The $500 million pact between UC Berkeley and one of the world’s largest oil companies went into effect Wednesday, though actual work had begun in June. 

The grant will fund both academic and corporate researchers at UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—though other institutions may also be involved, BP’s chief scientist told a gathering at a U.S. Energy Association (USEA) meeting in June. 

While the last signature had been gathered only this week, research had begun as early as June, BP Executive Director Chris Somerville told the same USEA meeting. 

Funded by the British oil company, Berkeley has already sent researchers to Africa and India in search of sites for planting crops. 

UC Regents voted in March to build a new research facility to house the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), BP’s chosen name for the project that university officials described as “the first public-private institution of this scale in the world.” 

The project will involve a wide range of academic disciplines, and program officials have already solicited and received proposals from faculty at both universities and the lab. 

”We are very pleased that the institute’s journey to develop new, cleaner sources of energy has begun,” said Somerville in a statement released by the university Wednesday. “Our mission is to harness the potential of bioenergy, to make discoveries and to help them become commercially viable so they can benefit the world. The institute will also examine the social, economic and environmental implications of using cellulosic biofuels to meet a significant proportion of the earth’s energy needs.” 

Cellulosic fuels are derived from plant fiber, rather than the more easily recovered sugars harvested from the crops like soybeans and corn for production of ethanol. 

EBI will also look into using microbes to create new fuels from coal and to recover oil from depleted wells., according to the grant proposal.  

While the university has portrayed the EBI as a program designed to make the United State independent by using marginal croplands to grow non-food plants for fuel, BP Chief Scientist Steve Koonin told the USEA that the company’s goal is a program that creates crops focused on tropical climates, though research will also develop plants for all climate zones. 

A nuclear physicist, Koonin spearheaded the process that led to the choice of Berkeley among five company-selected candidates. He is currently on leave from his post as provost and intellectual property manager for the California Institute of Technology. 

BP is the company known for decades as British Petroleum. 

The master agreement and other documents are available at www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/11/14_ebisigning.shtml  

Critics of the BP and its role on campus have charged that the company’s plans to use genetically modified plants and microbes threaten Third World countries, which are least able to resist the intrusions of multinational corporations. 

UC Berkeley professors including Ignacio Chapela and Miguel Altieri say the project will displace farmland needed for food crops in poor nations and replace them with patented crops owned by multinationals. 

Asked for a comment on the announcement of the signing, Chapela responded, “Very little else to note for the moment. Perhaps only to note the genius of whoever named the file of the agreement signed: it is called ‘Final Execution.’” 

The title refers to the document posted on the university’s web site.

Seventy-nine volunteers from across the East Bay underwent four hours of training on cleaning hazardous oil spills from the shoreline by the City of Berkeley and the East Bay Regional Park District at the Berkeley Marina Monday. 

State and local agencies are working to rescue oiled birds and clean up the oil spills along the East Bay shoreline after the Cosco Busan crashed into the Bay Bridge and spilled 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel in the bay Wednesday. 

Berkeley City Manager Phil Kamlarz issued a proclamation on Sunday restricting access to all Berkeley waterfront areas until further notice. Visitors are being asked to stay 50 feet away from the shoreline.  

“The first several days, we focused on bird rescue and containing the oil spill,” Kamlarz said in a statement Sunday. “Now that the weather is clear, it is time for trained HazMat experts to begin the cleanup of this toxic material. It is important that people continue to avoid the coastline while the water and shore are still contaminated.” 

The Marina—closed to boat traffic since Friday afternoon—has also set up a bird rescue station where oiled birds are being collected and sent for cleaning at the International Bird Rescue and Research Center in Cordelia. 

William Rogers, acting director for the Berkeley’s Parks, Waterfront and Recreation Department, said that residents and citizens are being asked not to approach birds but to report them by calling (415) 701-2311. 

“The incident command center picks up the calls and then sends trained folks to rescue the birds,” he said. 

Dressed in white suits, boots and gloves, volunteers used special equipment to pick up the oil and place it in special double-layered plastic bags. 

“We don’t want the oil to spread,” Rogers said. “It’s being collected in a special staging area.” 

A group was trained to rescue birds at the Marina on Sunday. 

“Berkeley has become one of the source points for birds from around the region,” said Rogers. Those interested in volunteering should call 981-6720. 

“They might not always be asked to rescue birds or clean the beaches,” he said. “But they can help with other things.” 

The Berkeley Fire Department’s Hazardous Materials team brought booms and other absorbent materials to the Marina to help clean up the water and shore. 

According to the East Bay Regional Park District, several hundred birds were rescued along the shoreline over the weekend. 

Mark Ragatz, shoreline unit manager for the East Bay Regional Park District, said that a command station had been set up at the Eastshore State Park to clean affected birds. 

“Since the oil is hazardous, we are asking people not to touch the birds without being trained,” he said. “We are bringing in teams from Louisiana, Texas and other places which deal with oil. It’s important people know how to catch the birds because if they go back into the water, they could die from hypothermia.” 

Ragatz added that although the spills had thinned with the outgoing tide, the heavy crude oil would clump up and stay in the environment for a long time. 

“It’s going to be a very long cleanup process,” he said. “I don’t know if you can fully clean up.” 

The park district has closed off water access to a number of parks in the East Bay including Point Isabel Regional Shoreline in Richmond, a popular dog-walking area. It is assessing the damage along East Shore State Park, which was closed to the public on Monday and will likely stay closed for the next few days. 

“It was closed for bird rescue,” said Shelly Lewis, park district spokesperson. “We’ll be manning the park again today to assess the damage. Our decision to open the park will be announced on our website.” 

Dead birds were spotted at the Berkeley Marina and the Albany Bulb over the weekend. 

Councilmember Dona Spring said she was extremely concerned about the birds and wildlife affected by the spills. 

“I don’t know if the Coast Guard is making any trips down to the Berkeley shoreline,” she said. “I guess they are too busy dealing with the major oil spills. We are going to be billing the Coast Guard for any expenses that occur during the cleanup. We should all make it our top priority to go down there and volunteer.” 

Some environmentalists have said that winter was the worst time for an oil spill since the bay is full of ducks, grebes, pelicans, cormorants and other water birds. The surf scoters, a species of ducks whose population has declined, seem to be the hardest hit. 

HOW YOU CAN HELP 

The International Bird Rescue Research Center has advised residents and visitors against cleaning birds and says instead to call the organization’s hotline at (877) 823-6926. 

When attempting capture, the animals’ eyes should be covered with a blanket or towel and they should then be transported inside a secure and ventilated container.  

Rules to follow during rescue: 

• Keep the animal warm, 80-90 degrees.  

• Don’t feed it or give it fluids.  

• Keep it in a secure, dark container or kennel.  

• Stay quiet around it and don’t constantly look at the bird.  

• Get it to a rehabilitation hospital as quickly as possible.  

• Never keep the animal or try to treat it yourself. 

For more information visit: www.ibrrc.org/Cosco_Busan_spill_2007.html or www.uscgsanfrancisco.com/go/site/823 

• A bird-rescue center has been set up in the parking lot on the north side of University Avenue in Berkeley, opposite Shorebird Park, west of the Harbormaster's office. They do not need volunteers. However, you can take down the following: pens, paper bags (for dead birds), towels, AA batteries and food for people. 

• Baykeeper is requesting that the public sign up on www.baykeeper.org/news/oilspill.html to be contacted when there is further need for public involvement. 

Save the Bay is taking donations to support the cleanup effort: www.savesfbay.org. Contact Adrien Andre to designate your donation toward the oil spill cleanup, at 452-9261 x124 or adrien@savesfbay.org.

Berkeley is home to the movement for the independence of disabled people and winner of the National Organization on Disability’s 2006 Accessible America competition, yet the disabled community expressed outrage at what people said was the mayor’s insensitivity at the Nov. 6 council meeting. 

Near the beginning of the meeting, Mayor Tom Bates refused a request by Councilmember Dona Spring to allow the issue of the warm pool, a swimming pool heated especially for the needs of frail seniors and disabled people, to be heard early in the evening.  

“There are a lot of elderly and disabled folks here to talk about the warm water pool. Could we take that up as the first item so that they can make their comments and then go home?” Spring asked the mayor, explaining, “They’ve got rides waiting for them?”  

Spring, who told the Planet she was “very upset at the treatment of the disabled by the mayor,” plans to bring a resolution to council in the near future to establish a rule permitting disabled and elderly people the right to speak early in council meetings. 

Many disabled people use paratransit services and must schedule transportation needs in advance. In addition, many depend on assistants to get them to bed, so they cannot be late getting home. Some disabled and frail people find it difficult or impossible to sit through a meeting.  

Responding to Spring’s request, Bates said that before the council heard the warm pool issue, it would address a zoning matter—telecommunications antennas, listed as Items 22 and 23 on the agenda. Then, Bates said, the council would hear his item on a solar financing district, Item 30 on the agenda. 

The warm pool issue was Item 28, part of the larger discussion of measures that might go on the ballot in 2008.  

“It should be [heard] relatively soon,” Bates told Spring, responding to her request. 

However, the item wasn’t heard for almost three hours. By that time, at least five people who had wanted to address the council had left the meeting, according to Joann Cook, who co-chairs One Warm Pool, the group advocating for the facility. 

“[Bates] was so disrespectful,” Cook told the Planet on Friday, stating further that she had noted the time the mayor used for his “pet” solar-financing issue. “He boasted about his idea for 37 minutes,” she said. 

“The mayor obviously wanted to make [the warm pool item] wait till after he got media coverage for his solar thing,” Worthington said. “He disenfranchised disabled people and senior citizens.”  

Gary Marquard was among those who had to leave early. He told the Planet Friday that his body cannot take the stress of sitting in a regular chair for long periods of time.  

“When Dona brought up [the idea of hearing the issue early in the evening], the mayor was dismissive,” Marquard said. “I wasn’t intending to speak. I wanted to see what happened and hold my [warm pool] sign to bear witness.”  

Worthington said in order to get his item heard while the TV cameras were still in the council chambers, the mayor violated council regulations. 

“Under council rules, Item 28 should come before Item 30,” Worthington said. “The rules say they should be taken in order unless there’s an action of the council.” 

Unsuccessful in getting the issue heard earlier, Worthington asked Bates, when the issue of the council ballot measures came up late in the evening, to allow speakers to address the council before staff gave its report. 

The mayor, however, had the deputy city manager give her report on the ballot measures before calling on the public to speak.  

He apologized for the lateness of the hour. “We’re sorry about that,” Bates said. “It’s not exactly our fault.” 

The Planet tried without success to reach the mayor for further clarification. 

Spring responded to the mayor’s comment in a phone interview Friday: “He had the audacity to say, we had no control over it,” Spring said. “He wanted to showcase his solar project.”  

Wearing his trademark black derby, Mark Hendrix, executive director of the Center for Accessible Technology, had rolled into the council meeting before its 7 p.m. start time. He was among those who had wanted to speak to the council, but had to leave early. 

Hendrix uses a wheelchair and public transportation to get around, but if he gets home late, his assistant is no longer available to help him get to bed, he told the Planet on Friday. Then, he said, he has to call emergency services and ends up getting to bed very late, which makes it difficult for him to get up early for work. 

“I wish Shirley Dean were mayor,” Hendrix said of the former Berkeley mayor. She allowed people with disabilities and small children to speak early in the evening, “unlike the current mayor,” he said. 

Reached Friday, Dean told the Planet that she could not recall if it had been written into council rules, but it was her policy to allow people with young children, seniors and the disabled to speak first. “It was so they didn’t have to sit through a long meeting,” she said. 

Dean said she had watched the Nov. 6 council meeting on TV. “I am outraged at what happened there,” she said. “I don’t understand why those things keep happening.” 

Something similar had happened to Richard Devylder in Los Angeles in 2001, Barbara Blinderman, attorney with Los Angeles-based Moskowitz, Brestoff, Winston & Blinderman told the Planet on Friday.  

Currently deputy director at the California Department of Rehabilitation, Devylder has no limbs and uses a wheelchair. He came to a Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors meeting to object to the appointment of a particular person named to the Commission on Disabilities, but after waiting hours for the item to come up, he had to leave.  

Blinderman filed a lawsuit on Devylder’s behalf in federal court. “It was a civil rights action,” she said. “He was denied the opportunity to speak.” 

Blinderman said her client didn’t want money. “He wanted to speak,” she said. Devylder won his case in 2002, mandating that the L.A. supervisors write rules assuring disabled people the right to speak early in the evening, Blinderman said.  

“We have something to celebrate and something to mourn,” Joe Robinson told fellow members of the citizen panel advising the state on toxic cleanups in southern Richmond. 

Members of the Richmond Southeast Shoreline Community Advisory Group (CAG) gathered Thursday night in City Council chambers to lament the loss of community activist Ethel Dotson and to hail a legislative victory by Assemblymember Loni Hancock. 

Dotson died Nov. 1 of cancer she believed had been caused by chemical contaminants from the sites she had formed the CAG to oversee, and it was Hancock who helped forced the change in regulatory oversight that enabled the CAG to come into being. 

Dotson was an outspoken woman who dressed flamboyantly and campaigned incessantly for the rights of fellow Richmond residents who had lived near the city’s many chemical-spewing plants and factories. 

During the last CAG meeting Hancock attended, in November 2006, Dotson told the legislator that she had just been diagnosed with cancer and told she had about a year to live. 

A Louisiana native, Dotson came to Richmond with her family as a toddler in 1944, and spent her childhood in Seaport Village (also known as the Seaport War Apartment), a segregated residential complex for war industry workers. 

Just across the fence to the northwest, at the site now known as Campus Bay, a complex of chemical plants churned out products ranging from fertilizers and pesticides to munitions and blasting caps. 

African Americans lived in the 494-unit housing complex until 1956, when it was demolished. 

Speaking at Thursday night’s CAG meeting, Hancock said her involvement began with a call from Contra Costa County Public Health Director Dr. Wendel Brunner. Alerted by Dotson to massive dust generated during the demolition of excavations at the former Stauffer Chemical site, Brunner called the legislator. 

“He said there’s a cleanup going on down here and we have to do something right away,” Hancock said. 

Dotson and other activists, including Sherry Padgett (who works nearby) and Marina Bay resident and UC Berkeley professor Claudia Carr, began organizing, joined by others like Dr. Henry Clark of the West County Toxics Coalition and Richmond Progressive Alliance activist and future Mayor Gayle McLaughlin. 

JoAnne Tilmon, another activist whose family lived nearby, has said 11 of her family members have died, and another—an aunt—is suffering from cancer. “I’m very skeptical of DTSC,” said Tilmon. “I want to make sure we’re doing the best for the community.” 

Demonstrations, protests and endless pleas to the Richmond City Council and the legislature resulted in a Nov. 6, 2004 hearing of the Assembly Committee on Environmental Safety & Toxic Materials at the Richmond Field Station. 

A major victory emerged from the hearing, when the San Francisco Bay regional Water Quality Control Board agreed to relinquish oversight of the cleanups to the state Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC). 

Both UC Berkeley, owner of the adjacent Richmond Field Station, and the partnership developing the former Stauffer Chemical site had opposed any change in oversight. 

The water boards have no provisions for public input during the cleanup process, while the DTSC has a provision for creating CAGs if a community member gathers enough signatures on petitions. 

Dotson spearheaded the drive to create the CAG, and became its founding member when the DTSC created the body, which held its first meeting on June 30, 2005. 

Her brother, Whitney, was to become the CAG’s chair. 

“Ethel worked very hard to put this CAG together,” said Robinson. 

“I don’t think anyone could fill Ethel’s slot,” said CAG member Eric Blum. 

Outspoken  

Dotson, 65 when she died at home in the company of her family, had fought relentlessly to expose the extent of contamination resulting from the south Richmond plants. 

Dotson had battled for the handover of the site from the water board to the DTSC not only because the toxics agency has provisions for public input, but also because the water boards have no toxicologists on their staffs. 

Instead, the boards rely entirely for scientific expertise on consulting firms hired by site developers. The DTSC, by contrast, is staffed by scientists trained in recognizing chemical hazards and their consequences. 

She insisted that radioactive materials had been used at the Stauffer site, a claim initially derided by some. 

During July’s CAG meeting, Henry Clark said that the discoveries of additional work with uranium and other radioactive elements at the site had confirmed her claims. 

“Practically everyone made it seem like she was crazy, but she was on point,” Clark said. 

Initial reports that a small test of melting uranium with an electron beam occurred at the chemical plant site have led to the discovery of more documentation indicating that more extensive testing may have taken place, including an account reporting that larger amounts of radioactive nuclear reactor fuel capsules may have been treated at the site. 

Another concern arises from the processing of so-called superphosphate fertilizers at the site, which are manufactured from ores that typically contain significant amounts of radioactive  

The Campus Bay development firm Cherokee Simeon Ventures—the partnership of an investment firm and a San Francisco developer—is currently preparing a radiation survey of the site, and additional testing is planned for the adjacent Richmond Field Station. 

The CAG’s progress hasn’t been without its bumps, and Clark and Tilmon have been absent from recent meetings. 

Dotson had fought to keep the CAG from expanding its focus to other sites in the area, arguing instead that the group should seek justice and financial reimbursement for those who may have been sickened by chemical exposures there. 

But the CAG gradually extended its purview and now encompasses Marina Bay to the northwest and other sites to the southeast. 

Dotson’s environmental activism wasn’t limited to the chemical plant site and her childhood neighborhood. She also targeted emissions from Chevron’s refinery, the city’s largest employer. She fought unsuccessfully to have to state or federal agencies test the blood of Richmond residents for toxic chemical exposure, and she testified and gave comments to state legislators and city councilmembers. 

“My whole life, my whole perspective has changed now,” she told the state Environmental Protection Agency’s Interagency Working Group on Environmental Justice on May 24, 2004. 

“That’s why we’re all angry,” she said. “You all have a responsibility. You have been covering up ... My brother—all—the whole family is sick. My sister died of cancer in ‘85. It goes on and on. People need some services now.” 

Many of the questions she raised remained unanswered. But she raised them, and she made herself heard. 

Wendel Brunner, unable to attend because of a conference, said in an e-mail to the CAG. “We should remind everyone that Ethel raised the issue of the (Campus Bay) site and the problems with the Regional Water Quality Control Board years earlier than most of the rest of us.” 

A long way 

“We have come such a very, very long way,” said Hancock. 

The lawmaker had come to the CAG to celebrate the passage of legislation that stemmed directly from her experience with the Richmond sites. 

AB 422, signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last month, tightens regulatory authority over toxic sites and requires state regional water boards to follow the same standards for water cleanup already enforced by the DTSC. 

Another key provision requires regulators to examine the potential for penetration of new buildings on cleaned-up hazardous waste sites by dangerous volatile organic compounds rising from the soil beneath. 

“The bill has gone through many permutations,” Hancock said.  

Encountering stiff opposition from the real estate development community, the measure stalled in the legislative process during her first effort to win passage. Then last year, after legislators in both houses voted approval, Gov. Schwarzenegger opted for a veto before signing the bill the second time around. 

“It says very simply that human health is a mandate for both the water board and for the DTSC in brownfields,” she said. 

Brownfields are contaminated sites that are remediated to the point when they can be developed. 

“It is a tremendous victory,” Hancock said, “a step forward not only for this community but for every community in the state of California.”  

Thursday night’s meeting ended with a moment of silence in Dotson’s honor.

A new report takes aim at the East Bay Regional Park District for not doing enough to ensure that low-income minority communities have access to open space. 

In “Access to Parkland: Environmental Justice at East Bay Parks,” Paul Kibel, adjunct professor at Golden Gate University’s School of Law and director of the school’s City Parks Project, reviews published and unpublished reports on access to and usage of the EBRPD’s holdings, which cover 100,000 acres of land in Alameda and Contra Costa counties and constitute the largest public park system in the immediate San Francisco Bay Area. 

In the report, Kibel argues that a majority of the district’s land, which comprises 14 parks, 19 preserves, nine recreation areas and 13 shorelines, is located in hillside areas, adjacent to affluent, white communities and often inaccessible to low-income minority residents living in the flatland neighborhoods of Oakland, Richmond, Berkeley, Hayward and Fremont. 

Kibel argues that because people are more likely to visit parks near their own communities, the district’s historic focus on acquiring large tracts of land in the highlands has created disparities in park usage based on income and, by extension, race. Kibel said he hopes his study will highlight the importance of the availability of open space in the fight for environmental justice, which has largely focused on toxics issues. 

In an interview with the Planet, Kibel explained why access to open space is an important component of the environmental justice movement. 

“People who exercise, who have greater access to recreational activities, are more likely to enjoy better health,” Kibel said. “There are mental or therapeutic benefits to interacting in natural settings. There is also the political question: in trying to build consensus for broader environmental policies, it is more difficult when the environmental constituency is limited to a small number of white affluent people. By expanding access to natural settings, we are helping to build a much broader, deeper and more diverse base for environmental protection and natural resource conservation.” 

Kibel said the report aims to start a conversation about the issue, rather than assess blame or accuse any individuals or groups of environmental racism. 

“We really did not want to dictate top-down-wise what should happen next, but to identify the usage pattern and make ourselves available as a resource going forward,” Kibel said. “The district has an advisory committee that could hold public workshops and solicit public comment as a means of soliciting more ideas from their constituents. From that, more concrete proposals would hopefully emerge. We want the solutions to come from the impacted community.” 

Kibel does, however, offer his own solutions in the report. One is for the district to expand its mission of preserving large-acreage wildlands for the purpose of conservation to include acquiring more land near the flatlands and along the shore. Specifically, it says the district should drop its requirement that it only acquire land that is more than 40 acres. 

The report also recommends creating joint power authorities with other agencies to facilitate the acquisition and operation of parkland, and suggests EBRPD work with local transit agencies to improve transportation to its hillside holdings, which are often too remote for low-income residents, who are less likely to own cars. 

The report’s findings don’t surprise Henry Clark, executive director of the West County Toxics Coalition, a nonprofit group that works to reduce environmental contamination in West Contra Costa County. “It is a tragic shame that low-income people, primarily people of color, don’t have transportation to these areas,” he said. “And even if the parks are adjacent to the community—like Park Pinole near Parchester Village (in Richmond)—people historically have been denied access and don’t feel it’s for them, even if it is right next door.” 

Clark agrees with Kibel’s recommendation that the district step up its collaboration with transit agencies in order to improve transportation to parkland, but offers an additional suggestion. “The district also needs to hire park rangers from our community,” he said. 

Not all proponents of expanding open space agree with the conclusions in the report. Norman La Force, chair of the Sierra Club’s East Bay Public Lands Committee, said urban parks like Point Isabel, located near the Richmond flatland community, and Martin Luther King Park, in the estuary near east Oakland’s minority community, would not exist without the help of the regional park district. 

La Force is vice president of Citizens for East Shore Parks, a group that helped establish Eastshore State park, which includes tidelands and upland property along 8.5 miles of shoreline from Richmond to Oakland. The state park was created through a collaboration between the regional park district and the state. 

“Overall, the park district has done a tremendous job,” La Force said, adding that some of the problem of getting more open space in Richmond lies in the political will of African-American city council members, who he says have complained that there are too many parks in their neighborhoods. 

La Force also said it would have been more useful to examine the California State Parks agency, which wants to create more urban parks but can’t get the funding to do so. 

Another critic of the report is Nancy Skinner, a park district board member who represents Ward 1, which includes Berkeley, San Pablo and Richmond. Skinner agrees that the district has historically focused on acquiring large tracts of land in the hillside areas, but says there is no doubt that the recent aim of the park district has been to acquire land along the shoreline, including Breuner Marsh, a 238-acre shoreline area located next to the African-American neighborhood of Parchester Village. 

She points out that the EBRPD was instrumental in the passage of Measure AA, which set aside $60 million for city parks to acquire flatland and shoreline parks and develop programs to serve urban communities. 

Skinner said Kibel’s report “misses the point” and admits that the district needs to do more to increase access. “Rather than looking at the geographic distribution of the parks, the report should have focused on the programs and facilities that we have to reach out to the flatland communities,” she said. “We don’t have a program at Eastshore Park or Tilden Park. We could do better there.”  

Skinner said a bond measure on the November 2008 ballot would provide for more money to city parks for acquisition of parklands and environmental education and outreach programs that target low-income people. 

Today I conducted an act of civil disobedience (my first in quite some time). Using a common kitty litter scoop, I peeled globs of oil from a beach, and placed them in a bucket. I defied not only the Coast Guard, but our own city manager, Phil Kamlarz, who has declared the shore off-limits.  

For days I had held off visiting the shore due to media reports that this type of act was too complicated and dangerous for the public. But with no opportunity to help officially, and nobody cleaning beaches, it was time to act.  

The good news is that a few passersby—joggers and cyclists—stopped, asked, and got involved at this very local level. The department of Homeland Security was seen only overhead, their helicopters slowing at each pass of our cleanup site, radioing commands into the distance. The bad news is that we lacked some equipment (not enough kitty litter scoopers), some discipline (it’s hard to tell someone else’s 10-year-old volunteer how to act), and we attracted others to the beach (some who ignored the signs and our warnings, and left with uncleanable toxic tar on their shoes, dogs, or kids).  

We pulled 150-200 pounds of oil off the beach, and nobody (but the unprepared) even got dirty. The oil came in globs ranging from fist size and down, mostly shiny and wet-looking. Each glob was soft and sticky, but readily rolled into a sandy ball.  

Sadly it seems as if “local” is not in the Department of Homeland Security vocabulary, and that should concern us all. We were not arrested. The officers and officials who visited us were all on paid overtime, not organizing, but spending their time chasing people from the beach. They let us continue, with a stern warning each time, on the grounds that we seemed “prepared.” 

But an organized cleanup would have had so many advantages. The area could have been roped off. The unqualified turned away. The proper technique demonstrated. And most importantly, an official effort could have leveraged the talents of hundreds of people. Imagine how much oil we could have kept off the birds.  

What do you need to take action yourself? Plastic bags, rubber bands, a kitty litter scoop, a small flat stick, and the gumption to sweet talk the officers into letting you stay. Put layers of bags over your shoes. Line a bucket with layers of bags, so you can drop oil in without touching the bucket rim. Hold your stick in one hand, the scoop in the other. Roll each bar of tar until it’s coated in sand, and flip it into the bucket. And if you’ve got extra sand, shake shake shake through the kitty scoop. Sand-covered tar will not be sticky.  

Thin rubber gloves? They’re a good idea, but frankly there’s no reason you have to touch anything. Just clean the area ahead of where you’ll walk, and avoid mashing the oil into the sand. And watch out for that tar—just a tiny bit of it spreads like wildfire over gloves, shoes, and clothes. Pat any stray globs with sand to keep them from spreading.  

Now cleaning rocks is a totally different matter—once it’s on the rocks it’s time to call the Department of Homeland Security. Let’s hope they’re listening, and let’s hope they learn how to leverage local talent before the earth starts shaking.  

Bryce Nesbitt, a Kensington resident, grew up in Berkeley.

Second Lt. Joseph Perkins described it as a small carnival—with its Humvee, Apache Helicopter simulator and climbing wall. A graduate of UC Berkeley, Perkins was one of the army recruiters on campus Thursday, Friday and Saturday.  

Perkins hasn’t seen combat. But if he was called to Iraq, he told the Planet on Friday he’d go. “I signed up,” he said. 

Near Perkins, a young man, dressed in a black T-shirt called out to passersby: “Get your free dog tags here.” 

It was noon on Friday, day two of the three-day army/ROTC marketing effort on campus. 

“We’re promoting the army with games and personalized ID tags,” Filipe Tamayo told the Planet. Tamayo’s not a soldier. He works for LAX, a marketing agency that sends teams all over the country to air shows, concerts and festivals to promote the army. They work in tandem with the recruiters. 

Asked why he hasn’t joined the army, Tamayo hesitated, then said it’s because he likes his job with the marketing firm. 

Others should join, he said. “Basically, the army opens a lot of opportunities for youth,” he said.  

Last month, Associated Press quoted Gen. William Wallace, head of army recruiting, reporting that the army began its recruiting year on Oct. 1 with fewer soldiers signed up than in any year since it became an all-volunteer service in 1973. 

During the 20 minutes or so a Planet reporter hung around the area where the recruiters had set up, only one person tried out the climbing wall and one went into the helicopter simulator. A few picked up free dog tags.  

Most walked by.  

No one protested. 

However, Matthew Taylor, a student in Peace and Conflict Studies, told the Planet on Monday that Friday evening Critical Mass bike riders rode to the recruitment area next to the Haas Pavilion and surrounded it.  

“It’s morally reprehensible that the University of California would allow the U.S. military to recruit people on campus to kill Iraqis. It’s indefensible to allow such a crime,” Taylor said, noting that the student government had passed a resolution in 2005 saying that no recruiting would be permitted on campus. 

“The administration refuses to respect the will of the ASUC [Associated Students of the University of California],” he said. 

No university spokesperson was available Monday, Veterans Day, to respond. 

Joseph Hill, a Laney College student, tried out the helicopter on Friday, explaining that the video simulation had him clearing an area of enemy forces. 

“It was a simulation of an attack; I cleared the way for a mission to make sure they could get through,” he said. “It’s pretty cool; it’s high tech.”  

Hill said when he was 18 he’d tried to sign up for the military, but asthma kept him out. 

Over at the climbing wall, marked on its side with “Go army.com,” Dwight Crow easily made it up to the top. 

“It’s fun,” Crow told the Planet after taking off his safety helmet. A senior in chemistry, Crow said he didn’t think the marketing efforts could change the mind of anyone who wasn’t already planning on joining the army.  

He said he has no plans to join and shook his head no when asked if he supports the war. 

But Crow said he doesn’t oppose the military. “It’s not the army, it’s the politicians,” he said. 

Photo by Judith Scherr 

UC Berkeley senior Dwight Crow tackles the U.S. Army climbing wall Friday, part of a three-day effort in Army and ROTC recruitment on campus.  

The State Historical Resources Commission unanimously approved the nomination for the Berkeley High School campus to be listed on the National Register as a historic district Friday. 

The nomination, which took place at a meeting in Palm Springs, will be forwarded to the National Register in Washington, D.C., for review. 

“It’s very seldom that a recommendation from the state is overturned,” said Lesley Emmington, a staff member of the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA). “I can’t think of a case. The National Register will probably take three months to decide.” 

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

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

Emmington said that in the event the campus is nationally landmarked, the school district could still go ahead with the demolition. 

“They have a burden on their hands now,” she said. “If it’s nationally landmarked, the State Historic Building Code can be applied. There should be a conscientious decision about a retrofit plan. It’s an irreplaceable resource in terms of defining a high school and a high school tradition.” 

Marie Bowman, a member of Friends Protecting Berkeley’s Resources, the group responsible for writing the historic district nomination, said that the school district had sent a letter asking the state to exclude the old gym since it lacked the integrity needed to belong in the historic district. 

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

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

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

It warns that the retention of the building would “hinder the full utilization of the school site for educational use.” 

Lawrence urged the commission to take note of the fact that the building had been severely modified since its original construction and that the 1936 seismic upgrade was “woefully inadequate.” 

“I rebutted it [the letter] at the meeting,” Bowman told the Planet from Palm Springs. “The state and their staff discussed the campus as a collection of buildings. I am proud that it’s finally happened after all this time. The school district had the chance to work with the community to preserve the building but they didn’t. Hopefully, they will have more respect for the community now.” 

The Friends sued the school district in March for what it charged was an inadequate environmental impact report on the demolition of the gymnasium and warm water pool within its Berkeley High School South of Bancroft Master Plan. The school district plans to build classrooms and a health facility on the site of the old gym. 

District superintendent Michele Lawrence was not available for comment Monday. 

“Our reaction to the news is neutral,” said district spokesperson Mark Coplan. “It’s important to understand that our current plan continues to maintain the historic footprint and integrity of the campus plan.The landmarks commission itself said that the buildings on the south end of the campus are in poor repair but that it doesn’t affect the landmark status.”

Members of the Oak-to-Ninth Referendum Committee have decided to drop their lawsuit over Oakland City Attorney John Russo’s decision last year to throw out petitions calling for a citizen vote on the controversial development project. But opponents and proponents of the lawsuit were as divided over the reason for voluntary dismissal as they were over the lawsuit itself. 

In a Friday afternoon press release issued even before the committee had formally decided to drop their lawsuit, Russo said that “the Referendum Committee has repeatedly tried to keep the public from knowing the facts of this case. Now, just before they have a chance to argue their case in court, they announce their intention to dismiss. That says a lot about the validity of this lawsuit.” 

But Oakland League of Women Voters president Helen Hutchinson, a spokesperson for the referendum committee, responded by telephone that “validity” had nothing to do with the committee’s decision to drop the lawsuit. 

“We dropped the lawsuit primarily because we ran out of money,” Hutchinson said. “We could never get to the heart of the matter because we were sidetracked by legal side issues.” 

Hutchinson said that the heart of the matter was “the development, first, and then our right to petition our government. And they were successful. They drained our bank account.” 

And Oakland Green Party member Kate Tanaka, a referendum committee member, said by telephone that “in order to get through the next round of depositions, we would have had to spend more than we currently have in the bank, and we weren’t sure that there wouldn’t have been another round of motions to follow. We were up against a phalanx of attorneys representing the city and the developers, and we only had one attorney ourselves.”  

Tanaka added that “it breaks my heart that we couldn’t get Russo inside a court to explain why he allowed City Council to approve the development agreement in violation of the City Charter.”  

Hutchinson said that her group had hoped to speak with supporters before filing the dismissal, but were pre-empted by the city attorney’s Friday press release. Hutchinson said that committee attorney Stuart Flashman plans to file the dismissal on Tuesday. 

