Amidst jeers, catcalls and demands for the mayor's recall – and threats from Mayor Tom Bates that he'd clear the rowdy public from the chambers – the Berkeley City Council voted Tuesday to allow two powerful telecommunications companies to place their antennas atop UC Storage, adjacent to the neighborhood at Ward Street and Shattuck Avenue. The building is owned by developer Patrick Kennedy. -more-

As Berkeley’s downtown planning panel faces its Wednesday deadline to make, break, or abandon a compromise on raising buildings’ height limits, it might want to look to the decisions of those who’ve considered the issue a bit longer. -more-

High rises and high densities top the agenda for Wednesday’s Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee meeting. -more-

Berkeley could be the first city to pay upfront costs for residents upgrading energy efficiencies and/or going solar. -more-

The Berkeley Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) voted on Thursday to nominate the Berkeley High School campus to the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district . -more-

The Richmond Community Redevelopment Agency (RCRA) is proposing to build a new housing development called Miraflores on the site of three Japanese American nurseries that date from the early 20th century. The greenhouse roofs are visible from west Interstate 80 near the Cutting Boulevard exit. -more-

For the average citizen, trying to clear up personal information on a government computer—Social Security records, for example—can range between a headache and a bureaucratic nightmare. For California ex-offenders it can be worse, a permanent way of life that sometimes can resemble a trip down into a Victor Hugo or Fyodor Dostoyevsky novel, a hole in which any effort to dig one’s way out only ends in burying oneself in a deeper hole. -more-

City Manager Phil Kamlarz and Police Chief Doug Hambleton will be at the Wednesday Police Review Commission meeting to respond to a subcommittee report on evidence theft issues. -more-

Council rules are clear: councilmembers and mayor may not direct city staff to perform any task—at least not without the city manager’s intervention. -more-

From the outside, Portable 9 looks like any other classroom at Berkeley High. But inside, a mix of sights, sounds and colors hurtles the visitor into a world of oil, paper and fabric. -more-

The easygoing truce that prevailed during much of the debate over downtown land-use policy blew apart Wednesday, fissuring along familiar fault lines. -more-

While Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee members have waged prolonged struggles over landmarks and tall buildings, they voted unanimously twice Monday night, approving two more chapters of the new downtown plan. -more-

Berkeley High School has dropped a plan to ask visitors to provide photo identification to enter the campus after some parents complained that it was unwelcoming and discriminatory. -more-

The law governing Berkeley’s condominium conversion, revised multiple times over some three decades, is likely to undergo more changes in the next month or so. -more-

A dozen protesters gathered Tuesday morning outside the building where UC Berkeley was celebrating its embrace of Dow Chemical. -more-

It was just a little rain three weeks ago, but enough to stop up a drain and cause flooding at the Friends of the Berkeley Public Library bookstore in city-owned Sather Gate Mall. -more-

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is reprinted with permission from the San Francisco Bay Guardian. -more-

A group of South Berkeley neighbors will picket the Verizon Wireless store on 1109 University Ave. from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday to protest the company’s plans to install cell-phone antennas atop the UC Storage building at 2721 Shattuck Ave. -more-

Formerly incarcerated individuals will have the chance to learn how to clear up their criminal records and “put the past behind them” when Congressmember Barbara Lee and several East Bay officeholders and agencies host the third annual Clean Slate Summit this weekend. -more-

Robbery -more-

CHIANG MAI—The world needs to hear from Aung San Suu Kyi—even if it’s just a three-minute statement. -more-

… poco maestoso -more-

“Downtown Berkeley is at present a pretty desolate and unattractive place, one that many citizens avoid if at all possible.” -more-

Today, Nov.2, is the date called All Souls Day in my childhood. There was a two-tier system for remembering the dead in those days. All Saints’ Day, Nov. 1, was a Holy Day of Obligation, a day when everyone was supposed to go to church to honor the superstars, the church-certified superstars like St. Francis of Assisi. The next day, an optional church day, was for the regular folks, no better or worse than anyone else, who had departed for Heaven before our time, who might be there already or were perhaps having a temporary layover in Purgatory to get ready for the big time. We were supposed to try to speed them on their journey with our prayers on All Souls Day. -more-

