorcycle. The owner of the parked motorcycle was standing nearby, and also sustained minor injuries. 

The motorist stopped and is cooperating with police. The California Highway Patrol is in charge of the investigation but police would not release information on whether the driver ran the light at the intersection before hitting Cardoza. 

Cardoza, who has been with the department for more than four years, has not been assigned a new motorcycle yet. 

Bank Robbery 

According to police, a young man entered the Andronico’s Market at 1414 University Ave. last Friday around noon and, displaying a handgun, robbed the Wells Fargo bank located in the store. 

The assailant then fled on foot with an undisclosed amount of money. The suspect is described as a black male in his late twenties, 5’10”, with a heavy build. At the time of the robbery, the suspect was wearing a dark colored pea coat, a fisherman’s hat, and dark colored pants. The robbery is part of spree of bank hold-ups that the city has experienced within the last few months. 

Dead body at Aquatic Park 

A jogger saw what appeared to be a dead body lying near the water while jogging through Berkeley Aquatic Park Thursday afternoon. The jogger contacted the police, who confirmed the report.  

Berkeley Police Department spokesperson Officer Joe Oakies said foul play was not apparent. The coroner’s office is handling the case and the name and cause of death are pending. 

Robber on Bike  

On Wednesday afternoon, police report that a young man on a bike tried to rob a furniture store on San Pablo Avenue. They could not confirm whether he was trying to steal money or furniture. 

ˇ

2004 is nothing like 1966. 

In the summer of 1966, we gathered bottles in front of the storefronts near 82nd and East 14th and tossed them at the police cars when they rolled by. It was a year after the Watts riot, only a few months before the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, the same summer as police shot demonstrators at the Bayview Community Center, and National Guard tanks rolled down the streets of San Francisco to quell the resulting disturbances. Malcolm X had been shot dead while giving a speech in a Harlem auditorium the year before, the same year civil rights demonstrators got their heads beat in trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. All through the fall of 1965 and into the winter and spring of 1966, Oakland’s black neighborhoods brooded in sullen silence, waiting to blow. The Oakland police knew it, and they dispersed any gathering of young African-Americans they came across. They padlocked the school playgrounds as if we were going to steal the rims off the backboards or the erase the basepath lines painted on the ground. They rousted us wherever they found us. We were young, and we were angry. No-one listened to us. No-one spoke up for us. And so, in the summer of 1966, we gathered bottles in front of the storefronts near 82nd and East 14th and tossed them at police cars when they rolled by. We roamed the neighborhood, looking for something to tear up. Someone tried to set fire to the paint factory two doors from our house. If it had caught, it would probably have taken five square blocks with it, including all of where Allen Temple now stands. It didn’t make any sense, but that wasn’t the point. Community anger doesn’t have a point. Pressure builds. Usually finds its release in music or parties or other diversions. Withers as it vents steam from hidden cracks. But sometimes, under certain circumstances, when the cracks have all been closed off and no other outlet can be found, community anger simply explodes. 

But 2004 is nothing like 1966. 

Over the fall and the winter of this past year, and into the early spring, police conducted what they called “Operation Impact” in Oakland, a project in which they flooded something they called “hot spots” with squads of outside officers—mostly California Highway Patrol officers—in what they said was an effort to clamp down on Oakland’s spiraling murder rate. “Hot spots” was a term that was never officially defined. In Oakland, it seemed to be one long stretch along International from High Street to 105th, including several neighborhoods to the east and west. The selected method of stopping Oakland’s murders was to simply pull over cars, in massive doses. Coming home late from work on nights the operation was in full swing, I once saw three cars pulled over by three separate Highway Patrol officers in a ten block stretch. Why all these cars were being pulled over, and what exactly this had to do with Oakland’s murders, we don’t exactly know. But the murder rate slowed and so, like the man in the ancient story who went outside before dawn one day and beat on a drum until the sun comes up—thereafter declaring himself to be the cause of it—Oakland deemed Operation Impact a success. 

What effect it had on all those non-murdering people who were ticketed in those sweeps, whose cars were towed, who had to stop traveling the streets for months at a time...well, we haven’t figured that one out yet, either. We haven’t even bothered to ask. 

In the spring, having tested the procedures in Oakland, the California Highway Patrol moved across the bay to take the program to the streets of San Francisco, which was having its own murderous outbreak. In early May, the Bay Guardian newspaper reported it as “an unprecedented joint San Francisco Police Department-California Highway Patrol crackdown...which would result in 857 traffic stops, 66 arrests, 520 citations, and 72 impounded vehicles. Police say no firearms were found, but three stolen vehicles were recovered. There were just six felony arrests, two for driving under the influence, and four for narcotics. The stated purpose of the operation, according to an SFPD press release put out on the first day, was ‘to control what are referred to as precursors to violent crime and gang-related activity, namely reckless driving, DUI, weapons possession, narcotics, vandalism, and loitering.’” 

“All [Operation Impact] was was ‘driving while black or brown,’” the Bay Guardian quoted a Bayview-Hunters Point leader as saying. “I think what you’ll see is a lot of people who had tickets or a broken taillight who couldn’t afford to pay them who got nailed by that—and is that really fighting crime?” 

Is it? Good question. But San Francisco, of course, is nothing like Oakland. Just like 2004 is nothing like 1966. 

Meanwhile, back in Oakland, the court-appointed police monitoring team set up in the wake of the settlement in the Delphine Allen v. City of Oakland police misconduct case (you remember that case, don’t you? it was part of the Riders scandal) released its third quarterly report on the conduct (or misconduct) of the Oakland Police Department. Under “areas of concern,” the team lists “street strip searches,” in which we learn some details as to how our police are cracking down on crime, in our name: 

“Recent citizens complaints filed with OPD and presented to the [Civilian Police Review Board] complain of searches that, if conducted as alleged, raise serious legal concerns,” the monitoring team reports. “Complaints describe searches on Oakland streets in which young men’s pants and underwear were pulled down, exposing their buttocks and genitalia to their friends, family and strangers on the street. In some instances, OPD officers donned latex gloves and performed invasive searches… In our professional experience,” the monitoring team goes on to say, “such [street strip] searches are unnecessarily humiliating and dehumanizing (sometimes intentionally) and can immediately alienate citizens and destroy community respect for its police department.” 

The “sometimes intentionally” comment concerning dehumanizing, by the way, was in the monitoring team’s report. 

One wonders how many of youngsters—cars impounded in one of the Operation Impact sweeps, humiliated on the streets by strip searches—showed up at Carijama on Monday evening, looking to get some revenge on the cops. This is not to say that the violence at this year’s festival was right, or the proper response. This is just a search for cause. And effect.  

Oakland simmers. Oakland broods. 

2004 is nothing like 1966. 

It may be worse.

SCHOOL FUNDING 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

Your front page article (“Berkeley Unified Launches Study of Long-Term Funding Needs,” Daily Planet, June 1-3) states BUSD will “go where no school district has gone before” by weaning itself from state funding and relying on local sources. This is an exciting idea, however BUSD already is where no other district has gone. Without acknowledging the basic math that impacts the schools this new venture must fail. There are already several locally funded districts: Albany, Piedmont, Orinda. All carefully watch admissions so local funds are spent on local kids. There are also other districts that make no real attempt to guard admission. Berkeley is unique in the Bay Area as a preferred school that does not attempt to guard enrollments. Preferred districts see it as a fiduciary responsibility to guard the local funds. Berkeley’s ideology is troubled by this approach. As more local funds are raised the implication of being where no other district has gone before also rises. One former Berkeley High principal estimated that Berkeley High serviced a student body that was half out of district. 

The problem of “free-riders” is a classic political dilemma. One answer to this dilemma is to charge non-residents the average that tax payers fund the schools. Another is to set aside a scholarship pool of separately raised funds.  

Ignoring reality is also a choice. 

David Baggins 

• 

TOXIC TALENT 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

To all the people who wrote voluminously and mindfully in objection to a tasteless article by Richard Brenneman: Have you read this guy’s crime column? This is an individual whose charming “humor” refers to a gunshot wound as a “ventilation”; calls a random street assault a “dustup”; thinks it’s so cool to describe an armed robber as “packing a piece.” That’s enough to know what can be expected of this oh-so-hip writer. It may seem illogical, but it’s not unusual for an otherwise decent paper to carry one mean-spirited columnist whose poison is seen as a kind of balance. Unfortunately, he’s the Senior Editor. We have hopes for the Daily Planet and hope it will have the wisdom to tell this guy to take his toxic talent elsewhere. 