The voluntary dismissal of the referendum lawsuit does not mean that the Oak-to-Ninth development will now go forward. Still pending is a consolidated lawsuit by a coalition of environmental organizations, one by Oakland environmental advocate Joyce Roy and the Coalition of Advocates for Lake Merritt (CALM) on grounds that the project violated the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and the second by the Oakland Heritage Alliance calling for the saving of the Ninth Avenue Terminal. Under the Oak-to-Ninth development agreement approved last year by City Council, the terminal would be virtually destroyed. 

Members of the Oak-to-Ninth Referendum Committee—a coalition of local organizations including, among other groups, the Jack London Neighborhood Association, the Oakland Green Party, the Sierra Club, and the Oakland Green Party—filed their lawsuit more than a year ago after submitting more than 25,000 signatures on petitions calling for a referendum on the proposed 3,100-residential unit, 200,000-square-foot commercial space development Oak-to-Ninth project. 

Russo threw out the petitions in September 2006 on the grounds that the development agreement attached to the petitions was not the final version of the agreement ultimately approved by Oakland City Council on a 6-0 vote earlier that summer. 

In last Friday’s press release, the city attorney’s office said that “the signature drive used an incomplete and misleading version of the Council’s ordinance—one that gave incorrect information about important issues such as open space and public access to the waterfront. A committee leader admitted under oath that they knew they were using an incomplete draft of the ordinance.”  

Referendum committee members countered that the version of the agreement attached to the petitions was the version on the city’s website that the Oakland City Clerk’s office referred them to when they began their petition drive, and what Russo called the final version was actually amended following the council’s final vote on the agreement, an action committee members called a violation of the Oakland City Charter. 

The city attorney’s press release also added that “state law also required signature gatherers to be Oakland residents. Discovery revealed that some out-of-town signature gatherers lied under oath by claiming that they lived in Oakland.” 

Hutchinson said she did not know who was deposed during the discovery phase of the lawsuit or what individuals may or may not have said. But she added that the committee had a California Secretary of State’s opinion that the qualifications of signature gatherers should not be at issue in determining the validity of petition signatures. 

“But to argue that issue, we would have had to go to the California Supreme Court, and we didn’t have the money for that,” Hutchinson said. 

Tanaka added that “I would have thought that city officials would have been happy to work with us to determine if city residents actually wanted to have this project, instead of working so hard against us. I can’t tell you how outraged I am by this.” 

A year ago, when the referendum lawsuit was first filed, the Oakland city attorney’s office appeared far more sympathetic to the group’s claims than it did in last Friday’s press release. 

Last year, the former public information officer for the city attorney’s office, Erica Harrold, said in a telephone interview called it a “draconian state law” that mandates that a petition for a referendum overturning a city ordinance—including the final version of the ordinance—must be turned in no later than 30 days after the final passage of the ordinance, even though state law does not give a timetable as to when the final version of the ordinance must be made available to the public. 

Referendum committee members said they did not actually receive a copy of the ordinance—which even then proved to be the copy Russo did not consider to be the final version—until 10 days had already passed following the passage of the Oak-to-Ninth development agreement. 

“We need to rework the state law so that the 30-day clock doesn’t start ticking until there is publicly available a stamped, final version of the ordinance,” Harrold said last year. Until that law is changed, she added, “our hands are tied. What else can we do? The city attorney’s office believes we were on solid ground” in throwing out the petitions.

California State School Superintendent Jack O’Connell said in an e-mail to an Oakland education activist this week that despite his belief that state school takeovers should be a “last option,” local control of the Oakland Unified School District will continue to be withheld until “the time is right.” 

Oakland education activist Susan Harman—who earlier this year testified in Sacramento in favor of Assemblymember Sandré Swanson’s ultimately vetoed AB45 Oakland local control bill—wrote O’Connell an e-mail inquiry in early November after seeing an October New York Times article on the No Child Left Behind federal law. 

In that article, the state superintendent said it was “unreasonable” under NCLB that some 700 California public schools were in danger of state takeover. “To have a successful program,” the Times quoted O’Connell as saying, “it really has to come from the community.” 

After Harman e-mailed O’Connell to point out the difference between this position and O’Connell’s opposition to Swanson’s local control bill, O’Connell responded that he saw no discrepancy.  

“California’s educational system relies on local control for the management of school districts on the theory that those closest to the problems and needs of each individual district are the best able to make appropriate decisions on behalf of the district,” O’Connell wrote. “I strongly believe that successful programs require a partnership between the district governing board and the surrounding community. However, the circumstances surrounding the takeover of Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), included the state Legislature passing an emergency $100 million loan for an insolvent Oakland district, leading to state control of the school system. The district's insolvency, no matter who was ultimately at fault, did not bode well for the district's future ability to properly educate its students regardless of positive strides made through the nascent small school reform movement beginning to take shape at the time. Since then, the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) has a proposed recovery plan, which outlines the improvements that would have to be achieved by the OUSD in order to reach fiscal solvency and be returned to local control.” 

Oakland’s schools have been under state management since a massive budget shortfall was discovered by OUSD school officials in 2003. No allegations of malfeasance were ever alleged, and the causes for the shortfall have been generally attributed to an earlier teacher pay raise and a drop in district income due to an unexpected decrease in attendance. 

Swanson’s bill, passed by the legislature but vetoed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, would have taken the discretion for return to Oakland Unified local control out of the hands of the superintendent’s office and tied it directly to FCMAT’s recommendations. Under current law, the state superintendent makes a final decision on local control in any of five operational areas after FCMAT recommends that local control can be returned. O’Connell has never spelled out exactly what criteria he will use in determining when OUSD will be ready to be returned to local control.  

FCMAT has completed its latest round of assessments of OUSD and has tentatively scheduled a release of its recommendations at a special OUSD meeting on Thursday, Dec. 6. 

The Memorial Stadium tree-sit sustained its second major casualty Sunday night when one of the protesters fell, breaking an arm and a leg. 

Nathaniel Hill fell as he was negotiating a rope line to descend from his aerie to meet his father, who had arrived from the East Coast for a visit, said Zachary Running Wolf. 

Hill was the second tree-sitter to suffer a bone-breaking fall. A woman broke her wrist in June when she was climbing a trunk after UC Berkeley Police had removed climbing lines, said Running Wolf. 

Meanwhile, student protesters continue to occupy perches in the branches of Science Hill on the UC Santa Cruz campus, where a tree-sit challenging that university’s growth plans was launched last week. 

Running Wolf said Berkeley tree-sitters have been in regular contact with their counterparts to the south. 

“We are quite impressed by their student participation,” said the Native American activist. Most of the Berkeley tree-sitters haven’t been students, in contrast to those in Santa Cruz, though students have been a small but continuing presence in ground-support activities. 

Hill is a former professional lacrosse player and has been a sometime participant in the Berkeley tree-sit for the past 10 months.  

In Santa Cruz, hundreds of students turned out for the protest last Wednesday, when a combined police force drawn from campus units in Santa Cruz and Berkeley, bolstered by officers from the Santa Cruz city and county law enforcement agencies, retreated in the face of student action. 

The Berkeley protest entered its 347th day Tuesday, almost a year after Running Wolf ascended into the branches of a redwood along the western wall of Memorial Stadium during the predawn hours of last year’s Big Game day. 

Campus police have since erected two parallel fences surround the grove that university officials want to fell to make way for a high-tech gym and office complex. 

Running Wolf has charged that the site is a sacred burial ground, and conflicting reports state that one or more than a dozen native burials were found during construction of the stadium itself. 

One court has already ruled against the protesters—Alameda County Superior Court Judge Richard Keller issued a preliminary injunction against the tree-sitters and their supporter team. 

In a second case, Judge Barbara J. Miller is scheduled to rule in the weeks ahead on whether construction of the gym complex can move forward. 

The City of Berkeley, project neighbors and environmentalists have joined in the second lawsuit. 

Running Wolf blamed Hill’s fall on the university’s decision to double-fence the grove, forcing protesters to negotiate ropes strung beneath the trees to make their way out of the enclosure. 

University officials contend that the protest is both reckless and illegal and say they want it to end so that construction can begin promptly if Judge Miller rules in their favor. 

While university spokesperson Dan Mogulof said the school has no intent to forcibly remove the protesters from their perches, Running Wolf said that he expects the action to occur during the winter break when students have left campus for the Christmas holiday. 

Meanwhile, students in Santa Cruz have been holding events at the site of the Science Hill protests, including film screenings, a class in mushroom identification, talks on the university’s Long Range Development Plan and a daily 4 p.m. potluck dinner and gathering. 

The Santa Cruz protesters have their own website at lrdpresistance.org.

Berkeley Planning Commissioners will tackle Demon Rum Wednesday night—or, more precisely, a proposal to tighten the rules on its purveyors. 

The ordinance up for consideration during the public hearing would give the city greater power to seize liquor licenses of merchants with businesses in areas where they wouldn’t be able to obtain licenses today. 

Licenses of so-called non-conforming business could be seized if the liquor stores were closed for more than 90 days. 

The proposed ordinances would also give citizens a power currently reserved for government by allowing them to initiate actions to declare merchants public nuisances. 

The final change would give the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) greater flexibility in its capacity to rule on new license applications. 

The package of measures follows a campaign to tighten liquor law enforcement initiated by the Berkeley Alcohol Policy Advocacy Coalition (BAPAC). 

The City Council adopted some of the BAPAC proposals dealing with private parties in February, but zoning ordinances are referred to the Planning Commission for consideration before final council action. 

Density bonus 

The commission will also discuss recommendations for a new city ordinance governing the density bonus given to housing developers who include rental units or condos priced for tenants and buyers who might otherwise be unable to afford them. 

City officials have said that the existing policies, governed only by the state density bonus law, would have allowed the proposed Berkeley Arpeggio (otherwise known as the Seagate Building) to rise to 14 stories on its planned location on Center Street opposite Berkeley City College.  

The Los Angeles City Council is currently considering its own density bonus law, which is much less generous to developers than Berkeley’s current policy. 

A joint subcommittee of ZAB and the Planning and Housing Advisory Commissions spent more than a year working on a draft proposal. 

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

The Berkeley Board of Education will vote Wednesday on whether to hire Emeryville-based Baker Vilar Architects to design Berkeley High School’s new bleachers and prepare plans for demolishing its old gym. 

School board spokesperson Mark Coplan said that huge locker rooms have been proposed underneath the bleachers. 

The architects, who were also hired to design the Martin Luther King Middle School Dining Commons, will also frame the time line for the demolition. 

The State Historical Resources Commission unanimously approved the nomination for the Berkeley High School campus to be listed on the National Register as a historic district Friday. The proposed historic district includes the old gym, itself the subject of a landmarking battle. 

The Friends Protecting Berkeley’s Resources—the group responsible for writing the nomination—had sued the school district in March for what it charged was an inadequate environmental impact report on the demolition of the gymnasium and warm water pool within its Berkeley High School South of Bancroft Master Plan. 

Warm pool users are also against the proposed demolition, which they feel threatens their use of the pool. 

The school district plans to build classrooms and a health facility on the site of the old gym. 

Wednesday’s meeting will be held at 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way at 7:30 p.m.

Second Lt. Joseph Perkins described it as a small carnival—with its Humvee, Apache Helicopter simulator and climbing wall. A graduate of UC Berkeley, Perkins was one of the army recruiters on campus on Friday.  

Perkins hasn’t seen combat. But if he was called to Iraq, he said he’d go. “I signed up,” he said. 

“Get your free dog tags here,” one of the young men called out to those passing by. It was noon on Friday, day two of the three-day marketing effort to promote the army and ROTC on campus. 

“We’re promoting the army with games and personalized ID tags,” Filipe Tamayo told the Planet. Tamayo works for LAX, a marketing agency that sends teams of marketers all over the country to air shows, concerts and festivals to promote the army. They work in tandem with the recruiters. 

They’ll be next to Haas Pavilion on Bancroft Way on campus from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday and in Arizona next week. 

Asked why he doesn’t join the army, Tamayo hesitated, then said it’s because he has the job with the marketing firm that he likes. 

Others should join, he said. “Basically, the army opens a lot of opportunities for youth,” he said.  

During the 20 minutes or so the Daily Planet hung around the area, only one person tried out the climbing wall and another one went into the helicopter simulator. A few picked up free dog tags.  

Most walked by. No one protested. 

Joseph Hill, a Laney College student tried out the helicopter, explaining the video simulation had him clearing an area. “It was a simulation of an attack; I cleared the way for a mission to make sure they could get through,” he said. “It’s pretty cool; it’s high tech.”  

Hill said when he was 18 he’d tried to sign up for the military, but asthma kept him out. 

Over at the climbing wall, marked on its side with “Go army.com,” Dwight Crane easily made it up to the top. 

“It’s fun,” Crow told the Planet after taking off his safety helmet. Crow, a senior in chemistry, said he didn’t think the marketing efforts could change the mind of anyone who wasn’t already planning on joining the army.  

He has no plans to join and shook his head “no” when asked if he supports the war. 

Crow doesn’t oppose the military. “It’s not the army, it’s the politicians,” he said. 

The Berkeley Marina was closed to incoming and outgoing boat traffic Friday after the incoming tide brought more oil globules and sick birds into its beaches and surrounding parks. 

State and local agencies are working to rescue the oiled birds at the Marina and all along the East Bay shoreline after the Cosco Busan crashed into the Bay Bridge and spilled bunker fuel in the bay Wednesday. 

The city’s Environmental Health Division has warned that people and pets should be kept away from the contaminated shoreline. 

“It’s hard to predict how long the cleanup will be, or how long the effects will linger,” said Acting Waterfront Manager Ann Hardinger in a statement. “A lot depends on just how much the ocean can take.” 

The Berkeley Fire Department’s Hazardous Materials Team brought booms and other absorbent materials to the Marina to help clean up the water and shore. 

The Berkeley Animal Care Center reported that 25 sick birds were spotted along the shoreline from Berkeley through Albany on Friday. 

Mark Ragatz, shoreline unit manager for the East Bay Regional Park District, said that a command post had been set up at the Eastshore State Park today to clean affected birds. 

“It looks like a mess,” he told the Planet Friday. “Some areas are not hit as hard but it could take several weeks to clean up ... Oil appeared in Crown Beach in Alameda today.” 

The park district has closed off water access to a number of parks in the East Bay including Point Isabel Regional Shoreline in Richmond, a popular dog walking area. 

Ragatz said that contractors had been hired to clean up the spills. Trained staff from the California State Department of Fish and Game and other local and state agencies were also involved in the rescue mission. 

Dead birds have been spotted at the Berkeley Marina and the Albany Bulb. 

“We picked up a dead duck from the Berkeley Marina today,” said Kate O’ Connor, director of the animal care shelter. “The International Bird Rescue Research Center has told us not to pick up any more birds but to tell them what type of birds we spot and where.” 

Councilmember Dona Spring said she was extremely concerned about the birds and wildlife affected by the spills. 

“I don’t know if the Coast Guard is making any trips down to the Berkeley shoreline,” she said. “I guess they are too busy dealing with the major oil spills. We are going to be billing the Coast Guard for any expenses that occur during the clean up. We should all make it our top priority to go down there and volunteer.” 

Some environmentalists have said that winter was the worst time for an oil spill since the bay is full of ducks, grebes, pelicans, cormorants and other water birds. 

The surf scoters, a species of ducks whose population has declined, seems to be the hardest hit. 

An oiled bird either dies of hypothermia or starves if not treated immediately. 

The International Bird Rescue Research Center has advised residents and visitors against cleaning the birds and instead to call the organization’s hotline at (877) 823-6926. 

While attempting capture, the animals eyes should be covered with a blanket or towel and they should then be transported inside a secure and ventilated container. 

Rules to follow during rescue: 

• Keep the animal warm, 80-90 degrees.  

• Don’t feed it or give it fluids.  

• Keep it in a secure, dark container or kennel.  

• Stay quiet around it and don’t constantly look at the bird.  

• Get it to a rehabilitation hospital as quickly as possible.  

• Never keep the animal or try to treat it yourself  

For more information visit www.ibrrc.org/Cosco_Busan_spill_2007.html. or www.uscgsanfrancisco.com/go/site/823/.  

The fenced-in tree-sitters at UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium oak grove gained new allies Wednesday as their counterparts in Santa Cruz climbed redwoods while their allies were driven back by an onslaught of police clubs and pepper spray. 

Both protests target development plans of University of California, with the Santa Cruz tree-sitters challenging that campus’ Long Range Development Plan (LRDP). 

Meanwhile, UC Berkeley campus officials have literally raised the stakes at the stadium grove, installing most of a new, higher fence system designed to isolate Berkeley’s own protesters “prior to the removal of the tree-sitters,” said Charles R. Olson, a San Francisco attorney hired by the university. 

The tree-sitters are protesting the university’s plans to build a four-level, partly subterranean gym and office complex where the grove now stands. The gym is the first in a series of projects planned for the area. 

With a judicial ruling possible as early as Wednesday in a lawsuit challenging the university’s stadium area development plans, the campus is preparing for whatever comes next, said Dan Mogulof, executive director of the campus Office of Public Affairs. 

“Either we are ready to begin construction or the trees continue to be protected,” he said. 

In addition to the approach of a ruling by Alameda County Superior Court Judge Barbara J. Miller, the Cal Bears football season ends Saturday. 

Until after the game, the university will keep existing pathways open in the grove area and will continue to allow food and water to be brought to the protesters occupying trees in the grove, Mogulof said. 

“But if the people in the trees continue to disregard state law, a court order, a local ordinance and campus regulations, we need to secure the area and enforce the law,” said Mogulof. 

The order refers to a ruling by another county judge, Richard Keller, who issued a university-sought temporary restraining order that, if enforced, would end the tree sit. 

But Mogulof said that to his knowledge the university is not planning to forcibly extract the protesters from the trees. 

“Everything is being done to minimize the chances of injury” to police, students and tree-sitters, he said. 

Olson, in a letter to Judge Miller sent Wednesday, said, “In order to remove the tree sitters from the trees and dismantle their living structures and circulation devices without unnecessary risk to the protesters or university security personnel, [Campus Police] Chief [Victoria L.] Harrison believes it is essential to establish a security perimeter that is larger than the currently existing perimeter.” 

The attorney also included a copy of Judge Keller’s order. 

Just how removal would be effected without forcible removal wasn’t explained, and Mogulof wasn’t saying. 

While Olson’s letter said that none of current actions are “implementing the Southeast Campus Integrated Projects”—the complex of buildings now under challenge in Miller’s court—Doug Buckwald disagrees. 

A plaintiff in the suit now before Judge Miller, Buckwald said that the post holes being bored in the parking lot adjacent to International House Thursday afternoon have nothing to do with the tree sitters. 

“They are clearly putting up a construction fence,” said Buckwald. 

Santa Cruz  

Wednesday’s events in Santa Cruz began at 4 a.m. when a handful of tree-sitters climbed into a grove of redwood trees on “Science Hill” slated to be chopped down to make way for a new Biomedical Sciences building—the first stage of construction under the campus Long Range Development Plan (LRDP). 

Campus and city police arrived as supporters were sending food, water and warm clothing up to the tree-sitters, arresting several of the supporters, said Jennifer Charles, a UCSC grad who is helping to coordinate publicity and support for the protest. 

“The student have been planning this for a while,” said Grant Wilson, who has a part-time position with the university’s Arts and Lectures Program. 

The LRDP plan calls for clearing about 120 acres of forested land on campus, said Charles, along with increasing the campus population by 4,500. 

The square footage of campus buildings would double under the plan, which has inspired a lawsuit by citizens and by the city of Santa Cruz, who say the plan doesn’t address the severe impacts it imposes on water, sewers, traffic and other community resources. 

Seven hours after their first encounter with police, protesters staged an 11 a.m. rally at the center of the campus, then set off toward the grove, where they were met by police standing behind temporary fencing and barriers. 

Campus police from UC Berkeley were also on hand, for what quickly developed into a melee after protesters confronted police and pushed their way into the grove and began to send food, water and—in some cases—the sweaters off their backs up to the tree-sitters, Wilson said. 

“Some of the officers got out their batons and really started thumping,” he said. “The students had nowhere to go and they were jammed up so close together they couldn’t even fall down. Other police actually pulled one policeman back because he was pretty liberal in the use of his baton.” 

Officers also used blasts of pepper spray, catching reporters as well as protesters, Wilson said. 

But in the end, the police relented, despite the arrival of another squad of officers in riot gear. 

“By that time there were more people showing up, so I think they realized that with that many students and community people there, it probably wouldn’t be good to come on so heavy-handed,” Wilson said. 

By the time the pepper spray had cleared, the students and their allies were in possession of the grove, with police standing by. 

Though one Berkeley officer was reportedly injured in the melee, campus police spokesperson and Assistant Chief Mitch Celaya did not return a call asking for confirmation. 

In a joint statement, UCSC Chancellor George Blumenthal and Campus Provost David Kliger condemned what they dubbed “a ‘dangerous’ demonstration.” 

In a move reminiscent of critics of the civil rights protests of as half-century ago, the administrators also placed some of the blame on outside agitators. 

“The incidents, which occurred on two parking lots proposed for the Biomedical Sciences Facility, involved a number of individuals not affiliated with the campus, including five people who scaled trees early in the morning on the site. 

“Instead of the constructive expression of speech through a nonviolent demonstration, the protest morphed into a dangerous example of inappropriate and in some cases illegal behavior.” 

Wilson said the tree-sitters, who appeared in masks in videos of the event, are reluctant to reveal their identities. 

But the protesters themselves were mainly students, joined by townspeople, Wilson and Charles said. Videos of the events show that most of those at the grove appear to be students.

The City of Berkeley dredged the lagoon at the north end of Aquatic Park and dumped the sludge along the shoreline this week. State Water Resources Control Board officials said the city’s Public Works Department never requested a permit for the project. 

Local environmentalists and city officials were furious that Public Works started the project during migratory season and dumped the sludge—likely toxic, they said—on the west side of the park, on top of a popular bird watching outlook and adjacent to one of the main wading bird foraging spots. 

Loren Jensen, supervising engineer at Public Works, told the Planet that the project was stopped Wednesday after public complaints and inquiries from the Planet. 

The lagoon is dredged every 15 years to clear out the debris around the tidal tubes and clean out the Strawberry Creek storm drain to improve circulation. The procedure costs the city about $80,000 from the General Fund. 

Jensen said that the State Water Resources Control Board and the Army Corps of Engineers —the two regulatory bodies responsible for issuing permits for dredging—had told project manager Hamid Kondazi that a permit wasn’t required but he couldn’t provide any documentation to support that claim. 

“He [Kondazi] can’t remember the name of the person he spoke to at the State Water Resources Control Board,” Jensen said.  

“A permit is required any time they are performing work in waters of the state under the California Porter-Cologne Act,” said Brian Wines, who oversees permits for Alameda County at the state water board. “They definitely should have asked us first. I am very disappointed that they didn’t do this.” 

By Wednesday, 30 truckloads of sludge formed four-foot piles along one of the best bird watching trails near the Berkeley Paddling and Rowing Club. Spills could be seen trickling down to the waters of the lagoon which feeds into the bay. 

Jensen acknowledged that the contractors hired by the city had not used the right method to dispose off the sludge. He did not name the firm the department had hired to dredge the lagoon. 

“I would not have approved the way it was done if I was the project manager,” he said. “There are some spills close to the area and the water should not be allowed to go back into the lagoon. It’s not a good sight. I have stopped the work and asked the contractors to clean up the spoils.” 

Wines told the Planet that the correct way to store the spoils was to pile it in a place and construct berms around it to prevent the water from running back into the waters of the bay. 

“We’ve asked Public Works to prepare it,” he said. 

Parks and recreation commissioner Lisa Stephens told the Planet that Laurel Marcus Associates—consultants hired by the city to provide advice on future park projects—had told the Aquatic Park Subcommittee that the sludge was probably highly contaminated since Strawberry Creek picked up all the urban waste on its way to the park. 

“I am astounded at the way our city continues to treat the park as its dump,” she said. 

An old car was sticking out from the spoils dumped at the site of excavation at the foot of Addison Street. 

A great blue heron, a park fixture, was feeding near a pile of the sludge which contained, among other things, a car steering wheel. Ducks and white-crowned sparrows could also be seen feeding near the dumps. 

“This is a place where the heron typically feeds,” said Mark Liolios of the Aquatic Park Environmental Greening, Education, and Restoration Team (EGRET). “I think as soon as the rains come the spoils will wash down and any toxic chemical in it will kill the fish and the birds that feed on it.” 

Berkeley arborist (and Planet columnist) Ron Sullivan told the Planet that stirring up the lake could disturb the birds’ food supply. 

“They really need to eat now, after the journey here, and all winter, to build up their reserves to return to their nesting grounds and breed,” she said. 

William Rogers, acting director for the city’s Parks Recreation and Waterfront department, said Wednesday he was not aware of the dredging. 

“Public Works told me today that the tubes are not working very efficiently,” he said. “In the event we have a lot of rain they want to improve the flow. There’s silt in front of the overflow that has caused floods in the past.” 

Stephens told the Planet that the city shouldn’t put storm water in the Aquatic Park to solve West Berkeley’s flooding problems. 

“It’s misguided public policy,” she said. “By deepening that area they are destroying a food habitat. There aren’t a lot of places at the Aquatic Park where birds can feed at the moment. Storm water is toxic. When the freshwater mixes with the salt water it kills the fish in the lagoon ... In order to keep West Berkeley from flooding, the city needs to have a very good storm-water plan.”

Amidst jeers, catcalls and demands for the mayor’s recall‚ and Mayor Tom Bates’ threats to clear the rowdy public from the chambers, the Berkeley City Council voted Tuesday to allow two powerful telecommunications companies to place antennas atop UC Storage, a five-story building owned by developer Patrick Kennedy adjacent to the neighborhood at Ward Street and Shattuck Avenue. 

Voting to overturn a Zoning Adjustments Board decision to disallow the antennas were Mayor Tom Bates and Councilmembers Laurie Capitelli, Linda Maio, Betty Olds and Gordon Wozniak. Councilmember Max Anderson voted to uphold the zoning board denial and Councilmembers Dona Spring, Darryl Moore and Kriss Worthington abstained.  

This reversed an Oct. 23 council action, where only Wozniak had voted to overturn the zoning board decision. The council had a month from the Oct. 23 vote to overturn the ZAB decision. 

Anderson, who represents the Ward Street neighborhood and is a registered nurse by profession, told the council that allowing the antennas—and their possible ill effects—was tantamount to disavowing a city resolution to follow the Precautionary Principle, which states that if a city policy might cause severe harm to the public, “lack of full scientific certainty about cause and effect shall not be viewed as sufficient reason for the city to postpone measures to … protect human health.” 

In accepting that policy, the city “accepted the responsibility of safeguarding us against technologies, environmental threats, other kinds of health threats that potentially exist,” Anderson said. 

The vote came after Kirk Trost, attorney with Sacramento-based Miller Owen & Trost, hired as outside counsel by the city, said publicly what he had been telling the council in closed-door sessions: given the federal Telecommunications Act of 1996, the city could not win its case in court against Verizon. 

Based on the Zoning Adjustment Board’s denial of the right for Nextel and Verizon to place telecommunications antennas on the roof at 2721 Shattuck Ave., Verizon filed a lawsuit in federal court in August, saying the zoning board decision unlawfully restricts the company. 

Trost said he agreed with Verizon and Nextel that the zoning board decision was flawed. There was no evidence in the record to support ZAB’s claim that there was a problem with the information provided by the companies concerning their need for the antennas in order to provide adequate capacity, Trost said, noting, “Instead the record in fact contains substantial evidence to support the need for the facility.”  

Trost further underscored that the Telecommunications Act rules out consideration of adverse health impacts. 

City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque told the public at the meeting Tuesday that in addition to her office looking at the question, the city engaged three different outside attorneys, all of whom agreed that Berkeley could not win its case in court. 

Maio, who voted with the majority, pointed out that the courts have consistently sided with the telecommunications industry and that the Supreme Court refused to address the question when a case was submitted to it. 

Bates, who lives among those protesting the antennas, voted with the majority to support the Nextel/Verizon appeal, reversing his Oct. 23 vote to support the zoning board.  

“We need to back up and strengthen our ordinance [on locating antennas]. Our ordinance is terrible,” Bates said. “We have made mistake after mistake in trying to appease an angry, upset constituency. We’ve made mistakes by bouncing it back and forth [between the zoning board and the council]—we probably shouldn’t have done that.” 

Bates went on to say that if the council went to court, “We’re headed for a loss and attorneys’ fees. I can’t in good faith go in to lose.” 

The mayor denied the audience time to speak, saying the public hearing on the question had been closed Oct 23. Audience placards, however, sent the massage: “Local control over antennas,” “Uphold the ZAB decision,” and “People’s voice; supreme law.” 

Spring, who voted with Bates and Anderson on Oct. 23 to uphold the zoning board denial, abstained Tuesday, saying the city didn’t have options. “Right now, we don’t have an attorney that will even take this case for us,” she said. 

Capitelli agreed: “We will lose in court. We will lose quickly and cleanly,” he said. 

Wozniak, who consistently voted to overturn the zoning board decision, said the city could not change the Telecommunications Act. “The right way is to go to Congress and change it,” he said. 

Anderson stood with his constituents: “Sometimes even when you don’t think you can win, you need to fight,” he said. 

Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee members turned thumbs down on point towers in downtown Berkeley Wednesday, voting 13-7-1 for a six-story maximum building height, while allowing for up to ten exceptions. 

Two of the exceptions would be hotels, which would be allowed the greatest height, yet to be determined. 

The vote ends—for now—the repeatedly rejected and resurrected staff-backed plan calling for up to 14 16-story towers as a way of packing more people into the city center. 

Building heights and the fate of Berkeley’s historic buildings were the two central fault lines that surfaced repeatedly during the two years members of DAPAC have been meeting. 

Formally launched on Nov. 21, 2005, the committee approaches its mandated sunset date of Nov. 30 with only two more meetings left to tweak their draft of the new city center plan. 

The final proposal adopted Wednesday contained compromise provisions drafted by James Novosel, a Berkeley architect. 

The version of the land use chapter adopted Wednesday allows for an 85-foot maximum height for all but a handful of exceptions, effectively allowing one more story than the existing plan. 

In addition to the hotels, four other buildings would be allowed to rise to 100 feet and four 120-foot buildings would also be permitted.  

One of the 120-footers could be an office building, but the others would have to provide housing above the ground floor. 

Closer vote 

While the final vote bestowed approval by almost a two-to-one margin, a much taller skyline failed minutes earlier by a single vote. 

That proposal, advanced by Victoria Eisen, would have raised the general downtown maximum height to 100 feet, or eight floors for housing over commercial. 

That option in addition to the hotels, also allowed for a quartet of 120-footers, or a trio at 140 feet or a duet of the much-discussed 160-foot point towers. 

Dorothy Walker and other proponents of the taller skyline said that only by making projects financially attractive to developers could the city hope to win funds for the parks, open space, public restrooms and other civic benefits proposed in other parts of the plan. 

But their proposal failed on a 10-11 vote. 

One of those who voted for the proposal was developer Ali Kashani, filling in for an absent Linda Schacht, a UC Berkeley journalism instructor. 

Kashani had presented the Land Use Subcommittee with detailed analyses that he said showed that only buildings of five floors or less or those of 14 stories or more would yield the levels of profits needed to attract developers. 

But Novosel had countered that he was able to design projects at the heights he proposed which promised to yield healthy profits for developers. 

Planning Commission chair James Samuels said that 85-foot buildings aren’t profitable, and have been built mainly by non-profits who receive subsidies for creating affordable housing. 

Review period 

The compromise package also includes a requirement for a follow-up review eight years after the final plan is adopted by the City Council to determine if the provisions have allowed for development, and to study the plan’s impacts on the proposed public amenities. 

But proponents of the modified height plan received a less than reassuring response from Planning Director Dan Marks on the question of whether or not the maximum height limits would really stave off taller projects. 

“We can’t tie the hands of the City Council,” Marks said. “The Zoning Ordinance” which spells out the plan’s requirements applies, he said, “but if the City Council chooses to make an exception they can as a matter of state law.” 

“I was cautiously optimistic that a maximum would be a maximum, but I guess I have reason to be cautious,” said Jesse Arreguin. 

“This is an American democracy,” said DAPAC chair Will Travis. “None of us were elected dogcatcher,” he said, and the Planning Commission and the Zoning Adjustments Board are vehicles of the City Council. 

“We are making a mountain out of a molehill,” said Kashani. 

Planning Commission chair James Samuels said that the only practical measure open to DAPAC was to set the maximums as a way to minimize variables. 

“The council will be bound by this if they adopt it,” said Wendy Alfsen. “We want to make clear that this is maximum height, and that they will be bound by it.” 

“Unless they change it,” added Travis. 

“What we’re voting on is an esthetic,” Novosel said. “My vote is not going to be for unlimited 100-foot buildings, adding that it is not going to be for not making a decision. We’re still going to get some very high buildings.”  

Numbers game 

While critics of the smaller-scale option insisted that proposal would significantly reduce the city’s ability to build new housing, Planning Commissioner Gene Poschman has cited his own figures that he says show that even with the existing plan the downtown could accommodate all the housing units the Association for Bay Area Governments (ABAG) says the city needs to allow over the next seven years. 

But ABAG wasn’t mentioned Wednesday night, making the event one of the few meetings where density was raised and the regional governmental agency wasn’t invoked. 

The new plan was mandated by the city’s settlement of its lawsuit challenging UC Berkeley Long Range Development Plan 2020, which calls for extensive development in the city center. 

The university wants to build up to 800,000 square feet of new off-campus construction in the heart of the city, and will be allowed to build 100 buildings on its own properties. 

The university is also the driving force behind one of the two hotels, the Berkeley Charles, which would rise at the northeast corner of Center Street and Shattuck Avenue. 

The second high-rise hostelry would be an expansion of the existing Shattuck Hotel, a city landmark a block away. 

Winston Burton said he was swayed to vote for Novosel’s changes because of the additional height it granted. 