WILL DAPAC HAVE BEEN WORTH IT? -more-

When I interviewed with Councilmember Kriss Worth-ington two years ago regarding my interest in serving on the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee (DAPAC), the first thing that I said was that I felt that the existing Downtown Plan was generally fine and that there really was no need for a new plan. When I was later appointed to the DAPAC, I entered the process with a lot of skepticism, hoping that something positive would come out of the process. Two long and exhausting years later, I am still not only skeptical but also concerned about the direction of the DAPAC. -more-

Having lived in Berkeley and other parts of the Bay Area for a number of years (yes, I am one of those dreaded “true believers” indoctrinated at UC Berkeley’s Department of City and Regional Planning), I occasionally read the Daily Planet online from across the country—mostly for entertainment, it must be said. I’ve watched the debate over tall buildings in downtown Berkeley with some interest and have to say that, despite my “true believer” status and my tendency to agree with the “pro-development lobby group” Livable Berkeley, I find myself in this case sharing the skepticism about the wisdom of filling up downtown Berkeley with buildings of 14 stories and more. But opposition to that kind of height should not translate into support for the anti-growth position so often espoused by the Daily Planet. -more-

Over the past 24-plus years, I have directly participated, either as a volunteer or a paid landscape architecture/urban design consultant, in approximately 15 separate projects that have been actually constructed in Berkeley’s downtown. -more-

Winston Smith was sitting in his cubicle in the Ministry of Truth. It was his job to collect all of the information about the problems with high-rise buildings and high-density development and place it in the tube to be sent down the Memory Hole so that it would be forgotten forever. It had been a busy day; many records had been changed to prove that high-rise “Smart Growth” worked perfectly everywhere it had been tried. He was exhausted. -more-

Tonight (Tuesday), Bruce Kelley, a local developer, will ask the City Council to approve his plans to build a house at 161 Panoramic Way. The lot Kelley plans to build on sits between two blind curves on the narrowest section of this substandard road. While California Fire Code requires roads to be 20 feet wide, Panoramic Way is only 11 feet, 8 inches wide adjacent to the north side of Kelley’s lot. Panoramic Way was designed for 1920s cars and has hardly been upgraded since then. The road is treacherous because of its narrowness, its many blind curves, and the absence of shoulders and sidewalks. Walkers and joggers are forced to the edge of the road to dodge passing cars and delivery trucks. -more-

In 1992, the Earth First conference in Rio de Janeiro brought together people from all over the world, from all disciplines and walks of life, to address the issue of sustainability, especially in relation to the earth’s diversity of species—its living systems. Among other topics, Rio ’92 addressed polices of the rich countries that drove poor people who live off the land to adopt certain “slash and burn” practices detrimental to the environment. Out of Rio ‘92 flowed the United Nations Biodiversity Convention which the United States was one of the last countries to ratify. A similar stance was taken over the Kyoto Protocol that addresses the emission of greenhouse gases that are not sustainable to the earth’s environment. -more-

Evelyn Giardina said in a recent letter to the editor, “And good riddance to you, Manuela. You built a career by telling the city manager and City Council what they wanted to hear, which is not the same as providing good legal counsel. Take your golden parachute and just go.” -more-

A CHANCE FOR COMPASSION -more-

Thanks to J. Douglas Allen-Taylor for his ongoing coverage of the tensions between Children’s Hospital Oakland and the Alameda County Board of Supervisors over the private hospital’s unilateral—and successful—effort to get a bond measure for their seismic improvements onto the ballot, potentially jeopardizing the Supervisors’ own plans for a bond measure for Highland, the county’s public hospital. If the powerful Board of Supervisors feels blindsided by CHO’s tactics, which deliberately left them out of the loop as CHO quietly wrote a bond measure and hired signature gatherers to qualify for the ballot, imagine how the nearby neighbors of CHO are being treated. We were just as surprised as the supervisors at a recent public meeting called by CHO, where they announced their plans for a 12-story tower in the R-40, single family home area north of the hospital campus, between 52nd and 53rd and the parking garage on MLK and the freeway. -more-

From Oct. 8 through 11, I visited Eugene and rode their BRT. This is a brief summary of the longer trip report on my website, http://berkeleybus.mysite.com. -more-

