Eugene Evans, the scoutmaster who sued the city after it refused a free berth to the Sea Scout ship Farallon because of the organization's anti-gay policies, was arrested Tuesday on six counts of child sexual abuse. 

Berkeley Police Youth Services Detail investigators served warrants at several locations, including Evans's home in Kensington, said Sgt. Mary Kusmiss, the department spokesperson. 

Charges against the 64-year-old skipper of the S.S.S. Farallon include lewd and lascivious acts with a minor under the age of 14, oral copulation with a minor under age 16 and sexual penetration by an object of a youth under age 14.  

After booking at the Berkeley City Jail, he was taken to the county lockup at Santa Rita, where he was being held in lieu of $1 million bail. 

The alleged victims range in age between 13 and 17, and police said the crimes took place over a period of years, "but they have yet to determine definitively how long Evans may have been molesting youths," Kusmiss reported.  

The officer said more details would be revealed after his arraignment in Alameda County Superior Court Wednesday in Oakland. 

Police believe other youths may have been molested and are actively seeking to identify anyone who may been inappropriately approached by the scout leader. 

During many of the years he served as skipper of the scouting ship, Evans was also a teacher at Encinal and Alameda high schools in Alameda. 

According to an Aug. 10, 2006, profile by conservative columnist James J. Kirkpatrick, Evans joined the Berkeley Sea Scout troop in 1957 at age 13, and had served as the skipper of the Farallon for the previous 35 years.  

Evans became a hero of the political right when he filed a legal challenge of city policies that deny free city services to organizations which practice discrimination based on sexual preference. 

His legal challenge of the city policy was celebrated by uber-conservatives and hailed in hundreds of posts on the Freerepublic.com web site. 

The conservative Pacific Legal Foundation took his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court after the California Supreme Court upheld the city's decision in March, 2006. 

The nation's highest court announced on Oct. 16, 2006, that it would not hear the appeal, leaving intact the state decision in the case of Evans v. Berkeley. 

The state court upheld the city's anti-discrimination policy, adopted in 1997, which barred free use of the Marina to any organization which discriminated on the basis of "a person's race, color, religion. . .age, sex, [or] sexual orientation."  

As part of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), the Sea Scouts bar youths from membership who are openly gay, as well as agnostics and atheists. 

With the adoption of the anti-discrimination policy, the city ended a half-century policy of providing free berthing space to the scouts. 

In finding for the city, California's justices declared: "We agree with Berkeley and the Court of Appeal that a government entity may constitutionally require a recipient of funding or subsidy to provide written, unambiguous assurances of compliance with a generally applicable nondiscrimination policy.  

"We further agree Berkeley reasonably concluded the Sea Scouts did not and could not provide satisfactory assurances because of their required adherence to BSA's discriminatory policies." 

Berkeley Police are asking anyone with information to call the Youth Services Detail at 981-5715. Callers may remain anonymous.

Berkeley protesters and their supporters gathered Sunday to celebrate the end of the first year of what they hailed as “America’s longest-running urban tree-sit.” 

The mood was festive, if at times surreal: UC Berkeley police had two officers videotaping the proceedings, while tree-sit supporters photographed the officers as they were in turn photographed by the media. 

Most of the tree-sitters wore masks, as did many of their supporters—a response to the university’s recent arrests of arboreal activists and members of their earthbound supply crew. 

UC Berkeley students have been swept up in the arrests, including one committee chair from the Associated Students of the University of California, said Matthew Taylor of the Free Speech-Free Trees Student Coalition, 

“We have renamed this site Guantanamo Berkeley,” said Zachary Running Wolf, the Native American activist who sparked the tree-sit a year ago on the morning of Big Game day when he ascended a redwood in the heart of the Coastal Live Oak grove along Memorial Stadium’s western wall. 

Sunday’s mood was generally upbeat as tree-sitters, students, activists and members of the broader community gathered along the sidewalk on Gayley Road. 

Among those in attendance were two members of the recently expired Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee—Juliet Lamont and Steve Weissman—and neighborhood activists Mike Kelly, Sharon Hudson and Gail Garcia. 

One colorfully clad contingent aimed their protests at BP, the British oil giant, and the half-billion-dollar pact it recently completed to sponsor biofuel research at the Berkeley campus. 

At one point, a reporter counted about 200 people gathered along the wide stretch of sidewalk, with numbers fluctuating throughout the afternoon. 

Karen Pickett of the Bay Area Coalition for the Headwaters, one of the earliest and most outspoken supporters of the protest, said community support for the tree-sitters has increased with time. 

The ongoing action at the grove challenges the tree-clearing operation planned if the university wins a pending court decision and builds a $125 million, four-level-high tech gym and office complex where the trees now stand. 

The legal challenge now before Alameda County Superior Court Judge Barbara J. Miller will determine whether or not the UC regents properly followed state law in voting to approve the gym complex and adopting an environmental impact report that cleared the way for the gym and a set of other nearby projects. 

Free speech 

For Michael Rossman, one of the leading activists of the Free Speech Movement that rocked the Berkeley campus more than four decades ago, it was the erection of the fences that transformed the protest into a free speech issue. 

“I didn’t know then that even earlier campus police had seized tables and literature” during the tree-sit, he said. 

Campus police action against tables where literature for a range of causes ranging from civil rights activism to the campus Young Republicans was displayed led to the eruption of the free speech protests that changed the face of campus politics across the nation. 

“This protest is an exercise in free speech,” he said, comparing the oak grove to a biological indicator species, a plant or animal which serves as a signal of the overall health of an ecosystem. 

“This is a fragment of an ecology that functions,” he said, “a biological ecology and a social ecology.” 

Rossman said the grove was a familiar scene to activists of his day, where members of the Free Speech Movement rested and sometimes distributed literature. 

“UC needs to respect its students,” said Hillary Lehr, a recent graduate who faulted university Chancellor Robert Birgeneau for his consistent refusal to meet with students protesting the plans to chainsaw the grove. 

By providing students with a well-rounded education that leads them to question, the university also has an obligation to listen and respond to the questions they raise, Lehr said. 

Taylor said one student had been arrested soon after meeting with university administrators, after she reportedly left blankets and a pillow outside the fence on one of the coldest nights of the year. 

“Two students spent Thanksgiving in jail,” following their arrests at the grove, he said. 

Running Wolf, who has been arrested nine times at the grove, has charged that the university’s plans to build at the grove would desecrate a tribal burial ground. 

Speaking to supporters Sunday, he said that the university’s approval of the BP research program—which aims to develop fuel crops to be grown in tropical climates—creates a two-continent struggle for indigenous Americans. 

University response 

More than two hours after Sunday’s celebrations began, Dan Mogulof, executive director of the campus Office of Public Affairs, arrived at the grove, meeting with reporters well out of sight of the gathering below to decry what he called the “ongoing illegal and dangerous occupation” of the grove. 

He said the university’s response has thus far cost nearly $370,000, including the costs of two barbed-wire-topped fences that now ring the site, salaries for campus police and private security and costs for equipment and cleanups. 

While he declined to discuss the specifics of law enforcement strategies, he said the second fence was installed as part of the process of “putting pieces in places so that once this is resolved in court, we can bring this process to a peaceful and safe conclusion.” 

Asked if any community groups are working with university officials to resolve the standoff in the branches, Mogulof said, “We continue to be open to dealing with any group that is maintaining an illegal and dangerous occupation.” 

He said campus police have been admirably restrained throughout the year the protest has endured. 

Are Native Americans buried beneath the oak grove along the western wall of Memorial Stadium? 

Zachary Running Wolf and some members of the Ohlone people say the site is sacred, the resting place of villagers who once dwelt along the shores of Strawberry Creek. 

“There is no specific, verified evidence of burials,” other than one cited by a consulting archaeologist, said Dan Mogulof, UC Berkeley’s executive director of public affairs.  

But Richard Schwartz, a writer with several books on Berkeley history to his credit, says a look at the record raises critical questions about the university’s claim. 

There is no dispute that a dozen or so burials were found at Faculty Glade, a short walk downstream from the stadium. 

The evidence is less clear about the stadium area itself, but Schwartz would argue that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. 

James M. Allan, a consulting archaeologist hired by the university, declared in a written report that “there is no verifiable evidence for a burial ground at the site of the Stadium.” 

Part of the dispute centers on newspaper accounts, with one key account in a June 21, 1925 edition of the San Francisco Examiner alleging that several burials had been uncovered during construction of the stadium two years earlier. 

Allan’s report alleges that the account conflates the Faculty Glade burials with a single burial found at the stadium. 

“The only museum records (the accession record and card catalogue listing) we have found are for the aforementioned single Native American male burial at this site,” he reported to the university. 

But Schwartz responds with another 1925 article printed a day earlier in the Oakland Tribune, which quotes anthropologist Leslie Spier as stating that “many skeletons have been found in Faculty Glade, along Strawberry Creek and under the site of Memorial Stadium.” 

“If you take away the buildings and the roads and look at the area, you will see that it’s all one site from Faculty Glade to the site of the stadium,” Schwartz said. 

The Berkeley writer commented on yet another article—a piece appearing on the front page of Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle—which cited claims by an unnamed archaeologist that the grove site was too steep for burials. 

“Nonsense,” said Schwartz, who has himself discovered and registered a burial site in Berkeley on even steeper ground. 

The real question for Schwartz, who numbers university anthropology faculty among his friends, is why the university hasn’t set out to do a thorough survey of the land where it plans to excavate for a largely subterranean athletic training facility. 

While Mogulof said an archaeologist will be on hand to monitor excavations, Schwartz said discoveries could come too late, after earth-moving equipment had already wreaked its havoc on the site. 

“A great learning institution like UC Berkeley should want to preserve history and to make sure its legacy is preserved,” he said. 

Schwartz cited another article, from a 1929 edition of the Berkeley Daily Gazette, in which a longtime resident reported that an Ohlone shellmound had once stood at the site of the stadium. 

“No one’s done a thorough year-by-year search of all the newspapers, which might reveal a lot more,” he said.

The City Council continued the discussion on the Aquatic Park dredging to Dec. 18 because of time constraints at last week’s council meeting. 

Councilmember Darryl Moore told the Planet that he had asked the Public Works Department to provide a more comprehensive report about the toxicology tests.  

The city’s Public Works Department dredged the lagoon at the north end of the Aquatic Park and unloaded the spoils along the shoreline almost a month ago without requesting a permit from the California State Water Resources Control Board. 

The incident drew criticism from city officials and local environmentalists—including the Sierra Club—because the spoils were discarded on a popular bird-watching site and adjacent to one of the main wading-bird foraging spots. 

City officials provided the state water board with a full report of the dredging on Nov. 8 and stopped the project after inquiries from the community and 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. At the time the city last conducted the dredging in 1992, the spoils were barged out and deposited near Alcatraz Island. This is no longer permitted. 

The city report states that if the “Strawberry storm drain overflow is not cleaned and maintained, there is added chance of flooding occurring in West Berkeley during heavy rains.” 

According to the report prepared by public works for the City Council, the project had originally been scheduled for summer, but fell behind schedule. 

The report blamed the department’s engineering division’s failure to inform the regulatory agencies, the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Department officials and the Public Works director on its “quest to expedite the work before the rainy season.” 

Preliminary results for toxins on spoil samples indicated a high but not hazardous lead level. 

W.R. Forde, the contractor hired by the city to dredge the lagoon, was responsible for taking samples of the sediment from the tidal tubes and the spoils to determine whether any contaminants were present in order to identify where the spoils could be disposed. 

According to the report, the samples were sent to Analytical Sciences testing laboratory in Petaluma.  

“Since the soil is contaminated with lead and hydrocarbons, we have to take it to a Class 2 waste disposal site in Altamont in watertight trucks,” said Jeff Egeberg, manager of engineering at public works. “But first we have to let the spoils dry. That could take up to two months. We will present the council with a full report of the approved work plan, the final test results and the ultimate disposal plan for the spoils at the December meeting.” 

The report states that the city would have to build a completely water-tight containment on-site to allow the soil to dry by evaporation.  

Forde has also indicated that it could take charge of the material and haul it off to its own facility. 

The city has requested Laurel Marcus, the environmental consultant working on the Aquatic Park Improvement Program, to review and identify any additional measures required for mitigating the environmental impacts to the dredging location and the spoils dumpsite. 

Councilmember Moore told the Planet that he expected the city to conduct its own tests. 

“The very contractor doing the dredging is doing the toxic tests,” he said. “It doesn’t really help.” 

The Planet has submitted a public records act request to the city for the test results. 

The state water board has asked the city to include in its work plan whether the cleaning operation caused any water issues or if any of the decant water made its way back to the lagoon. 

According to Brian Wines, who oversees permits for Alameda County at the state water board, signs of turbidity or dissolved oxygen demand in the water are detrimental for fish and water birds. The report states that no issues were observed. 

Egeberg told the Planet that it was unlikely that the project would resume before Christmas. 

“We are considering delaying the remainder of the dredging until after the wet weather season,” he said. 

Costs for consulting by Marcus and other expenses associated with environmental mitigations resulting from stockpiling the spoils are estimated not to exceed $20,000. 

The report states that these costs would have been the same regardless of errors in permit approvals.

Downtown Area Planning Advisory Committee (DAPAC) members voted 17-4 to adopt their draft of a new downtown plan, but one of the nays came from the head of the Berkeley Planning Commission. 

The proposed plan gets its next public airing Dec. 18, when city councilmembers will hold a workshop on the document from 5 to 7 p.m. 

Planning Commission Chair James Samuels was joined in his opposition by former UC Berkeley development executive Dorothy Walker, former city school board member and Zoning Adjustments Board member Terry Doran and Erin Banks, the spouse of former city Planning Manager Mark Rhoades. 

Shortly before the meeting ended, Walker said she wanted to submit a minority report. 

Thursday night’s vote passes the plan and accompanying documents to Samuels’ commission and the City Council. 

“It’s a terrific document and I’m very proud to be associated with it,” said city Planning and Development Director Dan Marks. 

“The university is pleased with everything that’s happened to date,” Mayor Tom Bates told committee members at the start of the meeting. “I’m pleased that we’ve reached a place where we’re all on the same page.” 

It was a city lawsuit challenging UC Berkeley’s expansion plans into the heart of the city that triggered a lawsuit which was settled, in part, by the agreement to create a new plan for the city’s central business district. 

The new plan significantly enlarges the district beyond the boundaries of the current Downtown Plan, adopted in 1990, in part because the settlement requires space to accommodate university plans to add 800,000 square feet of new buildings and 1,200 new parking spaces. 

Marks said some of the plan’s transportation element appears to be inconsistent with other plans, leaving those decisions to Samuels and his commission. 

He said the planning commissioners will also set the final details of the land use plan to be used in the state-mandated environmental review, which will begin in February and end with the presentation of the final environmental impact report (EIR) to the City Council the following January. 

And then, following revision by the City Council—and if the University of California agrees—the plan would be adopted in May 2009 as a city ordinance, Marks said, making it self-enforcing. 

“Our goal is that when the plan goes to the City Council for approval in January 2009, it has or will soon have the support of the university,” Marks said. 

The settlement agreement, which was signed on May 25, 2005, mandates that no downtown plan can be adopted without the university’s concurrence, and Marks said the university will be conducting its own review while the city runs through its adoption process. 

The university’s planning staff, represented by Kerry O’Banion and Jennifer Lawrence McDougall, have attended most of the committee’s meetings, and McDougall was present in the audience Thursday night. 

The university also holds veto power over the EIR, which must be complete before the plan can be adopted. Work on the EIR will begin early next year. 

For Matt Taecker, the planner hired by the city to work on the plan, the emphasis now shifts to the Planning Commission, where members will come up with their own recommendations. 

Thursday night’s DAPAC meeting, which ended with a group photograph, marked the 50th time members had gathered, including two public workshops and joint sessions with the city’s Landmarks Preservation, Transportation and Civic Arts commissions. 

Members spent their final session making last-minute changes to the eight chapters they’d already adopted, including the closely contested sections on historic preservation and land use. 

The land use chapter passed last month on an 11-1-8 vote, with four more members joining Thursday night’s opponents in abstaining on a proposal that set lower limits on building heights than critics had wanted. 

Foes also said they would not vote for any height limits without an economic study showing that the city would still get the affordable housing, open space, parks and other benefits included in the plan if the proposed limits were adopted. 

Early in the meeting, Downtown Berkeley Association President Mark McLeod urged the committee not to adopt the plan without providing for the economic study. 

The fate of DAPAC’s plan remains uncertain. 

Early Thursday evening member Lisa Stephens asked Marks whether their plan would be one of the options considered in the EIR. 

“I presume so,” said the city planner. 

But there was no assurance that their plan would be the preferred alternative considered in the EIR process. 

“There may be five votes for a different idea,” she said, referring to the Planning Commission, where Samuels—often in the minority on DAPAC votes—usually votes with a five-member majority. 

And then there’s the City Council, which will make its own decisions on the plan. 

After the meeting ended, Commission Chair Will Travis handed out ceremonial coffee mugs, complete with a scanned copy of the city seal, to committee members. 

“There are two versions,” he said. “One has a historic building on the back, the other has a point tower.” 

But the mugs had only one image, downtown’s landmarked Wells Fargo building, which rises to the same height as the controversial point tower projects repeatedly rejected by the commission’s majority.

A member of the Berkeley Unified School District’s Merit Commission said the Berkeley school board may not have reappointed him because he took an independent position on budget allocations, one out of step with the board’s wishes.  

Merit Commissioner Roy Doolan, whose three-year term came to an end Saturday, received a letter from the board in August notifying him that they were opening up the application process and that he could apply for the position if he wanted to. “It may be that I was not reappointed because I took a position contrary to that of the school district and the school board,” he said. 

Comprised of three members—one appointed by the Board of Education, one appointed by the collective bargaining units and the third approved and appointed by both—the commission deals with issues of personnel management. 

Superintendent Michele Lawrence told the Planet Monday that Doolan’s concern was premature. 

“His term was over,” said Lawrence. “He is more than welcome to apply again. No decision has been made about anything yet. It doesn’t mean that he [Doolan] is off.” 

Board president Joaquin Rivera said that the district wanted to open up the process to the community. 

“We want to know who else is interested,” he said. 

According to Doolan and Commission Chair Margaret Rowland, who was chosen by both bodies acting jointly, the disagreement between the commission and the school board arose from the commission’s budget allocations beginning in late February. 

“The Education Code gives the Merit Commission the complete authority to set its own budget,” Doolan said. “In this particular case, the question was whether the salary of the director of classified personnel would be paid primarily out of the district’s budget or the commission’s budget. When the salary is paid out of the Merit Commission’s budget the commission has more authority to supervise the director of classified personnel. Otherwise the district calls the shots.” 

According to Doolan, the Merit Commission sought to pay 100 percent of the director’s salary from its budget. He said that two years ago the position had been fully paid by the commission budget, but Lawrence pushed for the change to pay 80 percent of the salary out of the district budget, a move, Doolan said, which limited the commision’s power. Lawrence took issue with Doolan’s comments. 

“When the district was in financial trouble some years ago, we tried to look at ways to cut back on money in all the departments in the district,” she said. “We shifted the director’s salary to another account to balance the General Fund.” 

“When we increased the budget allocation to 100 percent, it was an accounting entry that had no total impact on the district’s budget or on the duties performed by the director,” Doolan said. “Either way the funds are still coming from the district’s General Fund.” 

The County Board of Education approved the Merit Commission’s 100 percent budget allocation to pay the director’s salary in July. It will be effective until June 30, 2008. 

Doolan said he received a letter from the board in June which stated that he was not representing the interests of the school board. 

“Since you are the board’s representative to the commission, the board has asked that I express to you concerns we have on positions you have taken that we do not feel represent our philosophy and view-points,” the letter, signed by board President Joaquin Rivera said. “I want to assure my fellow board members that you do represent our views and that you will convey this position at the Merit Commission meetings.”  

Rowland responded through a letter to the board in September that its letter indicated a serious misunderstanding of the essential role of the Merit Commission.  

“Nowhere is there language indicating that any appointee is the representative of the appointing authority,” she wrote. “All three commissioners are charged with upholding the rules of the Merit System and the appropriate sections of the Education Code. In order to fulfill its mandate, and by statute, the commission must function as an independent body, representing neither the district nor the unions.” 

Rowland told the Planet that the clearest example of the need for independence was the commission’s role in hearings. 

“If there is a grievance against the district brought by an employee, the commission is the ultimate hearing body,” she said. “How could an unbiased hearing be conducted by ‘representatives’ of either the district or the unions?” 

Rowland added that she was disappointed that Doolan had not been reappointed. 

“It’s too bad,” she said. “He has a lot of experience and is a valuable asset. It’s very common that people serve for multiple years.” 

She said that the controversy over the commission’s independence had not yet been resolved. 

The school board may have also violated the mandates of the Education Code when it failed to announce the name of the person it intended to appoint to the commission by Sept. 30 and open up a public comment period within 30 to 45 days of the announcement. 

It passed a resolution in October which stated that the board would appoint someone to the Merit Commission at its first meeting in December and that a public hearing would be held within 30 to 45 days after the announcement. 

However, the board did not send out a public notice until Nov. 29 which stated that the deadline for applications was Dec. 12 and that interviews would be scheduled in January 2008. 

“They are way, way behind,” Doolan said. “I think the superintendent has failed to properly advise the school board on the rules and regulations of the Merit System.” 

Superintendent Lawrence said that there was no mandated time for the appointment. 