And when it came time for the final vote, Billy Keys, who had supported the higher alternative, dismissed the calls of his compatriots for a detailed economic analysis before any decision was made. 

“The two members on our committee who actually build buildings are on opposite sides,” he said. “We can be talking about the economics of buildings till midnight. It’s time to vote.”

While Berkeley Police Chief Douglas Hambleton agreed with many of the Police Review Commission recommendations aimed at preventing criminal activity among police officers, he took issue with a few. 

In a written report issued Wednesday afternoon, the chief said he disagreed with the commission’s assertion that an investigation into drug evidence theft within the Berkeley department had been insufficient. 

The commission report entitled Evidence Theft Within the Berkeley Police Department was issued Oct. 12 by a committee of three PRC commissioners and two community members in response to two instances of police misconduct: one was the theft of drug evidence from the locked evidence vault by former Sgt. Cary Kent. Kent pleaded guilty to three felonies, served a year of home detention and is now on probation.  

The second was the alleged theft of property of arrestees by a Berkeley police officer charged by the Berkeley Police Department and no longer with the department, but whom the district attorney declined to charge. 

The committee report, approved by the full commission at its Wednesday evening meeting, was intended to address “the systemic failure of a department to identify and remedy major lapses in security, personnel management and administration.” 

Hambleton’s written response to the various recommendations was available to the commission only a few hours before its meeting. The commission discussed it preliminarily in the presence of the chief, city manager and deputy city manager. A more thorough discussion of the chief’s responses is scheduled for the Dec. 12 commission meeting, 7 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center at Hearst Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Way. The City Council will address the report and its recommendations in January. 

Among the most controversial committee findings was that the investigation into the Cary Kent case was insufficient.  

“Valuable evidence was not secured in a timely fashion, and no other individuals were investigated to determine what, if any, knowledge or involvement they may have had in the illegal movement of drug evidence. Police made no effort to determine whether Cary Kent was involved in illegal drug dealing after he was placed on administrative leave,” the report says. 

In his response, Hambleton said he disagrees with the finding, noting he had conferred with other current and former police chiefs, the Alameda County district attorney and others on the question of whether the investigation was adequate. “The investigation has been concluded,” he wrote. “Kent has been prosecuted … [and] has served his sentence … There is no need to reopen the investigation at this time.” 

While praising the chief for his willingness to work with the commission on its recommendations, Jim Chanin, an attorney and a community member of the committee that wrote the report and Commissioner Sherry Smith, also a member of the committee, took issue with the chief on this question. 

While the chief said that no more evidence was necessary for criminal prosecution, Chanin pointed out that this question goes beyond the Kent case. Chanin wanted to know why investigators failed to address the questions of what Kent might be doing with the drugs beyond personal abuse, and whether other officers were involved in the theft. 

“Our ongoing concern in the subcommittee was something like 289 envelopes. It seemed like that was rather much for a single felon to have absorbed,” Chanin said, referring to the number of envelopes investigators said had been tampered with. While investigators noted the number of damaged or opened envelopes, they looked only at how much drug evidence was missing from a handful of them. 

It seemed relatively easy to find out the difference between the amount of drugs an officer reported having taken from a suspect and put into the envelope, and the amount of evidence remaining in the envelope at present, Smith said. 

“There’s nothing here that indicates that any further investigation was done other than of Sergeant Kent and that gives us the heebie-jeebies because of the 289 [envelopes],” Smith said, underscoring that “others had access.”  

Smith said the commission hadn’t seen anything that showed that the other officers who also had access to the drugs were investigated and cleared. Some continue to work in the Special [drug] Enforcement Unit. “We’re not looking to have the Cary Kent case reopened,” she said. 

“No one knows how much drugs were taken,” Chanin said, arguing that other officers may have been involved, but there was no investigation into that possibility. 

Responding to the issue in his written report, Hambleton wrote that some individuals working with Kent had been transferred, while others remain in the same unit. “Since there is no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of these employees, it is not appropriate to make transfers that could be viewed as punitive,” says Hambleton’s response. 

Chanin spoke directly to the purpose of finding out how much drug evidence is missing. “[There was no] figuring out whether this was for personal use or for other than personal use,” he said. 

In his written response the chief said “the exact information was not needed for the criminal prosecution.”  

He said it would require reopening the case and involve the crime lab and “considerable time and expense. Due to resource issues, the county crime lab generally will not become involved in an analysis that is not related to a pending prosecution.” 

Chanin also expressed particular concern about the lack of clear policies regarding supervision by friends and relatives that has “disastrous consequences for the department.” The committee found that, in large part, the problem of recognizing that Cary Kent had a drug problem was that his appearance and poor work performance were overlooked by friends. 

While the chief agreed that such supervision could be problematic, he said city administrative regulations address the problem of near relatives. “It is not practical or realistic to restrict personal friendship within the city’s workforce,” he said. 

Among the recommendations with which the chief agreed were creating better early warning systems to identify officers whose behavior could become problematic for the department, putting in place an improved system to track entry into the evidence room, moving responsibility for cash accounts out of the police department and creating better systems to monitor seized asset funds. 

The report and the chief’s responses are on the Police Review Commission website at www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/prc/ 

The East Bay Regional Park District temporarily closed water access at selected shoreline parks Thursday after an 810-foot container ship rammed into the Bay Bridge Wednesday and spilt oil into the bay. 

San Francisco has threatened to sue the company or agency responsible for the 58,000 gallon spill which was incorrectly reported at first by the Coast Guard as 140 gallons. 

The East Bay park district reported that water access at the following parks had been closed since oil had washed on its shores as of 3 p.m. Thursday: 

• Point Isabel Regional Shoreline, Keller Beach and Ferry Point Pier at Miller Knox Regional Shoreline in Richmond 

• Albany Beach and North Basin at Eastshore State Park 

• The small beach at Middle Harbor Shoreline Park, Oakland 

Water access at Crown Beach in Alameda was closed as a precaution. The parks themselves remain open. 

Other district facilities impacted include the Brooks Island Regional Preserve off the Richmond Inner Harbor on the Richmond Marina. 

Absorbent material (boom) is being sent to some shoreline parks as a barrier. Local animal control officials are cleaning oiled birds. District staff will be cleaning up waterbirds today (Friday). 

Additional parks will be monitored and closures will be posted on www.ebparks. org, or call (888) EBPARKS for more information. 

More than 100 home and business owners may get long-term low-interest loans through the city to add energy efficiencies and/or solar panels to their properties, if a financing plan hatched by the mayor’s chief of staff, Cisco DeVries, pans out. 

The council voted unanimously Tuesday to support the plan in concept.  

Also at the Tuesday meeting, the council decided to hold a special Dec. 11 meeting to hammer out changes in the Condominium Conversion Ordinance, and they began to look at initiatives that might be on the November 2008 ballot, homing in on a $15 million measure to fund a new warm water pool for the disabled and elderly. 

Solar scheme 

The public financing plan advanced by Bates’ chief of staff Cisco DeVries is for the city to obtain money, from banks or bond issues, which would be lent to home and business owners to make their properties more energy efficient and/or to add solar panels and solar water-heating systems. 

The scheme promises to offer more favorable interest rates than private owners would be able to obtain on their own. Repayment would be over 20 years, rather than the 10 years a bank might otherwise require, City Manager Phil Kamlarz said. The loan would be paid back through an assessment added to property taxes, and the city would hold a lien on the property until the loan was paid off. When a property is sold, the assessment would continue to be paid by the new owner. 

DeVries estimates that the cost of the upgrades over 20 years would be about equal to the savings from the solar and other upgrades over the same period of time. 

Making the plan a reality will be costly, but the mayor said he hopes to use a $160,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency. The agency has yet to award the grant. 

“We’re in discussions with the EPA,” DeVries said.  

City Manager Phil Kamlarz said the city’s not likely to know about the EPA grant until February or March. Councilmember Gordon Wozniak said the city shouldn’t wait for the EPA, but should move forward with funds initially from the general fund. 

“Don’t let others scoop us,” Wozniak said. The council did not incorporate Wozniak’s recommendation into its vote, but City Manager Phil Kamlarz said he will continue working on the plan with city staff. No budget for staff work on the project has been made public. 

“There’s lots of details I won’t ask about right now,” Councilmember Laurie Capitelli said.  

Some outstanding questions include the degree to which homeowners would be required to provide energy efficiencies before installing solar panels and the degree to which the city would screen or recommend contractors to do the work. 

At the meeting, Bates underscored the uncertainty of the project timeline. “People shouldn’t wait for us. There might be some bumps along the road,” he said. 

Warm pool 

An initial controversy over the council discussion of the warm pool—a swimming pool to serve the disabled and frail elderly—arose when Councilmember Dona Spring asked if the question could be addressed early in the evening, given that some disabled people attending the meeting had fixed times for transportation home. 

The mayor, however, refused, instead allowing discussion of antennas (see separate story) and his solar project early in the evening. 

The warm pool—kept at about 92 degrees Fahrenheit—is housed in a historic but seismically unsafe building at Berkeley High now slated for demolition. Voters approved a $3.2 million bond before the demolition was planned. The bond has not been issued.  

Plans for a new warm pool on Berkeley school property at Bancroft Way and Milvia Street are under discussion. Consultants estimate costs at $15 million. 

While some of the warm-pool users had already left the meeting by 9:45 p.m., when it was discussed, Ben Rivers was among those who remained. He made his way to the microphone, with difficulty, using the physical support of others to walk. He spoke clearly, though haltingly, telling the council about the effects of lupus on him. “Because of my neurological condition, cold water causes my body to tense up,” he said “It’s essential that the water is very warm.”  

The question of the pool was among other initiatives that might be placed on the November 2008 ballot. The mayor clearly did not want to see the city footing the bill for the pool. “Forty percent of the people who use the pool come from outside Berkeley,” he said, suggesting that the funding might come, in part, from other cities or from the East Bay Regional Parks. 

“Don’t shaft the 60 percent of the people who need the Warm Water Pool,” Spring said, calling on the city and school district not to demolish the current pool until a new one is in place. 

“Everyone is looking for someone else to come up with a solution—we lost an advocate when we lost [former mayor] Shirley Dean,” Spring said. 

Ed Noland, an architect from ELS Architects and Urban Design, was prepared to give a 10-minute presentation on possible pool design. Bates did not want to take the time to hear it, asking if Noland could make the presentation in a minute and a half.  

In his remarks, which took about five minutes, Noland said the pool would have various means for the entry and exit of disabled people, as well as decks wide enough for the storage of wheelchairs. The roof would be able to accept solar panels, but installing them at this time would be cost prohibitive. 

At $15 million, the cost for taxpayers would be about $5 to $8 per $100,000 assessed value of the property over 30 years. 

Also on the ballot 

Staff advised the council on possible ballot measures, most likely up for a November vote, but some could be on the ballot as early as June. A Landmarks Preservation Ordinance referendum will be on the ballot, as well as the resubmission of Measure R, Patients Access to Medical Cannabis Act of 2004. The latter was ordered back to the ballot by a superior court judge due to problems with retrieving data from the electronic voting machines for a recount in the 2004 election.  

Also possibly on the ballot are separate measures to fund storm water infrastructure, police officers, fire fighters and youth services, as well as an advisory measure on community choice aggregation, which would create a way for Berkeley, Oakland and Emeryville to provide its own energy, rather than depending on PG&E. 

Condo conversion 

A workshop on condominium conversion was held, but members of the Berkeley Property Owners Association criticized the format, saying their concerns, including the 100 limit on conversions allowed each year and the 12.5 percent fee, were not addressed.  

In response, Bates called for a special council meeting Dec. 11 dedicated to the discussion of possible revisions to the ordinance.

Community members urged UC Berkeley to keep People’s Park an open space and sharply criticized a report on possible changes to the park at the People’s Park Community Advisory Board meeting Monday. 

More than 30 people commented on the draft report assessing the park’s needs and future changes prepared by San Francisco-based MKThink, consultants who were paid $100,000 by the university to conduct a nine-month study. 

Park users, UC Berkeley students and Telegraph area residents and merchants stressed that crime was their major concern at People’s Park. 

“We have to face the fact that it’s become very very dangerous,” said Michele Pelegri, a neighbor. “Some changes have to happen. Safety has to happen.” 

Captain Mitch Celaya, UC Berkeley assistant police chief, told the Planet after the meeting that he was extremely concerned about People’s Park. 

“There have been a total of 181 incidents that required police reports at the park this year,” he said. “Seventeen of those were violent crimes. The department supports cleaning it up or pruning the trees and bushes to make it a less attractive place for troublemakers. For individuals who say the park is a safe place, I am not sure they have a realistic view of what’s going on.” 

MKThink’s report proposed pavilions and other structures for the park. 

Sharon Hudson, a resident of Telegraph Avenue, called the proposed buildings in the plans “non-starters.” 

“The university has eyed that portion for development for the last 40 years and that will not happen without bloodshed,” said Gary Spencer. 

Debbie Moore urged boardmembers to look at the process carefully. 

“There is a process that happens every year and UC always wants to build something on it to reap profits,” she said. “If anything is constructed, riots will break out. Everyone wants open ground kept as open ground.” 

Park activist Arthur Fonseca said that the report ignored the existence of the free box—recently destroyed—and the free speech stage at the park. 

Board member George Beier complained that the report had failed to mention ways of honoring the park’s history. 

“We didn’t feel like we were qualified enough to comment on how to recognize the park,” said Mark Miller, the firm’s principal planner. 

Board member Gianna Ranuzzi said that the use of words such as “battleground” and “conflict” had cast a negative shadow on the report’s introduction. 

“We are summarizing what we saw to the board,” Miller replied. “They can take it or toss it.” 

Community members were also indignant that the report undermined the importance of Food Not Bombs, which provides free meals to more than 100 people every day. 

“They keep saying we need professional services,” said Peter Ralph, a park user. “There are a lot of people there who are served by the structure of Food Not Bombs and they didn’t talk to them.” 

Homeless shelter advocate Michael Reagan called MKThink’s suggestion to professionalize social services at the park “asinine.” 

“I could have done the same thing MKThink did for $100,” he said. “The university should have used the $100,000 to feed the homeless.” 

Miller told the board that the firm was not qualified to recommend whether the current social services were useful to the public and that further assessment would be required to come to a conclusion. 

“Engage in some serious thinking, not some MKThink,” one park user told the board.  

Gardener Terri Compost said that the report was based on two false concepts: the park was underutilized. and lacked diversity. 

“It is utilized and one of the most diverse places in the world,” she said. “We can definitely evolve the park. It can change. It doesn’t have to be static. But we need to involve everybody. I don’t think that getting rid of the trees and shrubs will help us to see through the park. Hopefully the university is not hoping to slip in those buildings there.”  

Emily Marthinsen, vice chancellor of facilities at UC Berkeley, said that the public comments would be included in the board’s final recommendations to the university scheduled to be discussed on Dec. 3. 

It’s not at all unusual for the majority of Berkeley voters to wake up with a nasty political hangover the morning after a presidential election. 

Consider the results of seven of the last ten elections: Nixon, Nixon, Reagan, Reagan, Bush, Bush, Bush. Berkeley voted against them all, but was overruled by the rest of the country (or the Supreme Court, as the case may be). 

And it’s not just during the relatively recent past that Berkeley has gone through this experience. 

Seventy-five years ago this week, gloom must have been strong throughout much of the town as Berkeley voters picked up the morning newspapers to learn their favorite had gone down to defeat in the Nov. 8 balloting. 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt had defeated incumbent Herbert Hoover. 

Berkeley voters had strongly backed both the political establishment and the losing side. 

Berkeley was a Republican majority town. There were 35,781 Republican voters registered in November, 1932, exceeding all other party affiliates by more than 19,000. 

Berkeley had only 14,329 registered Democrats. Socialist registration was 577. 78 affiliated with the Prohibition Party and 1 with the Liberty Party. 1,661 registered as “non-partisan.” 

Nearly three out of four registered voters cast ballots. “Semi-official” totals reported in the Berkeley Gazette on November 10, 1932, gave 21,750 Berkeley votes to Hoover, 14,713 to Roosevelt, and 2,223 to Socialist candidate Norman Thomas. 

Even though the Republican demoralization was obvious—Hoover polled some 14,000 votes below Republican registration in Berkeley, while Roosevelt drew slightly more local votes than there were registered Democrats—it wasn’t enough to offset the vast Republican numerical advantage in registration. 

Hoover won a 56 percent Berkeley majority, against 38 percent for Roosevelt. This was almost the reverse of the national tally, where Roosevelt took nearly six out of 10 votes (57.4 percent) and prevailed with nearly 23 million votes to less than 16 million for Hoover. 

Berkeley did show a slight pink tinge, with Norman Thomas receiving about four times as many votes as there were officially registered Socialists in town. 

The watershed election limited Hoover to 59 electoral votes, signaled the end of the era of robust Progressive Republicanism, and launched the New Deal coalition which would rule in Washington for another generation. 

And Berkeley was on the wrong side of history. 

Now you might console yourself with the thought that even if the town was Republican, at least the professors and students at the now-famous liberal campus must have favored Roosevelt. 

And you would be wrong. 

Faculty votes, of course weren’t dis-aggregated from the citywide totals, and most UC students weren’t old enough to vote. Of those who were, most couldn’t register to vote at their college address. 

But of UC faculty asked in a fall, 1932, straw poll about their Presidential preferences, 231, or 53 percent, favored Hoover. 98 said they supported Roosevelt, and 83 would vote for Norman Thomas, the Socialist. The Communist and Prohibition Party candidates got one vote apiece. 

The Hoover majority reflected similar faculty political preferences at Washington State, University of Oregon, Oregon State, USC and Stanford. 

Meanwhile, a straw poll taken among some Cal undergraduates in early October, 1932, recorded 410 favoring Hoover, 180 for Roosevelt, and 162 for Norman Thomas. Other names were written in by 100 voters. 

To be fair, those unscientific polls perhaps showed a hint of the future liberal and politically eclectic Berkeley. In the student poll, Democrat, Socialist, and “Other” votes combined formed a slight majority (442) over the Hoover vote (410). And in the faculty poll, one in five had supported the Socialist. 

The 1932 national campaign was hard-fought and bitter, but very short by today’s standards. Real campaigning didn’t start until the fall, and Hoover himself took to the campaign trail only for the final few weeks, after staying in the White House and appearing presidential. 

Roosevelt made a swing through California, with a stop in San Francisco, while Hoover returned to his adopted home state on election eve to vote from his home in Palo Alto. 

Thousands cheered his campaign train as it arrived in Oakland, and he traveled across the Bay for what seemed a triumphant parade up Market Street in San Francisco. 

Thus, today’s most strongly liberal / progressive California communities gave a hero’s welcome in 1932 to the Republican candidate who would, hours later, be decisively retired from the national stage. 

The Oakland Tribune wrote, on Nov. 6, that Hoover’s personal campaigning “changed the whole direction of the campaign, turning the tide sufficient to make it apparent that another fortnight of argument would render the outcome anything but doubtful.” 

The election itself, of course, swept all those Hoover silent majority fantasies away. A weak Hoover tide lapped only through Pennsylvania and part of New England. Roosevelt won everything else, including California, then a Republican stronghold in national elections. 

The Tribune acknowledged “an unparalleled political upheaval” the day after as returns were tabulated across the state. Democrats were making big gains up and down the ticket. 

But there, too, Berkeley had to be different. 

In the Congressional election for a new district that included Berkeley and parts of Oakland, Republican and political newcomer Ralph Eltse won a three-way match against Democrat and former City Attorney Frank Cornish and former Mayor and Socialist candidate J. Stitt Wilson. 

For a third-party candidate, Wilson drew a strong 10,072 votes to Eltse’s 17,501. The drop off from Hoover’s Berkeley majority to Eltse’s was over 4,000 votes. Democrat Cornish ran third, with 9,075. Cornish supporters pointed out that the Wilson and Cornish votes combined would have beaten the Republican. 

Perhaps so, but that wouldn’t necessarily indicate a latent liberal majority in 1932 Berkeley. Wilson’s status as a well-known former mayor probably attracted at least some Republican votes. 

And while Socialist candidate Wilson got more than 17 times as many votes as there were official Socialist voters in Berkeley, apparently only about one in four of the people who voted for Wilson also cast ballots for Norman Thomas, the Socialist candidate for President. 

In any case, Republican Eltse, although the winner, was swimming against the tide. California, which had only one Democrat in Congress before the election, sent 11 Democrats out of 20 in the State’s reapportionment-enlarged House delegation, along with newly-elected Democratic Senator William Gibbs McAdoo. 

“It was a grand house cleaning, with conservative and dry mis-representatives thrown in the discard by the stern hand of the voters,” the pro-Roosevelt San Francisco Examiner editorialized. “Dry,” of course, meaning those who supported Prohibition and lost statewide along with Hoover. 

In the state legislature, Republicans held their own in the Senate—helped by the fact that 17 Republican incumbents were not facing re-election in 1932—but lost a whopping 18 seats in the Assembly. Their majority there dropped to 55 out of 80, and Democratic Assemblymen increased from seven to 25.  

Looking back at the national election and its aftermath, historian Piers Brendon would later write in The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s: “…in just over three months the President averted catastrophe, restored the nation to psychological equilibrium and incidentally buttered his own political parsnips for life. He imbued the United States with a sense of purpose, unity and dynamism. He epitomized compassion in government. He reinvigorated public service and, like John F. Kennedy after him, got the young involved. He gave promise that the resources of democracy were equal to the crisis and that capitalism could heal itself. He exuded optimism. As Harold Ickes said, ‘It’s more than a New Deal. It’s a New World.’” 

California and the nation were on their way to a Democratic resurgence, led by Roosevelt. 

Berkeley was just slow in coming along for the ride. 

If anyone wonders if there’s a role for classical music in the hard-edged 21st century, they should acquaint themselves with the Oakland East Bay Symphony, which had its season’s opening on Friday night at the Paramount in Oakland. We go to a good number of musical events, some of them really big hits with their audiences, but it’s only at the Paramount with Maestro Michael Morgan wielding the baton that bravura performances are rewarded with shouts of “right on” from the balcony. Sometimes (horrors) they come even after a particularly thrilling movement, in defiance or ignorance of the classical convention which counsels waiting until the whole piece is finished to cheer. It’s not just polite clapping, or even the vigorous foot-stomping on the wooden floor of Berkeley’s First Congregational Church which is used to applaud the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. When the enormous Paramount audiences like something, it’s expressed by full-throated roars, often ornamented with the kind of piercing whistles normally heard at rock concerts or baseball games.  

Since this paper usually reserves its review space for repeating events which our readers have future opportunities to attend, we didn’t have an assigned reviewer at Friday’s concert. We did see one of our regular reviewers there, and she loved it, but she won’t be writing a review for us. Instead, we’d like to direct our readers to Joshua Kosman’s review in Monday’s San Francisco Chronicle. (This is partly to maintain our reputation for being “fair and balanced,” since a reader commentary in these pages last week pungently denounced the Chron’s editorial judgment for its defense of Diane Feinstein’s vote for Michael Mukasey.)  

I’m no reviewer myself, just a devoted audience member, and in this case even if I were it wouldn’t be cricket for me to praise the evening’s star soloist, Hope Briggs, since she’s a long-time friend. Instead, let me just quote a bit from the impartial Mr. Kosman, in case you’ve cancelled your Chron subscription in response to last week’s diatribe: 

“Her singing was proud, defiant and full of pizzazz, both tonally and dramatically... Friday’s performance was the work of a singer unafraid to make a large, energetic statement, and able to back that up with commanding technique and smooth, eloquent phrasing. All that, and she holds the stage like a true diva...Her finest showing came midway through the set, with a rendition of “Tacea la notte placida” from Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” that was both voluptuous and pure-voiced. The opening phrases were shaped with eloquent directness, and with Morgan’s aid, Briggs then brought the aria to ever-greater heights of intensity and emotional fluency....” 

Take that, David Gockley. In case you’re not an opera fan, it’s possible you missed San Francisco Opera manager Gockley’s gaffe last summer, when he dumped Briggs from a production of Don Giovanni in questionable circumstances after the final dress rehearsal. Kosman wisely steered away from that controversy in his review, but since I’m not a reviewer myself I’m free to comment on it. (I am qualified to review Hope’s red dress, which was smashing.) 

The always-vocal crowd at the Paramount loved Briggs just as much as Kosman did. It was the usual mix of elegantly dressed matrons and patrons, many of them African-American, and schleppy Berkeleyesque types, both the seedy graying academics and the blue-jeaned young. A fair number, male and female, even sported the obligatory display of tattooed biceps. But whoever they were, and however unlikely it seemed to find them all in the same hall, they love the OEBS and they adored Briggs—they roared their approval after every aria. 

I didn’t see Gockley there, though I did recognize some regulars from Tuesday nights in the balcony at the opera house. One hopes he sent a flunky to listen and watch. He might learn something. 

His arrival at the San Francisco Opera was accompanied by a lot of fanfare about his track record in Texas as a popularizer. He’s tried to live up to it by staging televised performances with video screens in the balcony, and he’s even beamed a few shows to novel venues like the San Francisco ballpark which should be called Willie Mays Field if sportswriters had any guts.  

Is any of this working? Is opera attendance up? Judging by the smallish crowd in the balcony the night we saw The Magic Flute, which isn’t hard to like and was charmingly staged, I doubt it, but I don’t know for sure. 

What’s certainly not helping are the raucous, vulgar and cloyly patronizing SF Opera commercials, starring Mr. Gockley in person, which blast the ears in between musical selections on genteel KDFC. The message appears to be that opera is for everyone, but the effect is simply to make me, and I suspect most listeners, switch stations as fast as possible to classic jazz on KCFM. It may come as a surprise to someone who’s lived in Texas for a while, but there’s a sizable number of music lovers who don’t listen to Grand Old Opry but might be persuaded to enjoy grand opera with the right incentives. Including, for example, the presence of a glamorous and well-loved home-girl diva like Hope Briggs. 

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s one more real reviewer, Jack Neal, who heard Hope’s recent performance as a last minute replacement for the scheduled star of Nevada Opera’s Aida: 

“Briggs sings magnificently and brings magnetism, majesty and considerable magic to Verdi’s Ethiopian princess doomed by her across-the-border love for Radames, commander of Egyptian forces....There’s not a moment when Briggs’s singing does not thrill. Her Act III aria, “O cieli azzurri” is regal in tone, passionate in demeanor, and a sensation of vocal agility. There’s no reason why Briggs should not become a major star on the international opera scene.” 

Are you listening, Mr. Gockley? Here in the Bay Area, audiences would like to hear Hope Briggs again, and soon. She might even persuade some of her Oakland fans to BART across the bay for a change. 

The “Emily” in the very successful Emily’s List fundraising organization is not a person but an acronym. It stands for the old political slogan Early Money Is Like Yeast, which means that a dollar given early in a campaign is worth many more dollars for the would-be candidate than one contributed at the end. Early dollars can be used to do fundraising for additional funds, and to reach out to undecided voters in time to recruit them as campaign volunteers.  

So it was no big surprise to see a sizable number of envelopes with Loni Hancock’s return address in our mail at home over the last couple of weeks. What was a surprise was noticing, as I did the bi-weekly junkmail toss, that only some of them were addressed to the two registered voters who live at our house. Others were addressed, either on the envelope or on the inside letter, to people I’d never heard of. One inside addressee was “Hon. Nancy Graham, Oakland City Council.” The only Nancy I know of on the Oakland Council is Nancy Nadel. Curiouser and curiouser. 

But as the Alameda County Registrar of Voters has recently demonstrated, computerized databases can get mailing lists messed up with little difficulty. Presumably Ms. Hancock’s team was unlucky enough to buy a bad list. But as I was throwing these letters away, a boldfaced underlined sentence in the middle of the first page caught my eye: I need your help to raise $250,000. A quarter of a million dollars? That sounds like serious money. 

And it’s only a primary. Maybe.  

The scenario is that if the ballot measure on the February ballot which is designed to keep State Sen. Don Perata from being termed out of his job goes down to defeat, then Assemblymember Hancock will be able run for his vacated senate seat. Oakland’s equally progressive ex-Assemblymember Wilma Chan will probably be her opponent in the Democratic primary.  

Loni seems to want to make sure that her pockets are well and truly lined just in case. Another piece of mail from her campaign was an invitation to a pricey fundraiser at a toney Hills address. The little return envelope that came inside one of the big envelopes had boxes to be checked all the way up to “Enclosed is a contribution of $3,600.” And the small print told us that “Small contributor committees may contribute a maximum of $7,200 per election.”  

Yes, serious money is being raised in our town, for sure. Well, whoever wins this race, we’ll continue to have our usual left-of-somewhere representation in Sacramento. One might wonder why it will take the better part of a million bucks from us voters and the special interest contributors to get there, however. 

And what will happen if Hancock gets the chance to ascend to the other house, I started wondering? Here’s where it gets interesting. In the same basket of mail was an invitation to Kriss Worthington’s campaign kick-off party—he’s running for Hancock’s assembly seat, assuming she doesn’t need it again. Since that one didn’t have big price-tags attached, we went, hoping to check out the house.  

When the hat was passed, we didn’t put anything in, but we felt a bit guilty about it. A chat with a campaign insider revealed that Kriss was also trying to raise what used to look like big bucks early in the race, though not nearly as much as Hancock wants. He said, for example, that members of most district labor unions already support Kriss, but that their leadership is reluctant to contribute actual money to someone who doesn’t already have a substantial war chest. Early Money Is Like Yeast, for sure. 

We went home. We thought it over. Here’s what we’ve decided: 

It’s traditional for newspapers to wait to endorse candidates until the waning days of the campaign, until polls are already predicting the winner. It’s traditional for big, well-funded newspapers to construct some sort of “editorial board” to interview candidates and to pretend to make a decision based on what they say. Uh-huh. Tell me when anyone has ever seen an editorial board bite the corporate hand that feeds it. 

And as anyone who reads this paper knows, we’re not a traditional paper anyhow. Our editorials are signed, and when I say “we” in them I’m just talking about the executive editor plus the publisher, “owners” only of our ratty desks, dangerous chairs and obsolete Macs, just the people who sign the paychecks and pay the bills. So when “we” endorse a candidate for office, it doesn’t bind anyone else on the paper. The reporters are still obliged to report the news fairly and accurately. The authors of signed columns speak only for themselves, as do the opinion page writers of letters and commentaries. And obviously the cartoonist does as he pleases. 

“We” have decided that Kriss Worthington, whom we’ve known for the 11 years he’s been on the Berkeley City Council, would make a very fine representative of the urban East Bay in the state assembly. We can’t imagine that anyone could do a better job. Kriss is phenomenally hard-working and very smart. Anyone who watches Berkeley City Council meetings knows that he’s the guy who follows the ball when most of his colleagues are wool-gathering.  

There are three other candidates in the Democratic race now, nice guys all but no match for Kriss in either experience or skill. Two are on the Richmond City Council—we’ve met them at political events and get their press releases, and they’re fine fellows, but not really ready for prime time. The third is a Berkeley resident with whom we’ve had a nodding acquaintance for a number of years, another nice guy, one who has access to a bundle of private money, but who has no legislative experience of any kind. 

There’s also a rumor that the Bates/ Aroner/Hancock apparatus (a reader once slapped our hands for calling it a machine) is desperately looking to field its own successor candidate. Dynastic politics is getting to be a bad habit in this country—if we’re not careful we could even succeed in bringing back feudalism. All too often in the 35 years I’ve been watching East Bay politics voters have been deprived of a real choice because the established Democrats have slipped in their official choice in the primary where very few voters participate. It’s time for this to end. 

Worthington is a true loyal Dem, well-liked by important segments like labor, environmentalists, feminists and minorities, but he’s not the official candidate of any organization or interest group. Hancock et al. would do everyone in the district a tremendous favor by not dredging up their own candidate and contributing to a completely unnecessary race to fill another war chest and line the pockets of ever more campaign professionals. In fact, if Hancock really truly believes that she needs to raise a quarter of a million dollars to run against Wilma Chan, she might do herself a favor by opting out of the assembly race altogether.  

But regardless of what Bates/Aroner/Hancock decide to do, we’ve already made our own choice, and we’re backing Kriss Worthington. If Early Money Is Like Yeast, early endorsements are the flour that must be kneaded in if the campaign is ever to rise to appropriate heights. We urge readers outside of Berkeley to get to know Kriss and what he stands for, and we think they’ll like him as much as we do.  

And don’t forget about that money thing, as annoying as it is. Our insider guessed that Kriss really needs to raise $100,000 by December 31 to continue as a credible candidate. It would be great if that could be raised by a thousand $100 contributions from rank-and-file voters, and it’s possible, if everyone chips in now. 

—Becky O’Malley 

P.S. Today’s mail brought yet another Hancock solicitation letter, this one correctly addressed to me. Those guys don’t quit. 

FRESH AIR? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Sen. Dianne Feinstein stated that the new Attorney General Mukasey is an “independent breath of fresh air.”  

I wonder how the victims of the Bush administration’s waterboarding would describe him. 

Dave Heller 

• 

TRUTH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I applaud Gray Brechin for his smart and powerful commentary piece, “Taking the Chronicle to Task.” I’m appalled that Dianne Feinstein voted to approve Michael Mukasey for attorney general, and that the San Francisco Chronicle supported her actions. To Brechin’s point, “controlled drowning” (which sounds more ominous than “waterboarding") is reprehensible under any conditions. Mukasey may be administratively more adept than his predecessor but, sadly, he’s as unspeakably supportive of the Bush-Cheney machine. Thank you, Brechin and the Berkeley Daily Planet for helping us readers remember what, uh, journalism is really about (the truth?). 