Sandy Rothman 

• 

INTO THE FRAY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

OK, I have to jump in to the fray. It seems your staff has fewer reporting and editing skills than we’d all realized. Congratulations on the really bad job of handling this one! Pagans have been a part of the Berkeley community for many years now, and have done some fine things for this city and your staff managed to insult all of us—the active and the quiet ones alike, and quite a few who aren’t Pagans as well. “Cute and clever” or “sarcastic and witty” never works when reporting an event. Your staff should know that without your readership having to remind them! 

Guess I’ll have to dust off my pentacle and actually go next year. 

Leave it to (local rabble rouser and folk singer) Carol Denny to respond with something even nastier than the Planet reporter—maybe the two of them could meet at some cafe and practice being sarcastic and witty together. Their brand of humor is certainly lost on me! No Pagan or Wiccan in his or her right mind would consider the awful and violent things she recommends, not even as a joke! 

Ashes of Roses  

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RICHMOND PROJECT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Regarding Richmond’s proposed campus development: Your staff and, particularly, your reporter Mr. Brenneman, who researched this issue, have done our community and the Bay Area a valuable service. 

Thanks, and keep it up! We need it! 

Tony Sustak 

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CORRECTIONS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I must address some corrections to Becky O’Malley’s editorial (“Seeing Ourselves as Others See Us,” Daily Planet, May 25-27). I am one of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Inc. of which she incorrectly states “make fun of Catholic nuns,” “are secretly resentful of women who are in a position of power,” that we “imitate” and/or “mock nuns.” I understand her misperceptions, however a little research at our website—www.TheSisters.org—would have easily cleared up her errors.  

First, we don’t mock nuns anymore than she mocks being a human. We are nuns, we take vows and serve our community and have many fans within many religions including Catholic nuns. We don’t imitate—we are as real as the hate crimes and homophobia, classism, sexism and racism that we seek to overturn in creative manners and agitprop actions.  

The argument has traditionally been made against drag queens and transphobically against intersex individuals that we envy or despise women. We all come from women my dear and if you were to look at us and a picture of a woman I think you would agree that we aren’t trying to fool or deceive anyone that we are women or superior to women. I resent that comment in particular and I think our female and intersex members around the world would agree.  

Our Order was founded to promulgate universal joy and expiate stigmatic guilt—that is guilt applied to you for being yourself—gay, female, poor, a person of color, specially-abled, etc. Amongst our innovations is that in our Order, unlike most mainlining religions, the nuns have the power and all have a voice in the decisions and directions and we transform stigmatic guilt into a call to activism. I would be thrilled if the Catholic Church would put the Pope and cardinals on hold and let the nuns run the church for a while. Maybe then condoms could be put in the hands of those who want them and the “holy” war against queers who want to marry and raise their children in dignity would be stopped. Maybe then women around the world could be granted economic freedom and healthcare for all could manifest. Maybe then wars would be condemned rather than John Kerry refused communion for not demonizing marriage for all. Maybe then making the world a better place for our children’s children would be a priority rather than the greedy needs of the few. 

No, we don’t imitate the Catholic Church, it really would be easy but we have higher goals than that. You wrote that “Religious belief has always been used as justification for outrageous and intolerable actions” and I agree. You also wrote that you have been educated by nuns and now I know that is true again. 

Sister Kitty Catalyst OCP 

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STATE BUDGET 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

Gov. Schwarzenegger has failed. He campaigned on the promise that he could slash the car tax and balance the budget by getting rid of “waste.” The reality is much different. The governor has failed to find the mythical ‘waste.” Instead the cuts in crime fighting youth programs are part of a long list of critical services that the governor is slashing to afford his car tax refunds. My son’s classroom size is likely to climb into the high thirties, his access to the library is going to be cut, his lungs are going to be attacked by more pollution as cut bus routes drive up traffic, to name just a few more. It is a Faustian bargain. The governor offers a “lower tax” (that mostly benefits those that can afford expensive cars) and we all pay far more in crime, congestion, pollution, hospital bills, and lost kids. Let Arnold and your state representatives know where your priorities lie. 

Tom Lent  

• 

UNIVERSITY AVENUE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Following the last meeting of the Planning Commission the mayor and City Council should all be very concerned about the fate of University Avenue. 

It seems as if the Planning Commission has its own agenda for more growth and for the abandonment of the UASP. The commission seems out of control. Instead of hearing the concerns of University Avenue neighbors, the commission only seems to hear the voices of the developers and the build-at-any-cost advocates. And the commission seems to be advocating regulations and guidelines which are overly vague and could lead to more Acton Court buildings. 

It was my understanding that the council instructed the Planning Commission earlier this year to come up with a nuts-and-bolts way to implement the UASP and to address the concerns and needs of all parties, neighbors and developers. But this is clearly not happening. The Planning Commission is not helping to bring people together; it is driving them further apart. 

It certainly seems as if the package the Planning Commission will present to the council for consideration will not solve the unanswered questions about the avenue. The City Council will be asked to vote on regulations and guidelines which will increase the volume of debate on every University Avenue project to come. You can expect more bitter fighting, rancor and the inevitable lawsuits. 

I know the council wanted to have the issue of University Avenue settled before the summer recess. But the attitude of the Planning Commission has made this impossible. 

The City Council must reject the commission’s work when presented for endorsement. The council must tell the commission they got it wrong. The council must tell the commission to meet and listen to all members of the community affected by University Avenue development. And come up with guidelines all can live with. It is possible to reach a consensus, the neighbors and developers seem willing to talk. If it takes a few extra months to get these issues settled it will be worth it in the long run. 

Frank Greenspan 

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Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have been to San Luis Obispo only once, but the beautiful downtown creek left a lasting and favorable impression. Couldn’t Berkeley use something other than Telegraph Avenue as a city icon? 

I suggest forming a citizen’s group to get donations and to organize volunteer labor. This might be a way to revitalize community pride as well as downtown Berkeley. 

Robert Gable 

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Editors, Daily Planet: 

I received a letter from the city manager about renewing my 2005 preferential parking permit. No where in the letter or on the renewal form does the city mention the mitigation passed along with the fee increase passed last year, that people with incomes under $29,000 a year may pay only half the $30 fee. All they have to do is attach a copy of their income tax statement or other proof of income with the renewal form and a check for $15. 

Is the city so desperate for funds that it will mislead low-income residents by not supplying this information? I think the city manager should send out a new letter with this information and inform those who have already paid that they may receive a refund with the proper supporting information on income. 

One warning: If paying in person, it’s best to make your own copies since the city charges $2 a page! 

Estelle Jelinek 

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Editors, Daily Planet: 

As a born and raised Berkeley girl, I find Susan Parker’s columns offensive and racist. She writes in a very condescending way about the “colorful natives” in her recently gentrified neighborhood. I don’t know where she’s from but I wish she would go back. Why are you printing this stuff? 

Thanks for letting me express my opinion. 

Leslie Williams 

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Editors, Daily Planet: 

Regarding the proposed Longs store in downtown Berkeley, councilmembers Spring and Maio’s remarks sound like they have not visited a local Longs lately. It is not a “liquor outlet” (Maio), that would be Beverages & More. Nor, just by its presence, will it attract “...panhandling to buy alcohol…” (Spring). Panhandlers are rampant in every block of downtown already, with or without Longs. 

It is a dry goods store offering pharmacy, gifts, photo, seasonal items, grocery items, snacks, cosmetics, etc. It is not a ready-food store and thus will offer no competition to the nearby E-Z Stop Deli. They will add their friendly, intelligent service in a spacious, well-stocked store. 

The nearby Walgreens could benefit from the competition. Locals, students and business people in the area are currently given no choice but to shop at the Walgreens which is crowded, rude, under-staffed, and has a limited selection of goods. I invite opposing councilmembers to visit a Longs store in person to see how clean, neat, friendly and professionally the stores are run. With downtown bemoaning the glut of empty storefronts and several recent business closures, the City Council should be welcoming Longs with open arms. Any store selling liquor or cigarettes (Walgreens, E-Z Stop, etc.) should have the same safeguards in place to avoid sales to minors and Longs should not be singled out. 