Exposing people for their true values and politics by showing what they have done versus their rhetoric is fair play in politics. Have you noticed that with all the hyperbole from Hallinan, Gendelman and their anonymous allies, they have not debunked any of the things we put in the campaign booklet. The reason that they are so hot is that they have been exposed for their duplicity. I have offered to debate any and all of them and they have declined because they are afraid of what the listeners will find out if their true positions are exposed. They like to stay with the controlled attack, e-mails behind our and the voters’ backs, and personal attacks with no facts, and the expensive mailer that says nothing in particular. -more-

The Pacifica Bylaws establish a collaborative, democratic process between listeners, staff and management with specified and shared powers and responsibilities, but not everyone gets the concept or wants it to happen. In fact, Concerned Listeners (CL) and their management/staff power allies are committed to the business as usual and status quo imposed by the old regime’s NPR/Healthy Station model and program grid, and are organized and funded to block and dismantle the transition to a democratic KPFA, to control what they can’t disable or destroy, including our elections. -more-

Carol Spooner’s Oct. 30 commentary in the Berkeley Daily Planet states that the “People’s Radio” candidate statements in the KPFA election “. . . are not attacks on anyone’s character. They are factual assertions and strong arguments concerning the positions and actions of other candidates. . .” -more-

First, I’ve been watching the board operate at KPFA for over two years. I’ve gone to almost every board meeting. I started this to try to figure out how much screaming to attend to. That’s not a style I appreciate, but sometimes I understand people express themselves in less-than-optimal ways under pressure. -more-

The situation at KPFA radio, some encouraging signs notwithstanding, remains grim. The idea of participatory democracy was conceived as a response to the crisis of the ‘90s, but has yet to take hold. Many members of the KPFA staff, who embraced the concept when it helped save the station, do not support it now that listener members have been given real governing power. In other words, while the 'savepacifica' era was characterized by solidarity between staff and listeners, the 'save(d)pacifica' era has been characterized by polarization between these two groups. -more-

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the original letter referred to by Matthew Hallinan in his Oct. 30 commentary in the Daily Planet. -more-

Welcome to South Berkeley. With its 14 cell phone antenna locations and an unknown number of actual radiation emitters at each location, South Berkeley has become Berkeley’s elektro-smog ghetto. Any Berkeley resident who lives in a neighborhood without antennas is probably using ours! As far back as1996, the Communications Workers of America stated in their pamphlet called Your Community Guide to Cellular Phone Towers, “ In some cases, companies have chosen poorer sections of a town to build towers. Is this part of town being asked to house the eyesore and health hazard so the other side of town can use the phone?” -more-

As we come down to the wire at the Berkeley City Council this coming Tuesday evening, we face a dilemna that one city council after another around the country regularly faces. The telecommunications industry is shoving cell antennas into neighborhood after neighborhood with a very powerful economic and legal fist to back it up. The fist need only be raised when a community dares to seriously question a telecommunications companies’ corporate plan. This plan aimed at profitk results in pollution of our airways with continuous radio frequency radiation. In Berkeley’s case, Verizon threatens to eliminate our entire ordinance governing the siting of cell phone antennas, that is unless we bow down to their current demand for antennas at three separate Berkeley locations. Is this a form of economic blackmail? -more-

Sometimes I miss out on interesting natural phenomena. It wasn’t until last month, while cruising the posters at the biennial State of the Estuary Conference, that I learned about the water snake invasion of Lafayette Reservoir. I’d go check it out, but it’s too late; they’re all gone. Another exotic-species boom gone bust. -more-

Every now and then I see a teenager in one of my trees. From a window I thought at first it might be a small UC student locationally adrift, in a striped shirt. A closer look showed it to be a young Cooper’s hawk, glaring down at me in comparably dauntless fashion. Thanks to Joe Eaton’s bi-weekly column, I can guess that it is drawn to the sparrows and finches at the thistle feeder, though the ducks keep an eye skywards when it appears, and my female cat skedaddles into the house. Smaller than the ducks, she is I hope still too large for the crow-sized Cooper’s. -more-

A couple of weeks ago, the Metropolitan Greater Oakland (MGO) Democratic Club held a journalists’ forum on the first 200 days of the administration of Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums. -more-