“There are no penalties for this,” she said. “The laws allow the board to take time for the interviews and the public hearing. Since the board had a tight agenda, they were not able to make the selection before.” 

Board president Joaquin Rivera echoed her thoughts but added that the board would pay more attention to the timeline in the future. 

“We never intend not to comply with the Education Code,” he said. 

The BUSD Board of Education is seeking qualified candidates for a board representative on the BUSD Merit Commission. The new merit commissioner must be: 

• A registered voter and a resident of Berkeley. 

• A known adherent to the principle of the merit system. During the term of service, a member of the commission cannot be an employee of BUSD or a member of the governing board of the school district or the County Board of Education. 

Applications will be forwarded to the Board of Education, and interviews will be scheduled in January 2008. Deadline for applications is Dec. 12, 2007. 

For more information contact: 644-6320 or publicinfo@berkeley.k12.ca.us. 

Claiming its intent is to support future state and county candidates—though it has scarcely done so in the past—Business for Better Government, the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce Political Action Committee, has hired a San Francisco law firm to go to bat for the Chamber PAC’s right to continue filing campaign finance statements with Alameda County rather than the city of Berkeley. 

A May 30 letter from Deputy City Attorney Kristy van Herick to the California Fair Political Practices Commission says that given that the Chamber PAC has contributed exclusively to Berkeley candidates—with just one exception—she believes that the chamber PAC is required to file its campaign contribution statements in Berkeley 

The state agreed with van Herick. An Aug. 15 response signed by FPPC General Counsel Scott Hallibrin states that in a five-year period the Chamber PAC had spent just 0.4 percent of its campaign funds on a race outside Berkeley.  

“…the single $500 contribution the PAC [out of about $126,000 over five years] made to a non-city candidate should be deemed de minimis and the PAC (at this point) should be deemed a ‘city general purpose committee,’” the letter says. 

Whether a committee records its contributions in Berkeley or in Alameda County makes a significant difference for Berkeley voters, Stephen Bedrick, a Fair Campaign Practices Commission member, told the Planet in an interview Monday.  

When the statements are filed locally, “It’s easier for Berkeley voters to find the information—the Berkeley City Clerk puts the information online,” he said. The county puts contribution reports online only when the filing party uses particular software to record contributions. 

“The point of filing is so voters can see who is contributing to what measures or candidates,” he said.  

A Nov. 14 response to the FPPC, written by Melissa A. Mikesell of the Sutton Law Firm, argues that the FPPC did not take into account the Chamber PAC’s “intended future activities, in reaching this determination” and that making a decision based only on where contributions were spent “is only one factor in determining whether a general purpose committee should file as a county or city committee.” 

Mikesell’s letter argues that courts have ruled that committees should file in the highest jurisdiction “in which they intend to be regularly active, even if some or all of the committee’s past activity is in a different jurisdiction.” 

Mikesell further contends that the Chamber PAC’s other county-focused activities should be taken into consideration, such as monitoring county politics and legislation for its impact on Berkeley business. 

PAC chair Miriam Ng did not return calls from the Planet. 

Chamber Executive Director Ted Garrett, new to the post and to Berkeley, said, while the chamber and the PAC are separate and make separate decisions, he wants to “make sure we’re always doing the right thing.” 

“I’d be disappointed if the PAC were to do something [different from what] I’m trying to do at the Chamber,” he said. 

“I’m reviewing everything,” he added. “If there’s a Chamber PAC, it has to blend well with the Chamber.”

Registered nurses at Alta Bates Summit facilities in Berkeley and Oakland will join colleagues at other Sutter Health facilities for a two-day walkout next week, their union announced. 

The California Nurses Association (CNA) served notice on the hospitals Friday. 

The action will begin on the morning of Thursday, Dec. 13, according to union spokesperson Charles Idelson. 

CNA members staged an earlier two-day job action Oct. 10-11 which resulted in the chain locking out strikers for five days, the period for which it had hired replacements. 

While Sutter is a chain with more than 20 hospitals, labor compacts are negotiated between the union and each hospital or hospital group. 

No talks are currently scheduled at the Berkeley and Oakland facilities, according to the union. 

The chain operates two hospitals in Berkeley, the Alta Bates campus at 2450 Ashby Ave. and the Herrick Campus at 2001 Dwight Way, and the three facilities at its Summit Campus in Oakland: the Merritt Pavilion at 350 Hawthorne Ave., the Providence Pavilion at 3100 Summitt St., and the Peralta Pavilion at 450 30th St. 

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will hold hearings on draft environmental impact reports (EIR) on two major buildings in coming weeks. 

The first hearing, set for Dec. 10, will focus on the 140,000-square-foot Computational Research and Theory (CRT) Building. 

Planning Commission Chair James Samuels criticized the design during the commission’s meeting two weeks ago, but he had praise for the second structure, the Helios Energy Research Facility (HERF). 

The hearing on the second building, which is designed to house the controversial $500 million biofuel research program sponsored by BP, plc, the former British Petroleum, is set for Dec. 17. 

Both hearings will begin at 6:30 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 

The 160,000-square-foot Helios building will house the Energy Biosciences Institute, the name BP has given the research effort the multinational oil company hopes will develop crops to be farmed in the tropics for transformation by genetically engineered microbes into vehicle fuels. 

The draft EIRs are both available online. For the CRT building, see www.lbl.gov/community/CRT, and for the HERF building, see www.lbl.gov/community/helios. 

The two structures are located at opposite ends of the 200-acre lab property in the Berkeley hills. 

The Berkeley Planning Commission will hear a lab presentation on the projects Dec. 19, when the commissioners will offer responses of their own. 

Debra Sanderson, the city’s land use planning manager, said her boss, city Planning and Development Director Dan Marks, will be providing an official response as well. 

The final EIR must address concerns raised during the current comment period, which extends through Jan. 4 for the CRT Building and Jan. 11 for the Helios/EBI facility. 

The final EIRs will be issued later in January, with the UC Board of Regents slated to approve the EIRs in March. 

If the regents approve, construction on the Helios building is to begin in spring 2008, with completion by fall 2010. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has pledged $40 million in state bond funds towards construction costs. 

Work on the CRT building should begin in June 2008, with completion set for May 2011. 

The Berkeley Landmarks Preservation Commission will vote on whether to approve a permit to rehabilitate and make alterations to the exterior of the city-landmarked Shattuck Hotel Thursday. 

Originally designed by architect Benjamin G. McDougall, the hotel—built in 1909—is considered one of the historical jewels of downtown Berkeley. 

The hotel tripled its size in the early 1910s when the original building was extended. Additions were also made to it in 1926 and 1957.  

The project proposes to reconstruct the original arched Allston Way entry, fenestration and doors and to add a new steel and frosted glass canopy, sconces, handicapped-accessible ramp and entry steps. 

Applicant Mark Hulbert of Preservation Architecture also plans to paint the hotel in its original colors and recreate the balconies. 

Since the current elevators in the hotel do not provide disabled access, Hulbert proposes to construct a new elevator tower—containing two new elevators and a penthouse—just south of the location of the existing ones. 

Parimal “Perry” Patel of Palo Alto-based BPR Properties, the company that owns Shattuck Hotel, told the Downtown Area Planning and Advisory Committee in September that he wants to expand the building to house around 320 rooms, part of which includes the construction of the 16-story tower. 

Located at 2086 Allston Way, the hotel is currently undergoing modernization of its rooms, after which the owners want to begin the construction of the tower.  

Since the proposed height of the addition exceeds current downtown zoning and violates Berkeley’s existing General Plan, it would require variances from the city’s Zoning Adjustments Board. 

Changes to the exterior of the building, a designated historic resource, would have to be approved by the city landmarks commission. 

In a letter to city Planning Director Dan Marks, Patel said that the height of the tower had been determined from a financial and not an aesthetic standpoint. 

He stressed the need for more meeting space in the city and his desire to work with UC Berkeley to expand conference rooms. Patel said he was also considering plans to build a parking structure downtown and valet services to meet parking demands. 

Long-term residents of the hotel have filed a petition with the Rent Board alleging that the owners are trying to force them out. 

Melinda Jane Morales, 59, of Richmond was struck and killed at 7:25 p.m. Saturday by an Amtrak Capital Corridor train heading south toward San Jose at or near the Gilman Street crossing. 

The accident, still under investigation, follows on the heels of the Nov. 15 death of Scott Slaughter, 31, of Oakland, killed when he crossed the train tracks north of the Berkeley Amtrak Station taking a short cut through a hole in the fence by the tracks to get to his job at Truitt & White on Hearst Avenue. 

On Saturday, the train was traveling at about 73 miles per hour, according to Vernae Graham, Amtrak spokesperson. It was able to stop by the time it got to Virginia St., Lt. Wesley Hester, Berkeley Police Department told the Planet.  

Witness testimony could not be verified, Hester said. One person told police the victim was walking along the tracks and another said the person on the tracks appeared to be waving at the train. 

The two train-track deaths happened not far from one another, both in Councilmember Linda Maio’s district. When reached Monday afternoon, Maio said she had spoken to the police chief, who was trying to get more information on the incident from Union Pacific, which is the lead agency conducting the investigation. 

“I’m very concerned about these trains going through urban areas—they can be quite dangerous,” she said, noting that in the East, some trains run through tunnels underground in heavily populated areas. 

UC Berkeley needs to clean up any remaining radioactivity at a laboratory in the Gill Tract where biologists combined cancer cells with lymphocytes to produce antibodies a decade ago. 

State law requires the cleanup before the university can take the site—and the Gill Tract—off of its radioactive materials handling license. 

“The facility’s recent history included the use of radioactive material in biomedical and environmental research,” said Ken August of the Radiological Health Branch state Department of Public Health. 

“The research was conducted under a broad scope license issued to UC Berkeley,” he said. “Currently the site is pending decommissioning, and the only activities authorized are those needed by UC to prepare the decommissioning plan.”  

The Gill Tract research facilities are located near the southwest corner of the intersection of San Pablo Avenue and Buchanan Street in Albany, adjacent to UC’s family housing units.  

Radioactive isotopes were used as tracers at the Hybridoma Center, and two nearby sheds were used for temporary storage of radioactive wastes, said Greg Yuhas, the university’s radioactive safety officer. 

Hybridoma cells, which are essentially immortal, are used for the production of monoclonal antibodies, produced by the lymphocytes—the body’s infection-fighting cells. 

The resulting antibodies and another class of compounds called lymphokines are used in treating a variety of diseases. 

Experiments were conducted in the one-story wood-frame stucco-covered center from 1988 through 1997, Yuhas said, while the wastes were stored in a plywood shed and a shipping container. 

Before the university can drop the property from the list on its radioactive materials license, the state administrative code requires a complex decommissioning survey. 

Yuhas said there are two isotopes which create ongoing safety concerns: carbon 14 and tritium, an isotope of hydrogen. Other isotopes used had much shorter half-lives. 

The first stage of the survey involves preparation of a proposal for how the survey will be conducted, covering all aspects of the sites that need to be examined for residual traces of radioactivity.  

Yuhas took would-be survey contractors on a tour of the site Wednesday, and they have until Dec. 14 to prepare their proposals. 

The decommissioning survey must include measurements of radiation on floor surfaces, the surrounding soil and nearby agricultural plots, walls above sinks, laboratory hoods and sink traps, floor drains, ducts, intake and exhaust vents and refrigerators and freezers. 

Once prepared and reviewed by Yuhas and the university’s office of Environmental Health and Safety, bids will be forwarded to the university’s capital projects office, and the winner will be sent to the state radiological office. 

State officials can approve the survey or require additional survey work by another contractor or its own scientists. 

The survey itself could take from one to six weeks, depending on its complexity, and the resulting cleanup could take “from months to years,” Yuhas said. 

Once completed to the state’s satisfaction—and also according to the requirements of the federal Nuclear Regulation Commission—the site and the Gill Tract itself could be removed from the university’s nuclear materials license. 

Any radioactive wastes found would be removed to a designated disposal facility, Yuhas said. 

As a result of an investigative report by India-West on alleged safety and labor code violations at several Indian American-owned orchards in the Sacramento River valley, the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board plans to launch an outreach and education effort in the Indian American agricultural labor force. 

“We have to admit, we’ve had no contact with the workers from that community,” ALRB assistant general counsel Ed Blanco told India-West. “We had some contact with the (Indian American) growers involving some Mexican workers, but that was in 1990.” 

According to micro-data samples from the 2000 census, there are about 2,000 Punjabi farm laborers living in Sutter and neighboring Yuba County, and most of them spend at least a few months each year working in Punjabi-owned orchards. 

South Asian growers account for less than 1 percent of the farmers in the California, but records show that they have been the targets of 5 percent of civil actions 

Kulwant Johl, the president of the Yuba-Sutter County Farm Bureau, a trade association of farm owners, and the owner of over 900 acres of orchards, said Punjabi Americans make up approximately 15 percent of the local farm labor force. They cling to agricultural work, he said, because they lack the English language skills required for driving trucks or working in local stores. 

Records at the California Department of Pesticide Regulation indicate that Indian American growers have been found in violation of pesticide safety regulations more frequently than other growers in the state. 

According to USDA’s 2002 Census of Agriculture, South Asian growers account for less than one percent of the farmers in the California, but DPR records show that they have been the targets of five percent of civil actions brought by county agricultural commissioners for pesticide use violations over the past two years. Thirteen Indian American growers have paid field violation fines of over $15,000 in the past two years. 

Within the year, ALRB will begin holding general informational meetings at Mahal Plaza, a Yuba City housing complex for low-income farmworkers, with the goal of “letting workers know what their rights are,” Blanco said told India-West. 

ALRB, founded under the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, aims to help farmworkers set up secret ballot elections to decide whether or not they wanted to be represented by labor unions; and also to combat unfair labor practices that pose a threat to collective bargaining. 

Blanco said that Punjabi farmworkers are likely to raise concerns about wage payment, overtime and access to healthcare, which do not fall under his agency’s purview. “If we hear of any violations or complaints of discrimination that don’t pertain to us, we’ll forward that on to the appropriate agency.” 

India-West accompanied an Employment Development Department outreach coordinator on a field visit to the Sierra Gold Nurseries in Yuba City, where a team of Punjabi laborers was observed grafting young cherry trees. While their Hispanic counterparts spoke openly to the official, the Punjabi workers were oddly reticent. 

“The farmers are giving us everything we need,” one man told India-West. “Everything is perfect. The government should do more, though. It should provide classes, do inspections and translate things into Punjabi.” 

Punjabi American farmworkers interviewed at their homes in Mahal Plaza agreed that state agencies are failing to provide adequate outreach and education, but they also went so far as to say that their work conditions are less than perfect. 

All the individuals interviewed reported that they have never been paid overtime wages, and several claimed to have had work-related injuries that they didn’t report for fear of being blacklisted by local labor contractors. 

Most people said that they were allowed to take two unpaid 15-minute breaks for eight to 10 hours of work. One woman accused Indian American growers of discriminating against the elderly and not providing their workers with adequate drinking water. 

Another woman, when asked whether she thinks Punjabi farmworkers know their health and safety rights, answered, “Something wrong could be happening, but we would never know it.” 

Blanco said ALRB would “move forward” based on what India-West has reported. He added, “It seems like there’s a real need for workers to know that their rights are, and as the agency that enforces those rights, we are going to be spearheading the effort.” 

ARLB, in a joint effort with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, has been planning the outreach effort for the past month. 

“Our board and the governor’s office are all interested in becoming more effective,” Blanco said. “In the past our work was done with primarily Mexican and monolingual Spanish speakers. We recognize that there is a certain amount of diversity, and we really need to reach out. In this area with the Punjabis, and in Fresno, too, with the Hmong.” 

If ALRB officers determine that Indian American growers are engaging in unfair labor practices under the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which includes anything from firing workers engaged in collective bargaining to listening in on lunch-time union meetings, then the agency could order an injunction and bring the parties involved into ALRB’s administrative court process. Blanco himself or ALRB general counsel Michael Lee will represent any farmworkers who file charges against their employers. 

“Most people are just looking for guidance, and we have to figure out a way of providing that,” Blanco said. “We can only go onto farms in certain situations—when we go through a case and win, or if workers want to form a union.” 

Most of the outreach to Punjabi American farmworkers will have to be carried out through community organizations, such as Sikh temples and social centers, and local advocacy groups. 

“One way or another, we’ll reach them,” Blanco assured. “We’ll be using a translator, and our materials will be translated into Punjabi.” 

Lee Pliscou, a lead attorney at the Marysville office of California Rural Legal Assistance, said the news is heartening. He added that CRLA, too, has brought a Punjabi-speaking legal intern on board, who has been holding informational sessions on pesticide safety. 

CRLA and ALRB will together launch an outreach effort in the Punjabi American community during next year’s pruning season in April and May. Although the sites of the outreach efforts have not as yet been finalized, they are sure to include Mahal Plaza. “I’ve also suggested bringing another person that people would want to talk to, like an immigration specialist who can talk about the citizenship process, or a person who does job skills training in computers or English,” Pliscou told India-West.

Michael Caplan, acting manager of the Office of Economic Development, was named as manager, and Zach Cowan, assistant city attorney, was named acting city attorney, said Phil Kamlarz in a memo Monday to the mayor and City Council.  

“[Caplan] is a great advocate for the unique blend of businesses and jobs that Berkeley has to offer,” Kamlarz wrote. He has been with the city since 1989, serving both in the Office of Economic Development and as a neighborhood liaison. 

Cowan will replace Manuela Albuquerque, who retired from her post as city attorney, effective Nov. 30. A member of the city attorney’s office since, 1993, Cowan has been assistant city attorney since 1994.  

“We are happy to have Zach as the acting head of the city attorney’s office,” Kamlarz said. 

Both positions were effective Dec. 2. 

State School Superintendent Jack O’Connell came to Oakland on Friday to formally announce that he is turning over two more areas of operation to the Oakland Unified School District.  

The two areas are personnel and facilities management. O’Connell also announced that once a Memorandum of Understanding is signed between his office and local district officials concerning the power transfer, the OUSD board can begin the selection and hiring of a new school superintendent. 

Under the arrangement, the state will continue to hold complete control over the two remaining operational areas—finances and pupil achievement—and will hold a veto power over any actions of the local board or superintendent. OUSD was given back local control over a fifth operational area—community relations and governance—earlier this year. 

O’Connell’s announcement, at Crocker Highlands School in the Oakland hills, came just two days after the release of a report by the Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team recommending the release of state power over the two operational areas. 

OUSD has been under state control since 2003 when the discovery of a massive budget shortfall forced the district to take out a state loan. 

While international attention is focusing on President Hugo Chavez and the Sunday referendum on the Venezuelan constitution, a conflict that is just as profound is shaking Bolivia. Evo Morales, the first Indian president of the country, is forcing a showdown with the oligarchy and the right wing political parties that have stymied efforts to draft a new constitution to transform the nation. He declares, “Dead or alive I will have a new constitution for the country by December 14,” the mandated date for the specially elected Constituent Assembly to present a constitution for the country to vote on by popular referendum. 

A violent conflict that left three dead and hundreds injured erupted over the past weekend in the city of Sucre where the Constituent Assembly has been meeting. After more than a year of obstructionism by the right wing parties, Morales’ Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) and its allied parties that control 60 percent of the Assembly’s vote, approved the broad outlines of a new constitution designed to alleviate economic inequalities, codify a new agrarian reform program and end the apartheid system that the indigenous population has lived under for centuries. 

The “New Left” presidents that have emerged in Latin America in recent years reflect a social insurgence that is challenging the old political leadership and demanding an economic alternative to the neo-liberal policies of Washington that favor foreign interests and the multinational corporations. Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador and even Chilean leaders are carrying out social and economic reforms, although with the possible exception of Ecuador under President Rafael Correa, these reforms are taking place with little or no defiance of their country’s dominant business and financial interests. Upheavals verging on a revolution are taking place in Venezuela and Bolivia. 

In Bolivia the upheaval is very different from Venezuela’s in that it is lead by the Indian majority against the historically dominant “k’aras,” meaning whites and mestizos. The opposition to Morales is lead by the eastern city of Santa Cruz where the business elites and the right wing parties exercise political and economic control. In Sucre and some of the other major departmental (state) capitals where the whites and lighter-skinned peoples tend to concentrate, Santa Cruz has recruited allies, particularly among young university students who are acting as shock troops to confront indigenous organizations and members of the Constituent Assembly.  

In Sucre, the opposition demanded that the new constitution move the executive and congressional branches of government from La Paz to Sucre, which used to be the center of government until the late 19th century. This was clearly a spoiler strategy that plays heavily to racist sentiments – as La Paz and its nearby sister city of El Alto are at the heart of the country’s majority Indian population that supports Morales and mobilized in 2003 to topple a “k’aras” president in La Paz who murdered Indian demonstrators in the streets. 

When the Assembly passed a draft of the new constitution last weekend, the opposition violently took over the streets and all the major public buildings in Sucre using dynamite and Molotov cocktails, demanding the resignation of “the shitty Indian Morales.” Parts of the city were in flames as the Assembly members fled, followed by the police a day later, who had been ordered not to use live ammunition against the mobs. 

The right wing and the business organizations in Santa Cruz and allied cities are threatening to declare autonomy and even talking of secession. A special assembly convoked by the Santa Cruz Civic Committee declared that it would only recognize Sucre as the “location of all the powers of the state.” Branko Marinkovic, a major business magnate and the head of the Santa Cruz committee, declares, “The fight has begun for our autonomy and liberty…. ” Along with Santa Cruz, civic committees in five other major departmental capitals are calling for an economic boycott to withhold basic consumer commodities from the market and sow economic chaos. A move is afoot by the Civic Committees to “declare de facto autonomy” on December 14. 