Katie Breer 

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Editors, Daily Planet: 

Bus fare hikes are again being considered by AC Transit, not yet six months following the December 2003 fare hike for seniors and disabled persons.  

Despite drastic cuts in services, according to items 9 and 10 on an agenda for last AC Transit board meeting (May 19) those who can least afford a fair increase: disabled people, seniors, and also students may be asked to pay more to ride AC Transit next September 2004.  

AC Transit holds its board meetings first and third Wednesdays at 2 p.m.  

Although AC Transit does have a limited if ineffective forum for riders to protest its policies, meetings are always held in small rooms that soon fill, usually at 2 p.m., when working people are least likely to be able to attend. President Wallace, a kindly soft-spoken man, is obviously preempted in meetings by the AC Transit attorney. 

Now is the time to protest fare hikes. Let us not allow a second fare increase in less than a year! AC Transit Riders unite!  

Arlene Merryman 

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Editors, Daily Planet: 

Whatever Bush and Cheney’s true reasons were for invading Iraq, the actual result has been to validate Osama’s paranoid fear of the USA to millions of Muslim men. Our country’s invasion, born of arrogance and greed, was Al Qaeda’s most effective recruiting tool. But, the sexual abuse conducted in American-run prisons overwhelms the invasion. 

Do you remember the movie “Lawrence of Arabia”? There is a scene, about 1/3 into the film, which cauterizes the audience, solidifies its sympathies with Lawrence against the Turks. Up until that scene, it’s not clear who are the good guys and who are the bad, or why. In that scene, however, a soldier who escaped Turkish capture describes the Turks’ forced sodomization of prisoners. From then on, there is no doubt. 

To Muslim men, the sex abuse pictures from Abu Ghraib show the US to be the kind of pervert about which Muslim radicals rant and rail. Whatever the US mission to the Middle East was - whether to force democracy, stability, or to control terrorism - it is now “Game Over” for us. There is nothing more we can do. 

The Bush government has betrayed us by conducting the war as a depraved nation on a cultural conquest, which Islam has always feared. Turns out, thanks to Bush and Cheney, Osama may not be paranoid; the USA really is an ambitious, corrupt empire. Bush’s administration has failed to protect us. Their arrogant invasion and incompetent occupation have created many, many more enemies. 

Bruce Joffe 

Piedmont 

• 

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Editor, Daily Planet: 

I hate to contradict Charles Siegel’s statements about Union Square, but having been in the retail business for over 15 years, including four years with a company that had a store on the square itself, I would not describe Union Square as being your typical retail center. The bulk of the regular customers at the Union Square stores are either tourists from the nearby hotels, or office workers from downtown businesses. Folks from the suburbs do not flock into Union Square to shop, except perhaps once a year at Christmas. Charles is also off base with the parking situation. There is a 985-space garage right under the square itself, an 1865 space garage at Sutter and Stockton, a 925-space garage at Ellis and O’Farrell, and a large private garage on the block behind Macy’s. I suspect people who do come in from out of town drive for the most part, rather than having to fight their way onto BART with bags full of stuff, not to mention having to run the gauntlet of panhandlers and other bizarre people who congregate around the Powell Street BART station.  

What are the implications for Berkeley? If you want to replicate Union Square in Berkeley, build hotels, build more parking, get more office workers, and clean up the streets. Also, get much faster vehicular access from the freeways. On the other hand, if you want to have a fully pedestrianized downtown, with small boutiques and restaurants only, fine, but it won’t attract serious shoppers. As Charles correctly points out, Berkeley is not a natural or a convenient shopping destination in its current physical format. Also, if you want to see one possible vision of what a pedestrian mall can turn into, visit the pedestrian precinct in downtown Sacramento and look at the empty storefronts. All the retail activity in that town is several blocks away in a large indoor complex which has a parking garage attached to it, or out in the suburban malls. 

Sorry, but it’s a fact of life that retail activity and cars go hand in hand in this country. It may not be the ideal situation from a quality of life standpoint, but as I said in one of my earlier missives, you can’t have your cake and eat it. 

Malcolm Carden 

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Editors, Daily Planet: 

Judy Stamps writes that “years of research in urban design” shows that University Avenue would be most appealing with the three- and four-story buildings of the UA Strategic Plan (“University Avenue Strategic Plan Should Benefit All Berkeley Citizens,” Daily Planet, May 28-31.) 

In reality, as Allan Jacobs says in his book Great Streets, all the research on urban design shows that streets are most visually appealing if the buildings on them are at least half as high as the street is wide. On University Avenue that means that buildings should be at least four stories. 

In his book The Regional City, Peter Calthorpe uses two buildings in Berkeley as models of good urban design: the four-story building on University and Grant, and the five-story building on Oxford and Berkeley Way.  

Calthorpe Associates did not develop a plan for three-story buildings on University Avenue because they believe research shows this height is visually appealing. Pressure from local residents forced them to limit heights to less than what their professional judgment and the research recommends.  

I agree with Stamps that we should zone University Ave. to benefit all Berkeley citizens, not just a vocal minority with a vested interest in the outcome. That is why the city should not cave in to pressure from the small, noisy contingent of University Avenue neighbors. These local residents care only about the impact of development on themselves and not about the good of the city as a whole. 

Charles Siegel 

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Editors, Daily Planet: 

The exceedingly convenient timing of latest Bush Administration hysteria about those darned summertime terrorist threats (do they only attack in nice weather or are they guided by holiday greeting card fanatics?) is not hard to understand. After all, public support for Bush has been dropping steadily since the mass torturing and unseemly abuse of Iraqi prisoners was revealed to the world in April. However, I could not understand how the London-based Institute for International Baloney got their asserted number of 18,000 “potential terrorists.” (What exactly is a “potential terrorist” anyway?) This morning, one of the local papers said that the FBI was going to notify some 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies of this new supposed terror threat. So it all adds up, one “potential terrorist” per American state and local law enforcement agency. One on one, I think that we can handle that.  

And exactly how are these potential terrorists crossing our national borders after three years of the draconian internal security rules set up by Attorney General John Ashcroft? In donkey carts overland from Canada or Mexico? By plywood gliders flown 5,000 miles from their mountain redoubts in Afghanistan and Pakistan (against the prevailing Westerly winds, to boot)? And how is an alleged threat with “no time, no place and no date” qualify as being called “intelligence?” It sounds more like finely tuned propaganda to scare us into supporting our heroic warmonger to me.  

James K. Sayre 

• 

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Editors, Daily Planet: 

Jesse Arreguin states that he is the director of the ASUC’s City Affairs, Lobby and Housing Commission (Letters, Daily Planet, May 14-17). I expect that a person in such a position would have access to accurate information about rental housing, and I was therefore very surprised by his assertion that “Most landlords illegally inflate rents and compromise the rights of tenants.” In an informal conversation the executive director of the Rent Board estimated that the number of renter petitions is about 150 per year, and that there are several thousand landlords and about 19,000 rentals in Berkeley. A formal request would elicit more precise numbers but is unlikely to change the basic magnitudes. Even if we assume that every petition represents a case of illegal rent, or compromised tenant rights, and even if we assume that every petition is against a different landlord, this is still a long ways from “most.” 

I don’t think I exaggerate in stating that exaggeration has been a major factor in many of the major social problems facing us today. For an admittedly extreme example, one needs to look no further than “weapons of mass destruction.” You begin to believe your own exaggerations, and make decisions that are based on them. How objective can Mr. Arreguin be towards a class of people he regards as crooks? The problem goes the other way too. If most landlords are crooks, what kind of people will want to become landlords? And how will they treat their tenants? 

If housing is really a “basic human right” why is it that only landlords have to pay to provide it? And why do we vilify them for doing it? I don’t share Mr. Koenigshofer’s faith in the market, but that doesn’t mean that rent control is the best solution. 

Robert Clear 

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Editors, Daily Planet:  

If I may weigh in regarding John Koenigshofer’s op-ed assailing Berkeley’s Rent Stabilization Ordinace (“Kill City Rent Control Panel,” Daily Planet, May 11-13), and Rent Board chair Max Anderson’s subsequent response (“Rent Board Chair Chides Control Foe’s ‘Rant,’” Daily Planet, May 25-27): 

Mr. Koenigshofer obviously relishes his role as an anti-rent control agent provocateur. His suggestion that rent control is “unfair,” “unneeded,” “counterproductive,” should be dismantled, etc., flies in the face of reality: Rent stabilization ordinances have been part of California’s social/cultural fabric for nearly 25 years, and have been declared reasonable and constitutional by the California Supreme Court in several decisions. 