Elizabeth Bertani 

Alameda 

• 

COPENHAGEN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Michael Katz, in his Nov. 6 First Person article, opposes greater density and taller building for downtown Berkeley, comparing the city to the low rise capitals of Scandinavian countries. He says Berkeley should be more like them. Copenhagen has a population density of more than 15,000 people per square mile—50 percent denser than Berkeley. I guess he is suggesting that instead of having towers downtown, we should cover the town in five- to eight-story buildings as they do in Scandinavia. I agree—but I bet he doesn’t. 

Victor Silverman 

• 

CELL PHONE ANTENNAS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It seems that the idea of anything rising into the air (towers, antennae) stirs the ire of Berkeley’s build-nothing, do-nothing troglodytes. I imagine that if the campanile were being built today, UC-haters would complain that it was being done without community input, feminists would rail against having a phallic structure imposed on them, and community activists would warn of impending noise pollution from the carillon. 

I’ve avoided commenting on the antenna hysteria, but because superstition just annoys me, I’ll break my silence. Anyone who has attended high school, including presumably the Justices of the Supreme Court, should understand the square law that defines the attenuation of radiated energy as the distance from its source increases. Here are a few things more threatening to your health than living within a block of a rooftop telephone antenna: 

• Putting a cell phone to your ear. 

• Breathing near Center and Shattuck. 

• Eating a burger and fries. 

• Standing near your micro-wave when it’s on. 

• Drinking a Coke. 

• Voting Republican. 

My thanks to the City Council for not wasting my tax dollars on a pointless legal battle. 

Jerry Landis 

• 

COUNCIL’S 

CAPITULATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I was brokenhearted to see the capitulation of the City Council to the corporate fascists who insist on putting more cell phone towers in our neighborhoods. Watch closely, for this is how fascism comes to America: through the complete misuse and abuse of our constitutional system of law. One look at Kirk Trost told me in no uncertain terms that the man is a corporate stooge. The other attorneys relied on for their pessimistic advice were all hand-picked by our departing city attorney, whose lies I have documented in the LRDP case. How naive can the well-intentioned members of our City Council be? Perhaps the public should stop giving you the benefit of the doubt and assume that if you go on walking like a fascist, quacking like a fascist, and harming the people like a fascist, you probably are a fascist. 

Max Anderson is the only mensch amongst you, and even he is giving too much to the lies of the fascists. While it is true that there are many bad judges, there are also good ones who might have ruled properly in this matter to deny the fascists the anti-social object of their greed. It’s not that you fight even though you can’t win, it’s that you never know if you can win until you fight. If you are in the right, you may find hidden resources, but it is so long since any of you have been in the right that you probably forget what that feels like. 

Dona Spring complained that there were no lawyers even willing to take the case. How hard did you really try in looking for one? If all you did was rely on the city attorney to look for one for you, then how can you call that a sincere effort?  

Peter J. Mutnick 

• 

TALE OF NEW ANTENNAS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

After the cowardly votes by five City Councilmembers, now Verizon is pushing for 12 antennas on French Hotel at 1504 Shattuck. Hey, with such good friends in the city offices, Verizon is sure a permit will be issued. Based on my experience since 2002, I describe how the tale of this new set of antennas will unravel. 

This Thursday, Nov. 15, 2007, there will be a Design Review Committee meeting to discuss the superficial aesthetic issues of the proposed antennas. This committee is like a Stalinist court. It shuts people up if they cannot compare the beauty of the antennas to Sistine Chapel. The committee will quickly rubber stamp the approval. 

A few weeks later, the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) will listen to false claims of the applicant and will ignore what people have to say. They will rubber stamp a permit to Verizon. (The story may unravel differently here in that ZAB may deny permit; either way, it does not matter.) 

In two weeks, people (or Verizon) will appeal the ZAB’s decision to the City Council. 

The appeal may get ping-ponged a few times between the City Council and the ZAB. 

To give a new kink to the story, the City of Berkeley hires a so called “third party independent” engineer to evaluate Verizon’s application. Interestingly, the “independent” engineer is paid by Verizon. Not surprisingly, the “independent” engineer approves Verizon’s application. 

There could be more dramatic moments in the story. For instance, Verizon will threaten the city by a lawsuit or even file one. 

Final showdown. The city opens a public hearing. But, it will rest it for two three weeks to sap people’s momentum. 

Finally, after 18-20 months, the city tells people: “Sorry, according to Telecommunications Act of 1996, nothing can be done.” Thus, the city will rubber stamp a permit to Verizon. I can hear what council members will have to say: Capitelli: “We will lose in court. We will lose quickly and cleanly.” Maio: “I like to vote no, but will vote yes.” Wozniak: “Go catch Clinton; he passed the TCA 1996.” 

In the last scene, people tired after 18-20 months while have spent hundreds of dollars are yelling “shame, shame,” as the City Council disappears in the back chambers for a break. 

Yes, truly, shame on this sham democracy. This is rubber-stamp democracy. 

Shahram Shahruz 

• 

NEXT CITY ATTORNEY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

While nondiscriminatory “affirmative action” has been assigned numerous wordings by way of definition, the basic focus has been on policies intended to redress discriminatory practices in employment. These policies commonly redress discrimination and victimization based on age, disability, gender, marital status, sexual preference, and racial or ethnic origin, and they provide for equal opportunity in employment. 

Following introduction and implementation of employment affirmative action, it became apparent that an affirmatively managed search process can produce a pool of the best and most qualified-for-the-job candidates. 

It has been urged that the next city attorney’s appointment be the result of a search outside the city’s ranks, i.e. outside the city and state. Would the City Council—in the words of the legislation—“throw the net wide and inclusively”? 

An aspect of such a search process is creation of a “search and screen” committee consisting of representative persons especially qualified for such an endeavor. 

Helen Rippier Wheeler 

• 

PROTESTING TREES? COME ON! 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Do the second-generation spoiled idiots riding their parents’ bank accounts through school realize there is a war going on? One that our administration lied to back us into? A war that is so wrong on so many levels it makes a person dizzy? A war that has destroyed our standing on an international basis? Get some respect—get out of the damn trees and deal with real issues already. How embarrassing. 

Michael LeBrun 

U.S. Navy veteran 

• 

TORTURE INTO FOCUS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Our senators need to see the movie Rendition. It brings current U.S. practices of kidnapping and torture clearly into focus. The film shows the injustice, the pain, and the counterproductive pointlessness of these policies. Torture doesn’t provide useful information, but it does generate more terrorists. We don’t need another attorney general who can’t distinguish justice from torture.  

Bruce Joffe 

Piedmont 

• 

CROSSROADS EVICTION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

1990 was a rough year. I spent most of it fighting eviction and other actions taken by C.E.I. Corporation, my landlord. I organized a tenant’s association on the property and we took the slumlord to the Berkeley Rent Board. When I went to the city about the condition of the property at 1970 San Pablo Ave., they could not find any record of an apartment house there, and so started the law suits and rent strikes. In the beginning we had 14 units out of 26, that belonged to the association.  

I was under so much stress that I collapsed in the ER at Highland Hospital and spent seven days in Intensive Care, from a stomach ulcer. My only visitors while in the hospital were my friends Hali Hammer and Carol Denney. Carol actually drove me home from the hospital. 

About a month after I was released from the hospital the tenants in apartment number four decided they had had enough and they were going to move. I got the old tenant to agree to a sublease and since all prior agreements were oral my sublease was completely legal. This is when I contacted Carol Denney and she agreed to sign the agreement.  

Carol was the 14th member of the association that gave us the majority of the tenants in the building, which was a crucial factor in getting the loans on the building. It was also a factor in getting R.C.D., a management company, to come on board. Without Carol Denney I doubt the co-op would have gotten off the ground. 

Carol was also promised when she joined the association that she could never be evicted from her unit as long as she paid her rent and went generally along with the rest of us. Which is what makes her eviction extremely unfair since at the time I was the vice president of the board of the Village Co-Op and all of us were given the same assurances. We were all told that any eviction would have to include dispute resolution and mediation. In all fairness the eviction of Carol Denney should be stopped at once by the Crossroads Village Co-op. 

Gary Isom Spencer  

• 

CITY COUNCIL MISTREATMENT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Every person in Berkeley should be outraged by the mean-spirited treatment imposed on the disabled members of the One Warm Pool Advocacy Group at the City Council meeting on Nov. 6. I also hope that moral and caring people will voice their outrage to the City Council and more specifically to the two members of that body who blatantly carried out that travesty. Their behavior was despicable and beneath contempt and was not worthy of a city which prides itself on its humane treatment of the disabled. 

Juanita Kirby 

• 

THANK YOU, CODE PINK! 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I was deeply impressed by the open letter exchange between Captain Richard Lund, the Marine Corps officer in charge of the Berkeley Recruitment Center, and Anne Joi of Code Pink regarding their continuous demonstration in front of his office requesting its moving out of Berkeley. 

I’d like first to thank Capt. Lund for opening the door to this conversation by his letter describing clearly what it takes to have a job in the military commanded by the president. That is once you are employed, you are not allowed to change your position no matter how and where the military power is deployed. 

I know Lt. Watada, who lost his faith in the war, has now to endure a long struggle against the military’s criminalization of him. 

And I am very grateful that Anne Joi has responded to Capt. Lund in a polite conversational letter. 

To me her letter is a comprehensive reminder of the illegality and unpopularity of this war both home and abroad, the unjust treatment of both veterans and prisoners alike, the sexual abuse of female soldiers wearing the uniform of the U.S. military, and the insidious health and environmental hazards posed by the continued criminal use of depleted uranium by the U.S. military. 

It also reminded me of the Berkeley City Council’s resolution against the Iraq war, which I had almost forgotten. 

I sympathize with the position of Capt. Lund, but I think we should not have the Center in Berkeley. Living through this quagmire of war, we must not forget all the people who suffer. Everyday we must try to remember the whole picture of the world. What is more important than conversations between people with different occupations and viewpoints? 

I thank the Berkeley Daily Planet for offering a space to make this dialog possible. 

Fusako de Angelis 

• 

KPFA ELECTION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I want to thank the Daily Planet for its coverage of the KPFA election. I disagree with John Katz’s criticism for running my commentary and not Brian’s. The issue before you ran commentaries from two Concerned Listener (CL) candidates and none from www.peoplesradio.net.  

John Katz takes three shots at peoplesradio’s 10-point program. With regard to corporate underwriting, last year the GM from Houston publicly suggested that Pacifica consider “underwriting.” The fact that we don’t do it now is no guarantee for the future.  

On the Democracy Now! issue, John’s comment that it already plays twice a day is true but intentionally misleading. As our strongest news/public affairs program it should be played in prime time 7-8 a.m. Playing it at 6-7 and 9-10 a.m. begs the question. There are more people listening to their radios between 7-8 a.m. than at 6-7 and 9-10 a.m. combined. The second playing should be at night for people that can’t hear it during the day. The Morning Show folks that support CL refuse to move up one hour for a more dynamic and informative program to be in prime time. Turf before Mission? 

Transparency and accountability is far from what it should be and it has been Peoplesradio and others on the LSB and PNB that have been pushing it. CL folks have generally fought against transparency. Peoplesradio’s La Varn Williams, current PNB Treasurer, has done more than anyone to promote financial transparency at Pacifica and at WBAI, where a sectarian group has almost destroyed the listener base. CL members and allies on the PNB have refused to vote to hold WBAI accountable. Due to this I made a motion to require KPFA’s PNB members to report on their votes. CL found every bureaucratic reason to oppose this motion for transparency and accountability. 

The question that needs to be answered by John Katz for all the voters, is why has the CL slate never taken a public position on three very contested issues at KPFA? 1. The role of the Program Council; 2. The Unpaid Staff’s right to organize; 3. The Democracy Now! prime time move. 

I think the reason is that to continue to support the current KPFA staff/management group that asked CL to form their slate, CL would have to take positions that are anti-democratic and would expose CL’s power before principles politics. CL’s silence on these issues is deafening. 

Richard Phelps 

Oakland 

Despite its mission of dialogue, KPFA has become a venue for increasingly nasty attacks, which exhaust the station and turn listeners off. I would like to set the record straight on a number of allegations that have been printed in these pages and to ask the question: can KPFA afford to be at war with itself?  

Many of us have witnessed infighting destroy Left institutions—our own circular firing squads have often damaged our organizations in a way even the Right has not. Neither KPFA nor the American Left can afford such a thing, particularly today. There are different views about how the station should be run—and the differences are legitimate. The question is whether we can discuss those differences without personally demonizing the people who work hard to make KPFA the beacon of hope that it is and must remain.  

I believe the culture of vilification that has characterized KPFA’s Local Station Board election will tear the station apart regardless of who wins the actual vote. The KPFA community needs to find a way to disagree without attacking, to discuss the merits of diverging positions without impugning the motives of the people who hold them, and to work toward consensus rather than towards crushing opposition.  

Candidates for KPFA’s Local Station Board have demonized KPFA’s interim general manager Lemlem Rijio and me in campaign statements broadcast and mailed to KPFA’s subscribers (in violation of fair campaign provisions those candidates signed off on).  

The attacks are without basis but, like any smear campaign, it’s not the facts that matter—if a fabrication is repeated often enough it starts to take on a life of its own. 

The attacks insinuate that we are part of a secret plan to eviscerate KPFA’s mission and destroy its board. The allegations are based on a 2005 e-mail a staff member sent to a number of people during a crisis under the leadership of a previous station manager. The e-mail suggested discussion topics for a meeting and among them was an item suggesting a mass recall of board members, which the staff member also referred to as “dismantling” the then-current board. 

We received this e-mail. We never endorsed the staffer’s suggestion, and the meeting he proposed never took place. However, some candidates for KPFA’s board are now branding us “dismantlers” because we received an e-mail two years ago, prior to assuming our current positions. 

Candidates for KPFA’s board are also alleging that we are bent on “dismantling” KPFA’s Program Council, which we both sit on and which helps determine programming direction at the station. This is demonstrably false. By this spring, nearly three quarters of the members of the Program Council were one or two years past their elected terms, which brought the legitimacy of the body into question. We were the driving force in getting the various constituencies represented on the Council to elect new members, by giving them a deadline, providing administrative support for the recruitment of new listener representatives, and, after several month’s notice, putting the council on hiatus until new representatives were in place. The body has been meeting as a highly functional and legitimate group since September—before the current board elections began. 

It has also been claimed that we conspired to hijack both this and last year’s board elections, by not airing candidate spots on the air. However, the elections are run by an independent election supervisor who determines the timing for on air candidate statements, not us. 

Most recently, people have asserted on these pages that we have prohibited the announcement of demonstrations on KPFA’s air. This allegation is patently false. If you tuned into our last management report to the listeners, you would have heard us announce and encourage our listeners to attend the demonstration by Code Pink at the Military Recruitment office in downtown Berkeley, to oppose a right-wing counterdemonstration. And in the middle of our latest fund drive, not only did we take time out to broadcast the Oct. 27 anti-war demonstration in San Francisco, we each told our listeners multiple times about its time and location on our air. 

The people launching these baseless attacks make broader and more troubling assertions that KPFA’s staff are sell-outs and that the station is in crisis. 

In truth, KPFA is the strongest and most financially viable station in the Pacifica Network. We have more subscribers than any other Pacifica station, even those broadcasting to areas with twice the population we cover. As managers, we have increased KPFA’s channels for collecting listener feedback about what’s working and what isn’t. We believe the station has benefited greatly from that input, which informs the decisions we make. Our staff work tirelessly to shine light on US imperialism, the exploitation of working people, racism and environmental injustice, and to raise our collective spirits with an exceptional breadth of art, culture, and music. This last week, KPFA sent a team to Seattle headed by Larry Bensky to broadcast the final FCC hearing on media ownership. The FCC is poised to lift the rules on newspaper and television station cross-ownership, setting the stage for a new wave of mergers and corporate media consolidation, and as dissident FCC Commissioner Adelstein said: “no one else but you comes to cover these”. 

KPFA has expanded its programming to the cutting edge of new media, launching, among other things, The War Comes Home project, which uses online social networks, blogs, and other Internet technologies to broadcast the stories of returning Iraq veterans across the blogosphere. Of course, we could always do better, but there is a good deal of energy moving the station in a positive direction and it is a collective effort.  

So if the station is in good shape, why are candidates for KPFA’s board circulating such destructive allegations about KPFA management, the station, and its staff? More importantly, if they win control of KPFA on the basis of such attacks, what, exactly, will they have accomplished?  

Sasha Lilley is KPFA’s interim program director.

The current conflict within the KPFA community is a cauldron of bitter feelings and resentments. There are three slates of candidates currently running for the Local Station Board. I’ll discuss the two slates that are most directly at loggerheads: “Peoples Radio” and “Concerned Listeners.” The former group has severe criticisms of current station management and governance—criticisms that have been voiced quite persuasively here in the pages of the Planet, one of the venues where this debate has taken place. 

Concerned Listener candidates, on the other hand, appear to dismiss these criticisms out of hand, treating them as if they are not even worth responding to. For good reason, this infuriates those who are sympathetic to Peoples Radio complaints. A personal friend and veteran activist, Steve Kessler, has persuaded me that some of these complaints have merit. But how convincing is the broader critique made by Peoples Radio? Please consider the following: 

1. Peoples Radio makes its case largely on the basis of an e-mail message sent out by staff member Brian Edwards-Tiekert two years ago, in which he speaks of “dismantling” the local station board. However, neither the recipients of this e-mail message two years ago, nor CL candidates today, have ever indicated any agreement with it, and a meeting to dismantle the LSB never took place. The Peoples Radio campaign has made much too much of this single e-mail message. 

2. Peoples Radio alleges that KPFA management is suppressing the voices of the unpaid staff—volunteers whose work contributes so much to the station. The question that management currently faces, however, is this: Does the “Unpaid Staff Organization” (UPSO) really represent volunteer opinion? Some of the volunteers too are asking this question, and they tell the following history: a small group of people, dissatisfied with UPSO meetings, made discussion and decision-making all but impossible because they kept yelling and disrupting these meetings. As a result, a large majority of the unpaid staff stopped attending. A new group is now assuming the name of the “Unpaid Staff Organization.” Management says that it is willing to recognize an unpaid staff organization, provided that the organization really represents the unpaid staff, as was formerly the case. 

3. Peoples Radio argues that the KPFA Program Council is disregarded by station management. At issue is whether the Council is only an advisory body or has final decision-making power. Management has been trying to broaden participation in the PC, but—as with the UPSO—it has become a terrain of bitter, intractable dispute. Management says that those who were active in the Council last year refused to leave when their terms were up, but instead stayed on and are now insisting on their right to make station policy. 

The divide separating Concerned Listeners from Peoples Radio reflects a broader disagreement here in the East Bay that splits the left into two, mutually distrustful and antagonistic camps. Although there is diversity of opinion within each camp, they do represent different approaches. Concerned Listeners is more inclusive—oriented toward building broad alliances and more interested in reaching out to new audiences than in being politically “correct.” 

Peoples Radio adherents, on the other hand, tend (with some exceptions) to be more staunchly opposed to the Democratic Party, favoring third party movements instead. Peoples Radio candidate David Heller suspects that a KPFA “weakness” is “Some people who want to keep the debate within the realms of what the Democratic Party wants us to hear and uninformed about other political and social possibilities.” Another critic of KPFA argues that “what is needed most in the US: Teach radical politics, and that means on the electoral level, interview all socialist Peace & Freedom candidates and Green Party candidates.” 

It’s true that public discourse in this country is narrowly defined, and radical progressive voices are excluded from mainstream coverage. On the other hand, the left edge of the political spectrum is partly responsible for its own marginalization. Given this marginalization, it’s understandable that Peoples Radio would seek to reshape one of the few public domains accessible to its influence at all: a listener-sponsored radio station like KPFA. But is that project in keeping with the listening perspectives of the station’s wide audience, consisting of hundreds of thousands of listeners distributed throughout Northern California?  

Although Peoples Radio individuals claim to speak on behalf of “democracy,” and although there is some truth to their criticisms of station governance, they do not represent, politically or demographically, the listener base. I respect Peoples Radio for the passion that it brings to the project of changing the social world we live in. However, an acute awareness of suffering and evil in the world does not necessarily translate into knowledge about the most effective political path forward. KPFA communicates to a broad, politically diverse audience, and shouldn’t become an instrument of any group’s ideological agenda. 

Raymond Barglow is a Berkeley resident. 

Despite how he tried to portray himself in a recent East Bay Monthy article, Patrick Kennedy is no “Jane Jacobs.” He’s more like Jane’s nemesis, Robert Moses —the infamous developer who decimated New York City with freeways and oversized housing projects from 1920 to 1970. 

All urban developers try to get the largest possible building on their land to maximize profit. In the last twenty years, urban developers have often used the rhetoric of New Urbanism to build thousands of ill-conceived, high-rise buildings, completely out of scale with human beings and their surrounding communities. The developer’s logic goes something like this—“Because New Urbanists and others have shown that dense urban housing is environmentally good, hyper-dense high-rise housing must be even BETTER!” 

In reality, hyper, high-rise density can be almost as inefficient as suburban sprawl …and far more unpleasant to live in. The communities that Kennedy (and Jane Jacobs) cite as their models of success (like Greenwich Village or Cambridge Massachusetts) are all composed of densely packed two- to four-story walkup town homes and apartments. There are no 20-story high-rise buildings in these communities! The charm, walkability and community of these neighborhoods comes precisely from their smaller, “human” scale, where people have a sense of ownership or what human ecologists call “Territoriality and personal space.” 

From an environmental point of view, these smaller urban neighborhoods provide a nice level of bikeable, walkable density. Yet they are composed of buildings that can be (and were) made by hand, with low-energy materials. They use wood and stone versus concrete and steel and they don’t require elevators, compactors, electric water pumps or elaborate electrical air and water circulation systems. In the recent east-coast blackout of 2003, hundreds of blocks of New York City high-rise buildings were suddenly rendered uninhabitable, as toilets ceased flushing and people suddenly had to walk 20 flights of stairs to enter or exit their apartments. By contrast, life in lower scale neighborhoods (like those of Brooklyn and Queens) was able to continue as usual. 

Most importantly, high-rise buildings over four or five stories cut off sunlight from streets and nearby structures. As we develop solar energy, access to sun or “solar rights” will become a bigger issue. Uniform, densely packed two- to four-story development will ensure all buildings have equal access to sunlight. Buildings like Kennedy is proposing will make downtown Berkeley’s streets into lightless, anonymous, noisy canyons of concrete and traffic. 

The Wells Fargo and Power Bar buildings were terrible mistakes and are part of what destroyed downtown. The most vibrant neighborhoods in Berkeley like Elmwood, Westbrae or upper Shattuck are vibrant precisely because they lack high-rise buildings and are built on a dense but human two- to four-story scale. Kennedy’s proposed buildings are reminiscent of the high-rise “Urban renewal” apartment projects that Robert Moses and other city developers rammed through urban areas in the 1960s. In the process, they bulldozed vibrant two- to four-story (often minority) neighborhoods, replacing them with huge, anonymous apartment blocs that became hopeless prisons of poverty and crime. It was precisely this kind of development that Jane Jacobs opposed. I urge people in Berkeley to oppose Patrick Kennedy’s development proposals. 

Andy Singer grew up in Berkeley and  

currently lives in St. Paul, Minn. 

DOWNTOWN BUILDING HEIGHTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Phallic inspiration or not, I often admire the esthetics of well-designed tall buildings and even understand some of the benefits of denser land use. However, I seem to have missed one obvious question in these several years of passionate debate about downtown Berkeley height limits: How are persons rescued from “16-story point towers” in case of earthquake or fire? 

Gerta Farber 

• 

NATURE OF DEATH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In his thoughtful “Sonata on Important Things” (Nov. 2) Marvin Chachere offers a formulation, for himself and for the rest of us, on the nature of death. It invites contemplation and, perhaps, some further assessment. He first relates an assertion by Professor George Wald that “death does not exist in the non-human world and must therefore have meaning only among humans.” While this seems generally true, there is convincing evidence that elephants and the gorilla Koko have shown clear awareness of death as well as empathy for the dead, if not actual mourning. 

Mr. Chachere suggests that the beginning and end of human life have become indeterminate due to such advances as in vitro fertilization and artificial life support. There can be little argument that the biological beginning of life is the fertilization of an ovum, whether in vitro or in utero. But I would suggest that in sentient creatures we must look at the life of the brain. This amazing organ is a powerful processor, buzzing with electrical energy, constantly acquiring, revising, refreshing and retaining literally a world of data. When it plans, calculates, strategizes, creates art and meaning, we call it the mind. When it forms tastes, pleasures, compelling habits of association and gratification, we call it the self. (Some, who fantasize that it might somehow exist outside the body, call it the soul.) I propose that when the brain of the fetus first hears and assimilates sounds from the outside world, its life as a human has begun. Then, sometime later, when blood stops flowing to the brain and the last synapse has fired, life ends. 

Jerry Landis 

• 

MINOR QUIBBLES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I enjoyed Ken Bullock’s review of Little Mary Sunshine, and would like to see the play. However, the observation that the Masquers romp where Jean-ette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy would fear to tread was only half right. Nelson Eddy , admittedly came to fame and fortune because of the films, that he might never have found as an opera singer or concert artist, but he never ceased to laugh at them, and refused to ever take them seriously. In the 1960s, when he formed a greatly successful nightclub act with Gale Sherwood, he wrote their material, which included numerous comical, satirical skits revolving around Indian Love Call and the others. He would have been right at home on stage with the Masquers, because he had a delicious sense of humor that was only allowed to flourish on his radio shows—never in films; with one exception—The Chocolate Soldier with Rise Stevens. There he played a double role with great humor and got his best reviews. 

So I assure you and the Masquers that Nelson would be applauding and whistling his approval of this fun romp. 

Christine Souter 

• 

RHETORIC 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I’ve just finished reading Garry Wills’ brilliant book, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America, in which the author provides fascinating insights into this great president (who was not entirely without flaws). No one can deny that the Gettysburg Address, intended to “clear the infected atmosphere of American history” (Wills’ own words) is one of the greatest documents in all of American historical literature. I find it almost unbelievable that this powerful, moving speech, delivered on a battlefield to a nation weary of war, contains only 272 words! Thinking ahead to the next 12 months when Americans will be subjected to boring, long-winded, acrimonious campaign speeches, I suffered an acute anxiety attack. 

Uttering an urgent prayer to St. Jude, the patron saint of Hopeless Cases and Desperate Situations (honest!), I implored him to help me through this painful year of agonizing campaign speeches, debates, talk shows, etc., suggesting that he might somehow, perhaps in a minor miracle, instill into all candidates Lincoln’s gift of brevity. Don’t let me down, Jude! 

Dorothy Snodgrass 

• 

REPLY TO RICHARD PHELPS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Unfortunately, last Friday’s Daily Planet, in its editorial wisdom, neglected to run Brian Edwards-Tiekert’s explanations about the accusations against him alongside of Richard Phelps’ commentary accusing Concerned Listeners of not answering them. Instead, the Planet relegated Edwards-Tiekert’s letter, which answered those allegations, to their website! Not a logical, nor a fair, editorial decision. Brian Edwards-Tiekert is, after all, the primary source cited by Phelps et al. in the serial screed that found its way into the KPFA ballot envelopes.  

As to Phelps’ commentary, his 10-point program is disingenuous, in that he is calling for many things that already exist. KPFA already has no corporate underwriting. It already has an elaborate system of financial transparency and accountability. It already plays Democracy Now twice a day. 

In contrast, the Concerned Listeners slate, which is endorsed by Larry Bensky, Angela Davis, Kevin Danaher, Conn Hallinan and many other Bay Area leaders, stands for real substantive strengthening of the station. We are running candidates for KPFA’s Local Station Board committed to creating a workable framework for cooperation between the listener board, the management and the staff. We Concerned Listeners are trying to emphasize the proper powers of the LSB, according to the Pacifica bylaws, which enable the board to set the general goals for the station (its mission), without dictating to the management and the staff (paid and unpaid), the hands-on radio folks, how to run a radio station.  

We are trying to democratize the station—to involve a broader listener base to help us shape KPFA so it can appeal to a wider audience, and to insure that no narrow political trend will take possession of KPFA. 

I urge you to vote for Concerned Listeners (www.concernedlisteners.org) and send in your ballots by Saturday to make sure that they will arrive on time. 

John Katz  

• 

COPENHAGEN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I enjoyed Michael Katz’s commentary on Stockholm and Copenhagen, a city I visit often for family reasons. These cities are built low for historic reasons, the technology available at the time dictating heights. Since Sweden was neutral and Denmark occupied during World War II, neither suffered the destructive bombing that radically changed and raised the skyline of major British and German cities. These days, height limits in Copenhagen are dictated by air safety as well as tradition and aesthetics. 

The Danes protect and preserve their historic architecture but they also value modern design by project. The black glossy structure in the middle of the Town Hall Square is reviled by many because it’s considered ugly and out of place, but the same people are proud of their new opera house and other recent brilliant constructions. 

What I admire most about Copenhagen is the public transport, especially safe biking. I always get a bike on loan and peddle all over the city on designated lanes that are built on cobble stone above the car lanes and below the sidewalk. The biker feels protected and special, often traveling in a pack, carefully observing the rules. There are even bike lights on the major thoroughfares. 

Two summers ago, when I was visiting during a heat wave, we pedaled across town to a beach, packed with thousands of bathers who must have all arrived the same way. I’ve never seen so many bikes in one place! 

But back home in Berkeley, I either walk or drive on the main streets. I’m afraid to ride my bike. It’s even scary to walk on pedestrian crosswalks. Returning home from Denmark, I often conjure an image of America without cars, scrapping them all and using the metal to build trains and bikes. Imagine. 

Toni Mester 

• 

DOWNTOWN DENSITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I’m pleased to see that Becky O’Malley took my recent letter to the “Daily Planet” seriously enough to engage with it in the editorial that appeared in the Nov. 11 issue. But her conclusions, and her attitude toward the whole debate about density, puzzle me. She suggests that many who favor higher densities are hill-dwelling outsiders, trying to “tell the people who live on Addison Street or Berkeley Way or MLK what would be good for their neighborhoods.” The implication is that those who don’t live downtown are not entitled to express opinions about the development of the area, since we won’t be forced to live with the consequences. And yet, when I report that I would be willing to move into the downtown area if it were to become more dense and lively, O’Malley sees that as evidence of condescension. Apparently one’s opinions about the state of downtown Berkeley can be taken seriously only if one already lives there. 

This is a ridiculous conception of the terms of debate. The fact is that all of us who live and work in Berkeley should take an interest in the state of our downtown area, and in the parameters that will shape its future development and growth. If O’Malley rejects higher densities in this area, she should spend her time explaining her vision for the future of our city, rather than Googling her opponents’ names to find out how high up in the hill neighborhoods they live.  

I don’t know what set of restrictions on building heights would be ideal for Berkeley. I was intrigued by Gerald Autler’s comparison of Berkeley with Cambridge in the same issue of the Planet, which suggests that clusters of higher density can be achieved without a lot of very tall structures. But one way or another, it seems to me that we should be encouraging greater density in the downtown area rather than resisting it, for two reasons. First, we have a responsibility to take better advantage of the transportation and building infrastructure that is already in place in downtown Berkeley. If we really favor a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and want to protect our beautiful California landscapes from suburban sprawl and blight, then we need to do our fair share as a community to encourage and to accommodate more sustainable patterns of growth. Second, our downtown would anyway be a more attractive place if there were more people living there, patronizing shops and restaurants and cafes, and populating the streets and sidewalks of the central area.  

R. Jay Wallace 

• 

ABAG’S CAPITAL FUNDING  

PROGRAMS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Readers must be as tired as I am of arguments about whether Berkeley’s population is declining or increasing, and I don’t want to add to that. We’ll know the answer in about three years’ time. However, I do want to clear up a point that Gale Garcia has made more than once. 

She dislikes all the buildings constructed by Patrick Kennedy’s Panoramic Interests firm, and she’s entitled to do that. What I think she’s somewhat less entitled to do is to say (in your Nov. 2 edition) that “ABAG loaned $72 million to Patrick Kennedy ....” and that “.... capital funding contributions from ABAG have had a devastating impact on the character of the town.”  

First of all, ABAG (the Association of Bay Area Governments, of which I was executive director before retiring in 1995) doesn’t have enough money, by a long shot, to lend to anyone. Its financial programs make available, throughout California, capital funds for locally approved projects, through debt instruments (either bonds or certificates of participation), whose purchasers do so within a system that’s among the most efficient and economical in the United States. 

Secondly, the items that concern Ms. Garcia are taken completely out of context. For example, in Berkeley ABAG has also provided funding for two very worthy institutions—the Wright Institute and the Lifelong Medical Center (the latter of which, near the Oakland border, required an extraordinary collaboration among Alameda County, Berkeley, Oakland, HUD and the state of California). Similarly, funding has been found for Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Oakland, and countless educational, health care, affordable housing and retirement facilities up and down the state. 

Thirdly (and perhaps most importantly), Ms. Garcia would obviously have preferred ABAG to say no to Mr. Kennedy. But what I don’t think we want is for ABAG’s financial experts to turn down a mental health facility in Santa Cruz, an affordable housing complex in Cupertino, a school building in Petaluma, etc., because they don’t like the way it looks. Surely these thumbs-up or thumbs-down decisions should be made by the local jurisdiction within the normal democratic system. And in Berkeley, where that system probably takes longer than just about anywhere else in the country, all the buildings Ms. Garcia dislikes secured the thumbs-up sign from our representatives. Her beef should be with them, rather than with a modestly funded regional agency trying its best to keep costs down for taxpayers, governments, non-profits, charities, first-time homeowners and the elderly.  

Revan Tranter 

• 

GREAT AMERICAN SMOKEOUT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The American Cancer Society Great American Smokeout takes place on Thursday, Nov. 15. Although any day is a good day to quit smoking, this is a day for smokers to make their plan to quit, and for advocates to join the fight to help their communities enact smoke-free laws. Smokers can obtain free information on quitting at www.cancer.org/greatamericans. By calling the American Cancer Society Quitline® at 800-ACS-2345, smokers can double their chances of quitting for good. 