A massive mobilization of the Indian population in La Paz and the western highlands is taking place in support of Morales and the new constitution. Even in the eastern departments where the opposition controls the major cities, rural indigenous organizations are on the move, including in the department of Santa Cruz. The leader of Bolivia’s largest peasant workers confederation, Isaác Ávalos, is calling for a blockade of the cities, declaring, “we will seize their lands …if they impose de facto autonomy.” 

“We are at a national impasse,” says Miguel Urisote, a political analyst and director of the Land Foundation, an independent research center in La Paz. “The right wing led by the Santa Cruz oligarchy is in open rebellion, but Morales, the Movement Towards Socialism and the popular movements will not back down. The military is supporting the president.  

The radical upsurges in Venezuela and Bolivia have very different roots. In Venezuela, where over 80 percent of the population lives in the cities, it is primarily an urban upheaval that predates the rise of Hugo Chavez. In 1989, the “Caracazo” threw the existing political order into crisis when tens of thousands of people from the outlying slums of Caracas descended on the center of the city where the rich lived. The social and economic transformations of the past eight years under the presidency of Chavez have been carried out in tandem with the popular classes. The main battle has centered over the control and distribution of oil revenues, while in Bolivia the struggle over land and the right of the Indians to grow coca plants are major areas of conflict.  

While a close rapport exists between Chavez and Morales, the transformations in each country will assume distinct trajectories. They are part of the broader process of social change occurring at different paces and intensities throughout Latin America as the old models of the 20th century and the historic dominance of the United States are disputed. 

Roger Burbach is director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (CENSA) and a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. 

The “tap-tap-tap” you hear coming from the shops that line some of the narrow streets in Croix des Bosquets is the sound of artisans pounding nails into metal, crafting the recycled iron mermaids or butterflies that have given the bustling, dusty town, just 15 minutes northeast of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, its reputation for metal sculpture, says Jennifer Pantaléon, whose nonprofit, Zanmi Lakay, brings Haitian arts and crafts to buyers in the U.S. 

Haiti is just one of the countries whose crafts will be showcased at the this year’s East Bay Sanctuary’s International Holiday Crafts Fair Saturday and Sunday (Dec. 1 and 2), 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way.  

The fair will feature Kurdish rugs, textiles from Guatemala, and various crafts from cooperatives in Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and Palestine. 

Pantaléon says that while most of the crafts featured at the fair have not gone through a lengthy and sometimes expensive fair trade certification process, vendors vouch for the fact that the products were made under safe conditions and that the artists have been paid a fair price. 

“The U.N. soldiers [occupying Haiti] haggle—we don’t haggle over the price,” says Pantaléon, whose nonprofit funds job training and education for street children and former street children in Haiti. Pantaléon pointed out that these days there are few tourists in Haiti to buy the artists’ creations.  

Palestinian embroidery 

The Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) is also hosting an international fair. The event is next Saturday, Dec. 8, noon-6 p.m. at St. John’s Church, 2727 College Ave. and features crafts from Palestine and rugs from Turkey. 

Among the offerings will be embroidered blouses, shawls, bags and wallets from the Women’s Embroidery Collective in the Dheisheh Refugee camp in the West Bank, Deborah Agre, MECA development director, told the Planet. 

“So many men are unemployed—the women use traditional crafts to support their families,” Agre said, adding that MECA has helped to build the structure in which the women work.  

Ceramics, olive oil, and olive oil soap from various parts of Palestine will also be available at the fair. 

KPFA too 

For locals willing to cross the bridge—or BART it—to “the city,” the annual KPFA crafts fair, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Dec. 8 and 9, includes numerous fair-trade buying opportunities among the more than 200 juried artists and craftspeople. 

The fair is at the Concourse Exhibition Center at Eighth and Brannan streets. Entry fee is $10 and $6 for seniors and disabled; under 17 are free. Shuttles run from Civic Center BART. 

Jan Etre, event coordinator, says sales by women’s cooperatives in Guatemala, Thailand, India, Napal and Haiti, whose crafts will be available at the fair, helps keep rural populations from migrating to overcrowded cities and keeps the women from having to sustain their families through prostitution. 

Dreams on Looms will be at the fair to showcase place mats, runners and pillowcases from northeast India. They are produced by highly skilled but low-income women weavers earning living wages and “hand-woven on bamboo looms by co-operatives of women belonging to the Bodo, Dimasa and Karbee tribes of Assam, residing in the Brahmaputra valley and nestled in the foothills of the Eastern Himalayas,” according to the Dreams on Looms website.  

The KPFA fair also features live local music, including jazz artist Rhonda Benin, who performs at 4 p.m. Saturday. See www.kpfa.org/craftsfair/ for the complete lineup. 

St. Joseph the Worker 

For those who want to understand more about the formal fair-trade process and shop for fair-trade goods at the same time, St. Joseph the Worker’s Social Justice Committee is hosting a “Fair Trade Fair” featuring Laurie Lyser of TransFair, who will explain Fair Trade certification and show a short film.  

The event is at 7 p.m., Dec. 7 at St. Joseph the Worker School, 2125 Jefferson Street. The venue is not wheelchair accessible. 

Fair-trade items available for purchase will be Divine Chocolate from TransFair, Palestinian Olive Oil from the Jewish Voice for Peace and coffee from Just Coffee, which calls itself “Coffee with a Conscience.” 

Bill Joyce, of the Social Justice Committee, says that the coffee co-op in Chiapas is able to offer work there, so that workers do not have to immigrate to the U.S. Joyce has visited the processing operation on the Arizona border. “It’s a two-car garage sort of thing,” he said. 

Elephant Pharmacy  

Al Briscoe, director of marketing for Elephant Pharmacy, 1607 Shattuck Ave., says among his favorite fair-trade gift items are colorful finger puppets from Peru—four-inch-tall lions, giraffes, elephants and more made from 100 percent alpaca wool. 

“They’re super soft and have great detail,” he told the Planet. Full-size puppets are also available. They’re marketed by Playful World, which brokers fair-trade agreements with the artisans. 

All officially certified fair-trade items in the store are noted, Briscoe said, adding that they carry some items transitioning to fair trade that are not yet certified. 

Other fair-trade items on the Elephant Pharmacy shelves are silk bags made from recycled saris, chocolate and coffee. 

Global Exchange  

The nonprofit Global Exchange store at 2840 College Ave. specializes in fair trade and carries items from 60 different countries. Assistant manager Marilyn Nebolsky especially likes the bamboo salad bowls from Vietnam. 

The artisans get paid a fair wage and the product is made from bamboo, a sustainable, easily renewable crop, she said. 

Take Nothing Home (but a paper) 

Rev. Douglas Moss of the Hillside Community Church, 1422 Navellier St., El Cerrito invites the public to bring nothing home from the Dec. 1 sale (1-5 p.m.) but a gift certificate showing a purchase of cows, goats, gloves or a night in a shelter. 

“You’ll go home with no stuff in your hands,” Moss told the Planet on Tuesday. Many times gift giving becomes an obligation, but it should be a joy, he said. That’s where the certificate of purchase comes in. 

Instead of buying your grandmother talcum powder, you can spend $11 for milk and snacks for children in the Gaza Strip. Eleven dollars will also buy a rocket stove for use in Haiti—the stove uses half the wood a regular stove would. 

For $5,000 you can purchase two cows, two sheep, two oxen and two water buffalo destined for people in various countries around the globe. 

There will also be gifts to address local needs. One can purchase a night at YEAH, a youth shelter in Berkeley, or gloves for Friends of Five Creeks, which maintains local waterways. 

“It’s a way to do something and feel really good about it,” Moss said. 

Once known for tolerance toward the downtrodden, Berkeley turned a corner Tuesday night, advocates for the homeless and mentally ill say, when the City Council voted to give police greater power to give citations to people lying on city sidewalks. 

The business community, on the other hand, claimed victory in the eight-month fight to pass Mayor Tom Bates' Public Commons for Everyone Initiative, saying the measure begins to address the inappropriate street behavior of those who trample on the right of shoppers to enjoy the public commons and for merchants to earn their living. 

While the public filled the Council Chambers—with most expressing opposition to the proposed laws making it easier for police to cite people lying on the sidewalk—little resistance to the initiative’s increased restrictions on smoking was expressed.  

And most who spoke publicly also favored provisions for enhanced services to chronically homeless people, to be paid for by raising parking meter fees to collect an estimated $1 million in revenue. (Specifics on how the city manager’s office arrived at the $1 million figure will not be available until next week.) 

However, several speakers pointed out that services promised in the initiative, particularly increasing the availability of public toilets and funding supportive housing, could have been delivered without the tie to punitive measures. 

For attorney Osha Neumann, linking services with restrictions was like an abusive husband saying to his wife: “I'll support you, but you have to accept this abuse,” he told the council. 

Councilmember Max Anderson said no new laws are needed. “Some of these [services] could have been accomplished a long time ago ... We have to balance this some way so we don’t have to criminalize people to get them into these programs,” he said. 

The council vote on the initiative was divided into three parts: 

• A resolution that requires one warning (down from two) and no complaint to enforce a ban on lodging in public places—Berkeley police interpret “lodging” as lying down in a sleeping bag, sleeping, or having goods clustered around oneself—with enforcement a low priority between 10 p.m. and 6 p.m.” passed 5-3-1, with Mayor Tom Bates and Councilmembers Laurie Capitelli, Betty Olds, Gordon Wozniak and Darryl Moore voting in favor, Councilmembers Dona Spring, Kriss Worthington and Max Anderson voting to oppose and Councilmember Linda Maio abstaining. 

• An ordinance that expands the number of commercial districts in which lying on the sidewalk is prohibited was approved 6-2-1, with Bates, Moore, Maio, Capitelli, Olds and Wozniak voting in favor, Worthington and Spring opposed and Anderson abstaining. 

• A third vote approved greater restrictions on where people can smoke also passed and, in concept, a 25 cent per hour meter fee hike to pay for various services for homeless persons. This vote was 8-0 with Anderson abstaining. 

The business community was represented at the meeting by the Chamber of Commerce, the Downtown Berkeley Association, the Telegraph Avenue Business Improvement District and the North Shattuck Association.  

“Berkeley for a long time has tried to build a very big tent. We’re now in a situation where we’re having difficulty with parts of that tent,” Chamber CEO Ted Garrett told the council. “This [initiative] isn’t a panacea, but it’s the beginning of a win-win situation for everyone concerned.” 

Chamber President Roland Peterson, also executive director of the Telegraph Avenue BID, had lobbied for harsher laws, including one that would have punished people for prolonged sitting on the sidewalk.  

“There really are no new laws in this,” he told the council. “There are fine tunings on how it’s going to be enforced … This is one step in a much larger process. We’re going to be coming back to see how this has worked.” 

Wozniak blamed the stagnating business climate on Telegraph and downtown on the inappropriate behavior of people on the street. “On Telegraph and Shattuck, we have a very high commercial vacancy rate. We’re losing revenue. It’s very important that we do something about the problematic street behavior,” he said. 

Several Telegraph Avenue merchants, however, told the Planet in earlier interviews that they believed the numerous vacancies were caused by high rents, difficulties in getting city permits and the economy, including the bankruptcy of Tower Records and the nationwide scaling-back of the Gap stores, rather than the behavior of street people. 

Worthington told council colleagues that linking people lying on the sidewalk to under-performing business did not make sense. 

“When I hear business owners talking about problematic street behavior, they’re usually talking about someone standing and cursing or gesticulating wildly,” Worthington said. “Ironically, none of the measures here address that.”  

People aren’t afraid that someone lying down is going to hit them “and they don’t feel scared when they see somebody at nighttime sleeping,” Worthington added. “So these solutions to problematic street behavior—it’s inconceivable that they could work. None of those things address problematic street behavior.” 

Calling the initiative “disingenuous,” Kokavulu Lumukanda, a formerly homeless member of the Homeless Commission, called on the council not to support the initiative.  

“The homeless need more services and permanent housing and not coercion or punitive measures,” he said. 

Proposed Services Budget for Public Commons Initiative 

$1 million — to be raised with $.25 cent per hour increase in meter fees 

Public toilets: $142,000 

Supportive housing/outreach to chronically homeless: $350,000 

Transition age program: $100,000 

SSI Benefits advocacy: $78,000 

Centralized homeless intake system: $60,000 

Host program (guides on Telegraph/Shattuck to help tourists, report 

inappropriate behavior): $200,000 

Public Seating: $60,000 

Signs/outreach for smoking ban: $10,000 

—from Nov. 27 city staff report 

While enforcement for new restrictions against those lying on the sidewalk and smoking in commercial areas will likely begin within six weeks, new services—lauded by supporters as an integral part of the Public Commons for Everyone Initiative passed by the City Council Tuesday—will take more time. 

Police spokesperson Lt. Wesley Hester told the Planet Wednesday that the resolution making it easier to cite people for public “lodging” will kick in only after the police chief gives officers specific directions for implementation.  

The resolution amends local guidelines for enforcing a state law prohibiting “lodging” to require one warning and no complaint, with enforcement a low priority between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.” (The original resolution required two warnings; the citation was complaint-driven.) 

Attorney Osha Neumann told the council Tuesday that police were not waiting for the council to approve the new laws to crack down on the homeless. He alleged that they began as soon as the council approved the concept of the Public Commons for Everyone Initiative (PCEI) in June. 

Neumann spoke of three clients he said had been wrongly cited by police.  

A disabled woman who uses a wheelchair was cited for loitering near a school in Willard Park (next to the middle school) during the day, he said. A young man sitting against the locked gate of an empty store on a public sidewalk on Telegraph Avenue was cited for trespassing, he said.  

And a 62-year-old woman who uses a wheelchair, is legally blind, has been diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome, diabetes, arthritis, cancer and schizophrenia and is in constant pain, was cited for trespassing as she was sitting in a doorway of an empty storefront on University Avenue, Neumann said. 

The council had requested but was unable to obtain documentation on the frequency of quality-of-life citations, prosecutions and convictions—and the city manager’s office denied the Planet’s similar Public Records Act request—saying it was not possible to get that information from the Berkeley Police Department’s computerized records system. 

At the meeting, Councilmember Linda Maio repeatedly asked the police representative and city attorney how the prohibition against “lodging,” a state law, was implemented in Berkeley. She said sleeping people should not be harassed and wanted to be sure “people would still be able to sleep in sleeping bags.” 

The response was non-committal. “There would be no change in how we apply the law,” responded acting City Attorney Zach Cowan.  

“The main difference is that we could act without a citizen complaint,” Capt. Eric Gustafson, sitting in for the police chief, added. 

Maio pressed for specifics: “Under what circumstances would you invoke this law?” she asked.  

Gustafson said he could not think of an example, and Maio said: “We’re being asked to change something that is broken, but we don’t know what is broken about it. Why is it that we would disturb someone who is sleeping in a doorway?” 

The Berkeley Police Department Training and Information Bulletin Number 220 says: “…647(j) [the state law prohibiting lodging] applies when there is probable cause to believe that the person is lodging outside for the entire night on public property … Factors to consider in deciding whether to cite for violation of PC 647 (j) include whether the person: is on or in a sleeping bag or bedroll; is sleeping; has other belonging[s] clustered around and/or otherwise appears to be staying for the entire night; appears or is reported to have been at the location for an extended period of time.” 

Asked by the Planet for specifics about how officers currently implement prohibitions against lodging, Hester said it is up to an officer’s discretion.  

Asked to explain enforcement as “low priority,” Hester gave an example: if a person is seen “lodging” and if a robbery is in progress, the officer will respond to the robbery. 

New Ordinances 

The ordinance expanding prohibitions against smoking to larger areas within commercial districts, in parks and near health facilities, child care facilities and senior centers, and the ordinance prohibiting lying in all commercial areas will get a second reading at the Dec. 11 council meeting and take effect 30 days later. 

To pay for new services, new revenue—an anticipated $1 million annually—will be raised from a 25 cent per hour increase in parking meter rates. The council will consider an ordinance to that effect in January. Lauren Lempert, consultant on the PCEI, told the Planet Wednesday she expects meters to be recalibrated by March.  

To approve new services, the council must pass specific ordinances or resolutions and then approve contracts with vendors. In some instances, vendors will bid on the services.  

Lempert said she thinks increased advocacy for homeless persons to get disability payments, Medi-Cal and food stamps (for which the council has tentatively set aside $78,000) could begin soon after the council formally approves the services, given that the Homeless Action Center already does this work and can be asked to expand it. 

Lempert said expanding bathroom hours could happen in January or February (for which $142,000 is set aside) and new supportive housing for 10 to 15 of the city’s most difficult to house chronically homeless people (at $350,000) could be in place by April. 

Services that will go out to bid will take longer to implement. With council approval, they could include hiring “hosts” (at $200,000) to watch commercial areas for inappropriate behavior and help tourists and increasing public seating and trash receptacles (at $60,000). 

In a report to the council on PCEI, Lempert referred to the possible establishment of a community court where people would not be criminalized for acts of lying on the sidewalk, lodging, smoking or other quality-of-life offenses, but instead be allowed or required to perform community service and go into mandatory drug/alcohol treatment programs. The report does not include a formal proposal or costs for the court. 

As the new laws kick in, opponents of the Public Commons initiative promised to continue to fight it, with local resident Carol Denney telling the council to expect a “lie-in” on the sidewalk at the Downtown Berkeley Association offices. 

A vehement burst of community protest compelled the Berkeley Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) to postpone permitting BioFuel Oasis to establish a filling station at 1441 Ashby Ave. Thursday. 

More than fifty people turned up to voice a position on the controversial project, which proposes to displace Kandy’s Detail—a black-owned car wash business—and restore the historic use of the site as an automobile fueling station. It previously was used for selling petroleum-based gasoline. 

The board voted unanimously to give property owner Craig Hertz, current tenant Kandy Alford and BioFuel Oasis two months to reach an agreement about shared use of the site. 

While proponents of the all-women cooperative BioFuel Oasis, currently located at 2465 4th St., stressed the station’s need to relocate to a larger site and the benefits of biodiesel automotive fuel, neighbors complained of prejudice against the black community, and said that the city’s planning department had given preferential treatment to the proposed new tenants. 

Co-founded by Jennifer Radtke and Sara Hope Smith from a community project in 2003, the business is the first biofueling station in the East Bay.  

The proposed filling station would include an above-ground 6,000 gallon fuel storage tank. The four existing driveways and two fuel pump islands—which allow up to four vehicles to be fueled simultaneously—would be retained.  

“We want to transform the site into an oasis-like setting,” said David Arkin, project architect. “Our model is Cafe Roma.” 

Arkin added that the business has been forced to move from its current location because of the long wait customers go through. “The two pumps will make the fill up easier,” he said. 

The station’s approximately 2,000 customers will be able to access the pumps from 7 a.m. to midnight. 

Although the owners of the fueling station said that the hours of operation would lead to “more pairs of eyes” in the neighborhood, some board members disagreed. 

“Yes, it would make a difference to have more pairs of eyes but it would also create a different level of vulnerability,” said Deborah Matthews, Mayor Tom Bates’ new appointee to the ZAB. 

Board member Jesse Anthony said that he was worried about the congestion the station would cause at the intersection of Ashby and Sacramento avenues. 

“Don’t you think that’s a wrong place to have a fueling station?” he asked. 

“We have looked and looked and looked,” said Radtke, who like other co-op members calls herself a BioFuel Oasis owner-operator. “Unfortunately there is no other site in Berkeley.” 

Dave Fogarty, the city’s economic development director, said that the other sites available in Berkeley were not zoned for fueling use because of restrictions on auto uses. 

He added that there were virtually no sites available in the city where Kandy Alford could relocate his car wash. “If he did, he would have to comply with new laws regarding waste water disposal, which the existing car wash business is not in compliance with,” Fogarty said. 

According to the Biofuel plan, existing fuel pump canopies would be removed to provide vertical clearance for taller vehicles, and new, taller canopies with solar panel roofs would be constructed on the existing brick columns. Ten on-site parking spaces would be provided. 

The Landmarks Preservation Commission voted against declaring the site a landmark in June, and advised the applicant to incorporate some of the scalloped beam details from the building and existing island canopies into the new structure. 

“What BioFuel is proposing is fantastic,” said Hertz. “It’s the best thing that happened in and around that area ... It makes economic sense. I have asked Kandy if he wants to move to another place or share the site, but he doesn’t want to do it.” 

Hertz added that Alford was six months behind on his rent and was facing eviction. 

“He was not able to pay his rent because he was in the hospital,” said Pamela Isaacs, who identified herself as a spokesperson for Alford. “He is still sick ... We are not against BioFuel Oasis but we don’t want it in our neighborhood. This is all about gentrification, about getting rid of black businesses.” 

Toya Groves, a member of the Four Corners Association, a neighborhood community group formed to protest the project, said that the project ignored the retention and encouragement of black businesses in South Berkeley and the revitalization of the community’s economic base. 

“It goes against the goals of the South Berkeley Area Plan,” she said. “Kandy’s is a cornerstone of the South Berkeley community which hires and serves the community it is a part of ... You are saying that BioFuel will revive the neighborhood’s economy but they themselves are in a financial bind. The planning department waived fees of up to $8,000 for the proposed project because of financial hardship and even prepared the EIR for them. This is institionalized racism ... It’s splitting two community groups who should be together.” 

Board member Terry Doran called the carwash an “asset to the community.” 