Along with the City of Berkeley, San Francisco, Oakland, Hayward, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, West Hollywood and a half dozen other California cities operate rent stabilization ordinances. Moreover, more than 100 mobile home park sites statewide maintain rent stabilization laws. Together, these community rent stabilization ordinances regulate nearly a million tenant households across California.  

To briefly respond to Keith Winnard’s June 1 letter regarding Max Anderson’s May 25 op-ed stating his opposition to tenant “means testing”: If Mr. Winnard considers means testing to be “logically consistent,” than it follows that a parallel or reciprocal rental property owner means testing process is also logically consistent. 

Such an approach, however, is both counterproductive and legally untenable. 

Like the regulation of electricity and gas, telephone service, water, and other vital California services, community rent stabilization ordinances are universal regulatory programs—not selective or arbitrary income-based programs. 

Chris Kavanagh, 

Commissioner, Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board 

Ó

I’m writing as one of the “anxious artists” from Nexus who attended the recent Berkeley City Council Subcommittee on the New Animal Shelter. These meetings have been going on for about two years—this is the first we have attended since finding out about them one month ago. 

It’s been quite a shock to learn that after 30 years as an arts and crafts cooperative (one of the first in West Berkeley), with two years remaining on our lease, we have a bulls-eye painted on our backs. Jill Posener, chair of the city’s Citizens Humane Commission, who ran the meeting, told me afterward that we are the only site in West Berkeley suitable for the new bond-subsidized animal shelter. 

How we got to this point seems like a classic case of missed opportunities and capricious, arbitrary judgment calls. I am basing my commentary largely upon Posener’s remarks at the public meeting, a previous meeting she requested at Nexus, and on my conversations with her. We have had scant opportunity to negotiate with Councilperson Breland, the mayor, or city staff. I applaud Posener for open and forthright (if belated) communication with us. Otherwise we would be completely out of the proverbial loop. This letter should not be interpreted as a personal attack on my part, but Posener is de facto the city’s only negotiator vis a vis Nexus and presumably with the knowledge of and on behalf of city staff, councilmembers, and the mayor. 

Posener blames city officials and the bond language for thwarting the acquisition of her optimal site: the former Urban Ore location on Gilman at Sixth Street. 

As I understand the scenario, she advocated for using the bond monies to buy the McCauley Foundry site on Carleton below Seventh Street, and then trading up for the Gilman location. After that deal fell through (or was quashed at the highest levels), Posener provides various explanations for why the Foundry site was then rejected, lost, or some combination of the two. 

At the subcommittee meeting, she objected to the Foundry’s proximity to the railroad tracks and to Bayer Corp., which conducts animal-testing. Yet the area of West Berkeley that she wants to relocate to is permeated with Bayer parking lots, offices, and labs, Nexus is a scant two blocks from the tracks, one more than the foundry, and one (short) block from Bayer. 

Even Alan Shriro of the Berkeley East Bay Humane Society, part of the proposed joint venture with the city-owned animal shelter, indicated that a new building could be almost completely sound-proofed. (One example of the co-existence of noise and human residents is the Clocktower luxury loft building at the San Francisco end of the Bay Bridge--windows have been double and triple-glazed.) 

At the meeting, Posener reacted angrily to a participant at the meeting holding up a handout from the city manager’s office, describing a for sale property at 945 Camelia containing a 20,000 building on a 35,000-square-foot parcel. She dismissed the building as a “tear-down” (apparently acceptable in the case of the distinctive Nexus Building), and later told me another drawback was the proximity of neighbors she feared would object. This squares perfectly with her preference for Nexus--located in what she (inaccurately) described at the meeting as not being part of a neighborhood. 

After the meeting, Posener angrily shot down my suggestion of the Jetco site at Channing Way and Fifth Street, saying I was insulting to suggest a location so close to the tracks. 

In her visit to Nexus, Posener indicated that her “vision” for a new shelter required that all operations except for possibly offices must be on ground level. She said it was not acceptable for dogs to use elevators or climb stairs. She said a pet emergency room must be on ground level. The Humane Society’s Shriro, again, seemed to disagree about the inherent problems for dogs with stairs and elevators. 

In reality, while Posener recognizes the difficulty of finding a site in a dense city like Berkeley, her “vision” and what she finds acceptable are the more expansive suburban models involving the conversion of open space and farmland. 

The obviously inadequate existing animal shelter has a 7,000-square-foot building on a 12,000-square-foot lot, the voter-approved $7.2 million bond measure provides for a 12,000-square-foot building on a 20,000-square-foot, and Posener’s goal is a 20,000-square-foot building on a 35,000-square-foot lot. She does allow that the bond measure is inadequate for her goal. 

I certainly do not mean to suggest that Posener alone is driving the site selection process that has apparently been concluded behind closed doors. A compromise of sharing the spacious site—a retrofitted Nexus alongside a new shelter—although floated by a city manager, is apparently not seriously under consideration. It’s clear what the Humane Society brings to the table is the land, which they own. Unfortunately for Posener and some city officials, that site is not vacant but the location of Nexus. 

Arts and crafts uses are protected by both the West Berkeley Plan (part of zoning) and the newly drafted Cultural Plan. The Nexus Building is a potential landmark—the brick portion was built by the prestigious Austin Building Co. in 1924, and is an unfortunately increasingly rare example of early industrial activity in West Berkeley. Nexus is also notable for being a locus of studios, woodshop, and gallery exhibits for some 30 years. 

It is not bragging to say that Nexus helps to provide the ambiance that’s bringing developers, shoppers, and residents to this vital neighborhood. 

I would also like to make a small correction to an implication in Brenneman’s well-written article (“Arts Commissioners Call For Public Input,” Daily Planet, April 27-29). Nexus has not had the opportunity to negotiate an extension of our lease as a trade for Nexans providing the seismic upgrade—we have been consistently told by the Humane Society that they will tell us what they have decided to do about our lease renewal when they have made up their minds. 

Under state law, the property owner—in this case, the Humane Society—is ultimately responsible for seismic upgrades. But because the city continues to grant their requests for waivers for seismic compliance, the Humane Society apparently feels no urgency to bring the building up to code. This despite the hazards to their own staff, patrons, and pets in their dog-training area which is part of the unreinforced masonry building. They would benefit from our retrofit. 

We shouldn’t forget that those who died in the recent Paso Robles earthquake were killed on the street by falling debris—Nexus is right on the street and the parking in front and side is claimed by employees from nearby businesses, customers of Juan’s Place, and probably even Humane Society users. 

As an individual who lives in a household with two rescue cats, a dog, and macaw, and who has spent hundreds of hours and dollars rescuing, taming, having neutered and trying to find homes for feral cats and kittens I am acutely aware of the paucity of shelter services in the immediate area. I have often had to drive to San Francisco and even Novato shelters in order to place animals. I fully support the creation of an expanded and improved local shelter. 

But irrational, inconsistent reasoning and pious opinions must be set aside before another site can be found or the Nexus site be shared. Time is of the essence. An Environmental Impact Report, which the proposed demolition of the Nexus Building would surely trigger, will only add long delays and additional costs. The consideration of alternatives and constructive solutions mandated by an EIR should be happening right now. 

This is one catfight that could have been avoided. Arbitrary and short-sighted decisions should stop driving the process, and all the stakeholders should be at the table. 

Bob Brokl is an Oakland resident. 

›

We’ve all heard about the inspections that took place in Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction and programs to make them. As we know, none were found in Iraq. 

That wouldn’t be the case if the inspectors were to come to the University of California at Berkeley. They would find that programs to research, design, develop, improve, test, and maintain nuclear weapons have been going on under the auspices of this university for more than 60 years. They would find that the University of California provides oversight to the nation’s two principal nuclear weapons laboratories: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory. They would find that today these weapons laboratories are engaged in attempting to make new, more usable nuclear weapons: “bunker-busters” and mini-nukes. 

For a fee, the University of California has provided a fig leaf of respectability to the research and development of the most horrendous weapons known to humankind. It is ironic that our government cannot tolerate the possibility of Iraqi scientists creating such weapons, but at the University of California such a horrid use of science is called “a service to the nation.” 