As a former pipe smoker for nine (9) years, I understand how difficult it is to give up the habit of lighting up when faced with a day filled with stress. But, I learned how hard it was to walk long distances in the city with pipe smoke clogging my lungs and airways. I gave up because I wanted to be able to walk and breathe when I got older. Give It Up, You owe yourself the chance to walk and breathe without coughing you when you get older. 

I want your readers to know: 

• Tobacco use is responsible for nearly one in five deaths, or approximately 438,000 lives, in the United States. 

• Smoking accounts for at least 30 percent of all cancer deaths and 87 percent of lung cancer deaths. 

• The U.S. Surgeon General reported last year that an estimated 126 million Americans are regularly exposed to secondhand smoke in their homes and workplaces, and that no level of exposure to secondhand smoke is safe. 

• Secondhand smoke is responsible for approximately 3,000 deaths from lung cancer among nonsmokers every year. 

The lifesaving results of tobacco control initiatives are just beginning. By helping Americans to quit smoking, and reducing exposure to deadly secondhand smoke, we will continue to make progress against cancer. 

Jeff Schwartz 

Community Services Director 

American Cancer Society 

Oakland 

• 

CAR SAFETY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

One simple and easy thing to do for safety is to put white reflective strips on the rear bumpers of cars. This makes a vehicle visible for several hundred feet away at night. It is especially useful in fogs, which happen frequently in the Central Valley. 

Rolls of 150 feet are available from Hawkins Safety Products, 1255 Eastshore Hwy., a few feet north of Gilman. Their phone number is 525-8500. The cost is about $50. A seven-foot length of the strip costs just a few cents. Garages could install these strips in a few minutes. 

I am not being paid anything for telling people about the strips.  

Charles Smith 

• 

KPFA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In 1999 I joined thousands in the street when the workers at KPFA were under attack by a board that wanted control of the station and the content. This is exactly what is happening again. This time it is “People’s Radio” that is attacking the workers and wants control. Their tactics and actions make a mockery of democracy in the name of democracy. If you respect and honor the incredible work done at the radio station... If KPFA is a lifeline to you as an activist or an artist... If you want the station to grow, to reach more people and to deepen its roots in movements for social justice and peace, I urge you to support the extraordinary group of life-long activists and organizers who are running as candidates with the Concerned Listeners slate. 

Jon Fromer 

• 

WHY WASTE TIME? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I witnessed once again the City Council sold out Berkeley Citizens to corporations. The event was the approval of the Verizon and Nextell antennas by the City Council. Three years ago they did the same to the neighbors of 1600 Shattuck. 

The event was yet another charade, a kind of kangaroo court. First the city attorney, having an outsourced attorney on her side, put such a convincing defense for the approval of the wireless facilities. The outsourced attorney talked for 10-15 minutes to let the council and the public know that nothing could be done because of the Telecommunication Act of 1996. 

A question occurred to me: Considering the TCA 1996, is there any way to say no to wireless providers? According to the city attorney, no. So, if there is no way to stop wireless facilities, why waste time? The city should throw away the wireless facility ordinance and cancel the ZAB or the City Council hearings. They can tell us the magic mantra TCA 1996 and rubber stamp all permits. 

What the city does is a sham democracy. They get people involved for close to two years, make them spend hundreds of hours and dollars, distress them, and at the end they say: Sorry because of the TCA 1996, nothing can be done. I believe that from now on, the city should not even bother to inform people of wireless facility applications. This can save people lots of time and money. 

No thanks to council members who approved antennas in 2004 and now. They should be recalled. 

Mina Davenport 

• 

DISAPPOINTED WITH DIANNE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I was disappointed, yet not surprised, that Sen. Dianne Feinstein voted to confirm former judge Michael Mukasey for attorney general, thus assuring his confirmation by the full Senate. I went back and read Feinstein’s Oct. 26 press release explaining her vote. According to Sen. Feinstein, Mukasey gets much credit for not being Alberto Gonzales, which sets the bar awfully low for this nation’s chief law enforcement officer. She also notes that the Justice Department’s morale is very low and now needs a strong, independent person like Mr. Mukasey to lead it. Yet she brushes aside Mr. Mukasey’s refusal to show his independence from the president by categorically declaring “waterboarding” illegal. Waterboarding, by the way, is a simulated drowning techniques used on detainees. Waterboarding is clearly prohibited by the Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Convention. 

While Mr. Mukasey finds waterboarding personally repugnant, he would not necessarily regard waterboarding illegal in the absence of a specific statute or  

law prohibiting it, a disingenuous response at best. He calls on Congress to pass such a law. Is this a demonstration of independence from the executive branch? Didn’t President Bush vigorously oppose the congressional ban on torture? I also note that Rudolph Guiliani, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson, three of the leading Republican presidential candidates, refuse to condemn the use of waterboarding. 

I keep looking for our leaders or leaders-to-be to demonstrate moral fiber. Too often, I am disappointed as I am now with Sen. Feinstein. 

Ralph E. Stone 

San Francisco  

• 

SUTTER HOSPITALS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thousands of registered nurses at 10 Northern California Hospitals in the Sutter chain walked off their jobs for two days last month. Their main complaint has been over working conditions, which are horrendous. But not only nurses suffer. Conditions of work for hospital health workers is also a life and death issue for many patients. 

The major source of labor conflict is over the nurse-patient ratio. Too many patients assigned to each nurse reduce the opportunity for a swift response. Also, overworked nurses are more likely to make medical errors and even fail to wash their hands, which can precipitate deadly infections.  

It has been well documented that the greater the patient load, the higher the patient mortality rate. To take one example, a study of 168 hospitals, which was funded by the National Institute of Health, found that the chances of a surgical patient dying within one month of admission increased by 7 percent for each patient over four in a nurses workload. 

As a non-profit hospital chain, Sutter is required to favor public service over profits. But in reality, the Sutter chain is a most uncharitable charity. Maximizing profits is its main obsession. Toward that end, it has even overcharged uninsured patients, which prompted a judge to rule that they be reimbursed. Sutter’s top executives enjoy annual salaries, bonuses, and other perks exceeding a million dollars each. As patients are bilked, millions of dollars have been shifted to its other profit making enterprises. No wonder that Sutter is among the nation’s most profitable hospitals, earning last year $587 million—64 percent over the prior year. 

The Sutter hospitals are breaking the law, and patients are unnecessarily dying as a result. At the behest of the California Nurses Association, Senator Kuehl had successfully authored a bill mandating minimum staffing requirements at California hospitals. The bill was signed by Gray Davis in 1999. But Gov. Schwarzenegger’s appointees to the Department of Health Services, which is responsible for enforcing the legislation, ignores the chronic violations at Sutter as well as elsewhere. 

The irresponsibility of the state agency should be widely publicized and it should be pressured to do its job. Also, please call or write Sutter’s President and CEO Pat Fry to demand that the hospital chain obey the law. His office is at 2200 River Plaza Drive, Sacramento, CA., 95833, or phone (916) 286-6752. 

Harry Brill 

Wellstone Democratic Club

EDITOR’S NOTE: This letter was sent to the San Francisco Chronicle.  

For decades since a twin political assassination made Dianne Fein-stein mayor, the San Francisco Chronicle has covered for her and those of the wealthy and mighty whose interests—which are her family’s own—she represents. Your reporters have repeatedly used such descriptives as “California’s respected centrist Demo-crat” to hoodwink readers into believing what her voting record, like that of Joe Lieberman’s, plainly contradicts. Above all, you have failed to investigate or reveal Feinstein’s extraordinarily lucrative public-private partnership with her financier husband Richard Blum, now the chair of the UC Board of Regents, despite the wealth he has garnered from government contracts while his wife sat at the federal spigot.  

I never expected, however, that you would go so far as to take literal dictation from Dianne Feinstein’s office. Your opening description of Feinstein as a “stalwart Democrat” was enough to provoke my gag reflex, but your defense—even commendation—of her vote to confirm Michael Mukasey was taken almost verbatim from her ludicrous attempt on Tuesday to justify an indefensible action. In doing so, both she and you have virtually endorsed one of the most horrific forms of torture as well as this nation’s drift under the Bush-Cheney autocracy towards an outright, undisguised, brutal police state.  

I have news for you: Controlled drowning is already both domestically and internationally illegal and needs no further Congressional action to make it so. Furthermore, as Sen. Kennedy said, it does not need to be illegal to be at all times and everywhere reprehensible. No qualifications, no temporizing, no triangulating need apply unless one is on the side of barbarism, which Dianne Feinstein on Tuesday and you this morning revealed yourselves to be.  

Despite its steady decline in quality, I recently renewed my subscription to the Chronicle. Even though the Hearst Corporation has performed the miraculous—making the de Young ownership of that newspaper appear a golden age, as Caligula did that of the reign of Augustus—I felt a citizen’s duty to support a vestigial news-gathering institution like the floundering charity it has become. I did so even after learning that Hearst has entered a cross-ownership with Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group which will enable both megacorporations to jointly control virtually all of the Bay Area’s newspapers, to further strip their newsrooms, censure criticism, and to bring us yet more celebrity tittle-tattle, carbon-enhancing consumerism, and other traditional Hearst fare.  

Over half a century ago, on June 9, 1954, attorney Joseph Welch famously stopped Sen. Joseph McCarthy in his hairy-knuckled tracks by asking twice, “Have you no sense of decency?” Americans responded positively at that time, but after decades of indoctrination by Reagan “conservatism,” Clinton neoliberalism and other “stalwart Democrats,” I’m not sure that most would now understand the ethical import of that question.  

After reading your editorial, I ask the same of you. I do not need to pay to receive boomeranged press releases from torture-equivocator and dictator-enabler Dianne Feinstein’s office when I can get them from her website. She and Sen. Schumer should be shunned in polite company, and your paper boycotted by those who still have the decency required to understand Welch’s query, even in Caligulan times like our own.  

I no longer want your paper to land daily like a steaming dog turd on my doorstep. I’m canceling my subscription and calling on everyone else to do the same until editor Phil Bronstein, like former Acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin, submits to voluntary controlled drowning and then reconsiders from experience what he published this morning. Better yet, Dianne Feinstein—or whoever in her office faxed you that editorial.  

Gray Brechin is a local historian and author.

Daily Planet columnist J. Douglas Allen-Taylor has been an un-abashed apologist for Mayor Dellums for too long. In a petty feud with Chip Johnson of the San Francisco Chronicle, he uses his recent column to belabor the non-issue that Chip has been treating Mayor Dellums more harshly than former Mayor Brown. In the process, Allen-Taylor sadly misses the real story. Crime in Oakland is out of control and Mayor Dellums has failed to articulate a detailed action plan to address it. I for one applaud Chip Johnson’s tenacity in reporting the issue of crime. The Reader’s Platform in the San Francisco Chronicle relates the growing frustration residents face day after day with ever increasing crime and unresponsive and overworked police. Admittedly, Mayor Dellums did not create Oakland’s crime problem, but he has a responsibility to address it. 

In October of 2006, USA Today reported a list of the most dangerous cities using FBI figures and found that of 371 cities nationwide, Oakland ranked 364. Only seven other cities, including the likes of St. Louis, Detroit, and Compton, were more dangerous than Oakland. According to CityRating.Com, which also uses FBI statistics, Oakland’s 2003 murder rates were 3.50 times the national average, robberies were 2.78 times the national average, and all violent crimes were 2.31 times the national average. Yet Oakland has half the police. According to the U.S. Justice Department, Oakland Police have 18 sworn police officers per 10,000 residents. Other comparable communities have anywhere between 23 and 49 sworn police officers per 10,000 residents. This means that each Oakland officer must respond to more major crimes than in comparable cities. 

My community of North Oakland has been plagued with crimes, including murders, armed robberies of stroller pushing moms, brazen laptop snatchings, serial burglaries and the ubiquitous street corner drug dealing. Neighbors are working to deter crime through crime prevention councils and neighborhood walking groups. But criminals run amok, and they know police response is limited. Police complain there are not enough officers to respond to crimes, dispatch personnel are overworked, and the DA has a catch and release program. Police catch the criminals, and the DA releases them. One Oakland Officer conceded while it is illegal to carry a concealed weapon, perhaps it would be safer to do so rather than rely on the Oakland police to respond to a call for help.  

I attended the Oct. 13 town hall meeting to hear Mayor Dellum’s plans for Oakland, including addressing the pervasive issue of crime. The single biggest issue raised by most speakers at the meeting was crime. One speaker even referred to Oakland as the model city for crime, something that Mayor Dellums belittled and J. Douglas Allen-Taylor didn’t report. Unfortunately, I was disappointed to see Mayor Dellums is still long on rhetoric about solving poverty, an intractable issue that has plagued the United States for years and that no big city mayor has ever resolved, and far short on the details for getting more police on the streets to deter crime and allow residents to feel safe in their neighborhoods. That is not to say that addressing poverty in the long run isn’t part of the solution.  

Seemingly out of touch, Mayor Dellums had the audacity to lecture North Oakland residents and tell us that now that crime is pervasive in middle- and upper-class communities that people are concerned. And since crime is no longer restricted to the ghettos or the barrios, we need to put our money where our mouth. It has been widely reported that Mayor Dellums is reluctant to hire more police than Measure Y calls for because he does not want a police state. As simplistic as it sounds Mayor Dellums, more police on patrol in our neighborhoods and on the street will deter crime. See what New York City has done focusing on small quality of life issues, and what Colorado Springs and other cities of a comparable size have done. Equating more police to having a police state is simply irresponsible and misguided. 

According to Forbes Magazine, Alameda County has on average some of the highest property taxes in the country. Yet we are not getting basic local government services such as adequate police and are being asked by our mayor to pay even more. We have passed Measure Y for more police services, only to see the city fail to hire enough police. While solving poverty is a laudable goal, and something that needs a long-term plan with state and federal government assistance, we need relief in the short term to allow residents to feel safe and to encourage more private investment. If the mayor wants more discretionary funding to provide social programs, such as reintegrating parolees into the community and providing early intervention programs for at risk youth, then the trade-off is to encourage private investment that provides additional property, transfer, and sales taxes. Local economic development is not about pushing aside undesirable communities and undesirable residents, as J. Douglas Allen-Taylor posits, but is about bringing jobs and hope to Oakland residents, providing a funding source for the mayor’s desire to address the concentrations of poverty in Oakland. 

The residents of Oakland want Mayor Dellums to stand up and provide leadership on this issue. We want specifics, a timetable for action and responsible parties in the City of Oakland identified to implement a comprehensive plan that focuses on hiring more police officers and ensuring morale in the department improves. We don’t want tired rhetoric. Residents want safe neighborhoods, clean streets, paved roads and economic development. We want the basics of local government. We have already spoken with Measure Y. As a community we have already put our money where our mouth is. We know that Mayor Dellums is no Superman, but it is time that he stood up and show the leadership that we all expected. The devil is in the details. Otherwise, move over and let Ignacio De La Fuente run this city. 

Jeffrey G. Jensen is a North Oakland resident. 

I am not a member of the “Concerned Listeners”; nonetheless I am a ”concerned” listener. 

I, like most KPFA listeners, was under the impression that everything was resolved when the lawsuit was settled. However, at the prompting of a friend, I started to attend Local Station Board (LSB) meetings in early 2006 and then decided to run for the LSB in the fall of 2006. As the first runner- up in that election, I joined the board upon the resignation of board member Vida Simian in August 2007. 

I think the function of the LSB is similar to that of the board of directors of a company. The board is responsible for overseeing the management of the station to ensure that the finances are in order and that the station is providing compelling programming to the paying listeners. However, as I sat through the LSB meetings, I became concerned with many disquieting facts. I will list three of them. 

First concern is the relationship between the LSB and the general manager. In order for the board to exercise effective oversight of the station, it is important for the general manager to be working closely with the board. Currently, the interim general manager rarely meets with the board. Another thing we expect of a general manager is to nurture and encourage all the parts of the station. However, just as the Unpaid Staff Organization was finally getting its group organized, the interim general manager inexplicably and preemptively “de-recognized” them. Unfortunately this gave the appearance of cutting off a person’s legs who was just beginning to learn to walk again. Communication was lacking in the extreme. I hope that LSB can establish a good working relationship with the general manager, so that we can together strengthen every segment of the station.  

The second concern is the apparent marginalization of the Program Council to that of a strictly advisory role. It seemed that Program Council, consisting of all segments of the station, was an appropriate vehicle for making programming decisions in a fair, collaborative, respectful manner. Annie Hallet, of the Program Council, worked tirelessly to recruit candidates and conduct an election, but her efforts appear to have been for naught. A conspicuous example is that the Program Council should have been involved in filling the Sunday Salon slot, and it was not. Ob-viously, it should be of concern to the board whether the listeners are satisfied with the current new host. I hope that the program director will embrace a vibrant and engaged Program Council so that programming decisions can be made in a fair, collaborative, respectful manner, as laid out in the by-laws. 

The third concern is the way in which the LSB election has been run.  

1. Ballots were mailed out per the bylaws. 

2. The “Concerned Listeners” slate mailed flyers to all the members. This well- funded act of campaigning set the stage for unequal access to the voting subscribers which has not been balanced by anything else—including air time.  

3. Interim Executive Director Dan Siegel ruled that “People’s Radio Slate” statements were ‘personal attacks’ and removed them for a time from the station website in an especially autocratic moment. 

4. Audio archive of the Oct. 15 forum was removed from the lsb.kpfa.org web site 

5. The station has not played candidate’s recorded statements on air 20 days into a 30-day election cycle. 

As an institution that takes no corporate money, our election should be a model to the rest of the world of how a free and open election is run. 

Although “Concerned Listeners” candidates state that they will “bring civility to the board meeting” and “refrain from micro-managing the station”, after sitting in on LSB meetings for over a year I do not see them as issues. While civility is an important value, it is natural to have hotly contested ideas in situations that matter greatly to people and I fear that “civility” has become a code word to smear anyone who simply does not go along with Concerned Listeners’ plans.  

From a historical perspective we all owe Carol Spooner a great deal of gratitude for her Herculean efforts in bringing listener democracy to Pacifica and we should strengthen what she so admirably fought for, which is why I am joining her in her endorsements with one addition. 

I recommend voting for Joe Wanzala, Chandra Hauptman, Tracy Rosenberg and Steven Conley, among the independents; CC Campbell-Rock of the Voices for Justice slate; and Attila Nagy and his fellow candidates of the People’s Radio slate.  

Please remember that regardless of your preferences, to make listener democracy a reality, it is very important for each of you to take the time to mail in your ballot. Thank you. 

Aki Tanaka is an Oakland resident and is a listener member of KPFA LSB. 

For the average KPFA listener, it’s not easy to understand what—if anything—is really at stake in elections for the Local Station Board, nor how to select and rank candidates. They’re divided into myriad slates and factions, all passionately denouncing one another, but they’re all experienced progressives, and at a glance their platforms and platitudes sound pretty similar. And beyond the official election pamphlet, the station itself isn’t doing much to help voters understand the issues: There’s been only one, poorly publicized in-person candidate forum, and as of this writing, more than three weeks after the ballots were mailed, KPFA had yet to begin airing the recorded pitches candidates were asked to make weeks ago.  

So are the elections just another of those circular firing squads the American left is so famous for? If so, it would make sense to do what most listener-subscribers do: toss their ballots in the recycling bin, or perhaps just vote for the names you recognize or candidates endorsed by people you respect.  

That response would be a mistake, though, at least if you are among those who think KPFA and Pacifica could be a more dynamic and effective voice for peace and justice. Behind the sound and fury, this election involves serious issues about the direction of the station and network. And while they’re ostensibly about governance rather than programming (because the Local Station Board itself doesn’t make programming decisions), these issues are directly related to what goes out on KPFA’s signal—which is to say, how well it functions as a voice for social change. 

A bit of background 

The current bylaws were adopted in the wake of the crisis that came to a head in 1999, when the Pacifica national board, increasingly out of touch with listeners and local staff, moved to “hijack” the network, evidently with the goal of converting it into a more mainstream, corporate operation. A broad alliance of listeners and programmers managed to recover control of the network. The bylaws they eventually put in place were intended to create a system of governance that allowed for strong management, but obliged it to take into account the views of both listeners and staff (paid and unpaid). 

Unfortunately, the listener-staff alliance has largely unraveled, at least at KPFA. (There are similar dynamics at the other four Pacifica stations, though the particulars differ.) Many staff members, particularly but not exclusively paid staffers, have decided they don’t like the system of governance embodied in the bylaws. Instead, they have, with considerable success, promoted a model in which power is shared (albeit sometimes uneasily) between the paid staff and managers drawn from their own ranks, while listeners and unpaid staff are largely frozen out of decision making.  

The question the KPFA community now confronts is whether to accept this trend or to make a renewed attempt to implement the letter and spirit of the bylaw—to leave the station in the hands of a self-perpetuating in-group or to push forward to a model in which listeners and the unpaid staff, as well as the paid staff and managers, have a real voice 

KPFA’s current management—Interim General Manager Lemlem Rijio and Interim Program Director Sasha Lilley—are bright and energetic, and in my opinion they have some good ideas for improvements. On the other hand, they have made it clear that they have no use for anybody they don’t control. Specifically: They routinely ignore the LSB (Lemlem is an ex officio member and is supposed to give a report every month but hasn’t attended for months). Sasha suspended the Program Council (a group made up of herself and various other managers, plus representatives from the unpaid staff, the board, and the community) for months, and now that it has reconstituted itself, she wants it to do nothing but fill out online forms. And Lemlem moved to “derecognize” the Unpaid Staff Organization (UPSO) exactly at the moment when that group was pulling itself together after a long hiatus. 

For sure, the station and the network need strong managers—no one thinks they can be run by committee. The question is whether we should have strong managers who consult only among themselves and an oligarchy of paid staffers, or whether all the station’s constituencies can have seats at the table. 

Governance and programming 

The connection between governance issues and what goes on KPFA’s air isn’t entirely obvious, but after a year on the LSB and six months on the Program Council (during most of which it was suspended), I’m convinced the link is very real. On the one hand, the people who want listeners and unpaid staff to have a real voice in the direction of the station tend also to want more community news, activist voices, and vigorous and open political debate, including about “touchy” issues like Zionism and the Israel lobby, 9/11, and the role of the Democratic party vs. third parties. (None of this equates, as the Concerned Listeners group and some others would have you believe, to some kind of ultra-left takeover.)  

On the other hand, most of the management and staff who want to run things for themselves seem to be afraid of anything that departs from “professional” radio norms or that might offend the left-liberal crowd. 

Lemlem and Sasha tried, for example, to enforce a policy that would prohibit programmers from inviting listeners to turn out for demonstrations—Miguel Molina got written up for saying “be there” about a perfectly legal antiwar rally—even though their own lawyers eventually admitted that there are no legal or regulatory grounds to ban such “calls to action.” Lately, after the LSB approved a resolution I submitted calling on management to set up a simple system for political activists to get demonstrations and other events announced on the air, management took a disturbing step in precisely the opposite direction: they added an outright prohibition on announcements of demonstrations and rallies to the station’s guidelines on public-service announcements. 

And look what happened when Larry Bensky quit: many of us thought that offered a great opportunity to try out some sharp new voices on Sunday morning, but management, with no consultation with the Program Council or anyone else, handed the Sunday slot to Peter Laufer, a guy who sounds as if he’d be right at home on mainstream radio—which is where he has spent most of his broadcasting career.  

Your choices 

If you’re comfortable with decisions like those, go ahead and recycle your ballot, or vote for the Concerned Listeners slate, which is fully committed to backing the current interim management. But if you think listeners and unpaid staff deserve a role in KPFA decision making, and if you want the station to be a stronger voice for peace and justice, then you owe it to yourself to vote for candidates who support those goals. My choices: Joe Wanzala, Chandra Hauptman, Tracy Rosenberg, Attila Nagy, CC Campbell Rock, Steve Conley, Richard Phelps, Stan Woods, Gerald Sanders, Mara Rivera, and Dave Heller. (For an explanaiton of these choices, see TK.) 

However you vote, do it soon—ballots must be received back at the station on Nov. 15. 

Henry Norr is a member of KPFA’s Local Station Board and Program Council. 

Although our City Council on Tuesday, Nov. 7 surprised many of us naïve citizens by reversing its position made two weeks earlier in support of South Berkeley residents, it was less surprising if one examines the council’s history. On many occasions, the council had led Berkeley citizens to believe that it was truly sympathetic to neighborhood concerns over RF radiation from cell phone antennas. They cite for their reason federal law as promulgated in the 1996 Tele-Commun-ications Act which pre-empts the city from being able to defend its citizen on the basis of health concerns.  

This issue was taken up once more Tuesday evening at a packed public City Council meeting. Beginning at 5:15 p.m. the council met in closed session, in part, to develop its plan for presenting its capitulation to the phone companies on this issue. Attorneys, led by Manuela Albuquerque and Kirk Trost, an outside attorney, had once again pushed the city very hard to agree to Verizon’s terms or else face and lose a very expensive lawsuit. The plan involved deciding that the council would settle the controversy by allowing Verizon and Nextel to install their 11 antennas at 2721 Shattuck Ave. In return, Verizon would drop its lawsuit to eliminate the city’s illegal ordinance. Of course, these companies and any other interested telecom companies would also be allowed to locate many other antennas at the same site in the future.  

Berkeley Neigborhood Antenna-Free Union (BNAFU) had been alerted that afternoon that the public might not be allowed to speak on our issue. So I called the city clerk’s office Tuesday afternoon and was told that the mayor could choose to allow us to speak, so I left a message with his secretary that we had, in fact, been told by councilmembers that we would at least be allowed to speak during the public comment period. I also told the secretary that many of our supporters expected to be allowed to speak and that the mayor should definitely be apprised of this fact.  

Our public comments at the previous meeting had been so powerful and persuasive, that a motion to uphold the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) received three votes, including those of Max Anderson, Donna Spring and even Mayor Tom Bates. The motion to deny the ZAB received only one vote (Wozniak’s) in its favor.  

Our supporters naively went into Tuesday’s meeting believing that we had a good chance of maintaining the council support given to us at the previous meeting. And we came prepared to speak once again, in even greater numbers. 

Just before our item was to be discussed on the council’s Nov. 6 action agenda, the mayor contemplated whether or not to allow any public comment. We know this because a city staff member was told by the mayor to approach Verizon and Nextel to ask them if five minutes would be enough time for them to present their case. I was speaking to the Verizon attorney, Paul Albritton, at the time, outside in the hall when he was approached by a city staff member who asked to speak to him privately. When Mr. Albritton returned, he reported to me that he had been asked by this city staff member if five minutes would be enough for Verizon to present its case. He said to me that he told the staff member that Verizon did not need any more time. They had finished presenting their case, and he was going to go find the Nextel attorney. These comments also happened to be overheard by others standing nearby.  

Unfortunately and unfairly, this staff member had not approached any member of BNAFU with a similar proposal to arrange to hear our comments on this agenda item. In fact, none of our supporters were allowed to say a word on the antenna proposal during the entire meeting. 

When the antenna item did come up for discussion, Councilwoman Maio immediately asked for a report from Manuela Albuquerque’s outside “independent public interest” attorney Kirk Trost. He proceeded in a very clear, detailed and prepared speech to tell the council what the city’s attorneys had pounded into council members in closed sessions over the previous four weeks.  

After this speech, despite the protests of audience members wanting to respond, the “discussion” was closed, and the council quickly voted to reject the ZAB decision and grant Verizon and Nextel their permits. This muzzling of our free speech was totally unjust, in light of the mayor’s offer of speaking time to Verizon and Nextel.  

The council’s rush to a quick decision with no public comment swept under the rug many critical issues that had been raised at the public council meeting of Oct. 23:  

1. Ms. Richie Smith, a member of the City Commission on Aging had reported that loud noise emanating from the cell antenna equipment at her church, next to her home in South Berkeley, was still keeping residents awake at night. This problem continued after Ms. Richie and neighbors had reported the problem to the city some time ago and after the city documented that the noise level was exceeding legal limits. City staff had reported on Oct. 23 that they had not been aware of a continuing problem, and that they would solve it. Ms. Richie told us on Tuesday that as of Nov. 6, no action had been taken to remedy the problem. She was not allowed to speak because there was no time allowed for any public discussion on Nov. 6.  

2. On Oct. 23, BNAFU had asked that if the permit were to be granted, we needed to know that Verizon and Nextel would pay for an independent engineer to measure RF radiation levels in the area immediately surrounding the proposed site on Ward and Shattuck. We proposed that these measurements be taken before and after antennas were installed. We suggested that the University of California could assist in this effort. No councilmember insisted on this basic neighborhood protection.  

3. We had asked city staff many times previously, and the council itself on Oct. 23, how many Verizon and Nextel antennas are currently located at each Berkeley site. We never received that needed information. But there was no time allowed to answer this question on Nov. 6. 

4. Our neighborhood has no guarantee that more antennas will not be located at this site by other cell phone companies. We had suggested that the owner of the property, Patrick Kennedy sign a document binding him and any future tenant to limiting the number of antennas to those agreed upon as a result of this settlement. No council member even bothered to raise this concern on Nov. 6. 

5. On Oct. 23, we told the council that we must fix our ordinance so that it complies with the law. We proposed that the council agree to revise the current ordinance governing the installation of antennas to conform to current court rulings on the matter, so that in the future our ordinance will stand up to legal scrutiny. Until such time that we have a legal ordinance, should we not have a moratorium on further antenna installations? 

On Nov. 6, the council clearly was in a big rush to satisfy Verizon’s demands and disallow our participation. It gave what little control it does have for mitigating the damage done by its previous 8-1 decision to institute a cell antenna ordinance completely out of whack with the law. The council then compounded that error by disregarding all of the other important concerns that the community had raised at the Oct. 23 City Council meeting. 

Thankfully, this struggle is not over. In fact, we have not even begun to fight. 

Michael Barglow is a South Berkeley  

resident. 

The presidential election will occur on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, less than a year from now. Because the candidates have been campaigning for 11 months, we already know quite a lot about the likely outcome. 

There are three front-runners in the competition for the Democratic presidential nomination: New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, and former Sen. John Edwards. Sen. Clinton has run a strong campaign, performed well in the Democratic presidential debates, and gradually pulled away from her competitors. The latest polls indicate Ms. Clinton has the support of 44 percent of Democrats, followed by Obama with 25 percent, Edwards with 14 percent, and the other candidates trailing far behind. While her favorability ratings continue to worry some political observers—78 percent of Republicans view her negatively—they’ve improved as the campaign as progressed. 

The race for the Republican nomination is closer. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani maintains a narrow lead over three other major GOP candidates: former Sen. Fred Thompson, former Gov. Mitt Romney, and Arizona Sen. John McCain. Among GOP faithful there is a notable lack of enthusiasm for any of the front-runners: Giuliani is seen as too liberal, Thompson as too lethargic, Romney as too “extreme”—he’s a Mormon, and McCain as too erratic. 

Although he isn’t doing well in the national polls, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is showing surprising strength in Iowa, the first primary state, where he’s running in second place behind Mitt Romney. Both the economic and social conservative wings of the GOP like Huckabee—he’s an ordained Southern Baptist Minister. If Huckabee is among the top three Republican candidates in Iowa, his candidacy will attract more money. 

So far, the Democratic primary has been relatively tame: there have been few of the personal attacks that often characterize these contests. That will change in the general election, as Republicans view Sen. Clinton as a prime target for attack. Rudy Giuliani has based much of his campaign on the contention that he is the best alternative to Ms. Clinton as her “liberalism” would be bad for America. 

Nonetheless, after the summer Democratic and Republican conventions, the battle for president will likely be waged on issues as much as personality. There are huge differences between the Democratic and Republican positions on the top concerns. 

The preeminent item will be Iraq, where Democrats favor a staged withdrawal and Republicans want U.S. forces to remain until they “win.” The most important domestic issue is healthcare, where Democrats favor a national plan that protects most Americans, particularly children, and Republicans oppose this as “socialized medicine.” The two parties also differ on the economy: Democrats want the federal government to take action to ensure Americans have access to good jobs and Republicans believe the solution is more tax cuts. As regards immigration, Democrats favor a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and most Republicans don’t. 

There are also clear differences on the other issues likely to be discussed in stump speeches and candidate debates. Democrats favor exploration of alternatives to fossil fuel, rebuilding America’s transportation infrastructure, and encouraging conservation by actions such as raising Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards; Republicans want regulations removed so energy companies can dig and drill anywhere in the United States. While Americans are worried about the possibility of another terrorist attack, there is disagreement about how much power to grant the president to pursue terrorists: Republicans favor granting the executive branch of government carte blanche, letting the White House do whatever it feels is necessary to thwart attacks: even if this means spying on average Americans, torturing suspects, or denying suspects due process. All Americans worry about education, but Republicans see the problem as a simple matter of setting standards and punishing poor performing schools. Democrats view education as a system that involves elements such as nutrition, family support, teacher training, and funds to improve the educational infrastructure.  

Republicans favor government involvement in important personal decisions such as family planning and end-of-life arrangements; Democrats believe these should remain private matters. Finally, Americans are concerned about the environment whether in the form of local pollution issues or the menace of global climate change. Republicans remain passive on environmental issues arguing either that environmental catastrophe has been overstated or the best solution is to let the market respond. Democrats take a more active stance and want the federal government to act both in the form of regulation and also incentives to encourage citizens and corporations to take environmentally beneficial actions. 

It appears that the 2008 presidential election will pit Hillary Clinton against Rudy Giuliani: two candidates seen as “flawed” by members of their respective parties. Although the presidential campaigns will feature virulent attacks on both Clinton and Giuliani, the primary focus will be on issues, the dramatic difference in philosophy between Republicans and Democrats. On this basis, Senator Clinton will probably prevail, as her positions are closer to the American mainstream. 