“Do you have any idea of how to make the transition better for Kandy?” asked board member Suzanne Wilson. 

BioFuel oasis owner-operator Margaret Farrow said that no specific ideas had been discussed at this point.

For some, council meetings are drudgery. But for Dimitri Belser, president of the Ed Roberts Campus board of directors, and others who came to Tuesday’s meeting to support the ERC, the session proved to be exactly what they had hoped for. 

“Tonight, that dream [of Ed Roberts Campus] could become a reality,” said Belser, just moments before the unanimous council voted to give $2 million to the project that will house seven nonprofits that serve disabled people, a fitness center for the disabled, and childcare. The campus will be located on the east Ashby BART station parking lot. 

With $4.5 million approved by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission Wednesday and new funding from BART, the ERC has the $44 million it needs to break ground for the project that has been 12 years in the making. 

Councilmembers expressed concern that they were taking funds originally intended for a sound wall between Aquatic Park and the freeway, but pledged to find new funding for the wall, estimated to cost more than $5 million. 

In other council actions: 

• Councilmember Kriss Worthington withdrew a resolution supporting Metro Lighting workers in a dispute with their employer, saying that he placed it on the agenda with inadequate research. 

• By unanimous vote and without discussion the council gave a $50,000 sole source contract to Build It Green to do the groundwork for a pilot project funded by the city and the Department of Energy to get more homes and businesses to use solar energy. 

Solano Ave. BID 

At around midnight, Susan Boat, owner of the salon Scissors and Comb on Solano Avenue, addressed the council along with several other Solano Avenue business owners, calling for dissolution of the Solano Avenue Business Improvement District. 

They said they were not speaking simply for a handful of business owners, but that they brought with them petitions from 130 business owners calling for the dissolution of the district. The petitions, they said, represent nearly 60 percent of the membership and 59 percent of the value of the assessments. 

The merchants said they object to the involuntary nature of the district and the domination of Albany merchants on the board of the nonprofit—the Solano Avenue Association—that houses the BID. (There was a separate BID board that recently dissolved itself.) 

Economic Development Manager Dave Fogarty said in a phone interview on Thursday that it is up to the City Council to decide if the BID should be dissolved. The item was not on Tuesday’s agenda and, to date, has not been scheduled. 

Berkeley’s tree-sitters and their supporters are getting ready for Sunday’s celebration that will mark the end of the first year of a colorful campus protest. 

The events—slated for 2 to 6 p.m.—come as university officials have announced their plans to cut branches used to provide food, water and other supplies to the arboreal activists. 

“We’ve been getting a lot of interest from the press,” said Doug Buckwald, organizer of Save the Oaks at the Stadium and a plaintiff in the litigation challenging the university’s plans for a grove of California Live Oaks along the western wall of Memorial Stadium. 

“We want everybody to come out,” said Zachary Running Wolf, who started the protest by ascending the trunk of a redwood at the grove on the morning of last year’s Big Game day. 

Running Wolf has been arrested nine times in the intervening months.  

Campus police have been making frequent arrests of tree-sitters and their supporters, racking up five on Thanksgiving day. 

The university has erected two fences around the grove, adding a layer of barbed wire at the top after protesters repeatedly scaled the fence. 

Meanwhile, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Barbara J. Miller has been deliberating on the legal challenges filed by the city, two environmental groups, the Panoramic Hill Association and an assortment of other plaintiffs, including City Councilmember Dona Spring. 

Councilmember Betty Olds, environmentalist Sylvia McLaughlin and former Mayor Shirley Dean even took their own brief turn in the trees earlier this year, attracting attention from the New York Times and other national media. 

But the student turnout has been small at the Berkeley campus site where the university plans to build a $120 million high -tech gym and office complex. 

In Santa Cruz, a tree-sit launched Nov. 8 has succeeded in attracting larger numbers of students, who are protesting that campus’s Long Range Development Plan and its call for significant increases in students and buildings. 

Word of the university’s intent to cut branches on the edges of the grove surfaced last week, and formal confirmation came in an e-mail sent Monday from the office of the general counsel of the UC Board of Regents. 

The notice, sent by attorney Kelly Drumm, said the decision is “based solely on an assessment of security needs” by UC Berkeley Police Chief Victoria L. Harrison. 

Attorneys Stephan Volker and Michael Lozeau had asked that university officials consult with them before any action was taken, but in the e-mail Drumm said that the chief “believes that discussion of potential police actions in advance of those actions could compromise the effectiveness of those actions and exacerbate an already dangerous situation.” 

City Councilmember Gordon Wozniak met with university officials last week to raise concerns of his constituents that the tree-trimming operations could adversely impact the landmarked Gayley Way streetscape. The street was designed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, whose best-known creation is New York City’s Central Park. 

The Student Athlete High Performance Center planned for the western rim of the stadium is one of several projects in what the university calls the Southeast Campus Integrated Projects. 

The legal action now pending in Judge Miller’s court alleges that the environmental documents the regents approved for the gym complex aren’t legally adequate. Another aspect of the challenge centers on alleged violation of the Alquist-Priolo Act, which governs construction on or adjacent to earthquake faults. 

The Hayward Fault, which state and federal geologists have judged the likely source of the Bay Area’s next major earthquake, splits the stadium from end to end. 

Running Wolf said he is challenging the project because he believes the stadium is the site of a Native American burial ground.

The Berkeley Board of Education selected the finalists Monday to fill the post of superintendent for the Berkeley Unified School District. 

The board started the selection process in September after Superintendent Michele Lawrence announced her retirement. Lawrence will step down Feb. 1. 

District spokesperson Mark Coplan said up to six candidates had been picked for interviews scheduled for Dec. 8 and 9. 

Although board vice president John Selawsky said he could not comment on the number of finalists, he described the final pool as diverse. 

“We have some current superintendents in it,” he said. “The goal is to interview them all in a one- or two-day period and then after the board agrees on the finalist to bring that person back for a final interview.” 

Selawsky said the board will announce the new superintendent after visiting the candidate’s current district. He said the announcement will likely be made before the end of the year. 

Some have criticized the board for what they called a secretive selection process. Mission Viejo-based Leadership Associates, the search firm hired by the board to guide the search, and board members have said it was important to keep the search confidential. 

“I continue to have grave concerns about this process,” said Cathy Campbell, president of the Berkeley Federation of Teachers. “I think the board has missed an opportunity to advance a city-wide, community-wide approach to the challenges facing our district by having this closed-door, secret process, rather than a process that opens the door to community input. Three of the most important stakeholders in this district, parents, teachers and students, are completely excluded from any meaningful input into the decision.” 

Michael Miller, coordinator of the group Parents of Children of African Descent, agreed that the search process kept the public marginalized. 

“It’s quite distressing,” he said. “We want not only a qualified individual but someone who can meet the broad needs of our community ... While Michele Lawrence brought her skills in fiscal management at a time when our district was in financial difficulty, we now need a superintendent with the passion, skills, and experience to address issues of race and class and make student achievement the number one priority.” 

Selawsky said confidentiality was imperative for creating a strong pool of candidates. 

“Once it comes down to the final person it’s a different thing,” he said. “All personnel matters are confidential. If current superintendents end up not getting the job then their relationship with their community members get soured ... As a result we have to ensure them confidentiality.” 

Some Latino parents said that there was insufficient notice given to parent groups about the community meetings held in September. 

“There was excellent translation provided, but that was only at one meeting,” said Beatriz Leyva-Cutler, director of Centro Vida, a Berkeley Spanish-immersion preschool, a member of the Berkeley High Governance Council and parent of a Berkeley High junior. “I don’t think a lot of parents are even aware that there is a process underway or that there was an opportunity to talk about what they want in a new superintendent. Communication is the biggest barrier.”

State Schools Superintendent Jack O’Connell appears ready to turn over two more areas of control to the Oakland Unified School District on the recommendation of the Fiscal Crisis & Assistance Management Team (FCMAT), a move that could lead directly to the hiring of a new OUSD superintendent under local control.  

O’Connell’s office has set up a conference in Oakland for Friday morning (today) in which it will “announce the process of returning two additional operational areas to the Oakland Unified School District governing board: Personnel and Facilities.” 

FCMAT, the state funded school intervention organization, issued a report on Wednesday in which it recommended that O’Connell turn over control of those two areas. The state superintendent began controlling all five OUSD operational areas—including finance, community relations and governance, and pupil achievement—following a 2003 state takeover of OUSD resulting from a massive district budget shortfall.  

At that time, the local board lost all power, and the local superintendent, Dennis Chaconas, was fired and replaced by a state administrator hired by O’Connell. 

The FCMAT report also said that it was close to a recommendation of return to local control to OUSD in a third area: pupil achievement. Control over a fourth area—community relations and governance—was returned by O’Connell to the local board earlier this year on FCMAT’s recommendation from two earlier reports. 

Clearly ebullient OUSD board member Gary Yee described the leaps in FCMAT’s assessments of OUSD’s performance from last year to this as “remarkable,” and called the report and its recommendations “the most powerful good news we’ve seen in the district in some time.” 

Under the original SB39 legislation that authorized the 2003 state takeover of OUSD, the state superintendent has the sole power to grant the return of local control in any operational area following the FCMAT recommendation. Earlier this year, the legislature passed Assemblymember Sandré Swanson’s AB45 bill that would have taken the local control restoration discretion out of the superintendent’s hands and given that return automatically upon FCMAT’s recommendation. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed that bill. 

Following the release of this week’s FCMAT report, and even before O’Connell’s announcement of agreement with the organization’s recommendations, the OUSD board moved quickly to begin the process of employment of a superintendent. At Wednesday’s board meeting, OUSD Board President David Kakishiba said that he was putting an item on the board’s Dec. 8 retreat agenda that will “begin the dialogue on how we should go about the superintendent search process.” 

In a telephone interview held earlier on Wednesday, Kakishiba said that in past state takeovers of local school districts, the state has allowed the hiring of a local superintendent once three of the five operational areas have been returned to the local district. 

Kakishiba said that the granting of authority to hire a local superintendent after the return of three operational areas “is not set out in law, but it has been the past practice. Vallejo is the most recent example where that took place.” 

If O’Connell follows through with his announced plans to return the two additional areas to local control as expected, it would eventually mean a bifurcated administrative system in OUSD, in which the state-appointed administrator—currently interim administrator Vincent Matthews—would have sole and final authority over the areas of finance and pupil achievement, using the board as an advisory body only in these two areas. 

The board would set policy in the three remaining operational areas—community relations and governance, facilities management, and personnel management—and run them through the newly-hired local superintendent, but Matthews would act as a trustee in those areas, with the ability to veto any policies or actions if he considers them harmful to the district’s fiscal recovery. How that bifurcated administration would actually act in operation—and how much or little leeway and deference the state administrator would give the local superintendent and board—is unknown. 

O’Connell’s actions following the most current FCMAT recommendations—if he does follow through with abiding by them—contrasts sharply with his past treatment of OUSD. O’Connell ignored FCMAT’s recommendation of local control return in the area of community relations and governance for two years, and then granted it only after Swanson filed his proposed AB45 legislation, which would have taken the return authority out of O’Connell’s hands. 

At Wednesday night’s board meeting, board members gave the assemblymember full credit for moving the local control process forward. 

“I know that we didn’t have any of these areas returned until Swanson intervened,” board member Kerry Hamill said. “Before his bill was introduced, the process was dead.”

FCMAT rates on a 10-point scale, with scores given to several individual standards within each of the five operational areas (community relations and governance, finance, facilities management, personnel management, and pupil achievement), and then the operational area itself is given an average of the individual standards scores.  

FCMAT only recommends return to local control of an operational area when the average of that operational area is at 6 or above, and where no individual standard within that operational area is given a score of less than 4. 

The most recent scores and how they changed from FCMAT’s last OUSD report: 

Community Relations and Governance 

(already returned to local control) Up 0.27 points, from 7.0 in 2006 to 7.27 in 2007.  

Personnel Management  

(recommended for return to local control) Up 1.4 points, from 5.2 in 2006 to 6.6 in 2007. 

Pupil Achievement 

(falls just below FCMAT recommendation for return to local control) Up 0.87 points, from 5.0 in 2006 to 5.87 in 2007. 

Financial Management 

(not recommended for return to local control) Up 1.3 points, from 4.0 in 2006 to 5.30 in 2007. 

Facilities Management 

(recommended for return to local control) Up 1.28 points, 5.8 in 2006 to 7.08 in 2007. 

The complete FCMAT report is posted on both the OUSD and FCMAT websites. 

Planning Commissioners began their trek through one of Berkeley’s most complex and cabalistic arts Wednesday night—deciphering the city’s policies on density bonus and inclusionary housing. 

Spurred by a City Council request made last spring, the city planning staff was ready to propose a zoning ordinance amendment that would have changed the law applicable to West Berkeley’s mixed-use residential (MU-R) zone, easing requirements (in that area only) for developers to provide low-income housing.  

But a majority of the commission wasn’t willing to schedule a hearing on the proposed ordinance without first considering its overall impacts on affordable housing supplies and its relationship to city policies designed to encourage development of less expensive housing. 

The inclusionary ordinance requires that 20 percent of units in projects of five or more apartments or condominums must be allocated for lower-income tenants in the case of apartments, or in condominium buildings for buyers who make less than 120 percent of area median income. 

In lieu of building the units, developers may pay a city fee that is supposed to be used to build affordable units elsewhere in Berkeley.  

The impetus for the council’s request for the West Berkeley zoning change was its rejection of an appeal by Berkeley developer Edward Adams to build a four-unit, three-story housing project at 2817 Eighth St. 

Under the current ordinance, the council and the Zoning Adjustments Board decided they had no option but to reject the project as it had been proposed. 

Current zoning allows for six units on the site, and the city’s inclusionary ordinance requires that the developer must pay a fee to help build affordable housing elsewhere if he fails to build up to a lot’s capacity. 

Adams told the commission that he had reduced the number of units to accommodate the desires of neighbors, but that the project would die if he had to pay inclusionary housing fees and other fees and costs which might add up to a third of a million dollars. 

“We would like to be able to do four units without a fee,” he said. 

Commissioner Harry Pollack and Chair James Samuels were ready to move for a hearing on a staff proposal for an amendment allowing for fewer units in the West Berkeley district on lots currently carrying a requirement for five units or more. 

While density standards now apply in the city’s R-1, R-1A, R-2 and R-2A residential districts, the West Berkeley zone is the only commercially-zoned area in the city where they are mandated. 

There are also no equivalent standards for the R-3 and R-4 zoning districts. 

City Assistant Planner Claudine Asbagh said the rationale for the district was to create a buffer zone between the city’s manufacturing and light industrial district and the residential neighborhoods to the east. 

Commissioner David Stoloff said he was concerned that the impact of a policy change could lead to a loss of affordable housing in the city. He didn’t want the Planning Commission to reach any decision before the city’s Housing Advisory Commission (HAC) weighed in with its own opinion. 

But planning staffer Alex Amoros, a relatively new hire, said that the proposal hadn’t been scheduled for the HAC. 

Commissioner Gene Poschman said that he and Susan Wengraf had pushed for creation of the inclusionary ordinance and the MU-R district in part “so there would be no loopholes for four-unit projects” like the one Adams had proposed. 

But he said he was also concerned because if a developer decided to build the required five or six units to meet the city’s inclusionary needs, the state density bonus law—mandating the city to allow the developer to build additional mass as a bonus for creating affordable housing units—could push the project up to seven units or more. 

Poschman said he was also concerned by a pending proposal to cut the inclusionary fees for units in high-end condo projects from 62 percent to 40 percent, while no similar reductions had been proposed for lower-cost condos.  

“I think Gene is saying he doesn’t want to look at a small piece, but at the whole thing,” said Pollack. “I’m saying that I want to look at this one small piece.” 

“I’m concerned about the impact on affordable housing here in Berkeley,” said Helen Burke, who urged a delay in action. “If it waited this long to get to us, what would be the harm of waiting a couple of months and looking at the whole picture?” 

“I am opposed to a public hearing for the same reasons as Helen,” said Stoloff, who often finds himself on the other side of votes from Burke. 

Land Use Planning Manager Debra Sanderson said a staff shortage had caused the delay in bringing the issue to the commission, and that staff viewed the proposed change as one of a number of “cleanup” ordinances they would be bringing to the commission in coming sessions. 

Stoloff offered an alternative motion, to put off any decision on a hearing till more information was at hand, but his proposal failed on a 3-3-1 vote to get the five votes needed for passage, with Larry Gurley abstaining and Roia Ferrazares, Samuels and Pollack voting no. Commissioners Dacey and Wengraf were absent Wednesday. But the motion to hold the hearing also failed to get the five votes needed for passage. 

Ferrazares said that when the question comes back for discussion, she would like to have a representative from HAC on hand to present that commission’s views. 

“I want to hear why MU-R is different from other zones, and I want to hear how this change might negatively affect the inclusionary ordinance,” she said. 

Wednesday night’s focus reflects increasing attention paid to West Berkeley by city staff and the council. 

Reconsideration of MU-R standards follows in the wake of the creation of zoning amendments which paved the way for car dealerships to set up operation in areas of West Berkeley where they were previously excluded. 

That move was spurred by Mayor Tom Bates, who said the rezoning was needed to keep dealerships—and the sales taxes they generate—from fleeing the city. 

Dealers and city staff said car manufacturers want dealerships concentrated in locations near freeways, while most of Berkeley’s dealers had been traditionally located on Shattuck Avenue. 

Other changes now under consideration would change the definition of what kinds of arts qualify for protected properties in West Berkeley, a move backed by the Civic Arts Commission, responding to a proposal to transform the old Peerless Lighting plant and surrounding land in West Berkeley into a large project that would feature corporate offices and labs as well as a small number of new live/work studios. 

The current definition of arts is limited to traditional manual crafts, while the new definition would extend privileges to artists who create with computer technology. 

Berkeley has been losing live/work artist units in recent years, with new units not keeping up with the attrition as properties are either demolished or transformed into more upscale projects.

The administration of Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums moved swiftly to consolidate its recent police 12-hour day arbitration victory, announcing that the Oakland Police Department will be broken up into three “geographically accountable” command areas effective Jan. 19. 

Under the plan, police officers will work exclusively within their command areas, each area under the command of a single captain responsible for activities on a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week basis.  

The new structure will replace OPD’s current shift command structure, in which patrol officers are moved throughout the city wherever needed. Dellums administration and police department officials believe the geographically accountable command structure is the first step towards instituting community policing in Oakland, a system that has long been talked about and called for, but never fully put in place. Officials also hope the move will be a major step in getting a handle on Oakland’s crime problem. 

One of the divisions will cover the North Oakland-West Oakland area, one the East Oakland area from Lake Merritt to High Street, and one from High Street to the San Leandro border. 

The announcement on the geographic division breakup comes only days after a national organization ranked Oakland as the fourth most dangerous city in the nation, and while Dellums is considering the adoption of a detailed community policing plan that would coordinate all of the city’s violence abatement services—from increasing street lighting to moving against problem properties to police actions—through the already existing, geographically based Service Delivery System. 

Dellums also said this week that he was preparing a list of six or eight proposals to present to Oakland City Council in the near future to increase both the number of police officers recruited by the Oakland Police Department and the number who actually make it through the academy and hiring process.  

Oakland currently has approximately 719 officers, 300 of them patrol officers, some 80 short of the authorized strength of 803. City and police officials have conducted an intense recruitment campaign in recent years to bring the department up to full strength, but the city has been hampered by the fact that only 50 officers are actually hired out of every 1,000 who respond to the recruitment. 

In addition, some Oakland community groups have been calling for an increase in the police strength to as many as 1,100. No group, however, has yet offered a plan how that number of police would be recruited or retained, or paid for if they were actually hired. 

While the geographical division plan has been in existence for years, OPD Chief Wayne Tucker said that it was impossible to fully implement under the district’s 10-hour shift pattern. Tucker proposed moving to 12-hour shifts, which he said would allow entire groups of officers to be assigned exclusively to one of the three proposed geographic areas in the city. The Oakland Police Officers Association police union opposed the 12-hour shift plan and the matter went to arbitration, where an arbitrator ruled in Tucker’s favor earlier this month. 

Flanked by police officials and key City Councilmembers at a press conference held Tuesday at Oakland’s Martin Luther King Jr. Way Emergency Operations Center, Dellums called the move to the geographical command structure a “major step forward. This is more than symbolic change. This is real change towards our goal of safety in Oakland.” 

Deputy Police Chief Howard Jordan, speaking for an absent Chief Wayne Tucker, who was called to court on police arbitration matters, said the new system “gives us the opportunity to manage and respond to crime trends” in specific geographic areas in a way that is not currently possible, adding that the department has already begun meeting with groups and residents to explain the new system, with a Dec. 11 public presentation scheduled. Jordan said that the department has been phasing in the new structure for months, and expects it to be fully operational when the department switches over on Jan. 19. Still, he asked the public to be “patient and supportive” during the transition period before expecting full results. 

Councilmember Jean Quan was upbeat about the new system, saying it will make her constituent responsibilities much easier. 

“Currently, if someone asks me about a specific crime committed in my district, I have to find out which particular shift the crime occurred on before I know which commander to go to,” Quan said.  

In addition, she said that under the present shift command structure “we can’t look at crime trends properly because they happen over different shifts” with different commanders, different ways of collecting information and reporting problems, and different methods of attacking the problems. Under the new structure, Quan said, “now I know that a single captain is responsible for my area.”  

Quan added that the new geographical division structure will allow the police department to move from merely responding to 9-1-1 calls to “having more responsibility to look at the sources of the crime problems.” 