Two of the weapons developed at the Los Alamos Laboratory were used on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These were relatively small weapons but caused the deaths of more than 200,000 persons, mostly innocent civilians, by incineration, burning, blast and radiation poisoning. There are no guarantees that the nuclear weapons being developed today under UC auspices will not be used again. In fact, the odds are that they will be used again, by accident or design. 

There are three reasons the UC should get out of the nuclear weapons business: 

First, UC is a great university, and no great university should lend its talents to making weapons capable of destroying cities, civilizations and most life on Earth. A university exists to examine the amazing wonders of our world, to collect and categorize knowledge, and to pass important knowledge from the past on to new generations. How can a great university allow itself to be co-opted into helping create weapons of mass destruction? 

How can the UC Board of Regents justify this as “a service to the nation”?  

Second, there is no moral ground on which nuclear weapons can rest. These are weapons of mass murder. They cannot discriminate between combatants and civilians. They kill indiscriminately. By continuing to develop and improve these weapons, the United States, economically and militarily the strongest country in the world, is signaling to other nations that these weapons would be useful for them as well. 

Third, the International Court of Justice has stated that the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is illegal under international law. It allowed only one possible exception in which the “very survival of a state” was at stake. In such a situation, it said that the law was unclear, but under any circumstance the use of nuclear weapons would not be legal if it failed to discriminate between civilians and combatants or caused unnecessary suffering. There is no evidence that nuclear weapons could be used without violating these precepts. 

Sir Joseph Rotblat, a Manhattan Project scientist and Nobel Peace Laureate, has written: “If the use of a given type of weapon is illegal under international law, should not research on such weapons also be illegal, and should not scientists also be culpable?” 

It is time to heed the words of Professor Rotblat and to bring nuclear weapons under control. If the scientists and engineers at the laboratories are unwilling to give up their role in creating and improving nuclear weapons, then at least the UC community can send a message to the rest of the country and the world that it is no longer willing to participate in the management of laboratories making weapons of mass murder. 

The motto of the University of California is “fiat lux,” meaning “let there be light.” It is unlikely that the light the founders of the university had in mind was the flash “brighter than a thousand suns.” They meant the light of knowledge, truth and beauty. The University of California should end its association with the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories when the contract expires in 2005. 

David Krieger is president of the Santa Barbara-based Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org) and the author of Nuclear Weapons and the World Court and Choose Hope, Your Role in Waging Peace in the Nuclear Age.

“I’ve spent the last 30 years being a public nuisance,” says Julia Vinograd, adding—with a smile—“in a positive way.” 

Berkeley’s unofficial street poet laureate is a familiar figure on Telegraph Avenue, and anyone who finds a table at the Caffe Mediterraneum soon finds Julia approaching with several of the 48 volumes she’s published. 

“I wave my books at people, and if they open them, they find themselves outraged by the fact that they’re actually readable,” she says. 

A Berkeley native, Vinograd was raised in Pasadena, another world entirely, before returning as an undergraduate in 1961 to study poetry under the likes of Gary Snyder. 

Caught up by the turbulent events of the early ‘60s, she found herself among the 700 students who occupied Sproul Hall for the Free Speech Movement Sit-in. 

“I wasn’t anybody important,” she says. “I wasn’t a politico—I was a poet, an English major.” 

After graduating from UC in 1965, Vinograd headed off to the University of Iowa for her Masters of Fine Arts, and then, two years later, it was back to Berkeley. 

“When I left, all the girls looked like secretaries and all the boys looked like law clerks,” she said. “When I came back, there’d been a cultural revolution. Now they all looked like they’d just walked off a tapestry. I wandered around the streets with my notebook and tried to capture it all.” 

It wasn’t just a notebook she carried as she made her entry into the world of street poetry. Vinograd quickly established herself as “the Bubble Lady” for the bubbles she created to entertain children. 

“I basically do one book a year now and I blow bubbles for the kids. Otherwise, I’m useless,” she quips. 

In the early years it was two books a year, slim volumes created with a mimeograph machine and a stapler. Today’s books offer twice as many poems, slick covers, and machine bindings. 

“Until recently they were $3 each, but I had to go up to $5,” Vinograd said. 

But if you’re running short of cash, don’t worry—she’ll either cut the price or offer to barter. 

“I love trading. I get at least half my holiday presents every year by trading with street vendors,” she explains. “I also do CDs now.” 

Like so many in Berkeley who remember the ‘60s, Vinograd harbors a soft spot in her heart for that long-vanished era. 

“You could do pretty much anything you wanted to and live pretty much any way you wanted. The Grateful Dead started as a garage band then, and now music is so corporatized that garage bands don’t have a chance. And a lot of people stayed on the street by choice,” she explains. 

For poets and artists, Telegraph offered tons of good food, “and all of it very cheap. In the beginning, I hung out at the Med and the Forum. And there was Pepe’s Pizza Parlor, where we went for the best ice cream. That was when the crew that was filming The Graduate got kicked out of the Med and they had to shoot Dustin Hoffman from the street.” 

Vinograd recalls one delightful moment “when a group of young, very blonde kids walked up to me and said, ‘We know you. We’ve been rolling joints on your face through three states.’” 

It was then they produced one of her books, which they’d used as a platform to capture the debris spilled as they rolled up their doobies.  

But one thing’s a lot better these days, Vinograd says, and that’s poetry. 

“There’s a lot more poetry right now. The ‘60s produced the worst poetry I’ve ever read, everyone trying to capture the essence of their acid trips. The ‘50s were good, and things started coming back in the ‘70s. The critics were mad at Charles Bukowski because people actually read him, and critics feel that poetry is something that should have to be interpreted.” 

Vinograd anticipated one question before it could be asked—how much does poetry writing pay? 

“You make a living off your books when you’re dead,” she said. “Right now, one book pays for the next.” 

Vinograd has no shortage of friends, and her sister Deborah—also a Berkeley resident—creates the illustrations that add yet another dimension to some of her poetry books. 

Though she walks a little less because age and time are taking their toll on her legs, Julia Vinograd remains a fixture along Berkeley’s Telegraph row, offering poems, conversation and the occasional bubble to all.

Simple syllables 

woven together 

bring great joy to Berkeleyans 

Or so an aspiring haiku artist might describe this Saturday’s Berkeley Poetry Festival and Community Fair, returning after a one-year hiatus. 

Created by Berkeley poet Louis Cuneo—a transplanted New Yorker—this year’s free festival features the poetry of Berkeley High School students, open mic readings, a two-hour poetry slam, music, and a presentation to and reading by Julia Vinograd, the city’s unofficial poet laureate. 

Festivities begin at 11:15 a.m. at Civic Center Park, with 45-minute set by The Wild Buds, a Berkeley band. 

Starting 15 minutes later, anyone’s welcome to sign up for a slot in the open mic poetry readings—three minutes max per poet—which commence at noon and finish at 1:45. 

City Councilmember Kriss Worthington will next present the city’s first Lifetime Achievement Award to Vinograd. 

After Vinograd reads one of her creations, Charles Ellick of the Berzerkeley Poetry Slam will host a two-hour festival poetry slam, featuring two rounds and a collection of prizes. 

Students from Berkeley High School’s Youth Speaks will close the festival hour, with readings from 4 to 5 p.m. 

While the poets hold center stage, a variety of other activities will also be on hand, including children’s activities, a community fair featuring publishers, poets, craftsfolk, artists, organic food vendors, a blood drive organized by the Alameda County Red Cross, student and teacher workshops presented by Youth Speaks and a Poet’s Scroll—a group poem to which all comers are welcome to add their lines. 

“This isn’t an ‘I’ event,” said Cuneo. “It’s a ‘we’ event.” 

But Cuneo’s personal history is a ballad-poem in itself. 

While still living in New York, Cuneo attended a performance by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. His raucous laugh attracted Zappa, who used both his laugh and his stream of consciousness ramblings in several albums. 

Cuneo moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1970 while still in his early twenties. “I decided that if I had to live with cockroaches, I might as well do it in a nice, warm environment.” 

Mother’s Hen, the organization Cuneo created to help poets bring their work to the community, began a year later, the outgrowth of a poetry reading in his home. 

He moved to Berkeley a decade later. 