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

Bamboo is a plant with many faces and many reputations. It’s invasive, except when it’s not; it’s edible, tough, fast-growing. It’s good for scaffolding, houses, roofs, containers (in sizes from spice-bottle to bazooka), musical instruments (the Malagasy valiha tubular harp and sodinha flute, just for example), bows and arrows and the bowstrings too, fishing rods, curtain rods, flooring, paneling, dishes, kitchen and table utensils as well as the table and most of the kitchen itself, including water pipes.  

So you can eat bamboo shoots using bamboo chopsticks (or a bamboo knife, fork, and spoon) from a bamboo plate and wash it down with a drink from a bamboo cup, poured from a bamboo pitcher, sitting on a bamboo chair at a bamboo table on a bamboo floor in a bamboo house in a bamboo forest, listening to a bamboo orchestra. You can spill it on your bamboo-fiber shirt if you don’t watch out. 

I’ve even seen a bicycle made mostly of bamboo, and a mo-ped veneered in it. I’ve never heard of bamboo booze but I figure it’s only a matter of time.  

Don’t sing “Under the Bamboo Tree” as you wobble down the road, though, or some pedantic individual like me might yell out to correct you. Even timber bamboo is just tall grass. That’s part of the secret of its biological success and its indispensability to us. 

Grass has the physiological advantage of fast growth from advancing roots. That’s why prairies get along just fine while being grazed by bison; or savannas, ditto with wildebeest and other antelopes, zebras, and whatever else still ranges across Africa in magnificent herds. Grass doesn’t mind being bitten off at the top. That pruning doesn’t affect its growth pattern the way it would that of trees or most normal herbs.  

There’s a sort of running joke among evolutionary botanists about the war between the grasses and the trees, for world domination. (Currently, the grasses have domesticated us for their purposes much more successfully than the trees have: Consider how much more of the land’s surface we’ve devoted to grains—grasses—than to fruit orchards and ornamental trees.) It seems to me that the various bamboo species represent a sort of biological compromise between the two, or maybe a subversion of the tree strategy of size and structural sturdiness.  

Bamboo accomplishes this by having a critical proportion of lignin and cellulose in its tissues—lignin for stability, cellulose for tensile strength—and a tubular stem/trunk structure for optimum light weight to be supported.  

Another of bamboo’s physiological peculiarities is the way it flowers.  

Yes, grasses flower, if someone doesn’t mow or graze them. They’re wind-pollinated; the flowers get away with being inconspicuous since they don’t have to attract pollinators. Any bamboo species tends to bloom rarely—30 to 80 years, by some estimates—and then all at the same time.  

And then the plants die. The synchronous bloom and seed-setting is followed by the withering of the parent plant. Since a whole grove or even forest might consist of one clone arising from a central root mass, rather like an aspen clone, it all follows the same sequence and then drops dead.  

This has interesting consequences. It might be that it’s not such a problem as had been supposed for pandas, who feed exclusively on bamboo foliage, unpromising though that is. They’ve survived rather a lot of these bloom years; I guess that’s no surprise. What they need, apparently, is more bamboo forests to move to when their heretofore reliable green buffet disappears.  

The mass flowering of bamboo is reminiscent to the life cycle of those cicadas that live underground for 17 years, then stage a mass emergence, mate, and die. (Or 13 years, depending on the cicada.) Oaks and other nut trees do something similar on a less dramatic scale when they bear heavily and en masse in their masting years.  

It’s all about predator satiation. The bamboos flood the market to ensure that some seeds don’t get eaten, and do it on such a long cycle that seed-eaters are unlikely to adapt their own life cycles to it.  

“If bamboos flowered every year, seed eaters would track the cycle and present their own abundant young with the annual bounty,” wrote Stephen Jay Gould. “But if the period between episodes of flowering far exceeds the life-span of any predator, then the cycle cannot be tracked (except by one peculiar primate that records its own history).” 

Gould notes that such a reproductive cycle, in this case so long that any seed-eater would starve to death waiting before becoming dependent on it, works just fine evolutionarily: “It is sometimes advantageous to put all your eggs in one basket—but be sure to make enough of them, and don’t do it too often.” 

Photograph by Ron Sullivan. 

A timber bamboo in a Berkeley backyard.

“Religion, sometimes, is a continuation of politics by other means,” notes Jon Alterman, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies Middle East division, and it was hard to avoid that thought about last month’s conference of Christians United for Israel (CUFI) in Washington, D.C.  

There was Gary Bauer, former head of the right-wing evangelical Christian organization, the Family Research Council, bringing a crowd of 4,000 conventioneers to their feet with a prayer that “the people of Israel…—even under American pressure—never give up even one centimeter” of land in the Occupied Territories. 

According to the weekly Jewish newspaper, The Forward, a choir struck up “Blow the Trumpets in Zion, Zion,” while delegates “danced between the rows waving Israeli and American flags; some people wept.” 

If there was something slightly bizarre about apocalyptic Christians weeping over the fact that Israel might trade land for peace, there was nothing fringy about the foreign policy heavy weights CUFI has gathered under its wing. On hand to address the convention was Senator Joseph Lieberman, Republican heavyweight Newt Gingrich, and the man who will quite likely to be the next prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. 

The force behind CUFI, Texas Pastor John Hagee, counts President George Bush, Republican presidential hopeful Senator John McCain and the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee among his supporters, as well as a number of Democratic legislators, including U.S. Rep. Eliot Engel of New York. 

Hagee’s organization—active in all 50 states—is currently pressuring Congress to confront Hezbollah in Lebanon, increase aid to Israel and toughen sanctions on Iran, although the Texas minister himself doesn’t think Teheran will respond to anything but war: “It is time for America to adopt Senator Lieberman’s words and consider a military pre-emptive strike against Iran.” Hagee also advocates attacking Syria and the Palestinians.  

Lieberman and Hagee are not the only ones talking about attacking Iran these days. President Bush recently told the American Legion convention, “Iran’s actions threaten the security of nations everywhere … We will confront this danger before it is too late. According to an “informal poll” taken by ex-Middle East CIA field officer, Robert Baer, “The feeling is we will hit the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps” within six months. The Sunday Times reported Sept. 2: “The Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive air strikes against 1200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranian military capacity in three days.” 

Are Christian evangelicals, in what is arguably the most religious administration in U.S. history, driving the Bush Administration’s agenda in the Middle East and Africa? Or is the religious content of U.S. foreign policy “politics by other means”? Is the current culture war against Islam by people like historian Bernard Lewis, philosopher Francis Fukuyama and Pope Benedict XVI a return to the religious mania of the First Crusade, or does it have more in common with TV evangelists whose concerns are the contents of their parishioner’s wallets rather than the state of their souls?  

Certainly the Bush Administration has appointed religious activists to key policy positions. Longtime religious activist and neoconservative Elliot Abrams, former chair of U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom, has helped focus U.S. foreign policy on “religious persecution” in Sudan, Russia and China. According to Newsweek, his co-chair, right-wing Catholic activist Nina Shea, made “Christian persecution Washington’s hottest topic.”  

The Bush administration’s Special Envoy to the Sudan, Robert Seiple, is the former CEO of World Vision, a Christian aid and advocacy organization. According to John Eibner, chief executive officer of Christian Solidarity International, “pressure” from Christian groups played an important role in pushing the U.S. to get involved in Sudan.  

But is U.S. Africa policy driven by religious activists, or by the fact that by the year 2015 some 25 percent of U.S. oil imports will come from that continent? Christian evangelicals have also made deep inroads into the American military.  

Lt. Gen. William Boykin, currently a deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, argues that the fight in Iraq is between a “Christian nation” and “Satan,” and can only be won “if we come against them in the name of Jesus.” 

The Pentagon is a strong supporter of Operation Straight Up (OSU), which delivers entertainment and sermons to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. OSU describes its mission as a “crusade”—an incendiary word in the Middle East—and distributes a “left behind” video game where players fight the Antichrist represented by the United Nations. Former Air Force Academy graduate Mickey Weinstein, who heads up the Military Freedom Foundation, describes OSU as “the Christian Taliban.” 

According to a 2006 study for the U.S. War College by Col. William Millonig, Christian evangelical influence in the armed forces began during the Vietnam War. He concludes that “conservative Christian and Republican values have affected the military’s decision making and policy recommendations,” warning that “America’s strategic thinkers, both military and civilian, must be aware of this and its potential implications on policy formulation.” 

Again, however, are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan driven by a religious agenda, or the fact that 65 percent of the world’s remaining oil reserves are in the Middle East? 

Religion has long played a role in the West’s relationship to the rest of the world, but more as a way to divide populations than convert them. Ireland and India are cases in point. 

England invaded Ireland in 1170, but for the first 439 years it was a conquest in name only. In 1609, however, James I founded the Plantation of Ulster, imported 20,000 Protestant settlers and introduced religious strife as a political tactic. By favoring Protestants over the native Catholics in politics and economics—the so-called Ulster Privilege—the English pitted both groups against one another. 

The tactic was enormously successful, and England used it throughout its colonial empire. Nowhere were the British so successful in transplanting the Irish model than in India. 

But in India’s case it was unnecessary to import a foreign religion. The colonial authorities had India’s Muslim and Sikh minorities to use as their wedge. As the historian Alex von Tunzelmann argues in “Indian Summer,” it was the British who defined India’s communities on the basis of religion: “Many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged.” 

Muslims and Sikhs were favored for the few civil jobs and university slots open to Indians, a favoritism that generated tensions among the three communities, just as it had in Northern Ireland. The colonial regimes exploited everyone in both countries, but for some the burden was heavier. When communities in both countries fell to fighting over the few crumbs available to them, the British authorities stepped in to keep order, sadly shaking their heads about the inability of people in both countries ever to govern themselves. 

While Sir John Davis was describing the Irish as “degenerate” with the “heart of a beast,” Lord Hastings was arguing that “the Hindoo appears a being nearly limited to animal functions and even in them indifferent … with no higher intellect than a dog.” 

Lest one dismiss the above characterizations as typical 19th Century colonial racism, Winston Churchill once commented, “I hate the Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”  

Churchill’s intolerance, however, had a very practical side to it. As prime minister he once said that he hoped that the tension between Hindus and Muslims would remain “A bulwark of British rule in India.” 

The British were not alone in using religion as a tactic to divide and conquer. The French employed it quite successfully in Lebanon and Vietnam. In the former, Paris favored Maronite Christians over Muslims (and Sunni Muslims over Shiite Muslims), and in the latter, Catholics over Buddhists.  

No colonial tactic is successful forever, however, and in the aftermath of World War II the empires collapsed. But the use of religion as a device to divide and conquer leaves considerable wreckage in its wake. 

The current peace between Catholics and Protestants in Ulster is holding, but it took countless lives and almost 400 years to achieve.  

The partition of India on religious grounds cost more than a million lives and displaced some 12 million people. Pakistan and India have fought four wars since 1947, and the last one came distressingly close to going nuclear.  

And tensions between communities in India are still high. The right-wing Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party led nationwide riots over a 16th Century mosque in Ayodhya, and five years ago, 2000 Muslims were massacred in Gujarat by Hindu extremists. 

Exploiting religious differences hardly ended with the demise of the great colonial empires.  

The French continue to exploit religious divisions in Lebanon, and the U.S. is currently trying to cobble together a Sunni united front to confront Washington’s three opponents in the Middle East: Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Syria is mostly Sunni, but Bashar al-Assad’s regime is dominated by Alawites, a variety of Shiism. Some 60 percent of Lebanon is Shiite. 

But Shiites only constitute about 12 percent of Islam, and while Washington talks of a “Shiia crescent” as if it constituted some kind of united front, in fact there are enormous differences between Arab Syria and Lebanon, and non-Arabic speaking Iran. 

Islam is a polyglot of cultures and ethnicities—the largest Muslim country is Indonesia— but that point gets lost in the current culture war directed at Islam.  

Historian Bernard Lewis recently told the Jerusalem Post that Muslims “seem about to take over Europe” because Europeans have “surrendered” to Islam in the name of “political correctness” and “multi-culturalism.” Philosopher Francis Fukuyama argues that France’s opposition to the Iraq War was “in part to appease Muslim opinion,” and Omer Taspinar of the Brookings Institute claims that European Muslims “are becoming a more powerful political force than the fabled Arab street.” 

But as Jytte Klausen of Brandeis University points out, since only 10.25 percent of the Muslim population in Europe can vote, there is “very little cost” for political parties to ignore the concerns of Muslim communities. 

Researchers Jonathan Laurence and Justin Vaisse, who studied France’s Muslims, conclude there is “no such thing as a Muslim community,” and polls found that French Muslims listed “economic inequality” as their first concern. Foreign policy came in twelfth.  

Indeed, as Patrick Weil of the Sorbonne points out, the myth that Muslims somehow influenced France’s foreign policy “is the same argument as saying the Bush decision to go to Iraq was because of the Israeli lobby.” Muslims did oppose the war, as did most Europeans.  

If religion influences foreign policy, it is because it dovetails with the policies of powerful economic interests, which is not to say that religion always defers to secular self-interest. Once conjured up, it can take on a life of its own. 

In “Les Blancs,” Lorraine Hansberry’s edgy play about colonial Kenya, the play’s central character, Tshembe, points out that while concepts like race and religion are indeed instruments which men use to rule over one another, those contrivances create their own reality. “Men invoke the device of religion to cloak their conquests,” Tshembe tells a clueless American reporter. “You and I may recognize the fraudulence of the device, but the fact remains that a man who has a sword run through him because he refuses to become a Moslem or a Christian…is suffering the utter reality of the device. And it is pointless to pretend that it doesn’t exist—merely because it is lie.”  

In the Middle East and Sudan, religion certainly appears to be the “continuation of politics by other means.” Whether it is President George Bush invoking the threat of a world-wide Muslim Caliphate, or Pope Benedict XVI warning that Islam promotes violence, religion is increasingly being used to ramp up the fear factor in international politics. But as with Europe’s great religious wars, in the end religion in foreign policy is a device that allows the strong to seize the resources of the weak in the name of a higher power.

Water is the primary problem to solve if we’re to raise plants. I suspect this has always been the case almost everywhere (and offhand I can’t think of what the theoretical exception would be) and likely will be, at least until some theoretical descendants are working hydroponic plantations outside the orbit of, say, Mars, where the problem will be sunlight. Probably there’s some smiling herb grower now who’s working on an electricity-sparing solution to that.  

The conundrum, once we get that water, is balance. Surprise: the problem of water is also the problem of air.  

Winter’s coming in, and with luck we’ll have more rain. Some plants that have stoutly withstood the usual summer drought will succumb to a surfeit: succulents like cacti and some California natives like flannelbush are susceptible to crown rots and plain old drowning if they spend the winter in poorly drained soils.  

Roots, even those of big trees, lie mostly in the top two or three feet of soil. The more water-retaining the soil is, the more shallow most roots will be. They need some free oxygen, some air, around them, and soil with its pores and little spaces filled with water doesn’t have room for air.  

Containers also tend to drain slowly, often because something’s obstructing the hole in the bottom. (You wouldn’t be cruel enough to put a helpless plant in a watertight pot, would you? Aside from water plants and swamp plants that like wet feet, of course.)  

A paradox: a plant wilts when it’s too wet as well as when it’s too dry. The latter makes sense: water, moving through a plant’s circulatory system and out to its leaf tips and edges one molecule at a time, is part of what makes leaves and nonwoody stems stand up.  

So when leaves and stems droop, naturally we think of watering the plant. If we know the plant well enough, we can spot thirst before that, as leaves lost their usual luster and get just a little flaccid, a little tired-looking.  

Before rushing for the hose or the watering can, though, be bold and stick a finger into the soil at least one knuckle deep. A wilting plant in damp soil might either be temporarily coping with hot direct sun, or a fungal infection might be clogging its circulatory system. Fungi are present in most soils most of the time but, rather like the mildew on the bathroom wall, they get a boost from wet conditions.  

So cop a feel of your plants’ leaves and its soil, sure. But even before that, know what your plant will tolerate.  

The best way to figure that out is to know where the plant’s roots are. No, I mean figuratively. A plant of local ancestry will likely be OK in local soils. A plant from a mountaintop will want fast drainage. A plant from a riverside might not mind wet feet.  

The key to all that is the plant’s specific epithet—its Latin-sounding name. Uh-oh. But it’s not that hard, really. If you can order from a Thai or Italian menu, you can learn enough Latin to call your plants by name. 

Stay tuned.

I tend to stare at the ceiling a lot. I think it’s only to be expected. If you sleep on your back or lie on the couch reading Jane Austin (as we all must), you’re bound to spend a certain amount of time staring off into space and guess what’s there … between you and space but your ceiling. There it hangs (Yes, that’s what it’s doing, hanging.) between the walls, with all those cracks and stains and Grateful Dead posters and you think, “Maybe I should do something about this mess but what can I do? It’s a ceiling, not a casserole. I don’t know where to begin!” 

Many of us live in handsome old casas lined with walls and ceilings of lime plaster, a product made of limestone and transformed through baking and hydrating processes until we have the powder that makes useable plaster.  

In the houses of a hundred years ago and all the way up to about WWII, plaster was installed over wooden lath. This is essentially how this worked. Once a house was framed, a lather would install thin strips of redwood, lining the rooms of the house with these thin, furry and somewhat wiggly sticks. They varied in length, since there was no four- or eight-foot module and would run as long as the wall or ceiling allowed, getting spiked into place with lots of tiny “blued” lathing nails (bluing is a low-cost rust prevention).  

The lath was spaced about three-eigths of an inch, and when plaster was smeared across the lath surface, it would get smooshed (like my technical lingo?) though the spaces and dry into a shape that could no longer fit back out. This held the dry plaster in place. The plaster also dried onto the furry surface of the lath, further grasping the plaster. 

What I find fun about this technique is that it smacks profoundly of wattle and daub, a technique that is at least 10,000 years old, using wooden sticks similar to wooden lath with clay or dung smeared across the surface and finished into a hard surface. This was how walls in homes were commonly surfaced in many early European for eons. There truly IS nothing new under the sun. 

Anyway, I digress and then digress some more. 

Plaster was applied to the wooden lath in two or three coats of increasing hardness and decreasing viscosity so that the final layer could be quite smoothly applied and dry to a very hard surface. This actually becomes something of a problem for modern homeowners who want to stick Grateful Dead posters on their ceilings. They end up with cracks and also have a helluva time driving those thumb tacks in far enough. The wiser person puts up their poster using a tiny drill and a slightly fatter nail. Drill bits can be found in very fine sizes. 

In the era of WWII, wooden lath was replaced with gypsum lathing board (aka button board). This was the first use of the new gypsum plaster and predates and predicts drywall by at least a decade. Gypsum lath was made in long narrow sheets in which a field of holes was punched. The lathing board was nailed to wall and ceiling framing, much as modern drywall might be but was then covered with lime plaster. This is still done today in better homes where plaster is preferred. I’m on the fence as to how swell I think it is but I do admit to very much liking an imperfectly smooth surface, and drywall just doesn’t do that very well. 

So now, having laid down the history, we can discuss what can be done in your ancient manor. Real plaster that has begun to crack is easily distinguished from drywall, especially along ceilings. Since ceiling joists (usually 2x4s) hang from wall to wall, they tend to sinuate every time a Hummer (or truck) rumbles down the lane. 

Over the decades, they tend to develop fine cracks along the lathing, and if you look carefully you may notice that there are long running cracks about every two inches or so running the length of the room. Sometimes you can only see a few of them, but they still suggest the same effect. 

Plaster, like all things, varies in quality, and some plaster fared well these many decades. Other batches I’ve seen over the years haven’t proven so hearty and it’s quite clear that, in some cases, it was just bad mixing (this is also often true for concrete or stucco). If you have a house that has a lot of loose, cracking and unsightly plaster, I wouldn’t recommend any further patching but would instead beg you bite the bullet and start replacing the plaster with drywall. 

This has some real upside as well, so don’t feel bad. When you take the old plaster down, rather than patching over it, you gain access to the volume of the wall and make electrical work (and other cool things) a practical reality. Let’s take your dining room as a possible starting place (often a favorite). When you remove the plaster and all the old nails, you can easily add plenty of electrical outlets and lighting. 

You can install wall sconces if you like (a common Craftsman era feature) as well as a chandelier, a ceiling fan or recessed lighting. The wiring you connect all these things to can be quickly and cheaply installed because access is so good. Too often I see upgrades to lighting in a room with old plaster and am generally sure that the wiring wasn’t upgraded and may, in combination with bigger light fixtures become a hazard. 

With the wall open, it’s also possible to run speaker wire and install recessed or hanging speakers with hidden wiring. How about smart cable for a flat panel TV or a digital projector? How about phone wiring or a built-in vacuum system?  

A skylight is also easier to install if the plaster is out and sheetrock is going in, and it’s much easier to replace a window if you’re already replacing wall material. 

Taken on a one-room-at-a-time basis, replacement of plaster with drywall is not a huge project and here are some ways to make it even simpler: 

If keeping the job to a minimum is vital, old cracked plaster can be covered over with thin sheets of drywall. Drywall is made in one-fourth and three-eighths inch for just this purpose. Sheets of thick drywall can be screwed to framing directly through the old cracked plaster and then finished with tape and joint compound to create a smoother finish. 

Again, you won’t get a chance to use the full wall cavity, although you can make a lot of holes in the plaster running wiring, and then cover them over with your new layer. Two downsides to adding layers are loss of height or room size and added weight. 

When removing plaster, keep in mind that plaster is extremely alkaline and can cause a burning sensation when inhaled. Old plaster may also contain viral matter and other garbage that we’re better off not breathing, so use of a well-fitting respirator is strongly recommended if you’re involved in the removal process (also goggles, boots and heavy clothing). 

When removing plaster, it’s also a good idea to protect your floors with cardboard or old carpeting. Lime plaster is made using sand, and you can really scratch those old floors up if you don’t take precautions. 

It’s pretty amazing what a project like this can do for your spirits and how much a room can change in this process. My wife and I did this to our own home many years ago and it freed us to change many more things than we ever expected to change: lighting, skylights and even ceiling fans.  

Now I can lie on my couch and stare at the ceiling in the safe knowledge that somewhere, far away, someone else gets to stare at the Grateful Dead instead of me. 

TUESDAY, NOV. 13 

CHILDREN 

Children’s Delight Musical Theeater for ages 3 and up at 6:30 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. 524-3043. 

Illustration Workshop with illustrator M. Sarah Klise of “Regarding the Fountain” at 4 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. For ages 7 and up. 981-6223. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Naomi Wolf describes “The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot: A Citizen’s Call to Action” at 7:30 p.m. at , First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $10-$13. www.globalexchange.org/naomiwolf 

“The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area” Author Richard Walker, in conversation with Rebecca Solnit at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. www.universitypressbooks.com 

“Anarchy and Art” with author Allan Antliff at 7 p.m. at AK Press, 674-A 23rd St., Oakland. 208-1700. 

Poetry Flash with Matthea Harvey & Joe Wenderoth at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley City College Auditorium, 2050 Center St. 525-5476. www.poetryflash.org 

Freight and Salvage Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $4.50-$5.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

John Truby explains “The Anatomy of a Stroy: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller” at noon at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Page Stegner introduces “The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Junior Reid, Reggae Angels at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $18. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

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

Andrew Sammons, jazz, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

Vital Information at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$20. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 14 

CHILDREN 

“BookSongs” Gerry Tenney sings folksongs inspired by the books you love at 3:30 p.m. at the Claremont Branch, Berkeley Public Library, 2940 Benvenue Ave. 981-6280. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Spaces” Photographs by Warren Glettner opens at the Christensen Heller Gallery, 5829 College Ave., Oakland. 655-5952. 

FILM 

“Contortions: The Perfomance Work of Patty Chang” with filmmaker Patty Chang in person at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Rhoda Curtis reads from her memoire “Rhoda: Her First Ninety Years” at 6:30 p.m. at the North Branch, Berkeley Public Library, 1170 the Alameda at Hopkins. 981-6250.  

Tony Platt, coauthor with Cecilia O'Leary of “Bloodlines, Recovering Hilter's Nuremberg Laws, From Patton's Trophy to Public Memorial” at 7:30 p.m. at Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. 388-8932. www.hillsideclub.org 

Ann Vileisis discusses “Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes From and Why We Need o Get It Back” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

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

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Joel Behrman Group at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Whiskey Brothers, old-time and bluegrass at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Bandworks at 7:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $5. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Diablo’s Dust at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Benny Velarde at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Salsa dance lessons at 8:30 p.m. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

VOCO with Moira Smiley at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Vital Information at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$20. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, NOV. 15 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Creative Reuse” works by Oakland students. Opening reception at 5:30 p.m. at 472 Water St., Jack London Square, Oakland. On display to Dec. 16. 465-8770, ext. 310. 

“One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now” Guided tour at 12:15 p.m.at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. 

Patrick O’Kiersey “Selected Paintings and Drawings” Opening reception at 5 p.m. at the Craft & Cultural Arts Gallery, Atrium, State of California Office Bldg. 1515 Clay St., Oakland. 622-8190. 

THEATER 

Hecho in Califas “Amor Cubano” Written and performed by Eric Aviles at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

“Patty Chang” A performance by the video/performance artist at 6 p.m.at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Barbara Becnel introduces and discusses Stanley “Tookie” Williams’ memoir “Blue Rage, Balck Redemption” at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way at Dana. Donation of $10 suggested. 559-9500. 

The Holloway Series in Poetry: Rachel Levitsky: A poetry reading With graduate poet Gillian Osborne. Thursday, November 15th at 6:30pm 315 Wheeler Hall (the Maude Fife Room) on UCB campus Description: Avant-garde poet and critic Rachel Levitsky is a writer "committed to social and spiritual change." Her poems are often "highly charged, quick-to-read, funny and smart," sometimes vulnerable and bare, always engrossing For more info: http://holloway.english.berkeley.edu 

Adrian Tomine introduces “Shortcomings” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

John Hamamura reads form his novel “Color of the Sea” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

The Carol String Trio will present a free chamber music concert at the Central Berkeley Public Library on Thursday, November 15, from 12:15 to 1 pm. Violinist Brooke Aird, violist Linda Green and cellist Cathy Allen will perform works by Bach, Gliere and Dohnanyi. The performance takes place at the Central Berkeley Public Library, 5th Floor, 2090 Kittredge Street (at Shattuck), which is wheelchair accessible. This free event is sponsored by the Friends of the Berkeley Public Library. For more information, call 510-981-6100 or visit www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org.  

New Century Chamber Orchestra Baroque concert with Margaret Batjer at 8 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $28-$42. 415-357-1111. www.ncco.org 

Yo-Yo Ma, cello and Kathryn Scott, piano, at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $50-$125. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

dysFUNKtion Dance performance by UC Berkeley’s Asian American Association at 7 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $10 at the door.  

Aumnibus, acoustic world, at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $TBA. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

The Infamous Stringdusters at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Snake Trio with Marco Grandos at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Mike Stadler at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Faun Fables, Yva Las Vegas, Loretta Lynch at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Gato Barbieri at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $24-$28. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

“What do I know about a heart? To me, a man’s an asset!” Mae West’s very intonation is proverbial—though just after the start of Sex, her 1926 Broadway blockbuster now revived at the Aurora, she intones, not too piously: “Don’t give me that church business again; you’ll get me goin’ back to the old homestead.” 

That’s what a good deal of the ’20s were about, and another reason they were called roaring. After the First World War, they couldn’t keep ‘em down on the farm, and the duplicities of middle class respectability versus the facts of life, which the novelists and playwrights of Europe and America had been exposing for a couple of generations or so, became the stuff of popular entertainment.  

Vaudeville spawned burlesque—and in a way, burlesque spawned Mae West. Sometimes called “the greatest female impersonator who actually was female,” Mae’s mannerisms were as exaggerated as the—assets—that got a life jacket named after her during the next world war. And Sex, the play and the risque’ subject matter, was what got her over the top and in the nation’s eye (or face) for over 50 years. 

Risqué—the very word summons up a lost half-world of knowing words, looks, gestures ... moves ... that played off the polite meaning of things, the naughty exhibitionistic side of hip, or louche. Lenny Bruce’s bumper shots off compulsive morality now often draw blank looks; how will the hoarier poses of wisecracking Mae make out in The Postmodern? 

Maybe better, as—like current icons such as Madonna—she’s all show, all provocation, in fact a lot of talk, especially when removed from her milieu, one informed with constant tension over behavior, over the social mask. 

So how does the venerable Aurora, under the steady hand of artistic director Tom Ross, turn such a relic of bygone showmanship for contemporary consumption? Wisely, by concentrating on a good time had by all—a reduction of a tour-de-force of yore to a nostalgic entertainment, brought off by skillful entertainers. 

The one tour-de-force remaining is Delia MacDougall’s playing of the lead character, Miss Marguerite (Margy) LaMont, as something more than a bravura impression of Mae. She plays Mae West in every sense, makes her image live, a real icon. 

The rest of the cast was chosen well, having to play two or three roles each, especially two other real troupers, Steve Irish as Mae’s limey squeeze off a lime squeezer, Lt. Gregg, and Maureen McVerry as slummer and thrillseeker “Clara Smith,” showing considerable physical comic skill on her way down to the floor and back up again. 

Kristin Stokes is very bright and funny, touching as a good girl gone bad, and hoping to go back. Mae’s comment: “Agnes’ idea of a good time is to hear the bells chiming and have a good cry ... If I were as dissatisfied as you are, I’d join the Salvation Army.” She also plays a French maid and a chanteuse in the Cafe Trinidad, getting into a funny six-legged dance number with others in the ad-lib chorus. 

It’s that chorus, or ensemble, that really counts, from the framing device of New York Times critic sniffing and Variety scribbler spieling about Mae’s hit, to the panoply of popular—and forgotten—romantic tunes, dance numbers (from “Shake That Thing” to “Everybody’s Shimmying Now”) to Mae’s own versions of red hot mama crooners.  

It’s all a lot of fun, well-executed (if in a way cinematicized, the direction Mae went in from Broadway) with one really funny twist of plot which spices up a suburban parlor scene. But it doesn’t quite catch—though it strives very well—the tone of double-entendre, of artificiality versus sordid reality, which burlesque and the original pulp fiction used to bravely signify, proud to be “genre,” generic.  

On a more middle-to-highbrow level, reading Anita Loos also proves a little bit of a wash-out as far as seeing what all the fuss was about, while her friend Dorothy Parker comes across a little better. But to catch the dark undertow that closed Sex down when it was a success on Broadway and made Mae stand up in the black maria all the way to headquarters in a way that still aches, that’s still all-too-current, it’s necessary to see certain plays of O’Neill—or read Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. 

SEX 

8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday;  

2 and 7 p.m. Sundays through Dec. 9 at the Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addision St.  

$28-$50. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org.  

Bamboo is a plant with many faces and many reputations. It’s invasive, except when it’s not; it’s edible, tough, fast-growing. It’s good for scaffolding, houses, roofs, containers (in sizes from spice-bottle to bazooka), musical instruments (the Malagasy valiha tubular harp and sodinha flute, just for example), bows and arrows and the bowstrings too, fishing rods, curtain rods, flooring, paneling, dishes, kitchen and table utensils as well as the table and most of the kitchen itself, including water pipes.  

So you can eat bamboo shoots using bamboo chopsticks (or a bamboo knife, fork, and spoon) from a bamboo plate and wash it down with a drink from a bamboo cup, poured from a bamboo pitcher, sitting on a bamboo chair at a bamboo table on a bamboo floor in a bamboo house in a bamboo forest, listening to a bamboo orchestra. You can spill it on your bamboo-fiber shirt if you don’t watch out. 

I’ve even seen a bicycle made mostly of bamboo, and a mo-ped veneered in it. I’ve never heard of bamboo booze but I figure it’s only a matter of time.  

Don’t sing “Under the Bamboo Tree” as you wobble down the road, though, or some pedantic individual like me might yell out to correct you. Even timber bamboo is just tall grass. That’s part of the secret of its biological success and its indispensability to us. 

Grass has the physiological advantage of fast growth from advancing roots. That’s why prairies get along just fine while being grazed by bison; or savannas, ditto with wildebeest and other antelopes, zebras, and whatever else still ranges across Africa in magnificent herds. Grass doesn’t mind being bitten off at the top. That pruning doesn’t affect its growth pattern the way it would that of trees or most normal herbs.  

There’s a sort of running joke among evolutionary botanists about the war between the grasses and the trees, for world domination. (Currently, the grasses have domesticated us for their purposes much more successfully than the trees have: Consider how much more of the land’s surface we’ve devoted to grains—grasses—than to fruit orchards and ornamental trees.) It seems to me that the various bamboo species represent a sort of biological compromise between the two, or maybe a subversion of the tree strategy of size and structural sturdiness.  

Bamboo accomplishes this by having a critical proportion of lignin and cellulose in its tissues—lignin for stability, cellulose for tensile strength—and a tubular stem/trunk structure for optimum light weight to be supported.  

Another of bamboo’s physiological peculiarities is the way it flowers.  

Yes, grasses flower, if someone doesn’t mow or graze them. They’re wind-pollinated; the flowers get away with being inconspicuous since they don’t have to attract pollinators. Any bamboo species tends to bloom rarely—30 to 80 years, by some estimates—and then all at the same time.  

And then the plants die. The synchronous bloom and seed-setting is followed by the withering of the parent plant. Since a whole grove or even forest might consist of one clone arising from a central root mass, rather like an aspen clone, it all follows the same sequence and then drops dead.  

This has interesting consequences. It might be that it’s not such a problem as had been supposed for pandas, who feed exclusively on bamboo foliage, unpromising though that is. They’ve survived rather a lot of these bloom years; I guess that’s no surprise. What they need, apparently, is more bamboo forests to move to when their heretofore reliable green buffet disappears.  