But Community Policing Advisory Board Chair Don Link was more cautious, saying that while he supports the structure change, “the devil is in the details. A change in the attitude and the culture of the police department must take place as well.”  

Link said he would be “watching carefully” to see that the structure change actually results in “24-hour protection” for Oakland citizens.  

Former Oakland Police Department tech writer Phil McArdle, who has written a book on the history of the department for the Arcadia Publishing Images of America series, said in an interview this week that OPD operated under a geographic division structure in the early part of the last century, with precincts run by individual captains. McArdle said that corruption among some of the precinct heads forced the city to consolidate into its current citywide command structure during the 1950s. 

Former Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown moved briefly towards the re-establishment of police geographic divisions following the recommendations of a consultant’s report, but later abandoned the effort. Council Public Safety Committee Chair Larry Reid said that during the time geographical divisions were in operation “we had some reduction in crime in my district.”  

Reid said that with the return of the system, he was confident that “this city will, in fact, be a safer city.” 

Asked at the press conference who should get credit for the geographic division plan, since it was first introduced by Brown, Dellums said that while he would like to take credit himself, “this has been an evolutionary process. In the last election, the people spoke clearly that they wanted the city to embrace community policing. Along the way, other people wanted to get there, but the beauty of this moment is, we’re here now.” 

On Dec. 15, hundreds of people around Berkeley will come to eat a holiday meal at Berkeley High School (BHS) from 1-5 p.m. The BHS Associated Student Body (ASB) is calling on Berkeley residents and businesses to help by volunteering or donating money or food.  

“Last year I think we fed between 350 and 400 people,” said Edith Jordan, BHS student activities director. ”There was plenty of food for everyone and I hope that we can continue to feed even more people this year.” 

This year, student government has been working with other organizations to put on the holiday meal, so they can concentrate their resources. At the beginning of this month, ASB began collecting cans from students in their second period class and will award a prize to the class that brings in the most cans. 

The holiday meal has been a tradition at the school for many years, where teenagers help prepare and serve food for anybody who wants to come.  

“I like to see the kids doing stuff,” said Jordan. “Everyone gets really excited when they’re doing stuff that has a meaning.” 

There are three morning shifts, three afternoon shifts, and then a shift for clean-up. People are asked to volunteer for as many two-hour shifts as they like. However, the school is still looking for more volunteers and donations. Anybody can volunteer, not just BHS students. 

People who want to donate should call 644-8990 or bring food to room D148. 

It’s time to submit your essays, poems, stories, artwork and photographs for the Planet’s annual holiday reader contribution issue, which will be published on Dec. 21. Send your submissions, preferably no more than 1,000 words, to holiday@berkeleydailyplanet.com. Deadline is 5 p.m. on Dec. 16.

Domestic violence 

On Wednesday at 3 a.m., a woman called to report that her spouse had abused her on the 1400 block of 7th street. Berkeley police arrested the 41-year old man.  

Battery  

At 5:10 p.m. on Wednesday, a caller reported that two Berkeley High School students were fighting in front of Round Table Pizza on University Avenue. Nobody was arrested.  

Robbery 

At 7:58 p.m. on Wednesday, a 17-year-old man was arrested for robbing two other men on the 2000 block of Prince Street. He took a wallet with cash, identification cards, and credit cards.  

Drug arrest 

At 11:14 p.m. Wednesday night, Berkeley Police arrested a 31-year-old man under the influence of methamphetamine who had narcotics paraphernalia on him on the 2500 block of Hillegass.  

Theft 

On Tuesday shortly after 10 a.m., a woman reported that her cell phone had been stolen on the 2100 block of Dwight Way. No suspects are in custody. 

Reported Graffiti 

At 10 a.m. on Tuesday, an employee of the skate park on 10th and Harrison streets called in to report that there was graffiti at the park. Nobody has been arrested in connection with the case.  

Cat on a hot thin rug 

A Berkeley woman who sought to comfort her kitty by giving it a nice warm bed on a cold night can thank that same cat for saving her from the fire. 

Berkeley firefighters were called to the home in the 1200 block of Peralta Avenue, where they found flames shooting up next to a floor furnace. 

Deputy Fire Chief David P. Orth said a woman placed a rug over a floor furnace—which, he said, is never a good idea. The rug caught fire, quickly spreading to the nearby flooring. 

The cat commenced to wailing, awakening its caretaker, who called 9-1-1. The arrival of firefighters kept the damage to about $25,000, said Deputy Chief Orth. 

Boarding house blaze  

A $50,000 blaze in a Berkeley boarding house left 40 UC Berkeley students without a home, and university and Red Cross official scrambling for places to house them. 

Firefighters were summoned to 2438 Warring St. at 2:23 p.m. Friday, where they found one of the rooms in flames. “That room didn’t have sprinklers, for reasons that are unclear to us,” said Orth.  

Hall sprinklers kept the blaze confined to the single room. 

Out and about in Berkeley over the weekend, we had a chance to observe numerous examples of the truism that it’s not what you do, it’s who you are that counts. We walked up Ashby to Peet’s on Domingo, one of the oldest locations for Berkeley’s pride and joy, the original leading edge of the gourmet coffee revolution. In the many years we’ve been walking to Peet’s, the shops in the small commercial enclave on that corner have had a lot of turnover. Since we’ve been in the business of selling newspaper advertising, we’ve learned that there are many more people in Berkeley who’d like to run small businesses than there are people who know how to do it.  

The successful businesses (Peet’s is a prime example) take good care of their customers, even pamper them. The unsuccessful ones, those that last a year or two and then vanish, often seem to regard customers as unwelcome interlopers on private territory. For some reason the Domingo-Ashby corner has always attracted a larger-than-average number of these, elegantly appointed displays but with implicit “don’t touch anything” rules. Those come and go often.  

But there’s a store there now which seems to be a keeper, a bicycle shop which attracts crowds of recreational bicyclists on Saturdays and Sundays. They stop in to refuel at Peet’s, and then congregate by fives and tens on the sidewalk at the bike store to check out the new merchandise. The store has accommodated them by installing a bike rack on the street side of the sidewalk and lining up green plastic chairs alongside the shop-window. It’s a cheery testosterone-drenched gathering, all in all. 

But, of course, it does block two-thirds of the sidewalk. Does anyone complain about this? Not that I’ve noticed.  

The riders are clean, don’t seem to smell bad, have attractive bodies and eye-catching (and expensive) costumes. They seldom run down pedestrians, though old folks and small children sometimes have to jump out of the way quickly if a rider forgets to dismount on the sidewalk.  

That block has a wide sidewalk, and it’s well used. The kiddie boutique almost always has a sale rack outside, and the cafe has put out benches for its wait-listed overflow. There’s still a narrow walking area down the middle, but on weekends it can get tight. 

Outside of Peet’s there’s a courtyard with more benches for the coffee-drinkers and the bakery patrons. There and on the adjacent sidewalk you can observe numerous examples of aggressive and intimidating street behavior on Sunday mornings. 

There are children who are frightened by dogs, and there are dogs who are frightened by children. Parents of both children and dogs take the feelings of their charges seriously, and are alert to anything that might be interpreted as a threat. Some of the children have been trained in the proper way to speak to a strange dog: ask the owner if it’s all right, extend a hand for the dog to smell before petting it. Others have not, and it can get ugly. Many of the dogs are on leashes and/or friendly, but some are neither. Everyone knows the rules, however, and police are never called. 

There are even bathrooms for the right kind of public. They have combination locks, with combinations revealed by employees of the businesses to people who look right. They’re fairly clean, even on busy weekends.  

Over the years we’ve seen the occasional beggar out in front of Peet’s. Patrons of the businesses tend to look annoyed and turn away. There’s an extensive line-up of newspaper boxes along the curb, but we’ve never seen a live Street Spirit vendor there.  

On the way home we stopped off at nearby John Muir School, which functions as a public park on weekends. There we saw a small dog, perhaps a Yorkie, romping off-leash on the grassy lawn. It defecated, admittedly with a tiny output. The owner, engaged in conversation, ignored it. No pooper-scooper for him, but no one called the cops.  

A little boy, seemingly furious because his father said it was time to go home, hollered loudly and for a long time. The father yelled back at top volume. It was a disturbing display, but everyone else ignored it. 

Our grandchild played on the whirligig near the fence on Claremont. At the curb, less than 50 feet away, a man sitting in his car smoked up a storm and blew the smoke out his window in the direction of the playground. A complaint was not filed. 

Does the triply-redundant Public Commons for Everyone law apply near the corner of Ashby and Domingo, and does it affect the kind of people who usually hang out there? What about belligerent children, menacing dogs?  

If a winded bicyclist stretches out across the sidewalk for a moment or a merchant blocks part of the sidewalk with a sale rack, are the police called? Of course not.  

All in all, this seemed on Sunday to be an ideal shared-space oasis, a veritable Camelot, where seldom is heard a discouraging word despite small annoyances. How does it differ from, for example, Telegraph Avenue?  

The city of Berkeley has just expended more than a (conservatively estimated) hundred thousand dollars studying complaints about the Telegraph and Shattuck areas, and it’s poised to expend hundreds of thousands more. Many complainers say that they stay away from the areas in question, but they still claim to know what’s happening there.  

Much of what’s going on downtown and on Telegraph, however, is not unlike what happens elsewhere, for example near the intersection of Ashby with Domingo and Claremont. On Telly the hangers-out are not thirtyish bicylists with pricey gear and snappy outfits. Many are scruffy young with (to my ageing eyes) hideous tattoos and piercings, and their merchants of choice are there to supply them with more of the same. Retailers come and go, many with the same problems of poor business sense as those on Domingo. Peet’s has just opened another outlet for the same legal drug popular on Domingo, but other drugs can also be obtained on the Avenue.  

The Telegraph sidewalk is frequently partially blocked, just like the one on Domingo, not only by chairs and sale racks, but also sometimes by people who don’t have chairs and sit on the sidewalk. There are noisy and belligerent people (not as many of them chronologically children) and offensive dogs there too. There are no obvious public benches, however, and there are no public bathrooms, so defecation in the wrong place is not unknown, and not only by dogs.  

All in all, the activities in both locales are remarkably similar. Why have the mayor and his council majority chosen to get exercised by what happens downtown and on Telegraph, while ignoring Domingo and Claremont at Ashby? Could it be that the offending parties downtown are somehow different from the people who hang out in the Claremont district on weekends? Perhaps. Think about it. 

If you want a good laugh, type “sex on the sidewalk” into Google News. This will give you the opportunity to witness, firsthand, the birth of an urban legend. And where has it been born? Why, in our beloved San Francisco Chronicle, of course. Carolyn Jones reported on Tuesday that: “The new plan cracks down on yelling, littering, camping, drunkenness, smoking, urinating and sex on sidewalks and in parks.” I know she was at the City Council meeting—so was I, and I saw her. But where did she get that sentence? Never mind, it’s been picked up all over the map as the key component of whatever the City Council thinks it passed on Tuesday night.  

Fox News headline: Berkeley, Calif., Cracks Down on Sex on Sidewalks, in Parks. And from the online right-wing publication The American Thinker: No More Sidewalk Sex in Berkeley? 

Yet another chapter in the Chronicle’s on-going contribution to the Bezerkeley legend... It almost seems like their reporters use those 10-minute breaks for the caption-writer to sneak out and puff on a joint.  

And sex on the sidewalk is merely the most eye-catching part of that sentence. Almost all the rest of it is fictitious, too. In actual fact, all the council acted on was new penalties and regulations concerning where people may smoke or lie down. A councilmember who deserves protection as a confidential source quipped privately that you can still have sex on the sidewalk, you just have to do it standing up from now on.  

In fact, even though I’ve been in Berkeley off and on since 1959, I’ve never seen any sidewalk sex, though I did notice still-legal out-in-the-open sex in broad daylight in a parked car on Parker Street not too long ago. Of course, I averted my eyes immediately. 

You can find a reality-based account of what happened at the meeting elsewhere in this issue. If you don’t believe the Daily Planet, you can also find most of the facts about what happened online in the Los Angeles Times, the San Jose Mercury News, or even the Daily Cal.  

The central delusion about what the council did on Tuesday was one which the councilmembers shared. Several of them, card-carrying bleeding-hearts that they are, seemed to believe that what they were passing was an even-handed combination of sticks and carrots. The sticks were real, all right, but the carrots were conceptual, virtual, faux—or as Wobbly Joe Hill used to sing, Pie in the Sky Bye and Bye. 

Joe wrote a parody of a hymn which was used by sanctimonious preachers trying to reform the street people of his day, just about a hundred years ago:  

Long-haired preachers come out every night, 

Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right; 

But when asked how ‘bout something to eat 

They will answer with voices so sweet: 

(Chorus:) 

You will eat, bye and bye, 

In that glorious land above the sky; 

Work and pray, live on hay, 

You’ll get pie in the sky when you die. 

These days the preachers are more likely to be short-haired, and the religious people are more likely to be on the side of the poor, but the pie in the sky tastes about the same. 

All of the remedies for the plight of the crazy and reckless folks who live on the streets which the well-intentioned consultant suggested were not enacted on Tuesday, despite reports in other media, and will probably never be. The mechanism for funding them—raising parking meter fees—won’t even be considered until the Jan. 15 council meeting, and specific budget items will follow even later, “bye and bye.”  

In the meantime, the police have been given virtual carte blanche for rousting sleeping people whenever and wherever that they want—a Merry Christmas to you, sir, and God Bless You Every One. No added shelter beds, no new toilets, no more blankets just yet, sorry about that. But you’ll be sure to get citations for sleeping in the wrong place, and if you don’t pay the fine you’ll go to jail and/or lose your disability check. 

A few councilmembers came close to figuring out that they were participating in a shell game, though ultimately they couldn’t find the hidden pea. Max Anderson pointed out that $142,000 for public toilets could and should have already been available from the general fund, that enough toilets shouldn’t have to wait for a fee increase. Betty Olds echoed the urgent need for public toilets, but made no move to have them provided promptly. Linda Maio made a valiant attempt to highlight the irrationality in the resolution which stepped up enforcement of state laws against sleeping in public, but was defeated by double-talk from Acting City Attorney Zach Cowan and of course the mayor. Spring and Worthington as usual were intelligent and articulate, but they might as well have been talking to fence posts.  

A particularly unattractive part of the program was an orchestrated parade of ex-addicts singing that hallelujah, they’d been saved. One of them, a white guy, read a long litany of past sins, with the moral of the story that he’d finally reformed when he stopped claiming his civil rights. That particular bone stuck in the throat of African-American councilmember Anderson and others of us who are proud veterans of the civil rights struggles of the past 40 years. To be fair, the testifier probably didn’t write his own speech. None of this had any connection with what was actually on the agenda. 

An elderly woman started in on a tale of how her parents used to sit on a bench on Shattuck in the ’50s, but couldn’t get to her point because there was a one-minute sound-byte time limit for comments. It seemed like she was asking for more penalties for bad behavior, though it wasn’t quite clear. As she left the mic, she said that she’d only come because she’d been asked to—by an assistant city manager. Since when has it been the job of city staff to round up allies to speak in the public comment period? 

When the consultant finished her lovely upbeat report on what might help solve the identified problems, the mayor jumped in, as he frequently does, to restate what she’d said in his own inimitable style. No vegetarian he, he promised to “put meat on the bones.” Phony baloney and conceptual carrots would be a better description of what’s likely to be the filling of the PCEI pie-in-the-sky. 

In the past few years, all sorts of goodies have been put on the public table and then snatched away. The sound wall at Aquatic Park and the warm pool are two examples that have come up in the last month alone. Just to keep everyone honest, the Planet will be publishing the list of services promised on the Public Commons menu on a periodic basis, and we’ll be keeping score.  

Smart money would bet that the parking fee raise will happen, all right, but most of the public benefits it’s supposed to fund will never materialize. The money will be spent for other things, and then perhaps the manager will ask for new taxes or bonds to fund the social services: a classic bait-and-switch transaction. 

AC TRANSIT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Last Monday at 3 p.m. I stood at the bus stop on the corner of Durant and Dana along with four others. A route 51 bus approached and did not stop to pick up those of us waiting at the stop. It went by, crossed Dana and then stopped briefly on the corner opposite the bus stop, but did not wait long enough for me to reach the bus. The bus did not appear to be too full to pick up passengers. I waited 15 minutes for the next bus, although buses on the 51 route are supposed to run 10 minutes apart at that time of day on weekdays. I waited a total of 20 minutes for the bus. I told the driver on the next bus what had happened, and that I was really ticked off. She agreed that she would be, too. I live near Ashby and College, and I could have walked to that destination in less time than it took to wait and ride to there by bus. If the use of public transportation rather than private cars is to be encouraged, AC transit will have to improve its performance. 

Malcolm Zaretsky 

• 

CIVIL RIGHTS LEGACY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In a nutshell, here’s the obliterating insight about racism in America: It caused the South to go Republican when threatened by civil rights; plus, it caused white evangelists, in turn, to go Republican, when threatened by civil rights. And this then led to Bush who is bringing on a different kind of Armageddon; not the religious kind, but, more frighteningly, economic.  

Robert Blau 

• 

IN PRAISE OF NEW STREETLIGHTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Reader Rita Maran gingerly wrote a recent letter praising our new green garbage bins, so I’d like to follow her lead to praise another Berkeley winner. I’m referring to our new countdown sigsignals at intersections. Not only do they tell pedestrians how quickly they can relieve their impatience, but more importantly I think they make me a safer driver. I no longer have to guess whether the green light will disappear at the last minute, leaving me in a twilight zone of an instant decision to slam on the brakes (a bit dangerous, that) or go-for-broke. I trust they will result in fewer traffic accidents (and fewer photo-tickets) at intersections. Whoever in city hall proposed their installation deserves a nice letter to Santa. I’ll be glad to sign it. 

Victor Herbert 

• 

DOWNTOWN SERVICE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Well, I guess La Editora has now killed one of the last supposed attractions to downtown Berkeley by sending all the voyeurs instead down to Parker Street (“where she averted her eyes,”and thereafter concluded that they do it in cars in Berkeley as everywhere else, not on sidewalks). 

I haven’t experienced any streetside problems at Berkeley’s center lately, having only ventured there to go to its City Hall during my Marin Avenue lawsuit and a few times more recently to get my bicycle back from two bike shops—unfixed, successfully getting a refund from one of them, along with a claim that mountain bikes should not be shifted at speeds less than 9 mph. But hey, Albany and Oakland did no better; so I had to go all the way to Lafayette to get the job done right. The problems downtown are off the street—the usual commercial ones, not ones that are off the wall. 

No bookstore there anymore; not even any competition to Safeway, in the form of other ordinary grocery supermarkets, in the whole of Berkeley. Safeway thinks people should be club members just to buy food. I shop mostly from El Cerrito north, an area of practical reality, where Lucky finally junked the club-signup nonsense. 

I’ve heard that when the sidewalks downtown are found to actually not provide any free eye-averting entertainment, there are ways to spend money there if you want to pay for formal entertainment. Not me. 

Perhaps they should daylight Strawberry Creek....and then hire a beaver family to compete with Martinez’s show. I might go down there once to look at that, but I’d rather walk amongst the trees just outside Berkeley—you know, the non-people-bearing species of oaks and other trees that grow in neighboring regions. 

Raymond A. Chamberlin 

• 

COMMONS FOR NONE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The passage last week of the Public Commons for Everyone Initiative was an Orwellian assault by the city administration aimed at the down and out in Berkeley. For the city bureaucracy, in the very same week, to have announced with contemptuously short notice the closing of the last public swimming pool for the midwinter holiday season puts them even deeper in Orwell’s debt.  

It is dispiriting to have to re-open the campaign to save Berkeley’s public pools for everyone so soon after the outrageous treatment of Yassir Chadly, the gracious Master of the Pools, and the recent round of closures. This is an unprecedented dereliction by Berkeley’s managers, looking for line items to axe, of the responsibility owed to the health and well-being of its residents, and to the livelihoods and dignity of its employees. Ironically, if the city management was honest about the “bottom line”—an obscene calculus, to be sure—they would be forced to acknowledge the net benefits of swimming for the city accounts, owing to the alleviated burden on emergency rooms, the fire brigade, social services and so forth. 

If we lived in a community that truly honored the waters, sweet and salt, in city and bay, on which our lives and life together depend, and that obligation is now surely upon us, the closing of the last public pool—a cinderblock apology though it may be for the glory of the hammans of North Africa that were Yassir Chadly’s birthright—would be recognized as a grave moment for our city, in the midst of extravagant private waste. Just as the closing of the last public library would mark, and would be recognized by all to mark, the death of Berkeley as a home for those still committed to an ample life in common. 

Iain A. Boal 

• 

SALARY DISCLOSURES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I certainly hope that the Daily Planet will take advantage of the recent California Supreme Court ruling that salaries paid to city employees are public information to obtain and publish this information for the city of Berkeley. 

Marilyn S. Talcott 

• 

HOMELESS VETERANS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

“Support our troops.” How often have we heard this Bush administration mantra whenever Congress or the public demands Iraq funding accountability or an Iraq withdrawal timeline? Yet, once the troops become veterans, too often they are woefully neglected. In a 2006 survey, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) estimated that 26 percent of homeless people are veterans. VA further estimated that at least 195,827 veterans are homeless in the United States and 49,724 in California. This is a conservative estimate. This VA survey estimated the number of homeless veterans at 7,800 in Northern California (Martinez, Oakland and Sacramento), and 2,626 of these classified as “chronically homeless.” The VA defines “chronically homeless” as an individual with a disabling condition who has been continually homeless for a year or more or has had four or more episodes of homelessness over the past three years. 