A specialist in haiku, a Japanese meditative poetry that must cast its spell in a mere 17 syllables, he has branched out into photography—using film to capture the essence of haiga, a visual form of haiku that seeks to capture an image in 17 brushstrokes. 

Cuneo’s written and photographic creations are available in ten books and included in several anthologies. 

Berkeley Poetry Festival & Community Fair, 11:15 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, Civic Center Park. For more information go to http://mothershen.com/.  

b

“No applause, please” the diva commands as she walks on stage at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre.  

Quite probably the patter of applause heralds the start of a storm of greeting for the multi-award-winning actress, Rita Moreno, who stars in the Rep’s new production of Master Class, Terrence McNally’s Tony Award-winning play about opera singer Maria Callas. After all, we’ve all known about Moreno since she opened in West Side Story decades ago. The woman has won every award in the theatrical world. You name them: Oscar, Emmy, Grammy and Tony, the works. 

The icing on the cake is that there has had to be a slight adjustment in the current run at the Rep, so that Moreno can go to Washington D.C. to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  

But it is Maria Callas, the formidable diva herself, who will brook no nonsense—nor will Moreno, who embodies Callas in every second that she is on that stage. The audience members are rapidly whipped into shape. Callas’ wit is sharp, but funny. She will, mind you, throw the audience a bone from time to time during the evening, in the form of a direct comment or so, but she is on stage to conduct her famous singing classes and intends to waste no time.  

First, however, it will be necessary, absolutely necessary, mind you, to make sure that the pillow (in the chair that she probably won’t sit in all night) is at exactly the correct height. As the result of Callas’ various demands, we see rather more than one would expect of Owen Murphy, who plays a stagehand. His portrayal is so convincing that his first appearance on the stage may very well strike you as a minor accident. When he subsequently finds himself running various errands for the nit-picking Callas, his lack of awe is refreshing. 

When Callas finally gets her pillow and so forth organized according to her standards, she becomes gracious enough to greet the talented young piano player, Manny (played by Michael Wiles). He has been well within her view since she stepped on stage, but she has ignored him while she dealt with “more important” matters. He is the first of the awe-stricken neophytes, in his case so overcome by her fame that he can barely speak. 

Sophie, the first of the three students who see themselves as honored to be selected for a lesson with the great singer, is played by Donna Lynn Champlain. One’s sympathies are almost immediately engaged by this awkward, clumsily dressed and eager young woman with the beautiful voice. She is a natural target for the kind of situation she stumbles into with Callas and is naïve enough to say—after most adults would have stormed out in fury—“I think she likes me!” 

We hear only a very few bars of Sophie’s singing. Callas talks away most of the time she consciously spends with the girl and then goes into a reverie. As she recounts her early history, she becomes more and more an object of sympathy and far less the antagonistic, self-centered control-freak that she has appeared so far. Perhaps the fact that her image as a young woman in a white ballet costume dances in the background helps one’s attitude. (Cheree A. Sager is both graceful and deft in this role.) 

Sherry Boone and Scott Scully, who next take their turns as the students Sharon and Tony, are given a somewhat easier time than was poor Sophie. At least each of them gets to demonstrate their very real vocal gifts. In Callas’ second reverie, she relives some of her experiences as the lover of the richest man in the world—and some of the humiliation and losses to which she was subjected in that relationship. Again, she becomes a more sympathetic, as well as a more well-rounded figure. It’s an effective technique and well staged.  

While perhaps it isn’t surprising that Rita Moreno creates such a flawless presentation, it does seem a remarkable feat of casting that the supporting roles are filled with such powerful talent, musically and dramatically. Director Moises Kaufman has created a seemingly flawless production of Terrence McNally’s Tony Award-winning play.›

FRIDAY, JUNE 4 

CHILDREN 

Love Those Classics, with readings from “Ugly Ducking” and “The Gingerbread Man” at 10:30 a.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-3635. 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“The Renowned Photography of Margaretta K. Mitchell” reception for the artist from 6 to 8 p.m. at Schurman Fine Art Gallery, 1659 San Pablo Ave. Exhibition runs to June 30. Gallery hours are Wed. - Sat. 2 to 6 p.m., Sun. 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. 524-0623. 

California College of Art Alumni Exhibition at 5212 Broadway, Oakland, through June 10. 594-3788. 

THEATER 

Berkeley Rep “Master Class” with Rita Moreno at The Roda Theater. Runs through July 18. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Impact Theatre “Money and Run” an action serial adventure with different episodes on Thurs., Fri. and Sats. Runs through June 5 at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid. For tickets and information call 464-4468. www.impacttheatre.com 

New Shakespeare Co., “Hamlet” directed by Stanley Spenger, at 8 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, through June 5, no show June 3. Tickets are $10-$12. 234-6046. www.geocities.com/spoonboy_sf/hamlet.html 

California Shakespeare Theater, “Comedy of Errors,” Tues.-Fri. at 7:30 p.m., Sat at 8 p.m., Sun. at 4 p.m. at the Bruns Memorial Amphitheater, through June 27. Tickets are $13-$32. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Ben Bagdikian describes “The New Media Monopoly” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

“The Spoken Word Show” with films by David Michalak and stories by Dean Santomieri, and music by Tom Djill at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Suggested donation $8-$15. www.thejazz- 

house.com 

Calvin Trillin reads from his new collection of verse, “Obliviously On He Sails: The Bush Administration in Rhyme” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

The Potential Jazz Ensemble and MLK Jr. Middle School Jazz Band perform at 7:30 p.m. at King Middle School Auditorium, 1781 Rose St. at Grant. Admission is free but donations gratefully accepted in support of the school music program. 

Berkeley High School Jazz Band’s Final Concert at 7 p.m. at the Little Theater, Allston Way, Berkeley High Campus. Tickets are $3-$10. www.berkeleyhighjazz.org 

Berkeley Public Library Jazz Festival with the Tammy Hall Trio at 8 p.m. in the Reading Room at 2090 Kittredge. Free. 981-6100. 

SambaDá, Brazilian dance music, at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $8-$10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Stompy Jones performs East Coast Swing and Lindy Hop at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Swing dance lesson with Nick and Shanna at 8 p.m. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Norton Buffalo and friends, harmonica and acoustic trio, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $16.50 in advance, $17.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

The Ex-Boyfriends, Bitesize, Robosapien at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

The Bad Penny Boys at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Happy Turtle, jazz trio, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Paintbox, Look Back and Laugh, Cropknox, Ballast at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

The Cuts, rock and roll from Oakland, at 6 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

André Sumelius’ LIFT, drummer from Finland, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Cannonball and Realistic Orchestra at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $8-$10. 548-1159. 

www.shattuckdownlow.com 

Anton Schwartz, saxophonist, at 8:30 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. www.downtownrestaurant.com 

SATURDAY, JUNE 5 

CHILDREN  

Los Mapaches at 8 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $8 for adults, 43 for children. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

“Wild About Books” storytime with Cric Crac Storytelling Troupe and stories from Jamaica at 10:30 a.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6223. 

How to Make a Pop-Up Book with author Lulu Hansen at 3 p.m. at Eastwind Books of Berkeley, 2066 University Ave. 548-2350. books@ewbb.com 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“Visualizing Perspective” featuring Gary De Jong and Chung Ae Kim at 4th Street Studio, 1717D Fourth St. www.fourthstreetstudio.com 

THEATER 

Wilde Irish Productions, “Eclipsed” by Patricia Burke Brogan, at 8 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Runs Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. through June 27. Tickets are $15-$20. 841-7287. www.wildeirish.org 

FILM 

International Media Festival on Disabilities from 1 to 9 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5-$10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Ed Craine, contributing author, discusses “Masters of Success” at 3 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-3635. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Public Library Jazz Festival with Mary Watkins Trio at 8 p.m. in the Reading Room at 2090 Kittredge. Free. 981-6100. 

Bella Musica Chorus with the Prometheus Symphony Orchestra at 8 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 114 Montecito, Oakland. 525-5393. info@bellamusica.org  

Pacific Boychoir performs Bach’s Cantata 150 at 7 p.m. at Firts Presbyterian Church, 27th and Broadway, Oakland. Tickets are $15, available from 866-486-3399. www.pacificboychoir.org 

Pacific Mozart Ensemble performs at 7:30 p.m. at the Crowden School, 1475 Rose St. Tickets are $15-$20. 415-705-0848. www.pacificmozart.org 

José Luis Orozco at 10 a.m. at La Peña, in a benefit concert for BAHIA, Inc. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Chelsey Fasano and Helen Chaya, singer-songwriters, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Benefit for Berkeley Liberation Radio 104.1FM at 8 p.m. at The Longhaul Info Shop, 3124 Shattuck Ave. 595-0190. 