The mass flowering of bamboo is reminiscent to the life cycle of those cicadas that live underground for 17 years, then stage a mass emergence, mate, and die. (Or 13 years, depending on the cicada.) Oaks and other nut trees do something similar on a less dramatic scale when they bear heavily and en masse in their masting years.  

It’s all about predator satiation. The bamboos flood the market to ensure that some seeds don’t get eaten, and do it on such a long cycle that seed-eaters are unlikely to adapt their own life cycles to it.  

“If bamboos flowered every year, seed eaters would track the cycle and present their own abundant young with the annual bounty,” wrote Stephen Jay Gould. “But if the period between episodes of flowering far exceeds the life-span of any predator, then the cycle cannot be tracked (except by one peculiar primate that records its own history).” 

Gould notes that such a reproductive cycle, in this case so long that any seed-eater would starve to death waiting before becoming dependent on it, works just fine evolutionarily: “It is sometimes advantageous to put all your eggs in one basket—but be sure to make enough of them, and don’t do it too often.” 

Photograph by Ron Sullivan. 

A timber bamboo in a Berkeley backyard.

TUESDAY, NOV. 13 

End the Occupation Vigil every Tues. at noon at Oakland Federal Bldg., 1301 Clay St. www.epicalc.org 

“Make Art NOT War” Artists are invited to bring their works to display along the sidewalk in front of the Marine Recruiting Station, 64 Shattuck Square, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. 548-7119. 

"Recycling Issues in Berkeley, Albany and Emeryville: What You Should Know" with Martin Bourque, Executive Director of the Berkeley Ecology Center and Nicole Almaguer, Albany Community Development Dept. at noon at Albany Library, at Marin and Masonic, Albany. Brown bag lunch sponsored by the League of Women Voters. 843-8824. 

“The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot: A Citizen’s Call to Action” with author Naomi Wolf at 7:30 pm, at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $10-$13. 415-255-7296, ext. 253. www.globalexchange.org/naomiwolf 

“Intellegence and Counter-Terrorism” with Ram Sidi, veteran member of Israel’s counter-terrorism establishment at 4 p.m. in the Toll Room, Alumni House, UC Campus. 642-7747. 

“Human Rights for European Gypsies” with C J Singh, at 7:30 p.m. at International House, Bancroft and Piedmont. 642-9460. 

Writer Coach Connection Volunteers needed to help Berkeley students improve their writing and critical thinking skills from noon to 3 p.m. To register call 524-2319. www.writercoachconnection.org  

Berkeley School Volunteers Orientation from 4 to 5 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. Come learn about volunteer opportunities. 644-8833. 

Community Meeting on Redesign of City of Oakland Website at 7 p.m. at LAkeside Park GArden Center, 666 Bellevue Ave. Other meetings throught the month. For the survey see www.oakland.net/survey For information call 449-4401.  

“Older and Wiser: Basic Legal Knowledge for Living Well to the End,” with estate planning attorney Sara Diamond at 1:15 p.m. at North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 981-5190. 

American Red Cross Blood Services is holding a volunteer orientation at 6 p.m. Advanced sign-up is required; please call 594-5165.  

Berkeley School Volunteers Orientation from 4 to 5 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. Come learn about volunteer opportunities. 644-8833. 

Street Level Cycles Community Bike Program Come use our tools as well as receive help with performing repairs free of charge. Youth classes available. Tues., Thurs., and Sat. from 2 to 6 p.m. at at 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

Community Sing-a-Long every Tues, at 2 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. 524-9122.  

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 14 

Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning Colloquium with Amir H. Gohar “Balancing Tourism Development and Cultural Site Preservation Along the Red Sea Coast” at 1 p.m. at Wurster Hall, Room 315A, UC Campus. All welcome. laep.ced.berkeley.edu/events/colloquium 

Civilian War Victim Series “Collateral Damage” with Dr. Brian Gluss at 1 p.m. at Emeryville Senior Center, 4321 Salem, Emeryville. 596-3730. 

AnewAmerica’s Gala & Microbusiness Expo at 6 p.m. at the Holy Redeemer Conference Center, 8945 Golf Links Rd., Oakland. Tickets are $85. 540-7785. www.anewamerica.org 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. Heavy rain cancels. 548-9840. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Sing for Peace at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

Stitch ‘n Bitch at 6:30 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

THURSDAY, NOV. 15 

“Countryside Living: Impacts to Wildlife and Watersheds” with Dr. Adina Merender at 7 p.m. at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Sponsored by the Golden Gate Audubon Society. 843-2222. 

“Current Research at Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary” with research coordinator Dr. Lisa Etherington at 12:30 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, Oak at 10th St., Oakland. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

“Playground” new extreme ski and snowboard film by Warren Miller at 8 p.m. at Wheeler Auditorium, UC Campus. www.warrenmiller.com  

“Aging Artfully” with Amy Gorman on Profiles of 12 Visual and Performing Women Artists 85 – 105 at 7 p.m. at El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Ave., El Cerrito. 526-7512.  

Babies & Toddlers Storytime at 10:15 and 11:15 a.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. 524-3043. 

FRIDAY, NOV. 9 

THEATER 

Actor’s Ensemble of Berkeley”Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave., through Nov. 17. Tickets are $10-$12. 841-5580. www.aeofberkeley.org 

Altarena Playhouse “Morning’s at Seven” A family comedy by Paul Osborn Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Altarena Playhouse, 1409 High St., Alameda, through Nov. 11. Tickets are $17-$20. 523-1553. www.altarena.org 

Aurora Theatre Cmpany“Sex” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St., through Dec. 9. Tickets are $28-$50. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

Berkeley Playhouse “Seussical, the Musical” Thurs.-Sat. at 7:30 p.m., Sat. at 2 p.m., Sun. at 3 pm. at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., through Dec. 2. Tickets are $18-$23. 665-5565. www.berkeleyplayhouse.org 

Berkeley Rep “After the Quake” at the Trust Stage, 2025 Addison St., through Dec. 21. Tickets are $33-$69. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Central Works “Every Inch a King” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., through Nov. 18. Tickets are $9-$25. 558-1381. 

Contra Costa Civic Theatre “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., selected Sun. at 2 p.m. at Contra Costa Civic Theatre, 951 Pomona Ave., (at Moeser), El Cerrito, through Dec. 9. Tickets are $11-$18. 524-9132.  

Masquers Playhouse “Little Mary Sunshine” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., selected Sun. at 2:30 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond. Tickets are $18. 232-4031. www.masquers.org 

UCB Dept. of Theater, Dance, and Performance “Wintertime” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at the Durnahm Studio Theater, UC Campus., through Nov. 18. Tickets are $8-$14. 642-8827. t 

Women’s Will “Antigone” Fri.-Sun. at 8 p.m. at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St. between Telegraph and Shattuck, Oakland, through Nov. 11. Tickets are $15-$25 sliding scale. 420-0813.  

Wing It Performance Ensemble “Hot Earth” An improvisaltional performance on gobal warming at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $20 if you drive, $15 if you carpool, and $10 if you leave your car at home. 465-2797. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Unbound Confession” Non-Representational Statements Group show of abstract works. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at ACCI Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527. 

FILM 

International Latino Film Festival “Fabricando Tom Zé” Musica do Brasil at 6 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $6-$8. 849-2568.  

“Hollywood Commandos” with filmmaker Gregory Orr in person at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808.  

“The Mind is a Liar and a Whore” by Antero Alli, at 8 p.m. at Grace North Church, 2138 Cedar St. Cost is $6-$10. 548-2153. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Susan Dinkelspiel Cerny presents “An Architectural Guidebook to San Francisco and the Bay Area” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Karla Brundage reads from her new poetry collection “Swallowing Watermelons,” at 7 p.m. at Nefeli Caffe, 1854 Euclid Ave. 841-6374. 

Neva Carpenter reads from her memoir of growing up in El Cerrito “Harem Scarem in El Cerrito” at 6 p.m. at the IT Club Cafe, Cerrito Theater, 10070 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. 848-1994. 

Adam David Miller reads from “Ticket to Exile” at 6:30 p.m. at Marcu Books, 3900 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Oakland. 652-2344. 

MUSIC AND DANCE  

Oakland East Bay Symphony with soprano Hope Brigss at 8 p.m. at Paramount Theater, 2025 Broadway. For ticket information call 652-8497.  

Sarah Manning and Shatter the Glass Dinner and concert at 6 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, Oak at 10th St., Oakland. Cost is $40-$60. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

American Ballet Theater at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $38-$100. 642-9988.  

Babtunde Lea’s “Summoning of the Ghost” Tribute to THe NYC Village Gate at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ.  

Los Cenzontles at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054.  

San Francisco Bay Area African Dance and Drum Festival at 6 p.m. and all day Sat. and Sun. at Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts, 1428 Alice St., Oakland. 415-378-4413. 

Liz Carroll & John Doyle, Celtic fiddle and guitar, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $20.50-$21.50. 548-1761.  

The Nomadics, jazz, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

SONiA & Disapper Fear at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082.  

108, Ghenna, Lbal, Pulling Teeth at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $8. 525-9926. 

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

San Francisco African Drum & Dance Festival at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $8-$10. 548-1159.  

One Struggle Band, Company of Prophets, The Attik at 7 p.m. at Café Axe Cultural Center, 1525 Webster, Oakland. Free. www.weekendwakeup.com 

Dionne Farris, R&B vocalist, at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $20-$26. 238-9200.  

SATURDAY, NOV. 10 

CHILDREN  

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with Ingrid Noyes & Michael Harmon, Old time music with banjo and guitar at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5 for adults, $4 for children. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Reflections” Art Reflecting Positive Energy by East Bay Women Artists. Opening reception at 7:30 p.m. at Alta Bates Hospital Gallery, 2450 Ashby Ave. Exhibition runs to Jan. 3. 204-1667.  

“Cultural Memories” Color pigment photographs by Mary Ann Hayden opens at Photolab Gallery, 2235 Fifth St.and runs to Dec. 28. 644-1400. 

“Community Recipe Book” an exhibit documenting the interaction of Laotian elders and African American and Latino youth as they participated in the park’s art and gardening program. Opening reception at 2 p.m. at Peralta Hacienda Historical Park, 2465 34th Ave., Oakland. 532-9142. www.peraltahacienda.org 

FILM 

“Resisting Enemy Interrogation” films of the US Army Air Force at 6:30 p.m. and “The Memphis Belle: Story of a Flying Fortress” at 8:45 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

THEATER 

“A Shirtwaist Tale” on American labor history, American women’s suffrage, and American Jewish history, Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at JCC of the East Bay, 1414 Walnut St. Tickets are $15-$20. 848-0237, ext. 3. http://ashirtwaisttale.com  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Rhythm and Muse with Philip Rodriguez at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. 644-6893. 

Lydia Lunch and Arthur Nersesian read at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Sam Cacas introduces his new novel “BlAsian Exchanges” at 3 p.m. at Eastwind Books, 2066 Univesity Ave. 548-2350. 

“Keep ‘em Flying” A discussion of issues of masculinity and identity in the films of the FMPU at 2 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive Theater. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Nokuthula Ngwenyama, violin and viola at 7:30 p.m. at Regents Theater, Holy Names University, 3500 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. Tickets are $35-$40. 601-7919. www.fourseasonsconcerts.com 

American Ballet Theater at 2 and 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $38-$100. 642-9988.  

Roberta Piket and Eric km Clark in concert at 8 p.m. at Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Tickets are $10-$15. 845-1350. 

Gary Wade, Unplugged at noon at Cafe Zeste, 1250 Addison St. 704-9378. 

Works in the Works, a low-tech performance series for Bay Area performing artists to show newly created works and works-in-progress Sat. and Sun. at 7:30 p.m. at Eighth Street Studio, 2525 Eighth St. Tickets are $10. 527-5115. 

Shadowdance 2007, Gothic and Tribal belly dance at 8 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway, Oakland. Tickets are $15-$20. 415-259-8629.  

Hecho in Califas with Upground and La Muñeca y Los Muertos at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Frankye Kelly & Her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Tom Rigney & Flambeau at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun/Zydeco dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054.  

Not an Airplane, Chris Jones, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Bay Area Guitar Summit with Dave Ricketts& Rob Reich, Teja Gerken, and San Francisco Guitar Quartet at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

John Calloway & Diaspora at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15. 845-5373.  

Charles Wheal & the Excellorators at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Ben Bernstein and Friends at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082.  

Iron Lung, Agents of Abhorrence, Never Healed at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $8. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, NOV. 11 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Works by Teresa Brazen” Reception at 2 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

FILM 

“Land and Live in the Jungle” from films of the US Army Air Forces First Motion Picture Unit at 3 p.m. and “God Is My Co-Pilot” at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Mark A. Wilson on “Julia Morgan: Her Unique Place in American Architecture” at 2 p.m. at the Seldon Williams House in Claremont Court. Tickets are $25. Sponsored by Berkeley Architectural Heritage Assoc. 841-2242.  

Day of the Dead Artists Talk with Abraham Ortega, Mariana Garibay and Lissa Jones at 2 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, Oak at 10th St., Oakland. 238-2022.  

“Moku o Lo’e: A History of Coconut Island” with author P. Christiaan Klieger, at 2 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, Oak at 10th St., Oakland. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

American Ballet Theater at 3 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $38-$100. 642-9988.  

Live Oak Concert with Jupiter String Quartet at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Cost is $12-$15. 644-6893.  

Community Women’s Orchestra “Women in Music” at 4 p.m. at Lake Merritt United Methodist Church, 1331 Lakeshore Ave., Oakland. Suggested donation $10. 463-0313.  

Zehetmair Quartet at 5 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $46. 642-9988.  

Upsurge, jazz and poetry, at 7 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Chinyakare Ensemble at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Bandworks at 1 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $5. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Ed Reed at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15-$18.. 845-5373.  

Marc Atkinson Trio at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

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

MONDAY, NOV. 12 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Alice Walker reads from “We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness” at 6 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. www.universitypressbooks.com 

Ira Cohen, Michael Rothenberg and Louise Landes Levi read at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Ilana Simons reads from “A Life of One’s Own: A Guide to Better Living Through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf” at 4:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

John Truby describes “The Anatomy of a Story: 22 Steps to Becomming a Master Storyteller” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

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

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Theatrum Musicum, early Elizabethan consort music, at 7 p.m. at Le Bateau Ivre, 2629 Telegraph Ave. 849-1100. www.lebateauivre.net 

UC Jazz Ensembles at 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

TUESDAY, NOV. 13 

CHILDREN 

Children’s Delight Musical Theeater for ages 3 and up at 6:30 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. 524-3043. 

Illustration Workshop with illustrator M. Sarah Klise of “Regarding the Fountain” at 4 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. For ages 7 and up. 981-6223. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Naomi Wolf describes “The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot: A Citizen’s Call to Action” at 7:30 p.m. at , First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $10-$13. www.globalexchange.org/naomiwolf 

“The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area” Author Richard Walker, in conversation with Rebecca Solnit at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. www.universitypressbooks.com 

“Anarchy and Art” with author Allan Antliff at 7 p.m. at AK Press, 674-A 23rd St., Oakland. 208-1700. 

Poetry Flash with Matthea Harvey & Joe Wenderoth at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley City College Auditorium, 2050 Center St. 525-5476. www.poetryflash.org 

Freight and Salvage Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $4.50-$5.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

John Truby explains “The Anatomy of a Stroy: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller” at noon at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Page Stegner introduces “The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Junior Reid, Reggae Angels at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $18. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

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

Andrew Sammons, jazz, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

Vital Information at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$20. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 14 

CHILDREN 

“BookSongs” Gerry Tenney sings folksongs inspired by the books you love at 3:30 p.m. at the Claremont Branch, Berkeley Public Library, 2940 Benvenue Ave. 981-6280. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Spaces” Photographs by Warren Glettner opens at the Christensen Heller Gallery, 5829 College Ave., Oakland. 655-5952. 

FILM 

“Contortions: The Perfomance Work of Patty Chang” with filmmaker Patty Chang in person at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Rhoda Curtis reads from her memoire “Rhoda: Her First Ninety Years” at 6:30 p.m. at the North Branch, Berkeley Public Library, 1170 the Alameda at Hopkins. 981-6250.  

Tony Platt, coauthor with Cecilia O'Leary of “Bloodlines, Recovering Hilter's Nuremberg Laws, From Patton's Trophy to Public Memorial” at 7:30 p.m. at Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. 388-8932. www.hillsideclub.org 

Ann Vileisis discusses “Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes From and Why We Need o Get It Back” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

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

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Joel Behrman Group at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Whiskey Brothers, old-time and bluegrass at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Bandworks at 7:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $5. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Diablo’s Dust at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Benny Velarde at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Salsa dance lessons at 8:30 p.m. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

VOCO with Moira Smiley at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Vital Information at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$20. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, NOV. 15 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Creative Reuse” works by Oakland students. Opening reception at 5:30 p.m. at 472 Water St., Jack London Square, Oakland. On display to Dec. 16. 465-8770, ext. 310. 

“One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now” Guided tour at 12:15 p.m.at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. 

Patrick O’Kiersey “Selected Paintings and Drawings” Opening reception at 5 p.m. at the Craft & Cultural Arts Gallery, Atrium, State of California Office Bldg. 1515 Clay St., Oakland. 622-8190. 

THEATER 

Hecho in Califas “Amor Cubano” Written and performed by Eric Aviles at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

“Patty Chang” A performance by the video/performance artist at 6 p.m.at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Barbara Becnel introduces and discusses Stanley “Tookie” Williams’ memoir “Blue Rage, Balck Redemption” at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way at Dana. Donation of $10 suggested. 559-9500. 

The Holloway Series in Poetry: Rachel Levitsky: A poetry reading With graduate poet Gillian Osborne. Thursday, November 15th at 6:30pm 315 Wheeler Hall (the Maude Fife Room) on UCB campus Description: Avant-garde poet and critic Rachel Levitsky is a writer "committed to social and spiritual change." Her poems are often "highly charged, quick-to-read, funny and smart," sometimes vulnerable and bare, always engrossing For more info: http://holloway.english.berkeley.edu 

Adrian Tomine introduces “Shortcomings” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

John Hamamura reads form his novel “Color of the Sea” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

The Carol String Trio will present a free chamber music concert at the Central Berkeley Public Library on Thursday, November 15, from 12:15 to 1 pm. Violinist Brooke Aird, violist Linda Green and cellist Cathy Allen will perform works by Bach, Gliere and Dohnanyi. The performance takes place at the Central Berkeley Public Library, 5th Floor, 2090 Kittredge Street (at Shattuck), which is wheelchair accessible. This free event is sponsored by the Friends of the Berkeley Public Library. For more information, call 510-981-6100 or visit www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org.  

New Century Chamber Orchestra Baroque concert with Margaret Batjer at 8 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $28-$42. 415-357-1111. www.ncco.org 

Yo-Yo Ma, cello and Kathryn Scott, piano, at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $50-$125. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

dysFUNKtion Dance performance by UC Berkeley’s Asian American Association at 7 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $10 at the door.  

Aumnibus, acoustic world, at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $TBA. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

The Infamous Stringdusters at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Snake Trio with Marco Grandos at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Mike Stadler at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Faun Fables, Yva Las Vegas, Loretta Lynch at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Gato Barbieri at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $24-$28. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Tenor Kalil Wilson, 26, who grew up in Berkeley and Oakland, won the annual New York Metropolitan Opera National Council competition regional finals in Los Angeles on Oct. 30 and will sing on-stage at the Met in February in the semifinals. 

Wilson, who now lives in Los Angeles, and is a recent honors graduate in ethnomusicology and vocal performance from UCLA, attended Berkeley Walden School, sang in the Oakland Youth Chorus and is an alumnus of the Young Musicians Program affiliated with UC Berkeley.  

His mother, Jackie Wilson, once ran a clothing store on Telegraph Avenue and is a past administrator for the Daily Planet. His stepfather, Baba Ken Okulolo, is the popular leader of West African and world music groups, such as Kotoja and the Nigerian Bros. 

Wilson recalled participating in his stepfather’s bands when very young, on stage dancing and playing drums. His first voice lessons were in high school. 

The Young Musicians Program “was welcoming, inviting ... it was really good training in the discipline of music, from the ground floor up,” he said. “There was a close relationship with the faculty. And everybody sang with the chorus during first period everyday.” 

He credited David Tigner, an influential teacher with the program, as “the first person who got me singing classical music. He was my mentor. A great person who ignited the spark I didn’t know was there.” 

Wilson’s interest in opera was “sparked by early music,” he said. “It had a lot of the conventions of jazz--improvisation, sparse scores with a lot of liberties taken, small ensembles and small stages. Monteverdi worked with orchestras of 15 to 20, max. They could see who they were playing for.” 

His training in ethnomusicology—with primary focus on West African popular music “and the larger diaspora, over to the Caribbean and America, with early jazz”—finds expression through his podcasts at www.passport.com, which Wilson said is “the flip side of ethnomusicology.” 

“I was looking at years in the academic trenches if I devoted myself to a career,” he said. “Singing took precedent. But that part of me manifested itself through the podcasts, the commentary I give on the programs. It’s prototypical music of the people, but maybe not so well-known. I pick it out, give an everyman’s intro, and the listeners’ curiosity takes over.” 

His programs, rated through I-Tunes along with other individuals’ podcasts and bigger concerns, like NPR podcasts, “usually place in the Top 50--and have been second in popularity,” earning up to 1400 hits recently.  

After recently finishing a demo of jazz and R&B standards, Wilson looks forward to the Met semifinals “with a lot of emotions; I choose the happy, the positive ones. I get to do what most people don’t. So I’m just going up there singing, trying to connect to the audience. Art is relevant if you’re true to it, trying to be part of the score; it’s frozen in time until performed. It’s a temporal form, and I’m halfway proud of myself if I produce something relevant to the moment, to myself and the audience. Then I’ve done the job of an artist.” 

The National Council’s competitions offer prizes of $15,000 to up to five winners of the Grand Finals. Unlike their famed pre-1954 predecessor, Auditions of the Air, they do not offer a contract or an audition for one with the Met (Auditions of the Air also awarded a $1,000 prize). Run entirely by volunteers, the competitions draw entrants from 45 districts in 15 regions. Semifinalists sing on the Met stage, finalists with full orchestra. 

Wilson’s regional appearance featured arias he chose from Benjamin Britten’s Albert Heering and from Giasone. For the semifinals, he’ll sing “two other baroque pieces: one obscure, from Rameau’s Dardanes, the other from Handel’s Alcina.”  

Of singing as a career and the “rap” of opera as “arcane” music, Wilson said, “I grew with chorus, early music, everything from Byzantine chants to modern showtunes and what’s in between. I explored my voice and choral singing. It’s been refreshing for me to unite things, to explore my racial and cultural background, to express unity, not disparity. Music is music; not the universal language, but a language. Popular music finds its way into the classical. Most high musics were once music of the people. For myself, I want to go where my voice leads me, down a number of paths which, so far, are not mutually exclusive.” 

Once in a great while, everything goes right. It’s not very often, mind you, but it does happen. This time it’s the play that’s ending its two-week run this weekend at the East Bay Jewish Community Center in Berkeley. 

The short version of this review is that everyone should drop everything and go see it. 

Aside from the fact that A Shirtwaist Tale is a great deal of fun and the music is delightful, it’s probably the easiest way you’ll ever find to get a real look at how we got to where we are in stuff like unions and women’s rights. 

(Hint: Aren’t you glad that those women in 1909 got work hours restricted to 52 hours a week plus not more than two hours of overtime on any one day?) 

Please note: There were men involved too. And we have some first-class performances by them on stage. 

But women—unable (or considered unfit?) to vote are presented here as leading the massive labor movement which caused so many changes. It’s a piece of history that really should be out there. 

A Shirtwaist Tale is a remarkable use of solid historical background for what is, in fact, a classic musical. There’s a full story—with a happy ending—quite comfortably intertwined with the real conflicts of the political struggles. 

Playwright Judith Offer has effectively and intelligently elected to create a 1950s style musical—complete with the now almost lost traditional third act. 

Offer says, “American playwrights are not addressing American subjects as much as they should.” 

She plans to write more “history” plays. That should strike anyone who sees her work in Shirtwaist as a really good idea.  

The uniformly excellent cast is astonishingly large by contemporary standards: Fifteen (Count’em 15!) actors for 16 roles. And the qualities of the performances are excellent. It is, in fact, so strong a production as to finally lay waste to the idea that all the best actors have turned professional.  

Quite probably, they just like to eat.  

We tend to think that once something is committed to film we have it forever. The act of recording seems by its very nature permanent, and often we forget that the very materials used to record are nearly as transient as the images they capture. For the reality is that film is a tenuous medium at best, given to disintegration and, in the case of nitrate films, spontaneous combustion. And this is compounded by the fact that cinema itself was for decades considered merely a novelty, an ephemeral entertainment of virtually no great cultural or historical value. 

In fact, it is estimated that 90 percent of all films made during the silent era (1895-1929) and 50 percent of all films made before 1950 are lost, disintegrated over time, neglected or willfully destroyed to extract their nitrate content, or simply mislabeled and forgotten, awaiting discovery on some dusty shelf. 

The National Film Preservation Foundation, a nonprofit organization created by Congress in 1997, has helped save more than 1,000 films over the past decade. Most of these films are not commercially viable; the audiences they draw at film festivals are not nearly large enough to cover the costs of their preservation and distribution, and there’s little financial incentive for commercial companies to release them on DVD.  

So the foundation, through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, stepped into the void and began releasing many of these rare cultural artifacts on DVD. The award-winning Treasures From American Film Archives series has consistently been one of the best reviewed discs every year in which a collection has been released. The first set featured a sampling of rare films spanning the history and range of the medium; the second focused on the silent era. 

This year the foundation has released Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934, another beautifully produced collection of 48 educational films, commercial features, cartoons, newsreels and propaganda films. The four discs each have a theme: urban life, women and women’s suffrage, labor and capital, immigration and patriotism. At $89.99, the price may seem a bit steep, but the set includes four feature films, an illustrated book with notes for all the films, and commentaries and original musical accompaniment for each. And all proceeds support further film preservation.  

Viewing these films is like traveling back in time. It’s a uniquely compelling experience to see documentary footage of everyday life 100 years ago, to see everyday people going about their everyday lives—not posed in static photographs, but walking, talking and laughing. And the more formally staged films say just as much if not more about who these people were, about how they thought and behaved, and how they sought to influence and persuade one another. And though the differences between their time and ours are legion, at times the real surprise is how much has remained the same. 

100% American (1918, 14 minutes) features the screen’s first genuine star, Mary Pickford, in a film designed to encourage citizens to buy war bonds. The idea of movie stardom and the harnessing of that influence for commercial and political means was new at the time, and there was no more popular figure in motion pictures than “America’s Sweetheart.”  

In the opening scene Pickford is shamed by a man on the street selling bonds. “Our boys are sacrificing their life-blood,” he cries, “What sacrifice have you made?” An alien thought in our time, when the popularity of war is maintained only by keeping it at arms’ length. We then watch as our plucky heroine struggles to overcome the myriad temptations of daily life—fancy new dresses, ice cream sundaes, public transportation—in an effort to save her pennies and donate them to the cause. Nevermind that Pickford wasn’t actually a citizen; in her native country the film was retitled 100% Canadian. 

In other films it’s apparent that some things haven’t changed over the years. Listen to Some Words of Wisdom (1930, 2 minutes) gives us Mr. Courage and Mr. Fear, chatting amiably over dinner at a restaurant. The Great Depression has Mr. Fear worried about his finances, even though he has just received a raise, and thus he orders a simple meal of crackers and milk. Mr. Courage intervenes, advising Mr. Fear that it is his patriotic duty to spend his money to help jump-start the economy.  

While there are many films in the collection that represent progressive causes, then as now film production was an expensive enterprise, so it is no surprise that so many of these films represent moneyed interests. Two cartoons illustrate the point. The first, The United Snakes of America (1917, 80 seconds) is essentially a newspaper political cartoon, brought to life by stop-motion animation as the drawing is inked in, first the faces and bodies of Uncle Sam flanked by an army man and a navy man. The film essentially creates a punchline by presenting the most crucial elements last, as snakes with labels such as “pro-German press” and “peace activists” come into view, attacking Uncle Sam and revealing that the cartoon is in fact a swipe at all those perceived as undermining the war effort. As far as editorial cartooning goes, this is not the least bit unusual. But to whom does this statement of opinion belong? An independent cartoonist? A media corporation—Hearst, perhaps, or Pulitzer? In the final seconds a hand comes into view to proudly sketch in the credit line and reveal the source: the Ford Motor Company.  

Uncle Sam and the Bolsheviki-I.W.W. Rat (1919, 40 seconds) is another animated political cartoon in which Uncle Sam protects the gross domestic product from the evil claws of the International Workers of the World, represented by a rat that crawls out of the woodwork to feast on the harvest. The patriotic Uncle Sam, tellingly hiding behind a wall of sacks labeled “American Institutions,” takes a shovel to the head of the dreaded Bolshevik-loving rodent and crushes it. Again, praise be to the Ford Motor Company. 

The status quo is again represented in a few films about the women’s suffrage movement. The Strong Arm Squad of the Future (1912, 60 seconds) is a short animated film that satirizes the movement by caricaturing women in roles of power as manly, brutish, and, most damningly, unappealing to men. More objective in its perspective is On to Washington (1913, 80 seconds), a news film that contains footage of the suffragette march on Capitol Hill. In a more commercial vein is The Hazards of Helen: Episode 13, one installment in a long-running serial in which the heroine battles not only villainous robbers, but the evils of workplace discrimination.  

This is just a small sample; Treasures III is far too varied to adequately express here. Suffice it to say that this is not just a collection for history buffs or cinephiles; the films contained here offer both entertainment and enlightenment, and more than a little astonishment.  

Photo caption: Suffragettes on Pennsylvania Avenue in On to Washington.

Poets and world travelers from the international scene of the 1960s and ’70s, Ira Cohen and Louise Landes Levi will read with poet and editor Michael Rothenberg 7:30 p.m. Monday at Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue. Admission is free. 

Cohen and Levi, both New Yorkers (Levi an honors graduate of UC Berkeley) met while both were living abroad, involved in the expatriate and international arts scene that was fostered by older generations of North American and European writers and artists. 

Michael Rothenberg met Cohen and Levi through his work editing Big Bridge, a decade-old online magazine. He’s also known for editing Penguin Books’ selections of poetry by Philip Whalen (whose caretaker Rothenberg was during the end of Whalen’s life), Joanne Kyger and East Bay poet David Meltzer—all important contributors to the Bay Area scene of the past 40 years and more.  

Louise Landes Levi has traveled to India “and, along the way, a lot of other places,” said her old friend David Schonberger, who runs Booksphere in New York City. Levi will revisit the Ali Akhbar School in Marin this trip. She now lives in a tower in Bagnori, a village in Tuscany, to be near her Buddhist teacher of the past 20 years, Namkhai Norbu. Her books of poetry include Guru Punk, Avenue ‘A’ & Ninth Street, Banana Baby and Water Mirror. Her translations include Sweet On My Lips, the love poems of Mirabai, Rasa by Rene Daumal, and Toward Totality by one of the original modern global explorers and seekers, Henri Michaux, whom Levi knew.  

Ira Cohen, a self-described “poet, photographer, filmmaker, world traveler and bullshit artist (maybe better if I said raconteur),” is a genial, sometimes acerbic monologist. His movies (some of which are available on DVD) include Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, Kings With Straw Mats and Paradise Now. His books of poetry include Whatever You Say May Be Held Against You and On Feet of Gold. His photographs often document his many friendships, such as those with the older mainstays of the Tangier scene, where Cohen went in the early ’60s to live: Paul Bowles, William Burroughs and artist/writer Brion Gysin. 

“Burroughs I met when he was having his shoes shined. He was very cordial and razor-sharp wth his ability to express himself,” he said. “Bowles I used to visit frequently and give him the gossip of the Medina, where I lived. I considered it a magical possibility, being in my 20s and having relationships with men of that stature, whom I respected, but could always talk to straightforwardly.”  

About Allen Ginsberg, Cohen said: “He was always talking from some pulpit or position, looking at me to see how I’d fit in ... more aloof, complicated, self-involved, I guess more political, than the others.” 

Cohen joked further about his own writing and reputation as “a famous unknown.” 

“Being my age, a little overweight, you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and try to look quickly away. I feel that way about my words sometimes,” he said. “But Brion Gysin told me, ‘You’re a man of the book, you’ll be around in the future commenting on us,’ and funnily enough, at 72, I’m around and they’re gone. And that was the world when I was younger, of people I admired and I strove to be in their company. The best thing in living the life I led was in the chance meetings and stumbling on things—like these men.”

Days of Heaven 

It is said that there is really just a handful of plotlines in this world, and that every book and song and film we devise is really just a variation on one of these archetypal themes. That may very well be the case, though the variations are infinite. And if they weren't infinite, the methods by which those themes are expressed most certainly are.  

Case in point: Terrence Malick's 1978 film Days of Heaven. A direct line can be drawn from William Faulkner's great novel Absalom, Absalom! through Orson Welles' Citizen Kane and on through this, Malick's second directorial effort. The film has just been released on DVD by Criterion in a pristine transfer that beautifully renders the movie's rich pastoral tones.  

All three concern powerful men who forge vast empires, only to run up against forces with which they are loathe to reckon, and all three stories are told from the vantage point of intermittently reliable witnesses. 

Welles adopted Faulkner's circular narrative form and moved his tale from the rural South to New York City in the deconstruction of the life of a man whose ambitions were ultimately curtailed by his own personal flaws. Malick moved the story back to the rural countryside, this time in the southwest. But whereas Faulkner's aristocratic plantation society was undone by the South's original sin of slavery, of racial tensions come to a head, Malick's is undone by less tragic but equally biblical plagues: locusts and fire. In all three, a man sees his particular brand of progress halted and reversed, ultimately leading to the destruction of the idyllic self-contained world he had sought to create. 