The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates that 89,553 to 467,877 veterans were at risk of homelessness, meaning that they were below the poverty level and paying more than 50 percent of household income on rent. 

Homelessness is rising among veterans because of high living costs, the lack of adequate funds, and many are struggling with the effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and substance abuse, exacerbated by a lack of support systems. 

The VA has been severely criticized for diagnosing wounded veterans with a personality disorder, instead of PTSD, thus denying them disability pay and medical benefits. In the past six years, more than 22,500 soldiers have been suspiciously dismissed with personality disorders, rather than PTSD. By doing so, the military is saving an estimated $8 billion in disability pay and an estimated $4.5 billion in medical care over their lifetimes. (These figures are from “How Specialist Town Lost His Benefits” by Joshua Kors, citing Harvard professor Linda Bilmes’ study, in April 9 The Nation). How many homeless veterans, discharged for personality disorders rather than PTSD, would be off the homeless roles if they had disability pay and VA medical care? While not every homeless veteran was misdiagnosed with with a personality disorder rather than PTSD, it seems obvious that the VA could do more to reach its stated “goal to provide excellence in patient care, veterans’ benefits and customer satisfaction.” 

Passage of the HUD appropriations bill would be a modest start. It includes $75 million for nearly 7,500 HUD-VA Supported Housing vouchers for homeless and disabled veterans. Unfortunately, President Bush has threatened to veto this bill because it exceeds his spending request. It is shameful that we can spend $473.4-plus billion conducting the Iraq war, but not an additional $75 million for war casualties. 

Ralph E. Stone 

San Francisco 

• 

EDUCATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Leaders in our educational system draw their salaries from public taxes. I am sure they would like to give back to the community the best possible education for their children. Therefore, we need leaders who can motivate students from every economic level, hire dedicated instructors, include parents as partners in the education of their children, get direct information on teachers and students by unannounced visits and open hearings, prevent favoritism and nepotism. Such inspired and responsive leaders will secure the future of our great country. 

Romila Khanna 

Albany 

• 

THE SURGE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Carolyn Lockheed’s page one Sunday Chronicle analysis on the Iraq occupation—despite its broader concerns about long-term problems—suggests that the U.S. military surge is succeeding on some level. Ms. Lockheed may not even be aware that she is the latest victim of the spin doctors who got us into Iraq. With a different perspective, Damien Cave reports in Sunday’s New York Times that there is a growing sense that Iraq has slipped to new depths of lawlessness as “some American officials estimate that as much as a third of what they spend on Iraqi contracts and grants ends up unaccounted for or stolen, with a portion going to Shiite or Sunni militias.” How? Corruption is what is driving this political-military machine, even beyond the bad and murderous policy. Our government’s policy is to feed it to create ruthless surrogates—as in Iraq so in Pakistan, so in Egypt, so in Israel, so in Palestine. Talk of success really means acceptance of this ever deeper erosion of our values and democracy here and elsewhere. That is even worse than “failure.”  

Marc Sapir 

• 

SUPERSTITION ANYONE? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Strange coincidence indeed: Ever since UC’s coach Tedford had been quoted as saying, in reference the oak trees at the stadium, “that’s what we have chainsaws for,” Cal football team’s fortunes went down. Coincidence or not, be careful what you say—arrogance bestows its own “rewards.” 

Jurgen Aust 

• 

ALLEGATION OF ANTI-SEMITISM 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Cynthia McKinney for president (broached in a recent letter)? Would the Green Party be comfortable running an anti-Semitic candidate? The letter writer should remember that the enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend. E.g. Sr. Chavez of Venezuela, another outspoken anti-Semite. 

Dick Bagwell 

• 

DELLUMS’ POLICING POLICIES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

J. Douglas Allen-Taylor makes Mayor Dellums’ new police policies appear to be a strong reaction to a crime situation that has Oakland rated the fourth most dangerous city in the nation. 

How sad. The city is sinking in violence and the mayor rearranges the deck chairs of Police Department command. Oakland needs bold new initiatives. One would be to declare that, irrespective of federal law, marijuana will be legalized and regulated in the city, and proper dispensation will be administered by the young men now living as outlaws. But to even talk of that would be “radical” and Dellums and others of our “liberal” political establishment can barely be “progressive,” much less respond to problems with what is needed, i.e. radical and even revolutionary measures. 

Ted Vincent 

• 

BUS RAPID TRANSIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The problem with the current Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) proposal is that it is a square peg that the transportation professionals continue to try to force into a round hole. There is the possibility of getting millions of dollars for a transportation project in the East Bay. AC Transit has latched onto BRT as the perfect way to spend this money. This is top-down planning. The Telegraph to International Blvd. route appears on paper to be a great idea. So the steamroller starts rolling.  

Once the people who live, work, and own businesses in the path of the project learned of it, they tried to express their concerns to the transportation professionals. So far their concerns have been ignored, downplayed, and stifled one way or another. The most recent example is Steve Geller’s dismissal of Doug Buckwald’s information about the Emerald Express in Eugene, Ore. It turns out that the Emerald Express implementation is not comparable to what is proposed for BRT. But Mr. Geller sweeps away all the points Mr. Buckwald raised, concluding that “…perhaps Berkeley could work on fixing the flaws in our BRT plan and go on to have Eugene’s BRT success.” (See letter printed Nov. 27.) In other words, regardless of the concerns raised, we should proceed with BRT in the hope that it will succeed, even though the facts that suggest that it will not. 

The Berkeley and AC Transit professionals continue to tell us that we need BRT if we are to have a chance of meeting Berkeley’s goal of a dramatic reduction in greenhouse gases. But the non-professionals—locals who live near, work along and use Telegraph Ave. and are familiar with its traffic patterns—are convinced that if any of the “build” BRT alternatives is approved and Telegraph Ave. is reduced to one lane in each direction for all traffic except for the BRT express buses and emergency vehicles, the resulting gridlock will generate far more greenhouse gases than is saved by the small reduction in auto traffic promised in the EIR. Two experts, one an AC Transit bus driver (letters printed Nov. 2 and Nov. 16) and a former Research Engineer from the UCB Institute of Transportation Studies (commentary published Sept. 28) agree with the neighbors. But so far none of the Berkeley and AC Transit professionals appear to be listening and the steamroller keeps rolling.  

What we need is an open forum where the BRT proposal can be evaluated in an evenhanded way. The answer to this problem is not all or nothing. We need to find the best elements of the BRT proposal, implement them, and drop those parts of the proposal that will make traffic worse. I continue to be reminded that we are told to “Share the road.” This goes for buses as well as bicycles and cars. 

Mary Oram 

I like Judith Scherr. She puts in long hours trying to get the story right and it’s not too easy in a town that has become as shady as our Berkeley has become of late. So I will forgive her if she has failed to see what the true purpose behind what is known to us as Options Recovery Services. When I went public a few months ago with my opposition to the mayor and City Council giving Options $200,000 at a time when food and housing to the poor was being cut by precisely the same amount, Judith asked me a good question. “How successful does a program have to be before you would support it?” It was busy and loud in the council chambers that night and I didn’t get to answer her. 

But I sure have thought about it a lot since then. 

I guess if a program helped just one person and turned his or her life around that would be enough for me. But I could not ever support a program that led to someone’s death or that regularly uses and supports the brutalization of the poor by jailing them for doing things that are legal for others that are more fortunate. I am sure that a few people that weren’t killed outright or beat too senseless by real criminals, have found a way to get their lives back to a semblance of normalcy. But there are many (myself included) that still feel a tremendous amount of anger at the beatings they (and I) endured because Options Director Dr. Davida Coady (and this is a God’s honest direct quote) felt that I “need to feel the pain of my addiction.” The pain of having my leg ripped off, my pelvis and back shattered, my arm and ribs broken, just to name a few of the injuries that put me on the streets, wasn’t enough. 

But what hurt most of all was being labeled a criminal because of my newfound poverty. Take a quick look at the Options website and you will see it all right there in a nut shell. Wherever homelessness is mentioned it is coupled with “crime” and “drug abuse.” The website talks about homeless “offenders” while throwing in words like “dignity” to really confuse folks. A quick look at their board of directors shows what this “recovery” program is really all about. Their president is a police captain while their vice president is a probation officer. George Beier, who shaped his entire campaign for City Council on whipping up fear and hatred for the poor and homeless, is in there as well. 

They’re a scary group with a big job to do. Make sure that anyone unfortunate enough to get caught in the Options web is made to “feel the pain.” 

Now it might be possible that city officials and others are really bamboozled by the smoke and mirror act that is put on by Options with their graduation ceremonies and their loading of council meetings with paid staff that gush about how jail changed their lives for the better. But it’s really hard to believe. Has none of them checked out their website? And are their memories so short that while Davida Coady raves about how much the state has saved with the passing of Prop. 36, Options actually lobbied against Prop. 36? 

The only recovery program in the state to do so. 

And now they are the only program that supposedly works for the homeless to support the punitive measures of the Public Commons Initiative. 

This all from a program that is working out of the Oakland courts serving mostly Oakland people and leaving them at our door step. It’s time for us to open our eyes and see or at least acknowledge what is we are buying at the expense of our most vulnerable people.  

We might not be able to do very much about those around the world being brutalized for being poor. But we can stop it here. Ask the mayor and City Council to let Oakland and the courts pay for their program and to restore all funds taken from food and housing programs in Berkeley. 

Dan McMullan is a member of the Disabled People Outside Project.

It is devastatingly ironic that the world’s poorest countries are, to some degree, subsidizing the healthcare of the wealthiest nations. For years, rich nations encouraged African countries to invest in infrastructure (education, hospitals, medicine); much aid was given to strengthen these very systems. Although it was unintentional, the donations proved to be quite self-serving. As wealthy countries give aid to struggling nations to improve healthcare outcomes with one hand, they siphon off graduates of medical schools with the other. The developed world benefits from the skills and knowledge of newly arrived doctors and nurses while the countries that produced these professionals suffer from staffing shortages. 

The reasons behind the migration of health care workers are fairly obvious. Most hospitals in Sub-Saharan Africa are dismal places: over-crowded, grossly understaffed and under-equipped. Medical personnel are often frustrated. Salaries are very low and rarely enough to entice doctors, nurses, and clinical officers to stay in rural areas or even capitol cities. Trained in the treatment of patients, they are unable provide these services due to a lack of essential equipment and supplies. It may be difficult to imagine a hospital wanting in stethoscopes, hospital beds, gloves, and syringes yet these are the issues countless providers face every day.  

Of course the West did not intend to decimate Africa’s medical force but this is what is happening. Countries like the United States, England, and Australia have nursing shortages they are unable to meet. The United States alone needs 129,000 additional nurses to meet today’s health requirements. There are not enough American nurses to fill the demand and the US and other developed countries in similar positions eagerly hire doctors and nurses trained in other parts of the world. This is especially true for former commonwealth nations as English-speaking staff from poor countries are quickly absorbed by hospitals in London and New York. The United States employs half the world’s English speaking physicians. Developed countries need staff to maintain high medical standards and to care for aging populations. Cataclysmically, underdeveloped countries face a double burden of disease; chronic non-communicable diseases as well as HIV/AIDS and many diseases that no longer affect rich countries.  

Market forces and a bleak future at home have led many health workers to emigrate. The more that leave, the worse the situation becomes and the more difficult it is to keep floundering health systems afloat. As poor governments struggle to run schools of medicine, pharmacology, nursing, dentistry, etc students graduate and leave to look after patients in richer parts of the world. Poor countries cannot compete with the salaries offered in industrialized nations. International aid organizations who hire national staff exacerbate the problem as well. By paying medical personnel up to ten times their public sector jobs they draw them away from district and rural facilities and provide no one to fill the gap.  

In Malawi, which has one of the lowest physician/patient ratios, there are about 250 doctors for a country of 13 million. With one physician per 52,000 people, and serious problem with HIV and AIDS, the situation is grim. The irony is that the areas with the highest disease burdens have the lowest numbers of professionals to provide essential care. Medical staff are not immune to the diseases that affect their patients; particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, systems are wracked by loss of staff to AIDS.  

What is to be done about this brain drain on the developing world? The reality is that more medical staff, particularly nurses, are needed worldwide. Developed countries should commit to training enough medical personnel to meet their own health needs. Expanded and new nursing schools are crucial to producing the necessary cadre of providers. Professors of nursing need to be adequately compensated and retained to teach future generations of nurses. Exchange programs between facilities in rich and resource-poor settings would allow for a wider clinical experiences and collaboration between colleagues. Wealthy nations could encourage their nurses to gain work experience in less developed settings. The Peace Corps, or a similar agency, could place American nurses in under-developed settings for a couple years in exchange for some student loan forgiveness. The situation requires new and innovative solutions. At the end of the day, it is vitally essential that developing countries are able to retain the staff in whose training they invest. Literally, the health of millions depends upon it.  

Former Berkeley resident Lucy Anderson is currently working toward a masters degree in public health at Columbia University. 

EDITOR’S NOTE: This commentary was submitted to the San Francisco Chronicle but was not published. 

The taxpayer money spent on fighting against the community opposition to UC Berkeley’s proposed 142,000-square-foot, four-story Student Athlete High Performance Center (SAHP) to be located next to the west side of land marked California Memorial Stadium could have been spent on relocating the project away from Piedmont Avenue. Indeed, the SAHP that will be shared by 13 of the 27 Cal intercollegiate sports is needed and should be built, but on one of the two identified alternative sites and centered within an established transportation corridor that is more central to campus and not at the expense of destroying the Memorial Stadium oak grove that runs along Piedmont Avenue. This avenue between Gayley Road and Dwight Way was designated a City of Berkeley Landmark in 1990 and was also designated as California Historic Landmark No. 986 in 1989. 

UC is not only discounting its ever increasing sprawl impact upon the City of Berkeley’s historic landmarked neighborhoods, it seeks to continue its build-out plans on the hillside impacting Strawberry Canyon’s ecological integrity and the well-being of existing neighborhoods. Piedmont Avenue is not built to handle the current traffic congestion and it will not be able to absorb the increased traffic that this project will bring. 

UC Berkeley was a key partner on the drafting of the Urban Environmental Accords signed by mayors from around the globe who took the historic step of signing the Urban Environmental Accords in San Francisco on June 5, 2005 in recognition of United Nations World Environment Day 2005. 

The Urban Environmental Accords were a result of year-long partnership of cities, the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), the United Nations Environment Program, the University of California at Berkeley, environmental nonprofits, and businesses. 

The Accords focus on seven environmental areas common to all cities: water, energy, waste, urban design, transportation, urban nature, and environmental health. 

How can UC Berkeley claim to become a leader in the effort to increase energy production and reduce the impact of energy consumption on the environment while its own ecological footprint keeps increasing and encroaching on neighborhoods as well as adding to greenhouse gas emissions? Let’s not forget that their deal with BP is suspect when citizen stakeholder’s participation and academic oversight are eliminated. 

Un-sustainability is based on the idea that when resources are consumed faster than they are produced or renewed, the resource is impacted or depleted. When sustainability is practiced, the demand on nature is in balance with nature’s capacity to meet that demand. When demand on ecological resource or impacts exceed what nature can continually supply or adapt to we then have “ecological overshoot.” This Student Athlete High Performance Center is clearly an example of ecological overshoot, especially when placing the new additional athlete center at the edge of campus increases traffic, increases storm water and sewer services and maintenance of traffic infrastructure, as well as road wear due to the large scale construction. Then we have ongoing air-quality impacts by increased traffic and the destruction of an intact established oak grove ecosystem, tree canopy and wildlife corridor. This wildlife corridor can be seen from Google’s satellite map. This is all about adding sprawl impacts to the area. 

This project also undermines the City’s of Berkeley’s Measure G’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gasses and is compounding already existing impacts by the University’s ongoing expansion and placing more demand on our local city and ecosystem services. The University of California’s non-profit status exempts UC from paying toward a large portion of city services it uses—all at expense of local resident taxpayers who have no say on the impacts generated by UC’s new building projects.  

The Urban Environmental Accords included the goal of, “passing legislation that protects critical habitat corridors and other key habitat characteristics (e.g. water features food-bearing plants, shelter for wildlife, use of native species, etc.) from unsustainable development.” The City of Berkeley passed such a law in this category back in 1998.  

The City of Berkeley’s Oak Tree Removal Ordinance NO. 6462-N.S. declares a moratorium on the removal of any single stem Coast Live Oak tree or a circumference of 18 inches or more, and any multi-stemmed coast live oak tree with an aggregate circumference of 26 inches or more at a distance of four feet up from the ground within the City of Berkeley. The California Native Plant Society (CNPS) has stated that the Memorial Stadium oak grove is “an important gene bank for the coast live oak.” This grove, from the sub soil ecosystems to the canopy of its trees, harbors species that will not survive once disturbed. 

Every one of the 38 healthy threatened oaks (along with redwoods and other native California trees in the grove) should and could be protected from destruction under the Berkeley moratorium, but the university has indicated that because UC is part of state government, they are “not obliged to obey local environmental laws.” 

Memorial Stadium was designed with its grounds, including the oak grove, as a memorial to those Californians who lost their lives in World War I. The university should preserve not destroy the grove to honor the ultimate sacrifice made by those soldiers who died in WWI as was intended from the inception of the stadium and its surrounding grounds. 

The gulag style double fence topped with barbed wire erected by UC Berkeley and UC’s utilization of its heavy handed round the clock police instigation and agitation is an effort to undermine a First Amendment free speech protest. Now residents who visit the Grove or talk to the tree sitters are subject to arrest. 

This is something that happens in rigid and repressive police states where such controls are used to control the social, economic and political life of the population. These repressive measures are out of line and against a community stance to protect their historic and environmental resources especially with the backing of existing local law to protect these trees. 

UC Berkeley needs to do the right thing as in bring down the fences, honor the oak grove as a permanent historic and memorial site and build the Student Athlete High Performance Center in an alternative area and start honoring the fact that the citizens of Berkeley have a right to protect what they deem precious. And while they are at it spend the money not on police and fences and fighting the City of Berkeley and locals in court—get those 300-plus staff and faculty immediately out of the seismically unsafe Memorial Stadium offices and into safe portable structures until the separate Memorial Stadium issues are resolved. 

Redwood Mary is the founder and executive director of Circle The Earth — Grassroots Women Taking Action for a Sustainable Future (a project of the Agape Foundation, www.circletheearth.netfirms.com), and co-chair of the California Women’s Agenda Environmental Task Force. She holds a degree in public policy from Mills College and is a supporter of the Save the Oaks Campaign. She has spent time tree-sitting at the Memorial Stadium oak grove.

WORK IT OUT TOGETHER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Last night I watched the Berkeley Zoning Adjustments Board’s hearing on allowing a bio-fuel installation on the corner of Ashby and Sacramento. It’s presently held by a car-wash operator who is behind on his rent. He is black. The hearing was heated and became a racial clash, black vs. green white women who wish to run the fuel station. Some black folks screamed and yelled about the possibility of racism, etc. It seems to me that the obvious “Berkeley” solution should be for both operations to join forces: bio-fuel and car-wash together. It would be mutually beneficial to both. You know, the popular song: “Black and white to-geth-er-er.” Seems like of all the cities in America, we should be able to work this conflict out “together.” 

Robert Blau 

• 

‘ETHNIC CLEANSING’ 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In Jean Damu’s article about the eviction of Kandy’s Kar Wash, he uses the term “ethnic cleansing” to refer to the anticipated displacement of a black business by a business owned by white women. I cringe at the inappropriate use of this term, which is a euphemism for genocide. A Wikipedia listing reads as follows:  

“Ethnic cleansing refers to various policies or practices aimed at the displacement of an ethnic group from a particular territory in order to create a supposedly ethnically ‘pure’ society. The term entered English and international usage in the early 1990s to describe certain events in the former Yugoslavia. Its typical usage was developed in the Balkans, to be a less objectionable code-word meaning genocide,...ethnic cleansing has become improperly used to describe a situation wherein poorer ethnic groups are being displaced economically, by other, generally more affluent ethnic groups.” 

It is not genocidal when a business is evicted from its location, sad as that may be for those who have patronized it. Nor is every misfortune which comes upon a black business necessarily “anti-black.”  

Deborah Cloudwalker 

• 

BERKELEY PARKS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Regarding the Nov. 27 article by Steven Finacom about parks in Berkeley, a correction is in order: While the author states: “In 1974, Berkeley voters approved Measure Y, which provided $3 million for new parks. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw the planning and creation of Cedar Rose Park, Strawberry Creek Park, Ohlone Park on land that had been cleared to build BART through north-central Berkeley, and the purchase of the old Santa Fe Railroad right-of-way,” Ohlone Park was actually created in the summer of 1969, in the spirit of People’s Park. Both represent the beginning of the modern communitarian ecology movement, which the late Karl Linn recognized in our brief but intense friendship and conversations when he asked me to devise a plan for gardener safety in the parks along the BART path in North Berkeley after a spate of robberies in the gardens. 

If Karl were alive today we would split the MacArthur Grant he expected to receive, and we would have continued to join forces as the male and female sides of the druidic park building impulse. 

Wendy Schlesinger 

• 

PUBLIC COMMONS  

CONTROVERSY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I can’t help but notice the behavior of many Cal students and football fans during parties on game days. Individuals at these parties typically drink heavily in public; assemble in groups that block the sidewalks; leave piles of food wrappers, cans, and bottles everywhere along the streets and sidewalks near the stadium; allow underage drinking; frequently urinate in public; and generally act in a very noisy and sometimes belligerent manner. All of this occurs with nary a peep from our law enforcement personnel—who duly observe much of the activity. 