“Hooray For Hollywood” Alameda Civic Light Opera features dinner and a floorshow with songs from Hollywood blockbuster movies along with movie-themed live and silent auctions, at 6 p.m. at the Alameda Elks Lodge. Tickets are $55. 864-2256. www.aclo.com  

Mighty Prince Singers and Talk of Da Town, roots of a cappella, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50 in advance, $18.50 at the door. 548-1761.  

www.freightandsalvage.org 

African Folk Night with The Nigerian Brothers and DJ Omar at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Drum circle with Pope Flyne at 9 p.m. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Jenna Mammina at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com  

Wayward Monks, jam band jazz, at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $8-$15 sliding scale. www.thejazzhouse.com 

7th Direction, Hyim and the Fat Folkland Orchestra, Shantytown at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Times 4, jazz funk quartet, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Embrace the End, Animosity, Lifelong Tragedy at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

Blame Sally at 9 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Tickets are $10. 763-1146. www.oaklandmetro.org 

Braziu at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $8-$10. 548-1159. 

www.shattuckdownlow.com 

Sylvia and the Silvertones at 8:30 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. www.downtownrestaurant.com 

SUNDAY, JUNE 6 

CHILDREN 

“The World in my Neighborhood: Celebrating the Bay Area’s Cultural Heritage” Family Day at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum from 1 to 4 p.m. with music, arts and demonstrations. Cost is $1-$4. 643-7648. http://hearstmuseum.berkeley.edu 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“Artist in Watershed” an exhibition of artworks by Patricia Bulitt opens at the Addison St. Windows, 2018 Addison St. 981-7533. 

THEATER 

“Primo” a play by Ed Davidson, on the last days of Holocaust author, Primo Levi, at 7:30 PM Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut Street. Cost is $15-$20. 925-798-1300. 

FILM 

International Media Festival on Disabilities from 1 to 9 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5-$10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Christie Mellor discusses child-rearing in “The Three-Martini Playdate: A Practical Guide to Happy Parenting” at 4 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

Poetry Flash with contributors reading from “So Luminous the Wildflowers, An Anthology of California Poets” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

George Farah exposes the presidential debate process in “No Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the Presidential Debates” at 7:30 at Black Oak Books. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Public Library Jazz Festival with the Dee Spencer Trio at 8 p.m. in the Reading Room at 2090 Kittredge. Free. 981-6100. 

The Youth Arts Studio, ”inside out,” a dance performance and art exhibition at noon at All Souls Church, 2220 Cedar St. Youth Arts Studio is a non-profit after school program offering professional-quality training in dance and the visual arts to middle and high school students. The performance and exhibit are free and open to the public. 848-1755. www.youthartstudio.org 

Bella Musica Chorus with the Prometheus Symphony at 3 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 114 Montecito, Oakland. 525-5393. info@bellamusica.org  

Piedmont Choirs Spring Sing at 3 p.m. at the Kofman Theatre, 2200 Central Ave. Alameda. Tickets are $10-$12. 547-441. www.piedmontchoirs.org 

Hip Hop Circus benefit for Camp Winnarainbow at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10-$1000. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Art Lande Quartet at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$18. 845-5373. www.jazz- 

school.com  

Americana Unplugged: The Saddle Cats, traditional bluegrass, at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Swinging on the Home Front, a cabaret and sing-along salute to the great songs of WWII, at 2 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

Za’atar, music of the Jews of Arab and Muslim lands, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $16.50 in advance, $17.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

MONDAY, JUNE 7 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Actors Reading Writers “Surprising Loves: Art and Romance,” at 7 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave.  

Ben Cohen explains “50 Ways You Can Show George the Door in 2004” at 12:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Dale Maharidge interviewed over one hundred Americans to write “Homeland” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Melita Schuam talks about what it is like to be a woman in midlife in “A Sinner of Memory” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 

The Last Word presents poets Sparrow 13 and Maw Shein Win at 7 p.m. at Pegasus Bookstore, 2349 Shattuck Ave.  

Poetry Express, featuring Alice Templeton, from 7 to 9:30 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Frankye Kelly sings Gershwin at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

TUESDAY, JUNE 8 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Penelope Grenoble O’Malley introduces her memoir “Malibu Diary: Notes from an Urban Refugee” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Geneen Roth discusses weight-loss in “The Craggy Hole in My Heart and the Cat who Fixed It” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

The Whole Note Poetry Series, with Toby Kaplan and Howard Dycus and open mic, at 7 p.m. at The Beanery, 2925 College Ave., near Ashby. 549-9093. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

2nd Annual June Jazz Jubilee from 3 to 5 p.m. at Salem Lutheran Home, 2361 East 29th St., Oakland. Free, but reservations requested. 434-2871. 

Mimi Fox, solo guitar, at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Jazz House Jam at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Donation $5. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Janis Siegel in a tribute to Broadway at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. Also on Wed. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Stan Ridgeway at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Jazzschool Tuesdays, a weekly showcase of up-and-coming ensembles from Berkeley Jazz-school at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 9 

CHILDREN 

Preschool Storytime, a program introducing books and music to promote early literacy skills, at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library West Branch, 1125 University Ave. 981-6270. 

FILM 

John Calloway’s AfroCuban Youth Ensemble at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $4-$8. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Marc Bojanowski talks about “The Dog Fighter” set in the underworld of 1940s Mexico, at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Peretz Kidron introduces the anthology “Refusenik!: Israel’s Soldiers of Conscience” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Penelope Tzougros talks about “Wealthy Choices: The Seven Competencies of Financial Success” at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble. 644-3635. 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with Charles Ellik at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

The Concord Ensemble, a cappella sextet performs “Your Beautiful Eyes,” music by the Renaissance Dutch master Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, at 8 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. Tickets are $20. 310-867-9583. www.concordensemble.com  

Coro Ciconia performs “Ockeghem & Son,” a program of late medieval and early Renaissance choral music, at 8 p.m. at Loper Chapel at First Congregational Church, Dana at Durant. Tickets are $10. 843-0450. pcfisher@berkeley.edu  

“Black and Female: What is the Reality?” A benefit performance at 8 p.m. at the Oakland Box, 1928 Telegraph Ave. Tickets are $15-$50 sliding scale. 536-2260. 

Billy Dunn and Bluesway at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. West Coast Swing lesson with Nick and Shanna at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Carol Denney, singer, songwriter, activist at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

The Christy Dana Quartet, trumpet-led original jazz, at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Cost is $8-$15 sliding scale. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Jules Broussard, Ned Boynton and Bing Nathan at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. www.downtownrestaurant.com 

The Key of Z: Experimental Instruments, and the Music They Make, with Peter Whitehead and his recycled instruments, at 7:30 p.m.at the Pacific Film Archive. Sponsored by Amoeba Records. 642-0808. 

Gaucho Gypsy Jazz at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

ubzorb and Sandhya Sanjana, Indian jazz vocalist at 9 p.m. at The Lucre Lounge, 2086 Allston at Shattuck. Cost is $5. 841-1390."

For the longest time, I felt sure that a romantic dinner out meant sitting across from your companion at a candlelit table in a great restaurant. It is only recently that I’ve been won over to the charms of bellying up to the bar in those very same restaurants and eating side by side. 

Sitting at the bar allows you and your sweetie to speak to each other in a normal tone of voice rather than holler your wit and wisdom across the table. Plus you are in a larger social arena than you would be able to enjoy if exiled to a table of your own.  

Whether you’re dining alone at the bar or with a friend, you can broaden the scope of your interactions by socializing with other patrons, if they interest you, as well as with the bartender. 

Bartenders at such places, as far as I’ve been able to tell, are rather like yoga teachers: It’s rare that I find one I don’t like. The best ones give you the sense that they both know and appreciate you, oddities and all. They are sensitive to your needs without ever intruding themselves on your privacy. They are not just your servers at dinner—they are part of the social ambiance of your meal. 