On November 14, 1901 an item in the Berkeley Daily Gazette informed: -more-

Mostly Natives is a classic, and worth a jaunt on a nice day. If you’re the sort of traveler who appreciates dramatic and various weather shows, that would include the average rainy spell; the rolling curtains and airborne leviathans of fog and cloud that unroll across the Richmond—San Rafael Bridge and lie in the folds of Marin County, alternately dazzling and shrouding you on the road are one of our particular local pleasures. -more-

This is for my wife. Actually, it’s for wives and girlfriends everywhere. Here it is. I was wrong. Wait, I’ll say it again. I was wrong. How are you feeling? Giddy? Lightheaded? Well, don’t lose control. It’s one of these construction things. Not anything important like bedspreads, hair-do’s or Angelina’s latest fling. -more-

TUESDAY, NOV. 6 -more-

Little Mary Sunshine, at the Masquers Playhouse in Point Richmond, is silly, jejune, puerile, even childish. It’s all of these things so successfully that it can be really funny. -more-

Sometimes I miss out on interesting natural phenomena. It wasn’t until last month, while cruising the posters at the biennial State of the Estuary Conference, that I learned about the water snake invasion of Lafayette Reservoir. I’d go check it out, but it’s too late; they’re all gone. Another exotic-species boom gone bust. -more-

Every now and then I see a teenager in one of my trees. From a window I thought at first it might be a small UC student locationally adrift, in a striped shirt. A closer look showed it to be a young Cooper’s hawk, glaring down at me in comparably dauntless fashion. Thanks to Joe Eaton’s bi-weekly column, I can guess that it is drawn to the sparrows and finches at the thistle feeder, though the ducks keep an eye skywards when it appears, and my female cat skedaddles into the house. Smaller than the ducks, she is I hope still too large for the crow-sized Cooper’s. -more-

TUESDAY, NOV. 6 -more-

FRIDAY, NOV. 2 -more-

From Bruce Barthol’s days as bassist with the original Country Joe and the Fish, to his three decades as resident composer for the San Francisco Mime Troupe, to playing for this year’s reunion of survivors of the Spanish Civil War’s Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Barthol’s been an unstinting fount of committed and humor songs and instrumental music. -more-

John Cage’s groundbreaking music is often associated with Asian thought: the random throws of the I Ching, Taoist and Zen spontaneity. Tonight (Friday) at 8 p.m., at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave., a different side of Cage’s exploration of non-European music and philosophy will be heard, when dhrupad singer Amelia Cuni sings his “18 Microtonal Ragas.” Cuni, the first performer to prepare all of these ragas for full performance, sings in five different languages, accompanied by Werner Durand, drones and electronics, and Raymond Kaczynski and Federico Saliesi on percussion. Cage’s “Solo for Voice 58” will also be performed. Italian-born Cuni has been a sensation among Indian music listeners the past few years. The concert is presented by Other Minds, founded by Charles Amirkhanian (formerly of KPFA), in association with the Italian Cultural Institute and the Goethe-Institut, both of San Francisco. $25, www.brownpapertickets. com or (800) 838-3006. -more-

Berkeley filmmaker Connie Field has taken on a vast project in her effort to document the global movement against apartheid in South Africa over half a century. Have You Heard From Johannesburg? is a six-part series that examines the movement in stand-alone documentaries. Field has completed the first of them and is at work finishing the second. Apartheid and the Club of the West, which will eventually take its place as the fourth installment in the series, opens today (Friday) at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. -more-

On November 14, 1901 an item in the Berkeley Daily Gazette informed: -more-

Mostly Natives is a classic, and worth a jaunt on a nice day. If you’re the sort of traveler who appreciates dramatic and various weather shows, that would include the average rainy spell; the rolling curtains and airborne leviathans of fog and cloud that unroll across the Richmond—San Rafael Bridge and lie in the folds of Marin County, alternately dazzling and shrouding you on the road are one of our particular local pleasures. -more-

This is for my wife. Actually, it’s for wives and girlfriends everywhere. Here it is. I was wrong. Wait, I’ll say it again. I was wrong. How are you feeling? Giddy? Lightheaded? Well, don’t lose control. It’s one of these construction things. Not anything important like bedspreads, hair-do’s or Angelina’s latest fling. -more-

FRIDAY, NOV. 2 -more-