Coincidentally, many of these behaviors are the very same ones condemned in Mayor Bates’ “Public Commons for Everyone” initiative! So, the solution is apparent: Dress the street people on Telegraph Avenue and downtown in proper Cal regalia, and let them have at it as they wish. For added merriment, Oski can even teach them a few Cal drinking songs. There you have it—a major social problem solved for the price of a few T-shirts and caps. 

Doug Buckwald 

• 

COMMONS FOR NAZIS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

What is disturbing about the Commons for Nazis Initiative is that it constitutes one more step in the slow but relentless march toward fascism. What has been set in place is a mechanism whereby the fascists in our midst can get whatever they want from government whenever they want it. With a convincing act of pretense at compassion by Linda Maio, who abstained, the steamroller of local fascism just flattened a few hundred more lives. But it is not the damage to those lives that is most disconcerting; it is the acceptance of fascism by many citizens of Berkeley that is doing inestimable damage to everyone. 

Peter J. Mutnick 

• 

OVERDEVELOPING EL CAPITAN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I recently took a day trip to Yosemite, and was upset to see contrails over El Capitan. In previous years the public was able to enjoy national parks that were completely pristine, but now worsening pollution threatens their natural beauty. At the rate we are going future generations will remember the pollution of national parks more than their awe-inspiring beauty. That is why it is absolutely essential that Sen. Feinstein votes to fully fund California’s National Parks. 

Jon Peaco 

• 

GMO LANGUAGE SUBSTITUTION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Richard Brenneman’s two-part report gets at the heart of the matter in exposing the fact that genetic modifications would play a role in producing biofuels. The media has played down the fact that, in this context, synthetic biology is the same as genetic engineering. Language substitution to minimize public opposition was used during the 2004 California stem cell proposition 71 campaign when the term somatic cell nuclear transfer was used instead of embryo cloning to deflect criticism that human embryo cloning would employ the same techniques. 

Whether the food or husk part of the crop is genetically modified is irrelevant in terms of damage to the environment from gene-flow associated with large scale GM-crop plantations, for example, or in terms of creating new patentable agri-fuel crop germplasm. By any terminology, the socio-economic impact to the already marginalized poor is undeniable and cannot be masked. 

Nazreen Kadir 

Institute Scholar in Science and Public Policy 

Western Institute for Social Research 

Oakland  

• 

LEAVE THE TREES ALONE  

— ONE YEAR LATER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Day by day now, the assault on nature takes a devastating effect on Cal football. Have you noticed we can’t seem to gain any ground since the UC police started enforcing the criminal UC Regents edict to cut the oaks down? Let’s not play down the Oppenheimer curse, where shortly after the atom was split by the good Doctor, Mother Earth said “Whoa, that’s enough winning for a while.” 

The oil spill in the bay, the Save the Oaks tree sitters, and BP’s secret contracts all beckon a looming face-off with Mother Earth. Come Dec. 2, it will mark one year since the Berkeley tree-sitters have stymied UC Goliath into thinking twice before slashing and burning their way to a new “state of the art” athletic training facility. Perhaps this will go down in Berkeley history as how the courageous, yet simple act of tree-sitting could make the UC bomb makers pause in mid earth raping mode. Bravo to bravery! 

Where was BP when the oil spill in the bay took place? Why weren’t they showing by example what pitching in together to heal the earth is all about? No , instead we should have chanted “BP or Be Free” the minute they crossed into the Berkeley Free State. Could it be they are just another profit seeking parasite seeking to drain a public university of it’s sense of rage? Or just jaded in their own history of oil spills as in Alaska? 

BP = Bad People, BP = Beautiful Profit. 

Has anyone taken notice that there are thousands of acres of parkland behind Memorial Stadium where potential athletes can run, hike, and sweat their way to a trophy season? No matter how much money he has, and it’s up to $3 million, or a million per loss and counting, one can hear Napoleon Tedford bellowing into the wind about what it takes to “compete,” and the sacrifices we peasants and nature lovers must endure. Gimme a break! 

Stoney Burke 

• 

MIDDLE EAST CONFLICT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It is ironic when we hear that the United States is “using its influence” to bring about a peaceful resolution to the Israel- Palestine conflict, and an end to the occupation of the Palestinian Territories. 

The reality is that the occupation would end immediately if the United States stopped its massive funding of the occupation. 

This talk of the United States being an “honest broker” is so cynical. It’s not a broker. It’s the major financier of the occupation enterprise. 

Carolyna Marks 

Founding Director,  

World Wall for Peace  

• 

IMPEACH CHENEY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It is my greatest fear that Kucinich’s resolution HR-333 will be buried and lost in the House Judiciary committee, when it is the only symbol and gesture of hope for this country getting back on the path to freedom, justice and the American way. The United States is purportedly a nation of laws which no man or entity is above. How nauseating is it that our vice president and president disregard the nation’s will, silence our elected officials, and do not hold themselves accountable to the Constitution. Both of them lie and twist the truth constantly and against reason: The Downing Street memos reveal that the president fixed the facts to match the policy which lead us into a five-year illegal occupation of Iraq; the FISA courts have been a blunder and it would seem that 80,000 American citizens are being spied on without warrants—many, one presumes, holding office a la Watergate; and an N.O.C. CIA agent’s identity has been revealed, apparently as political payback. This last act is considered treason. Seventy-five percent of the American populous believe this vice president has committed high crimes and misdemeanors. What will it take for this Congress to begin to act on behalf of the people’s will? 

Tara Daly 

Oakland 

• 

THE REAL TRUTH ABOUT EUGENE’S BRT SYSTEM 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I read with great interest Mr. Buchwald’s kind description of Lane Transit Districts (LTD) EmX bus rapid transit system. The system has been very successful attracting a large number of new riders: since opening in January, ridership has increased by approximately 90 percent over the service the EmX replaced. 

I wanted to provide some comments on the EmX service that may be helpful to the discussion. 

The EmX route is four miles long and consists of approximately 63 percent exclusive right of way. The LTD Board of Directors goal was and still is for 100 percent exclusive right of way. In the development of the EmX project certain compromises were made as a result of limited right of way, property impacts and trees. To ensure that the project was built, the LTD Board of Directors reluctantly agreed to run in mixed in the general purpose lanes along certain sections of the corridor. The largest section of mixed traffic operation occurs in the Glenwood area, which is about to undergo a complete urban renewal. As part of the vision for the area exclusive EmX lanes are proposed. 

The loss of on-street parking was a particular issue during the development of the EmX project. Where possible, alternative parking arrangements were sought, however the project resulted in approximately 70 parking stalls being eliminated. 

Currently no fare is charged on the EmX service. The reasons for this decision were that a small number of passengers currently pay cash, and the limited extent of the EmX route requires that most passengers transfer to a regular bus to complete their trip: thus paying a fare on the regular bus. LTD plans to introduce fares on the EmX service on opening of the second route in 2010. 

The introduction of the fare will likely result in a dip in ridership: a recent survey estimated that between 10 and 15 percent of new riders would not continue to ride once a fare is imposed. 

I trust that the above will help in your communities dialog about bus rapid transit. While l know very little about AC Transits plans to develop a bus rapid transit system l would encourage the community to be open to ways of providing as much exclusive facility as possible, as only this will ensure that the bus rapid transit is reliable and rapid well into the future. 

Graham Carey 

BRT Project Engineer 

Lane Transit District 

Eugene, Oregon 

• 

FOURTH AMENDMENT  

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The Bush administration and Homeland Security Department couldn’t convince Americans that using cable employees to spy in our homes was OK so now the White House is using firefighters to act as Big Brother, to spy and inform on Americans, with pilot programs in cities throughout the country. The reasoning behind the latest move is that unlike police officers, firefighters can enter hundreds of thousands of homes legally and with no warrant. Since when have Americans become the terrorists and let’s hope that firefighters don’t harbor any prejudices. 

Doesn’t the Fourth Amendment prohibit the illegal and unlawful and unwarranted searchers of residences? 

Ron Lowe 

Grass Valley 

Life is Much Better in Jail 

A humble submission inspired by the Public Commons for Everyone Initiative, with seasonal greetings. 

I was a junkie I lived on the street 

I had no money and nothing to eat 

A kindly policeman came by one fine day 

And changed my perspective on living that way 

(Chorus:) 

In jail! In jail! 

Don’t bother paying my bail! 

Give me a blanket and three squares a day 

Life is much better in jail! 

I had no direction when I was a kid 

I loved to be free didn’t care what I did 

My civil rights were just weighing me down 

But now getting busted has turned me around 

(Chorus) 

My civil liberties I have to say 

Just clouded my judgment and got in my way 

Pull up your bootstraps and reach for the stars 

Life is much better by far behind bars 

(Chorus) 

I was a treesitter up in the grove 

They told me to leave but I just wouldn’t move 

I had no respect for the cops til I saw 

They could take me to jail for no reason at all 

(Chorus) 

By Carol Denney

In last Friday’s issue of Berkeley Daily Planet, Jonathan Stevens asks one of the most discussed questions today: “Whom do we blame....” for the failures in public education? This is easy to answer: let’s start with the citizens of California, who passed Proposition 13 and began the process of starving what was once considered the premier public education system in the country. That initiative quickly gutted the state budget and made it unlikely that, without an appeal, California could ever add the per pupil funding expenditures necessary to achieve the results citizens say they desire. California has the highest class sizes in the nation and moves between 40th and 48th in per pupil expenditures (depending upon which numbers one uses). Thank God for Mississippi, one of the poorest states in the nation, and one of the few to be as consistently stingy as we are with our students. Nina Simone said it all in her classic song! And thanks to Berkeley citizens for Measure A and all of the bond measures which have supplemented the district budget.  

Stevens announces that more money for teachers and teaching won’t “solve the problem of teachers fleeing the field.” I urge him to talk to teachers five years into the profession who are aware that their dreams of owning a home will go unfulfilled. Every teacher (and probably many parents) knows a former colleague who left for greener pastures; many of us know several. There’s the beloved former teacher who told me many times, “I could never do this if (my husband) didn’t earn so much.” It’s one thing to make financial sacrifices for five years; it’s quite another to accept an entire career of such sacrifices. A teacher at the beginning of her career has a much different perspective than one leaving the profession. As a result, those credential classes with new teachers Stevens speaks of are more like 12-step meetings or sessions for returning war veterans; a bunker mentality dominates. Fortunately I earned my credential in a “working teacher” program which meant that my classmates were mostly veteran teachers from outside the state. Conversations with experienced teachers may feature the same themes, but will function differently and affect the participants differently, too! What frustrates a new teacher may inspire a veteran teacher, and vice versa. As we begin to experience the present teacher shortage, the State of California must find money to ensure both competitive salaries and excellent working conditions. All teachers have a brother or sister or parent whose jaw drops when we describe these facets of our work experience. 

Stevens prefers that any budget enhancements go to improved working conditions—ironically, also a cost item—that will “guarantee teachers the opportunity to practice their trade in peace and safety.” After some dozen years serving on the BFT negotiations team, I have heard district negotiators repeatedly refer to working conditions as cost items. (That’s why schools are exempted from Cal/OSHA provisions; the state is unwilling to commit the funds necessary to ensure high quality working conditions). Over the years, I have noted many improvements teachers and the district desire delayed because of their cost. Due to Measure A, our district doesn’t have to make those kind of hard decisions, but before the initial maintenance measure was enacted I, as the BFT safety officer, spent many days checking classrooms throughout the district for adequate heat and lighting, spot-checking for mold, and ensuring that each classroom phone could access the office. So: Mr. Stevens wants a more intimate environment in which students can be inculcated with the virtues of plurality and social justice? In other words, Mr. Stevens wants more classrooms? Well, it’s gonna cost real dollars to do so. How else to explain the district’s failure to implement the state’s ninth grade class reduction? Not enough money and not enough space. I share Stevens’ concern about improving working conditions; at BHS, for the last several years, more than half of the teachers have shared classrooms. That means that teachers lack the opportunity to make each classroom a viable and productive learning space. That’s why the South of Bancroft Committee is so committed to building additional classrooms and why all of the new structures on the campus are so important; keeping the Old Gym means keeping teachers in substandard classrooms and ensuring that we will never have enough. The new structures at BHS, along with the increased voluntarism on site and new leadership are responsible for a better learning environment and, I believe, happier students and teachers. Stevens has it half right: we deserve it all, and only improved salaries and working conditions will draw attract the teachers we need to fill California’s classrooms—on the scale we will need, there aren’t enough of the martyrs and nuns to fill those burgeoning vacancies. Talk to a veteran teacher: there are fewer martyrs in that generation. 

After 20 years in Bay Area classrooms, I have seen the same fights that he has seen. For starters, most of the fights I have witnessed at Berkeley High School, where he worked for a year, and where I have toiled for some 17 years, are not racially charged. They are—no solace to me, an African-American male—intra-racial fights; that is, they are fights within groups, not interracial, between members of different groups. Additionally, they are usually single gender; few teens seek out members of the opposite sex to fight, honoring that old code: If you’re a boy, you should never hit a girl! Fortunately, few of these fights repeat; our dean and counselors usually bring the parties together, counsel the students and negotiate a truce, inform the parents, send the parties home for a few days and move on to the next fight.... whenever that occurs. Mr. Stevens lamentably succumbs to the same spirit of hyperbolic sensationalism he rues. I don’t see fights on campus for days or weeks at a time... though I have come to expect them close to the Thanksgiving and the December holidays. How’s that for irony? Furthermore, the number of fights on campus has shrunken markedly over the years. 

Finally, I have learned too that what happens in my classroom may not be happening in the classroom next door. This is also true of districts. As someone who has worked in West Contra Costa, Oakland Unified and Berkeley, I know how dangerous it is to compare districts and schools. Each district, each school, each classroom has its own ethos. Stevens makes a big mistake in comparing such different environments; they cannot be conflated and compared easily. Two of them remain in receivership, under the control of a state administrator. You can’t come to Berkeley High School without noticing that there is something good happening every day somewhere on campus: guest speakers, student presentations, art displays, computer programming, sporting events or exercise, field trips. You can hardly turn your head without hearing the words “achievement gap” and seeing myriad attempts to address it. Much of what makes Berkeley different is the money that has been made available to its teachers through the BHSDG, In Dulce Jubilo, and BSEP. Don’t go to You Tube for horror and success stories about education in your local district: volunteer, join a committee, talk to children, call a teacher. You might learn something. You might like what you hear.  

Alan E. Miller, a former Berkeley Federation of Teachers vice president, teaches English at Berkeley High School.  

In “The State of Education” in the Nov. 23 Daily Planet, teacher Jonathan Stephens decries the “diminishing intellectual returns” in today’s classrooms, but fails to appreciate the deepened understanding of other cultures and behaviors, and the internalization of the idea of justice, that students achieve in today’s multi-cultural equal-opportunity classrooms. 

I was unfortunately educated in the segregated South. There we all learned to read and write and do math, but most of us would happily give up a little of those skills if we could have had the richer experience of diversity and justice. 

How pallid were our occasional schoolyard fights in that era, compared to the spirited conflicts that Mr. Stephens has “witnessed nearly every day,” and which he misinterprets as “racially charged violence.” There is no reason to think that students hurling racial epithets at each other as they fight are necessarily being “racial”—name calling is only natural when adolescent feelings boil over into physical conflict. 

Mr. Stephens writes, “Until we create a classroom culture that can guarantee teachers will have the opportunity to practice their trade in peace and safety, the problems facing us will only get worse.” 

Surely Mr. Stephens would not want to return to the safe and peaceful mono-cultural classrooms of the segregated South? The conditions he has witnessed are just “growing pains” that may take a century or two to work themselves out as we move closer to the dream we share with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. of a colorblind rainbow society. 

The following text is the United In Action “Talking Points for Superintendent Selection Process,” submitted to the Leadership Associates (“Leadership”) consulting group. Leadership is the agency contracted by the BUSD to find our next superintendent. 

United in Action believes that the stakes are far too high to simply hire a competent administrator. While we need the experience and skill set that will continue to maintain and enhance our infrastructure, we cannot continue to sacrifice the success and well-being of our students. The data are irrefutable. We are failing to educate our black and brown students at record levels, throughout the entire district.  

The 2007 CA STAR test results show that 77 percent of our second-grade African-American and Latino students are less than proficient in English-Language Arts, while more than 80 percent of our eleventh-grade African-American and Latino students are less than proficient. We must have leadership that will make student achievement the number one priority.  

We have outlined the qualities that we believe are absolutely essential for this position. We feel duty-bound to inform those in our community who may not be aware of the critical need for education reform. 

About the selection process: 

1. Berkeley is a unique and diverse community with many political, racial, ethnic, social, and economic divisions. The selection process lacks a community envisioning process to develop a shared set of community values and priorities regarding the new superintendent. In fact, the community meetings scheduled with the search team reflect and perpetuate these divisions by grouping only similar organizations together, rather than grouping diverse organizations together to facilitate consensus amongst the community. How will the consultants adequately represent the community vision when there has been no shared process in identifying our values and priorities? 

2. The process is too fast to address the goals and desires of our community. Similar selection processes in the past have not met our needs and this process is not likely to meet our needs either, unless there is more time allotted to developing a shared set of community values and priorities.  

3. The process does not enable the community to get to know the candidates in any real sense to differentiate whether they are good at selling themselves or good at solving our serious educational problems. The process is closed, the community role is marginalized, and the community's ability to qualify candidates to ensure we find a superintendent that we can support and who will support the change we feel our districts needs is undervalued by the process. 

Important Qualities for our next Superintendent: 

Our most recent superintendents have brought important skills for the improvement and success of our school district. Jack McLaughlin brought his skills in facilities construction at a time when many of our schools were being rebuilt, while Michelle Lawrence brought her skills in fiscal management at a time when our district was in financial difficulty. We now need a superintendent with the passion, skills, and experience to address issues of race and class and bring our community together to ensure the academic success of all of our students. This superintendent should: 

1. Hold student achievement as their highest priority. 

2. Have a proven track record of addressing issues of race, class, and equity in a large urban community similar to Berkeley. 

3. Understand institutional barriers to achieving educational equity. 

4. Be a community builder, with a demonstrated ability to build and lead a collaborative partnership with parents, teachers, staff, and the greater community. 

5. Have the ability and desire to enter into intentional and respectful relationships with city government, institutions of higher education (UC Berkeley and community colleges), community resources, and state and federal resources. 

6. Have experience in preschool through adult education, and understand and value the importance of continuing and alternative education (B-Tech, Independent Studies, the Adult School). 

7. Have proven commitment and innovation in recruiting and retaining teachers of color, and development of a professional development plan with the focus of helping boost the achievement of low-performing students and engaging all students.  

8. Have demonstrated experience in implementing a data collection system to systematically monitor student performance, and to inform targeted intervention efforts at the classroom, school, district levels. 

9. Be sensitive to the needs of special needs students, and have demonstrated ability in meeting these needs. 

Michael Miller is a coordinator for Parents of Children of African Descent. 

Richard Brenneman’s comment in Nov. 20 issue of the Planet continues to point to the deficiencies of the BP grant and agrofuel programs, but the real deficiency has gotten little mention until Dr. J. Overpeck’s statement on the last IPCC report in the San Francisco Chronicle on Nov. 18. In the front page article, Dr. Overpeck, director of the University of Arizona, Institute for the Study of Planet Earth and member of the IPCC, is cited as saying “It’s going to get warmer” from industrial emissions remaining in the atmosphere for decades to centuries without making mention of new emissions that will be adding to raise the level of greenhouse gases (GHGs) mainly carbon dioxide. The real issue that has to be addressed to get some control of global warming is finding a means to remove some of the 35 percent overload of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution. In the same article, Dr. S. Schneider of Stanford cited that overload in the article as being the main cause of warming seen in the last 40-50 years. Almost all proposals for curbing of emissions from vehicles and power plants, which still allows some adding to that 35 percent, and for growing agrofuels, which allow a lot of non-energy generating recycling of that gas, do nothing to remove any of that 35 percent. 

Again I call attention to my commentaries on June 12 and Oct. 26, in which the pyrolysis process is detailed to be applied to our wasted agrofuel crop dumped in our massive organic waste disposal program. That costs megabucks in maintaining the dumps or in composting, where we allow carbon dioxide to be reemitted needlessly after nature had so kindly trapped it for us in biochemicals. The frenzied call for agrofuels totally ignores how much land and water will be getting usurped from food production, which will be avoided by using our organic wastes as agrofuels. The pyrolysis process as detailed can be set up for none of that gas to be given off needlessly as all the carbon goes to charcoal for burial or organic chemicals useful for making drug and plastics. 

The benefits that can be realized using this process are enormous for both the economy and the environment. We would be removing some carbon dioxide from ever getting reemitted via biodegradation. We could get some energy free of needless emissions of GHGs, especially with the development of splitting water to get hydrogen, which was recently reported by Max Plank Inst. scientists. We would kick our oil addiction retaining megabucks sent to foreign countries having leaders with little friendliness to America. With the heating used in pyrolysis, we would destroy the hazardous germs and toxics in our massive waste disposal mess while recovering megabucks spent in maintaining dumps to prevent the escape of those hazards. And in time we would eliminate any new environmental messes of coal mining as well as the ever increasing losses of lives in coal mining. 