Now, mind you—the bars I’m talking about are every bit as much about food as they are about alcohol. I myself am completely hopeless as a drinker—one martini is to me as a fifth of Chivas Regal would be to someone better schooled in the art of drinking. Two glasses of good red wine in the course of an entire evening are more than enough to make me feel that I am celebrating. 

Berkeley, with its high standards for both food and conversation, is an ideal venue for a gourmet pub crawl. Normally I would at most go to two of these places in the course of an evening out. But, for the purposes of this article, I left a trail of lipstick-stained wineglasses all across Berkeley. Please, if you follow in my path, drink moderately and/or take taxis as you move about town. 

Start with oysters at Café Rouge on Fourth Street. They’re my standard for what is good and fresh and plump and tasty. I love it that Robbie the oysterman always smiles like a beaming schoolteacher as he points to the various mollusks and tells us where they come from. Someone who loves martinis would have one at this point, perhaps served by Darin, who tends the bar on mid-week evenings and exudes such an air of generosity, solicitude and goodwill. 

You could easily spend an entire festive evening at Café Rouge. Ask Darin for his recommendations about what’s best on the menu, which changes every other Wednesday. He’s never wrong. 

Wave goodbye and drive up to San Pablo Avenue and turn north until you get to Nizza la Bella, where chef-owners Eleanor Triboletti and Evelyne Slomon recreate the Italian-inspired tastes and smells of southeastern France. Sit at the bar and order the beignet de “Fiouretta de Cougourda,” delicate zucchini-blossom fritters stuffed with herbs and goat cheese—a veritable mouthful of summer. If you decide to end your evening here, be sure not to miss the individual apple tarts baked in the wood-fired oven imported from Provence. 

For your main course, if you’re still on the move, I would suggest avoiding a main course altogether with a stop at Richard Mazzera’s César, the beloved tapas bar next to Chez Panisse on Shattuck Avenue. Everything is delectable and the menu changes at least a little bit every day. My dining partner and I always prefer sharing two small plates. I love the bocadillo with smoked salmon and queso fresco, the stuffed piquillo peppers and all of the salads. The shoestring potatoes with fried rosemary and aioli on the side are enough to make a carb-counter like myself tremble with desire.  

César can get very crowded, especially on Friday and Saturday nights. If you go either very early or very late, you’ll have a better chance of getting a seat at the bar (but getting a seat at the bar is easier than getting a table). You can stand with a glass of wine, chatting with Cate and her boyfriend Dylan, if they’re working that night, and keeping a weather eye on the crowd, prepared to pounce when a place at the bar becomes available. 

Return to Fourth Street, if you’ve saved some room, and finish up at the bar of O Chame with a bowl of their balsamic gelato. I love this dessert. Not too sweet or filling, it nonetheless gives your palate a wonderfully grownup goodnight kiss. Share a glass of one of the delicious dessert wines on the menu—and vow to come back for a complete meal at this restaurant, where everything that comes out of the kitchen is exquisite and original while maintaining a laudable simplicity.  

If you feel that you’ve imbibed too much to drive safely, you can always sleep in the car and have breakfast at Betty’s the next morning. 

Barbara Quick’s latest book, Even More/Todavía Más, is a bi-lingual mother-daughter gift book co-written with artist Liz McGrath.

“De mortuis nil nisi bonum.” That’s the old rule. About the dead, nothing but good should be said. In the ancient world, perhaps, it was followed. In the 19th century it was widely quoted and usually observed for a long time after death. In the last half of the 20th, it was followed for a shorter period of time, at least by the press, until historians got started on their revisions. In the speeded-up 21st, bloggers have rushed to judgment on Ronald Reagan even before the completion of the elaborate funereal observances which the First Actor planned long ago. Berkeley’s Best Blogger, Economics Professor Brad DeLong, weighed in on Saturday: “He tried hard, but by and large he didn't have the brainpower to think his way out of the boxes that his prior commitments and initial personnel choices handed him.” For including faint damns with his mild praise of the late president, DeLong was roundly excoriated by some of his correspondents. A Mr. or Ms. Zarkov reflected the opinion of several: “One would think you could put the criticisms aside on the day the man died. Nasty, nasty. I’m disgusted.”  

In Berkeley, where we recently voted to landmark the building on whose rooftop James Rector was shot, by troops ordered up by then-Gov. Reagan during the People’s Park demonstrations, most tears shed for Ronald Reagan will probably be of the crocodile variety. Brad DeLong accurately reflected the word on the street here. In local café chat, if Reagan is not damned he is at least marked for a long spell in Purgatory. My friend the recovering red diaper baby used to claim that she voted for Reagan once as a way of getting back at her upbringing, but she now denies it. The best that anyone says about him is that he was an amiable non-entity Peter-principled up to his level of incompetence. 

But really, that’s not too bad, is it? Especially if the stress is on the amiable. For comparison, consider George W. Bush, another non-entity, but not an amiable one. In fact, a pretty vicious non-entity, as it turns out. Compare their war records, for example. Ronald Reagan actually served in the military during World War II. He ended up in Hollywood making propaganda movies, but in later years he seems to have believed that he took part in the heroic actions the films depict—he wanted to serve. GWB, on the other hand, ducked out of his softball assignment in the National Guard for long periods at a stretch. Reagan seems to have believed in the voodoo economics (remember that term?) which his advisors told him would help the average citizen. Bush appears to be operating with a much more cynical “cut taxes, take the money and run” philosophy. Reagan espoused a number of quasi-Libertarian beliefs opposed to “big government.” Bush, on the other hand, is vastly extending the reach of the most dangerous elements of the national regime.  

You know things have come to a sorry pass in this nation when people in Berkeley begin to indulge in Reagan nostalgia. “His kids turned out okay,” they say, thinking of young Ron and Maureen, mensches both. “He really liked to take naps,” they say approvingly. And of course “he gave a great speech.” At least when Ronald Reagan said nothing, it sounded like something. Again, as contrasted with the current incumbent, who talks about everything as if it were nothing, when in fact it’s often something dreadful coming our way that he’s promoting in his speeches. Listening to Bush cynically duck questions at his infrequent press conferences, you begin to long for a breath of that good old Ronald Reagan hot air, reflecting his boundless if unfounded optimism about the America he genuinely loved, well if not too wisely. 

—Becky O’Malley 

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The Berkeley School Board unanimously approved the first reading of an $8.3 million tax measure for the November ballot that, if passed by voters, would cost the average homeowner $184 per year in extra taxes. 

The two-year tax—designed to complement the district’s $10 million Berkeley Schools Excellence Project (BSEP)— would pay for lower class sizes, more librarians, additional music instruction, teacher training, statistical analysis and parent outreach. 

A second board vote on the proposal is expected in two weeks after a public hearing. 

Board members have argued that state funding cuts and inflation have forced the district to cut back on class size, music, and library initiatives that BSEP was designed to cover. A two-year supplemental tax, they concluded, could give relief to students while the district begins an 18-month strategic planning process before bringing a new long-term BSEP measure to voters in 2006. 

Sixty-eight percent of all funding provided by the proposed tax increase would go to reduce class sizes. Teacher student targets would be 20:1 for kindergarten through third grade, 26:1 for grades four and five, and 28:1 for grades six through 12.  

The board nixed a proposal from Director Terry Doran to restore a state subsidized program to establish 20:1 ratios in ninth grade English and Social Science classes. The district withdrew from the state program this year because it couldn’t afford its share. Doran argued that by reapplying for the state subsidy, the district would get more value for the added teaching positions. 

Superintendent Michele Lawrence said the tax proposal included enough new teacher positions to satisfy Doran’s request, but that Berkeley High Principal Jim Slemp indicated he favored using the new positions to provide advisors for ninth graders instead of reducing class size. 

Libraries would receive 16 percent of the new funding. In recent years, most schools have not had money for licensed librarians and instead staffed their libraries with library media teachers, whose hours have been repeatedly cut. 

Seven percent of the tax dollars would go to the music program to restore instrument instruction in the fourth grade and five days a week of band practice in the middle schools. 

At the urging of Superintendent Lawrence, seven percent of the proceeds will go to teacher training and program evaluation and two percent will go to parent outreach. 

A survey of 600 likely Berkeley voters conducted last month by Goodwin Simon Strategic Research showed that nearly three out of four voters would support the tax measure—far greater than the two-thirds majority needed to pass.