But Malick makes the story his own primarily through the telling of the tale. His version, unlike Kane and Absalom, is told chronologically, but it is far more elliptical. Malick's style can be described as impressionistic, full of contemplative shots of nature, of faces, of time passing slowly. It is as though Malick is giving us the chance to pause and simply watch the world breathe. Inserted here and there amid the action are quiet shots of birds passing overhead, of fields of wheat swirling in the breeze, of insects alighting on blades of grass—ephemeral sights and sounds that leave indelible impressions that defy verbal expression. A Malick film is not something to be dissected, examined and intellectualized, but rather something to be experienced and felt. 

Extra features include interviews with Gere and Shepard and cinematographers Haskell Wexler and John Bailey; a commentary by editor Billy Weber, art director Jack Fisk, costume designer Patricia Norris and casting director Dianne Crittenden; and an essay by film critic Adrian Martin. 

Days of Heaven (1978) 

Written and directed by Terrence Malick. Starring Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard, Linda Manz. Photographed by Nestor Almendros. 94 minutes. $39.95. Criterion Collection. www.criterion.com. 

Battleship Potemkin  

Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein's dramatization of an event from the Russian Revolution, is one of the touchstones of cinema. It caused a sensation when it was released in 1925 and remains one of the most influential films of the silent era. Its methods, bold and unconventional in their time, transformed cinematic technique. Kino International has recently released the film in what may prove to be a definitively restored edition, a two-disc set that includes both English and Russian versions of the film.  

The film is primarily influential due to what became known as "montage." Though the word really just translates as "editing" or "putting together," it has come to mean several different kinds of editing: rapid rhythmic cutting; spatial and temporally jarring cutting; or the accumulation of images in the creation of either an emotional effect or an intellectual idea. Perhaps the simplest definition is the juxtaposition of independent and often disparate images in the creation of meaning. Eisenstein himself described it as independent shots placed not one after the other, but on top of one another, like layers of meaning and emotion. 

The most famous example is the Odessa Steps sequence, a heart-pounding scene in which soldiers march methodically down what appears to be, due to Eisenstein's editing, an enormously long staircase, slaughtering a throng of people who rush to escape the gunfire. Eisenstein never fully orients the viewer to the landscape. Instead he provides a continuous rush of imagery: closeups of the dead and the dying; shots of crowds fleeing; stampeding feet; and, most famously, a baby carriage tumbling down the staircase, set in motion by the falling body of a murdered mother. Through the rapid juxtaposition of disparate shots, Eisenstein simulates the terror and bloodshed of the event, the disoriented space, the rush of motion, and the drawn-out feeling of time expanding, as though the horror will never end.  

There are simpler examples of montage as well. Early in the film, when the crew on the battleship feels the first stirrings of revolution, a sailor smashes a plate on the edge of a table. Eisenstein, through montage, imbues this moment with greater import and force by rapidly cutting in several views of this gesture. In quick succession we see the plate smashed in closeup and in medium shot, along with closeups of the soldier's face and arm. Essentially we see the action repeated, the plate smashed several times, but all this action flashes by in a second. It seems very simple, but Eisenstein was touching on something profound here, using the unique properties of the cinema in the creation of a powerfully expressive technique. With a few clever edits, he transformed a gesture of frustration into a battle cry, the first act of mutiny. The smashed plate heard round the world.  

Potemkin would be subject to far more cutting over the years. It would seem that every nation in which it appeared found it necessary to cut away at the film, diluting its revolutionary power and even shaping it to fit other ideologies. Thus the film, though it has been widely viewed and always appreciated, has rarely, if ever, been seen in anything resembling its original form since its 1925 premiere in Moscow. The Kino release does not claim to represent the film in its original state, but it is thought that this is as close as we're likely to get.  

Extra features include a 42-minute documentary on the making and restoration of the film, English and original Russian versions, and a photo gallery. 

Battleship Potemkin (1925) 

Directed by Sergei M. Eisenstein. 69 minutes. $29.95. Kino International. www.kino.com. 

Under the Volcano 

John Huston had one of the most varied careers a director can have. He started out as a screenwriter before making his directing debut with The Maltese Falcon in 1941. The film was a revelation, giving Humphrey Bogart his first truly great role. But as great as that film was, it owed much of its greatness to its source material, for Huston remained very true to the original text. He proved himself again and again though, and in many different genres, with Asphalt Jungle and Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Moby Dick.  

Some of his works were failures. As Christian Viviani points out in an essay that accompanies Criterion's new DVD release of Under the Volcano (1984), Huston was inclined to imbue projects of his own choosing with great passion, while granting assigned projects little creative spark.  

Under the Volcano is clearly one of Huston's pet projects. It features an excellent performance by Albert Finney as Geoffrey Firmin, a retired British ambassador in Mexico, reduced to alcoholism and self-destruction following the departure of his wife after she had an affair. Huston lavishes attention on the hard-drinking, self-loathing character, and on both the romance and the seediness of the environs.  

The movie is based on a novel by Malcolm Lowry, a book long considered "unadaptable" and thus more alluring to a maverick director like Huston. The novel concerns Mexico in the years before World War II, as the country was aligning itself with the Third Reich. Huston stripped the tale of much of its political and social ramifications to focus on the man himself, on the nature and consequences of his alcoholism, and on the relationships between the man, his wife and his half-brother.  

The film is mannered and theatrical, yet remarkably authentic in its portrait of a man simultaneously struggling to stay afloat and to drown himself, and of the loved ones around him who are desperate to help him with one and save him from the other.  

The result though is a film that remains somewhat unsatisfying. There are flashes of directorial brilliance, and the actors easily hold our interest, but the sidelining of much of the social and political context leaves Firmin's self-destruction seeming somewhat melodramatic, more soap opera than drama, more pulp than character study. 

The two-disc set includes commentaries by the film's producers, by screenwriter Guy Gallo, and by Huston's son, actor-director Danny Huston; a new interview with Bisset; a 1984 audio interview with John Huston; and two documentaries, one about the film's production and another about the life of author Malcolm Lowry. 

Under the Volcano (1984) 

Directed by John Huston. Adapted from the novel by Malcolm Lowry. Starring Albert Finney, Jacqueline Bisset, Anthony Andrews. 112 minutes. $39.95. Criterion Collection. www.criterion.com. 

Robinson Crusoe on Mars 

Science fiction is a delicate enterprise. No genre runs a greater risk of aging poorly. Theories and technologies can be discarded or adopted so quickly, and either way yesterday's fantasies just as quickly can seem quaint, naive, and silly. It's hard luck when these technical details overwhelm otherwise solid pieces of entertainment, and perhaps it is the works that avoid these pitfalls that age best. 

Byron Haskin's Robinson Crusoe on Mars is a good example of a science fiction film that manages to eschew much of the techno-gadgetry that sometimes sinks the genre. Instead Haskin focuses his plot mainly on the problem of a lone man's survival in a hostile landscape. It is less a science fiction film than a simple update of the Daniel Defoe novel. After all, Earth has been fully explored—why not reset the tale in the next frontier? 

Haskin is probably best known for bringing The War of the Worlds to the screen for the first time, in 1953. But Robinson Crusoe on Mars, though perhaps not quite as entertaining overall, is probably the more mature work. The special effects of course seem a bit simple at times, but this was, for the most part, cutting edge stuff. Haskin's spaceships move with frightening precision from one position to the next, like light-speed hummingbirds; his Mars is barren but with tantalizing signs of sustenance; and his caves are almost warm and comforting, perfectly conveying a sense of security, however tenuous, in a vast and terrifying landscape.  

The film lacks pacing, however. It understandably avoids the heartpounding race from one event to another of the alien-invasion variety, but Haskin's grasp of the techniques for slowing a film to a contemplative pace is weak at best. A more skillful director would have developed the spaces between the action and dialogue, lingering longer on the haunting images of the landscape, the shifting shadows as Martian day gives way to Martian night, or the weary but determined face of his hero. Of course, he would have needed a better actor than Paul Mantee to do it right, but still the film cries out for more finesse.  

Criterion's new DVD release of the film includes a commentary by screenwriter Ib Melchior, actors Mantee and Victor Lundin, and historian and special effects specialist Robert Skotak.  

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) 

Directed by Byron Haskin. Starring Paul Mantee, Victor Lundin. 110 minutes. $39.95. Criterion Collection. www.criterion.com. 

Water is the primary problem to solve if we’re to raise plants. I suspect this has always been the case almost everywhere (and offhand I can’t think of what the theoretical exception would be) and likely will be, at least until some theoretical descendants are working hydroponic plantations outside the orbit of, say, Mars, where the problem will be sunlight. Probably there’s some smiling herb grower now who’s working on an electricity-sparing solution to that.  

The conundrum, once we get that water, is balance. Surprise: the problem of water is also the problem of air.  

Winter’s coming in, and with luck we’ll have more rain. Some plants that have stoutly withstood the usual summer drought will succumb to a surfeit: succulents like cacti and some California natives like flannelbush are susceptible to crown rots and plain old drowning if they spend the winter in poorly drained soils.  

Roots, even those of big trees, lie mostly in the top two or three feet of soil. The more water-retaining the soil is, the more shallow most roots will be. They need some free oxygen, some air, around them, and soil with its pores and little spaces filled with water doesn’t have room for air.  

Containers also tend to drain slowly, often because something’s obstructing the hole in the bottom. (You wouldn’t be cruel enough to put a helpless plant in a watertight pot, would you? Aside from water plants and swamp plants that like wet feet, of course.)  

A paradox: a plant wilts when it’s too wet as well as when it’s too dry. The latter makes sense: water, moving through a plant’s circulatory system and out to its leaf tips and edges one molecule at a time, is part of what makes leaves and nonwoody stems stand up.  

So when leaves and stems droop, naturally we think of watering the plant. If we know the plant well enough, we can spot thirst before that, as leaves lost their usual luster and get just a little flaccid, a little tired-looking.  

Before rushing for the hose or the watering can, though, be bold and stick a finger into the soil at least one knuckle deep. A wilting plant in damp soil might either be temporarily coping with hot direct sun, or a fungal infection might be clogging its circulatory system. Fungi are present in most soils most of the time but, rather like the mildew on the bathroom wall, they get a boost from wet conditions.  

So cop a feel of your plants’ leaves and its soil, sure. But even before that, know what your plant will tolerate.  

The best way to figure that out is to know where the plant’s roots are. No, I mean figuratively. A plant of local ancestry will likely be OK in local soils. A plant from a mountaintop will want fast drainage. A plant from a riverside might not mind wet feet.  

The key to all that is the plant’s specific epithet—its Latin-sounding name. Uh-oh. But it’s not that hard, really. If you can order from a Thai or Italian menu, you can learn enough Latin to call your plants by name. 

Stay tuned.

I tend to stare at the ceiling a lot. I think it’s only to be expected. If you sleep on your back or lie on the couch reading Jane Austin (as we all must), you’re bound to spend a certain amount of time staring off into space and guess what’s there … between you and space but your ceiling. There it hangs (Yes, that’s what it’s doing, hanging.) between the walls, with all those cracks and stains and Grateful Dead posters and you think, “Maybe I should do something about this mess but what can I do? It’s a ceiling, not a casserole. I don’t know where to begin!” 

Many of us live in handsome old casas lined with walls and ceilings of lime plaster, a product made of limestone and transformed through baking and hydrating processes until we have the powder that makes useable plaster.  

In the houses of a hundred years ago and all the way up to about WWII, plaster was installed over wooden lath. This is essentially how this worked. Once a house was framed, a lather would install thin strips of redwood, lining the rooms of the house with these thin, furry and somewhat wiggly sticks. They varied in length, since there was no four- or eight-foot module and would run as long as the wall or ceiling allowed, getting spiked into place with lots of tiny “blued” lathing nails (bluing is a low-cost rust prevention).  

The lath was spaced about three-eigths of an inch, and when plaster was smeared across the lath surface, it would get smooshed (like my technical lingo?) though the spaces and dry into a shape that could no longer fit back out. This held the dry plaster in place. The plaster also dried onto the furry surface of the lath, further grasping the plaster. 

What I find fun about this technique is that it smacks profoundly of wattle and daub, a technique that is at least 10,000 years old, using wooden sticks similar to wooden lath with clay or dung smeared across the surface and finished into a hard surface. This was how walls in homes were commonly surfaced in many early European for eons. There truly IS nothing new under the sun. 

Anyway, I digress and then digress some more. 

Plaster was applied to the wooden lath in two or three coats of increasing hardness and decreasing viscosity so that the final layer could be quite smoothly applied and dry to a very hard surface. This actually becomes something of a problem for modern homeowners who want to stick Grateful Dead posters on their ceilings. They end up with cracks and also have a helluva time driving those thumb tacks in far enough. The wiser person puts up their poster using a tiny drill and a slightly fatter nail. Drill bits can be found in very fine sizes. 

In the era of WWII, wooden lath was replaced with gypsum lathing board (aka button board). This was the first use of the new gypsum plaster and predates and predicts drywall by at least a decade. Gypsum lath was made in long narrow sheets in which a field of holes was punched. The lathing board was nailed to wall and ceiling framing, much as modern drywall might be but was then covered with lime plaster. This is still done today in better homes where plaster is preferred. I’m on the fence as to how swell I think it is but I do admit to very much liking an imperfectly smooth surface, and drywall just doesn’t do that very well. 

So now, having laid down the history, we can discuss what can be done in your ancient manor. Real plaster that has begun to crack is easily distinguished from drywall, especially along ceilings. Since ceiling joists (usually 2x4s) hang from wall to wall, they tend to sinuate every time a Hummer (or truck) rumbles down the lane. 

Over the decades, they tend to develop fine cracks along the lathing, and if you look carefully you may notice that there are long running cracks about every two inches or so running the length of the room. Sometimes you can only see a few of them, but they still suggest the same effect. 

Plaster, like all things, varies in quality, and some plaster fared well these many decades. Other batches I’ve seen over the years haven’t proven so hearty and it’s quite clear that, in some cases, it was just bad mixing (this is also often true for concrete or stucco). If you have a house that has a lot of loose, cracking and unsightly plaster, I wouldn’t recommend any further patching but would instead beg you bite the bullet and start replacing the plaster with drywall. 

This has some real upside as well, so don’t feel bad. When you take the old plaster down, rather than patching over it, you gain access to the volume of the wall and make electrical work (and other cool things) a practical reality. Let’s take your dining room as a possible starting place (often a favorite). When you remove the plaster and all the old nails, you can easily add plenty of electrical outlets and lighting. 

You can install wall sconces if you like (a common Craftsman era feature) as well as a chandelier, a ceiling fan or recessed lighting. The wiring you connect all these things to can be quickly and cheaply installed because access is so good. Too often I see upgrades to lighting in a room with old plaster and am generally sure that the wiring wasn’t upgraded and may, in combination with bigger light fixtures become a hazard. 

With the wall open, it’s also possible to run speaker wire and install recessed or hanging speakers with hidden wiring. How about smart cable for a flat panel TV or a digital projector? How about phone wiring or a built-in vacuum system?  

A skylight is also easier to install if the plaster is out and sheetrock is going in, and it’s much easier to replace a window if you’re already replacing wall material. 

Taken on a one-room-at-a-time basis, replacement of plaster with drywall is not a huge project and here are some ways to make it even simpler: 

If keeping the job to a minimum is vital, old cracked plaster can be covered over with thin sheets of drywall. Drywall is made in one-fourth and three-eighths inch for just this purpose. Sheets of thick drywall can be screwed to framing directly through the old cracked plaster and then finished with tape and joint compound to create a smoother finish. 

Again, you won’t get a chance to use the full wall cavity, although you can make a lot of holes in the plaster running wiring, and then cover them over with your new layer. Two downsides to adding layers are loss of height or room size and added weight. 

When removing plaster, keep in mind that plaster is extremely alkaline and can cause a burning sensation when inhaled. Old plaster may also contain viral matter and other garbage that we’re better off not breathing, so use of a well-fitting respirator is strongly recommended if you’re involved in the removal process (also goggles, boots and heavy clothing). 

When removing plaster, it’s also a good idea to protect your floors with cardboard or old carpeting. Lime plaster is made using sand, and you can really scratch those old floors up if you don’t take precautions. 

It’s pretty amazing what a project like this can do for your spirits and how much a room can change in this process. My wife and I did this to our own home many years ago and it freed us to change many more things than we ever expected to change: lighting, skylights and even ceiling fans.  

Now I can lie on my couch and stare at the ceiling in the safe knowledge that somewhere, far away, someone else gets to stare at the Grateful Dead instead of me. 

FRIDAY, NOV. 9 

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing on Fridays until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Kate van Orden on “Court Ballet and Politics in 17th Century France” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St.526-2925.  

“He Stood Up: The Mistrial of Lt. Ehren Watada” A documentary at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar at Bonita. 

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310. 

Womansong Circle Paticipatory singing for women at 7:15 p.m., potluck at 6:45 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, Small Assembly Room, 2345 Channing. Suggested donation $15-$20, no one turned away for lack of funds. 525-7082. 

Introduction to Fearless Meditation at 7 p.m. at Center for Urban Peace, 2584 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. Donation $20-$30. 549-3733. 

SATURDAY, NOV. 10 

“Global Citizenship vs a New Arms Race: Can Peace Trump Hegemony?” with Jan Kavan, former Foreign Minister of the Czech Republic at 7:30 p.m. at the Alameda Free Library, Confernce Room A, 1550 Oak St. at Lincoln, Alameda. Free, donation accepted. www.alamedaforum.org 

Vegetarian Cooking Class “Thankgiving for the Birds” featuring squash dishes, root vegetables, biscuits and apple cake, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at First Unitarian Church of Oakland, 685 14th St. at Castro. Cost is $55 plus $5 material fee. to register call 531-COOK. www.compassionatecooks.com 

March for Environmental Justice to stop Chevron’s proposed refinery expansion. Meet at noon at the Richmond BART Station parking lot to march to the Chevron refinery. 232-3427.  

Solo Sierrans Sunset Walk An hour walk, on paved trail, wheel chair accessible, through the Emeryville Marina Meet at 3:30 p.m. behind Chevy's Restaurant, by picnic tables. 234-8949.  

NAACP Berkeley Branch Meets at 1 p.m. at 2108 Russell St. 845-7416. 

Modern Tantric Art Auction to benefit Himalayan Health Care. Preview at 6 p.m., auction at 8 p.m. at Yga Mandala, 2807 Telegraph Ave. Free, but RSVP requested. auction@tantricart.net 

Immigration Law Clinic Volunteer attorneys available to answer questions from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Oakland Public Library, Temescal Branch, 5205 Telegraph Ave. at 52nd St., Oakland. Sponosred by the Charles Houston Bar Association. 205-9593. 

Promote your Music Using the Internet with Sarah Manning from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Community Room, 3rd flr., Berkeley Public Library 2090 Kittredge. 981-6233. 

“Creative Reuse Workshop” for Oakland students, (K-12), from noon to 4 p.m. at The Museum of Children’s Art, 538 Ninth St., Oakland. 465-8770, ext. 310. 

East Bay Waldorf School’s Annual Harvest Faire with games, crafts, entertainment and food from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 3800 Clark Rd., El Sobrante. 223-3570. 

Ongoing Vocal Jazz Workshop from 2:30 to 4 p.m. at Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin at the corner of Masonic, Albany. 524-6797. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

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, NOV. 11 

Friends of the Alameda Wildlife Refuge Workday Help us prepare habitat for California Least Terns, which breed at the refuge. Meet at 9 a.m. at the main refuge gate at the northwest corner of former Alameda Naval Air Station, Alameda. Sponsored by Golden Gate Audubon Society. 843-2222. 

“Julia Morgan: Her Unique Place in American Architecture” with author Mark A. Wilson at 2 p.m. at the Seldon Williams House in Claremont Court. Tickets are $25. Sponsored by Berkeley Architectural Heritage Assoc. 841-2242. www.berkeleyheritage.com 

Green Sunday: Venezuela Report-back at 5 p.m. at Niebyl-Proctor Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave. at 65th, Oakland. Sponsored by the Green Party of Alameda County. 

Laternenfest and Parade Join a tradition German celebration for the whole family from 5 to 7 p.m. at Bay Area Kinderstube Preschool, 842 Key Route Blvd (off Solano Ave), Albany. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. Call to confirm. 841-8732.  

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

Tibetan Buddhism with Ruth Richards on “Creativity and Spirituality in Everyday Life” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

Sew Your Own Open Studio Come learn to use our industrial and domestic machines, or work on your own projects, from 5 to 9 p.m. at 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. Cost is $3 per hour. 644-2577.  

MONDAY, NOV. 12  

Berkeley Green Mondays A presentation on “Green Car Alternatives” with Bradley Berman at 7:30 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 848-4681. berkeleygreenmondays@gmail.com 

“Converting Plants to Fuel” with Chris Somerville of LBNL/Energy Biosciences Institute at 5:30 p.m. at Berkeley Rep, 2025 Addison St. 486-7292. 

“Stopping Wal-Mart” Joe Feller and Paul Seger discuss strategies for keeping Wal-Mart out of our communites at 7 p.m. at the Wiki Wiki Hawaiian BBQ, 9935 San Pablo Ave. 526-0972.  

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. 548-0425. 

Dragonboating Year round classes at the Berkeley Marina, Dock M. Meets at 6 p.m. For details see www.dragonmax.org 

TUESDAY, NOV. 13 

End the Occupation Vigil every Tues. at noon at Oakland Federal Bldg., 1301 Clay St. www.epicalc.org 

“Make Art NOT War” Artists are invited to bring their works to display along the sidewalk in front of the Marine Recruiting Station, 64 Shattuck Square, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. 548-7119. 

"Recycling Issues in Berkeley, Albany and Emeryville: What You Should Know" with Martin Bourque, Executive Director of the Berkeley Ecology Center and Nicole Almaguer, Albany Community Development Dept. at noon at Albany Library, at Marin and Masonic, Albany. Brown bag lunch sponsored by the League of Women Voters. 843-8824. 

“The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot: A Citizen’s Call to Action” with author Naomi Wolf at 7:30 pm, at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $10-$13. 415-255-7296, ext. 253. www.globalexchange.org/naomiwolf 

“Intellegence and Counter-Terrorism” with Ram Sidi, veteran member of Israel’s counter-terrorism establishment at 4 p.m. in the Toll Room, Alumni House, UC Campus. 642-7747. 

“Human Rights for European Gypsies” with C J Singh, at 7:30 p.m. at International House, Bancroft and Piedmont. 642-9460. 

Writer Coach Connection Volunteers needed to help Berkeley students improve their writing and critical thinking skills from noon to 3 p.m. To register call 524-2319. www.writercoachconnection.org  

Berkeley School Volunteers Orientation from 4 to 5 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. Come learn about volunteer opportunities. 644-8833. 

Community Meeting on Redesign of City of Oakland Website at 7 p.m. at LAkeside Park GArden Center, 666 Bellevue Ave. Other meetings throught the month. For the survey see www.oakland.net/survey For information call 449-4401.  

“Older and Wiser: Basic Legal Knowledge for Living Well to the End,” with estate planning attorney Sara Diamond at 1:15 p.m. at North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 981-5190. 

American Red Cross Blood Services is holding a volunteer orientation at 6 p.m. Advanced sign-up is required; please call 594-5165.  

Berkeley School Volunteers Orientation from 4 to 5 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. Come learn about volunteer opportunities. 644-8833. 

Street Level Cycles Community Bike Program Come use our tools as well as receive help with performing repairs free of charge. Youth classes available. Tues., Thurs., and Sat. from 2 to 6 p.m. at at 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

Community Sing-a-Long every Tues, at 2 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. 524-9122.  

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 14 

Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning Colloquium with Amir H. Gohar “Balancing Tourism Development and Cultural Site Preservation Along the Red Sea Coast” at 1 p.m. at Wurster Hall, Room 315A, UC Campus. All welcome. laep.ced.berkeley.edu/events/colloquium 

Civilian War Victim Series “Collateral Damage” with Dr. Brian Gluss at 1 p.m. at Emeryville Senior Center, 4321 Salem, Emeryville. 596-3730. 

AnewAmerica’s Gala & Microbusiness Expo at 6 p.m. at the Holy Redeemer Conference Center, 8945 Golf Links Rd., Oakland. Tickets are $85. 540-7785. www.anewamerica.org 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. Heavy rain cancels. 548-9840. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Sing for Peace at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

Stitch ‘n Bitch at 6:30 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

THURSDAY, NOV. 15 

“Countryside Living: Impacts to Wildlife and Watersheds” with Dr. Adina Merender at 7 p.m. at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Sponsored by the Golden Gate Audubon Society. 843-2222. 

“Current Research at Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary” with research coordinator Dr. Lisa Etherington at 12:30 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, Oak at 10th St., Oakland. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

“Playground” new extreme ski and snowboard film by Warren Miller at 8 p.m. at Wheeler Auditorium, UC Campus. www.warrenmiller.com  

“Aging Artfully” with Amy Gorman on Profiles of 12 Visual and Performing Women Artists 85 – 105 at 7 p.m. at El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Ave., El Cerrito. 526-7512.  

Babies & Toddlers Storytime at 10:15 and 11:15 a.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. 524-3043. 

FRIDAY, NOV. 9 

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing on Fridays until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Kate van Orden on “Court Ballet and Politics in 17th Century France” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St.526-2925.  

“He Stood Up: The Mistrial of Lt. Ehren Watada” A documentary at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar at Bonita. 

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310. 

Womansong Circle Paticipatory singing for women at 7:15 p.m., potluck at 6:45 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, Small Assembly Room, 2345 Channing. Suggested donation $15-$20, no one turned away for lack of funds. 525-7082. 

Introduction to Fearless Meditation at 7 p.m. at Center for Urban Peace, 2584 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. Donation $20-$30. 549-3733. 

SATURDAY, NOV. 10 

“Global Citizenship vs a New Arms Race: Can Peace Trump Hegemony?” with Jan Kavan, former Foreign Minister of the Czech Republic at 7:30 p.m. at the Alameda Free Library, Confernce Room A, 1550 Oak St. at Lincoln, Alameda. Free, donation accepted. www.alamedaforum.org 

Vegetarian Cooking Class “Thankgiving for the Birds” featuring squash dishes, root vegetables, biscuits and apple cake, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at First Unitarian Church of Oakland, 685 14th St. at Castro. Cost is $55 plus $5 material fee. to register call 531-COOK. www.compassionatecooks.com 

March for Environmental Justice to stop Chevron’s proposed refinery expansion. Meet at noon at the Richmond BART Station parking lot to march to the Chevron refinery. 232-3427.  

Solo Sierrans Sunset Walk An hour walk, on paved trail, wheel chair accessible, through the Emeryville Marina Meet at 3:30 p.m. behind Chevy's Restaurant, by picnic tables. 234-8949.  

NAACP Berkeley Branch Meets at 1 p.m. at 2108 Russell St. 845-7416. 

Modern Tantric Art Auction to benefit Himalayan Health Care. Preview at 6 p.m., auction at 8 p.m. at Yga Mandala, 2807 Telegraph Ave. Free, but RSVP requested. auction@tantricart.net 

Immigration Law Clinic Volunteer attorneys available to answer questions from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Oakland Public Library, Temescal Branch, 5205 Telegraph Ave. at 52nd St., Oakland. Sponosred by the Charles Houston Bar Association. 205-9593. 

Promote your Music Using the Internet with Sarah Manning from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Community Room, 3rd flr., Berkeley Public Library 2090 Kittredge. 981-6233. 

“Creative Reuse Workshop” for Oakland students, (K-12), from noon to 4 p.m. at The Museum of Children’s Art, 538 Ninth St., Oakland. 465-8770, ext. 310. 

East Bay Waldorf School’s Annual Harvest Faire with games, crafts, entertainment and food from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 3800 Clark Rd., El Sobrante. 223-3570. 

Ongoing Vocal Jazz Workshop from 2:30 to 4 p.m. at Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin at the corner of Masonic, Albany. 524-6797. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

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, NOV. 11 

Friends of the Alameda Wildlife Refuge Workday Help us prepare habitat for California Least Terns, which breed at the refuge. Meet at 9 a.m. at the main refuge gate at the northwest corner of former Alameda Naval Air Station, Alameda. Sponsored by Golden Gate Audubon Society. 843-2222. 

“Julia Morgan: Her Unique Place in American Architecture” with author Mark A. Wilson at 2 p.m. at the Seldon Williams House in Claremont Court. Tickets are $25. Sponsored by Berkeley Architectural Heritage Assoc. 841-2242. www.berkeleyheritage.com 

Green Sunday: Venezuela Report-back at 5 p.m. at Niebyl-Proctor Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave. at 65th, Oakland. Sponsored by the Green Party of Alameda County. 

Laternenfest and Parade Join a tradition German celebration for the whole family from 5 to 7 p.m. at Bay Area Kinderstube Preschool, 842 Key Route Blvd (off Solano Ave), Albany. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. Call to confirm. 841-8732.  

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

Tibetan Buddhism with Ruth Richards on “Creativity and Spirituality in Everyday Life” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

Sew Your Own Open Studio Come learn to use our industrial and domestic machines, or work on your own projects, from 5 to 9 p.m. at 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. Cost is $3 per hour. 644-2577.  

MONDAY, NOV. 12  

Berkeley Green Mondays A presentation on “Green Car Alternatives” with Bradley Berman at 7:30 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 848-4681. berkeleygreenmondays@gmail.com 

“Converting Plants to Fuel” with Chris Somerville of LBNL/Energy Biosciences Institute at 5:30 p.m. at Berkeley Rep, 2025 Addison St. 486-7292. 

“Stopping Wal-Mart” Joe Feller and Paul Seger discuss strategies for keeping Wal-Mart out of our communites at 7 p.m. at the Wiki Wiki Hawaiian BBQ, 9935 San Pablo Ave. 526-0972.  

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. 548-0425. 

Dragonboating Year round classes at the Berkeley Marina, Dock M. Meets at 6 p.m. For details see www.dragonmax.org 

TUESDAY, NOV. 13 

End the Occupation Vigil every Tues. at noon at Oakland Federal Bldg., 1301 Clay St. www.epicalc.org 

“Make Art NOT War” Artists are invited to bring their works to display along the sidewalk in front of the Marine Recruiting Station, 64 Shattuck Square, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. 548-7119. 

"Recycling Issues in Berkeley, Albany and Emeryville: What You Should Know" with Martin Bourque, Executive Director of the Berkeley Ecology Center and Nicole Almaguer, Albany Community Development Dept. at noon at Albany Library, at Marin and Masonic, Albany. Brown bag lunch sponsored by the League of Women Voters. 843-8824. 

“The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot: A Citizen’s Call to Action” with author Naomi Wolf at 7:30 pm, at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $10-$13. 415-255-7296, ext. 253. www.globalexchange.org/naomiwolf 

“Intellegence and Counter-Terrorism” with Ram Sidi, veteran member of Israel’s counter-terrorism establishment at 4 p.m. in the Toll Room, Alumni House, UC Campus. 642-7747. 

“Human Rights for European Gypsies” with C J Singh, at 7:30 p.m. at International House, Bancroft and Piedmont. 642-9460. 

Writer Coach Connection Volunteers needed to help Berkeley students improve their writing and critical thinking skills from noon to 3 p.m. To register call 524-2319. www.writercoachconnection.org  

Berkeley School Volunteers Orientation from 4 to 5 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. Come learn about volunteer opportunities. 644-8833. 

Community Meeting on Redesign of City of Oakland Website at 7 p.m. at LAkeside Park GArden Center, 666 Bellevue Ave. Other meetings throught the month. For the survey see www.oakland.net/survey For information call 449-4401.  

“Older and Wiser: Basic Legal Knowledge for Living Well to the End,” with estate planning attorney Sara Diamond at 1:15 p.m. at North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 981-5190. 

American Red Cross Blood Services is holding a volunteer orientation at 6 p.m. Advanced sign-up is required; please call 594-5165.  

Berkeley School Volunteers Orientation from 4 to 5 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. Come learn about volunteer opportunities. 644-8833. 

Street Level Cycles Community Bike Program Come use our tools as well as receive help with performing repairs free of charge. Youth classes available. Tues., Thurs., and Sat. from 2 to 6 p.m. at at 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

Community Sing-a-Long every Tues, at 2 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. 524-9122.  

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 14 

Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning Colloquium with Amir H. Gohar “Balancing Tourism Development and Cultural Site Preservation Along the Red Sea Coast” at 1 p.m. at Wurster Hall, Room 315A, UC Campus. All welcome. laep.ced.berkeley.edu/events/colloquium 

Civilian War Victim Series “Collateral Damage” with Dr. Brian Gluss at 1 p.m. at Emeryville Senior Center, 4321 Salem, Emeryville. 596-3730. 

AnewAmerica’s Gala & Microbusiness Expo at 6 p.m. at the Holy Redeemer Conference Center, 8945 Golf Links Rd., Oakland. Tickets are $85. 540-7785. www.anewamerica.org 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. Heavy rain cancels. 548-9840. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Sing for Peace at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

Stitch ‘n Bitch at 6:30 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

THURSDAY, NOV. 15 

“Countryside Living: Impacts to Wildlife and Watersheds” with Dr. Adina Merender at 7 p.m. at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Sponsored by the Golden Gate Audubon Society. 843-2222. 

“Current Research at Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary” with research coordinator Dr. Lisa Etherington at 12:30 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, Oak at 10th St., Oakland. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

“Playground” new extreme ski and snowboard film by Warren Miller at 8 p.m. at Wheeler Auditorium, UC Campus. www.warrenmiller.com  

“Aging Artfully” with Amy Gorman on Profiles of 12 Visual and Performing Women Artists 85 – 105 at 7 p.m. at El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Ave., El Cerrito. 526-7512.  

Babies & Toddlers Storytime at 10:15 and 11:15 a.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. 524-3043.