Along with pyrolysis, we should greatly expand our use of windmills to collect some energy from the brisker winds being caused by the excess of released heat energy from our fossil fuelishness, and that released energy stays trapped on the globe by the GHGs. The last IPCC report and the UN-SEG report from Sigma Xi out last spring warn of greater wind velocity causing damage and soil erosion, so why not reap the wind for electricity generation. Several groups are now calling for a ban on new coal fired power plants and should call for windmills to generate much of our future electricity. 

Unfortunately, those reports only talk of curbing emissions that will do nothing to reduce the overloads of heat energy and carbon dioxide already causing all the problems described in the reports with the authors’ warnings of the problems getting worse. The pyrolysis process as I have somewhat detailed will give us a means to start removing those overloads albeit slowly. That is how we have to get control of the real global warming cause. The pyrolysis process is the alternative for sustainability and for getting control of the real global warming cause that the emission curbing and agrofuels proposals can not achieve. 

Fremont resident James Singmaster is a retired environmental toxicologist.  

A couple of odds and ends: Robert Sapolsky, the Stanford neurobiologist, published a collection of his provocative essays a few years back as The Trouble with Testosterone. Where do you begin? Sapolsky was mostly interested in the hormone’s effect on the behavior of East African savannah baboons (see his A Primate’s Memoirs for tales of fieldwork) and on humans. But it’s not just a primate thing, or even a mammalian one. Birds have testosterone too, as do reptiles, amphibians, even fish: a common vertebrate heritage. 

A recent study by Joel McGlothin at the University of Virginia and Ellen Ketterson at Indiana University Bloomington examined the relationship between testosterone levels and parental investment in male dark-eyed juncos. These are the birds my folks used to call “snowbirds,” because of the timing of their arrival in central Arkansas. There’s an old Appalachian, I guess, fiddle tune with the cryptic title “Snowbird in the Ash Heap.”  

Our local variety, with dark gray heads and reddish backs, used to be considered a distinct species, the Oregon junco. But it, along with the eastern slate-colored junco, the white-winged junco of the Black Hills, and the pink-sided junco of the Rockies, have all been lumped together as dark-eyed. I wouldn’t count on that lasting, though, the way things go in bird taxonomy. Juncos are common Berkeley yard and UC campus birds, and year-round residents. 

McGlothin and Ketterson studied an eastern subspecies. Their working hypothesis was that a male’s total testosterone level would influence both his aggressive tendencies and his monogamous behavior, or lack thereof. The expectation was that high-testosterone males would be more likely to abandon their families and move on to new partners rather than sticking around to tend the nestlings. 

It didn’t quite work out that way. What they found was that all males were willing to help with childcare, to a degree. “If they have higher testosterone they help less,” says Ketterson. “If they have lower testosterone they help more.” But the best predictor of a male’s involvement with the kids was the stability of his testosterone level. Males whose levels rose and fell quickly investing less time in parenting. 

So who is the more fit parent, in evolutionary terms? Do the juncos with less stable testosterone, who are also more aggressive, sire as many successful offspring through extra-pair liaisons as the monogamous fathers do? That’s apparently where the research will go next. 

From birds to snakes: I recently wrote about the rise and fall of the diamondback water snake colony at Lafayette Reservoir (and managed to omit the horror story of the brown tree snake, a New Guinea native that hitchhiked to Guam and ate its way through the island’s bird population, wiping out several endemic species), mentioning how irascible and prone to bite these critters are. This drew a snake-handling anecdote from reader Richard Hodges: 

Back in 1970, I was on faculty at UT Austin. Besides being a computer scientist, I was an inveterate explorer of nature, and part-time snake fancier. One day, walking along Shoal Creek I spotted a water snake. Though I had never seen one before, I had read about it and was familiar enough with the poisonous snakes to be certain it was not a water moccasin. I approached it very cautiously and managed to “collect” it, without stimulating its defensive reactions. I installed it in a cage in my office on campus and over a period of weeks, by sensitive handling I induced it to a state of toleration approaching tameness. 

One day a top researcher in my field, Artificial Intelligence, was visiting the department. I think she was interviewing for a position. I attended the interesting lecture she gave. She was a fairly young and attractive brunette. Hearing about my snake, she approached me and asked to see it. I gladly showed it to her. She asked if she could handle it, saying she was a snake fancier also. I said that while it was tame to my touch, the species was known to be aggressive. She acknowledged the warning. 

Imagine my shock when at her apparently careful approach, the snake struck with a quickness I had never seen in it and bit her viciously. Water snakes have long teeth, useful for capturing slippery frogs, and blood was streaming from her hand! I was quite concerned, not for her health since such wounds usually heal quickly, but for my reputation, perhaps my career. But she just smiled and said “Don't worry, this often happens to me.” She wrapped her hand in a towel somebody found. We talked about it later over a beer and it developed that she was one of those people whom snakes often bite. I was the opposite—I often had handled otherwise aggressive snakes without problems. 

Joe Eaton’s “Wild Neighbors” column appears every other Tuesday in the Berkeley Daily Planet, alternating with Ron Sullivan’s “Green Neighbors” column on East Bay trees. 

Photograph by Joe Eaton. 

The bird formerly known as Oregon junco, in Tilden Regional Park. 

Last summer, I happened to be walking with an out-of-town couple who had come, early, to a Paramount Theater concert and, with some time to kill, wanted to know if I knew of any good places in the downtown area to get something to eat. I did, actually. Several places. But Jack London Square seemed too far for them to walk and, with little city signage to help them along the way, I thought they might be mistrustful of any directions a strange local might give them that took them off Broadway to Old Oakland or Chinatown. They got a hot dog from one of the vendors who works outside the Paramount events, I think, and an opportunity was lost. 

Two weeks ago, I wrote that the Dellums administration should concentrate its retail development plans away from downtown and into the existing community commercial districts. By that suggestion, however, I did not mean to imply that downtown should be abandoned. The Jerry Brown 10K plan was designed to attract new residents into the downtown area so that retail would follow. I would suggest that while we are waiting for the retail, the Dellums administration ought to adopt a different strategy: Make the existing downtown attractive for both residents and visitors, to the point that there is a sufficient critical mass of shoppers and eaters and foot traffic to get the attention of the retail businesses that are so important to our tax needs. 

And the key point is that such a plan will require far fewer city dollars than were used, say, to subsidize Forest City or the Fox renovation. What is needed to revitalize Oakland’s downtown is not so much money, after all, but rather a change of thought process, purpose and direction. 

Let’s go back to the out-of-town couple coming to the Paramount Theater event, and looking for somewhere to eat downtown, beforehand. What could the city have had in place, downtown, to help this couple find what they wanted, and what the city—almost desperately—wants them to be able to find? 

First-off, a free downtown shuttle would be nice. 

AC Transit used to run one several years back, but the service became one of the casualties of the transit district’s ongoing budget problems. My suggestion is that the City of Oakland needs to revive that service as a necessary component for downtown revitalization, either in connection with AC Transit or, if AC Transit is unwilling, the city should either run its own shuttle service or contract the job out to some other organization. 

Such a shuttle could run a route along the downtown areas where the city wants to direct the most dollars, and continue until all of the venues close. One suggestion would be to start somewhere around the uptown area—where the city is anticipating new residents moving into the Forest City Project—running past both the Paramount and the Fox, when the Fox begins operating as an entertainment venue, going down Broadway past the City Center and the Marriott, making a loop west through Old Oakland on its southward trip to Jack London Square and then east through Chinatown on its way back uptown. A component might also include a trip down 14th Street to the beginning of Lake Merritt and back, particularly as the city begins to move on the Measure DD improvements to provide an overground, visible, and walkable connection of the western end of the lake to the estuary. That would allow a pass-by of both the Oakland Museum and—if we ever open it up again as an entertainment venue—the Kaiser Convention Center. The city could provide uptown-downtown maps which include a list of places along or near the shuttle route to eat, to shop, and to take in entertainment. The city—or AC Transit—could also provide drivers who could answer appropriate questions. Yes, this would be an extra cost to the city. But the city already spends far more money on developer subsidies directed towards downtown revitalization. An uptown-downtown free shuttle would seem a necessary component to that revitalization, at a relatively minor cost. 

But what about the encouragement of foot traffic? 

Well, first, signage would help, considerably. Wherever we think large groups of people are likely to congregate—and then, again, periodically along the way—the city should erect signage in the uptown-downtown area which directs pedestrians to various sections. The signage would not necessarily advertise specific businesses but instead would let pedestrians know that “this way”--for example-- lies Chinatown, with its collection of shops and restaurants, and “that way” lies Old Oakland, with its bars and grills, world food outlets, bookstores, and other amenities. Periodically spaced, unmanned kiosks where brochures can be placed—something you almost always see in cities interested in catering to tourism—would also help. One ought not to have to find the Chamber of Commerce headquarters or duck into the lobby of the Marriott, if you know where the Marriott is, to find such things. 

That being said, making the walk more amenable and inviting between these destination points would also be a plus. 

The most serious impediment to encouraging foot traffic between City Center and Jack London Square is the 880-Broadway overpass—or underpass, depending on your point of view—between 6th and 5th streets. With the marked police car parking lot directly adjacent, and the police headquarters only a couple of blocks away, this is probably one of the safer stretches to walk in Oakland. But it doesn’t appear that way. Instead, the walk under the overpass is dark and foreboding and appears dangerous, and the aging collected pigeon droppings along the sidewalk give it a distinctly unsanitary appearance as well. Despite the inviting view of the city’s lighted Holiday Tree clearly visible at the entrance to Jack London Square only five blocks away, it is easy to imagine city visitors coming from the Marriott early in the evening, stopping at the overpass, peering down the street, deciding that, no, there’s probably nothing of particular interest or value down that direction, and turning back. 

This is clearly a case where a lemon should be turned to lemonade. Increasing the lighting under the 880 overpass would be a distinct plus. So, perhaps, would be tacking up poster boards along the pilings on each side and using them as mural space for local artists. Cleaning up the birdshit on a regular basis is, well, a necessity. An added touch might be to theme the underpass as a gateway arch and passage, with appropriate signage over the top in each direction. 

The suggestion of mural art through the underpass invites another suggestion, that the city should encourage walking through the uptown-downtown area not only as a way to get to a particular destination, but also for the pleasure of the walk itself and the things seen along the way. Several Oakland neighborhoods are already demonstrating the power of that process by having entire sections of houses with spectacular holiday light displays—the area near Seminary Avenue and MacArthur being one such example—so that folks make it a habit every year to drive the kids over and through, just to have a look. 

In such a way, Oakland could encourage walking in the uptown-downtown area, just for walking’s sake. 

West Oakland business advocate Steve Lowe long ago suggested that the city use the many vacant store windows along lower Broadway between the overpass and Jack London Square to house doll and toy displays. The idea was never picked up by the city, and one wonders why. It appears to be one of those win-win-win situations, all the way around. The city gets the uptown-downtown walking traffic it desperately wants, the displaying collectors and artisans get free publicity and exposure, and the owners of the vacant buildings get a rise in their property values as the size of the crowds increase. 

But such displays ought not to stop with dolls and toys. In several places in its downtown, the City of Berkeley sponsors art displays in vacant windows. Oakland ought to follow suit, with themed displays along selected walking routes, some of them cultural, some of them historic, some of them seasonal, changing them periodically so that pedestrians would be encouraged to come back from time to time. 

There are other social concerns of course, about who Oakland has been trying to attract to its uptown-downtown area and who it has been trying to keep out, and our inability as a city to come to some sort of terms with our young Black and Brown population. Resolving that problem would go a long ways towards resolving the problem of an underused uptown-downtown. But that’s an issue we’ve often talked about, and a subject for another time. 

Meanwhile, I’m no city planner, so I haven’t done a cost breakdown of the above suggestions. But I often walk or ride in the uptown-downtown area, and I see its deficiencies. I often hear the complaints and concerns that there are not enough places in the area to shop or eat. My concern is that the city is not doing enough to steer the public to the places that are already there. These are my suggestions of how to alleviate that problem. I am sure the professional city planners in Oakland can come up with a far better list, if they put their heads to it. 

In 1948, University of California enrollment at the Berkeley campus reached 22,000 students, making adequate housing the number-one problem facing the student body. That year, the California Alumni Association published the book Students at Berkeley, which contained a large chapter devoted to housing and analyzed potential student housing sites. 

The Northside was judged unsuitable for student housing owing to “very unfavorable topography” and “remoteness from the center of student activities.” Older buildings—the Victorians and Colonial Revivals now prized as historic resources—were also deemed inadequate for student habitation. 

As an example of “adaptation of old and unsuitable buildings,” the book displayed two photos of Victorians, one of which was the North Gables boarding house at 2531 Ridge Road. The 19th-century houses were unfavorably compared with the university-owned Stern Hall, built in 1942. 

The 1962 Long-Range Development Plan (LRDP) for the campus proposed new university buildings to be constructed on four Northside city blocks facing the campus between Highland Place and Scenic Avenue. Existing structures—public or private—were to be demolished, including the historic Cloyne Court Hotel, North Gate Hall, and Drawing Building, all designed by John Galen Howard, and the former Beta Theta Pi chapter house, designed by Ernest Coxhead. 

On the Southside, the housing development suggested by the Alumni Association dictated a radically clean sweep of the twenty city blocks between College Avenue, Bancroft Way, Fulton Street, and Dwight Way, retaining only “institutions of quasi-public and social character” and the Telegraph Avenue-Bancroft Way business district. The rest was to be occupied by “elevator-type living centers” with “generous open space for recreation and amenity.” 

Miraculously, the sweep wasn’t quite as radical as intended, and many historic buildings on both sides of the campus were spared. On the Northside, Cloyne Court Hotel, North Gate Hall, the Drawing Building, Beta Theta Pi, and many pre-1923 residences were eventually designated as landmarks. The Victorian at 2531 Ridge Road—for which a landmark application was never written owing to insufficient information—not only survived but continues to house students. 

This charming, turreted house, now divided into six apartments, was one of the earliest homes built in the Daley’s Scenic Park tract. The first improvement on the site was recorded in 1892, and by the following year it had more than doubled. After passing through two owners in as many years, the property was acquired by one William Fisher, who may have briefly lived in the house but never long enough to be listed in the Berkeley directory. 

Next door, at 2527 Ridge Road, another Victorian went up at the same time. This house was acquired by James and Margaret Pierce, who lived in it until 1904, when they became managers of the newly completed Cloyne Court Hotel and sold their home to the Swiss vice-consul, John Freuler. Until the mid-1910s, Strawberry Creek ran in its natural channel across the back yards of both houses. 

Unlike its next-door neighbor, 2531 Ridge Road was always occupied by renters. Beginning in 1899, it was the home of Mrs. Annie E. Benson, a 65-year old widow from Pennsylvania. In the 1900 U.S. census, Mrs. Benson listed her occupation as Landlady. This in itself was not remarkable, but the 1900 census revealed two facts about Mrs. Benson that were remarkable indeed. For one, her race was listed as Black, making Annie Benson the only African-American head of household on the Northside. The one other person listed as Black in the neighborhood at the time was a domestic living in the household of her employers. (Five other persons—the wife and four children of realtor Herman Murphy—were also listed as Black in 1900; however, all subsequent census records marked them as White.) 

The second revelation about Mrs. Benson is even more interesting. In 1900, her tenants at 2531 Ridge Road were Austin and Ethel Lewis and their three children. 

Attorney, writer, socialist, and civil libertarian, Austin Lewis (1865–1944) was a highly visible figure in his day. Born in England, he immigrated to the United States in 1890 with his parents and siblings. The family arrived in Berkeley circa 1898 and established the private Glenholm School in their home on the corner of Shattuck Ave. and Berryman Street, at the current entrance to Live Oak Park. 

Why Austin Lewis, who was practicing law in San Francisco, chose to leave the family home and move into a rental on Ridge Road is not apparent, unless he did so expressly to help Annie Benson. 

Lewis was a tireless activist and lecturer in support of labor and women’s suffrage. Shortly after his arrival in Berkeley, Lewis published a series of books on socialism. The first was a translation of Friedrich Engels’ Feuerbach: The Roots of the Socialist Philosophy (1903), followed by his own The Church and Socialism (1906), The Rise of the American Proletarian (1907), The Militant Proletariat (c. 1911), and Proletarian and Petit-Bourgeois (1910s). 

In 1901, Berkeley gained another socialist in the figure of future mayor J. Stitt Wilson (1868–1942), a former Methodist Episcopal minister turned lecturer, who in 1903 bought a Maybeck-designed house on Highland Place, two blocks to the east of the Benson-Lewis household. The house—built in 1896 and destroyed in 1956—is known to architectural historians as the Laura G. Hall House, but considering that Ms. Hall occupied it for no more than a year, while Stitt Wilson owned it for several decades, it might be more appropriate to name it after him. 

Like Lewis, Wilson published socialist tracts, including The Message of Socialism to the Church and The Impending Social Revolution, or The Labor Problem Solved (both in 1904). Unlike Lewis, Wilson was obliged to publish them at his own expense. 

Lewis and Wilson were the two luminaries of the Socialist Party, and both ran in California gubernatorial races on their party’s ticket. In 1906, Lewis garnered 5.1% of the votes in a four-way race won by Republican James N. Gillett. Four years later, Wilson collected 12.4% of the votes in a three-way race won by Republican Hiram W. Johnson. Lewis, who ran for the U.S. Congress from the Fourth District that year, came in third behind the Republican and Democratic candidates. 

As friend, mentor, and sometime lawyer to a large coterie of writers and poets, Austin Lewis counted Jack London, Herman Whitaker, and George Sterling in his circle. Influenced by Lewis, London wrote The Iron Heel, a dystopian novel set in the future and depicting the triumph of capital over socialism. 

In September 1909, Lewis was one of 25 literary figures who organized the Press Club of Alameda, which would evolve into the California Writers’ Club. At the time, the club was the only California organization of its kind to include both men and women members. Lewis was elected as the club’s first president. 

Among the causes that engaged Lewis’s interest were the efforts to free Tom Mooney and Warren Billings—two labor leaders falsely accused of planting a bomb in a 1916 San Francisco parade—and to repeal California’s criminal syndicalism law, which classified dissident speech as a felony punishable by imprisonment. 

The Lewis family stayed at 2531 Ridge Road only briefly. By 1901 they had moved to 3108 Harper Street, and two years later they decamped for Oakland, where they lived at 3103 Stuart Street (in 1927, Highland Hospital would be built across the street from their house). Annie Benson, now listed in the directories as a cook, continued living at the Ridge Road house until 1904, when she moved to 1536 Shattuck Avenue. Her new house stood on the site now occupied by the parking lot between the French Hotel and Bank of America. 

While the Swiss vice-consul was living next door, 2531 Ridge Road became the home of William O’Brien, a blacksmith. In 1919, the house was taken over by Edna G. White (1884–1957), a former school teacher from Illinois, who established in it a boarding house for female students. She called it North Gables. 

North Gables was run along the lines of a co-operative. Residents paid $25 a month ($30 in the ’40s) for room and board, supplementing their rent payments with five weekly hours of work that included cleaning, cooking, serving, dish washing, gardening, and repair. About a quarter of the thirty lodgers worked an additional two hours a day and lived rent-free. 

Like all such living accommodations, North Gables required the approval of the Dean of Women and underwent regular inspections. During the 1920s, it was expanded fore and aft—the front façade, which had originally featured a polygonal window bay in the southeast corner and a small entrance porch at the southwest, gained a deep porch running across its entire length, with a sleeping porch above it. 

North Gables weathered the Depression and World War II, enabling a great many girls of slender means to obtain university education. The boarding house ceased operation in 1949, after Miss White’s health deteriorated. The building has since passed through many hands and was eventually converted into apartments. Its former next-door neighbor is long since gone, having made way for the Hotel Slocum, now known as the Stebbins Hall co-op, named after Dean of Women Lucy Ward Stebbins, who in 1933 awarded North Gables third-place honors for scholarship. 

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

Photograph: Daniella Thompson  

2531 Ridge Road, built in 1892, is one of the oldest buildings on the Northside. 

It’s post-Thanksgiving: socially, it’s December. Time to think about holiday shopping.  

Sure, some people have got all their gift-shopping done, either in mid-July or in last year’s post-holiday sales. They have more storage space than anyone I know, and/or they lack the true Spirit of the Wild Hunt. (You didn’t think the Wal-Mart frenzy had anything to do with that newfangled Christ guy, did you?) The rest of us are just now getting into gear. 

If you have a gardener to shop for, it shouldn’t be too hard. First: You have live stuff to consider. There are seeds, late bulbs, and plants for the garden and house all over the place. In this season an indoor plant is a good idea; there’s no need to worry about late freezes and it’s always good to have one more bit of green living at one’s elbow to make the wait for Spring easier.  

For elegant and practical gifts, go browse at Hida Tool and Hardware. Be prepared to walk sideways, because the shop is tiny and full of good stuff. Sometimes you can find things you never knew you (or your giftee) needed, like cuffs that cover the arm just above glove level, for working on junipers or roses or any prickly plant. They look all superhero-cool too.  

Check out the long-reach pruners, the various hoes and weeders, the incomparable saws, the irreplaceable hori-hori trowel/knives. My personal art-object favorite is the right- or left-handed one-side-beveled grafting knife. This is one piece of shaped metal with a wicker wrap around the handle for a Neolithic look, which would make it retro even if it’s a 500-year-old design.  

Hida doesn’t sell Felco brand pruning shears, oddly enough. Sure, Felcos are a Swiss brand, but where’s the International Luv?  

If you really really love your gardener, consider a pair of Felcos as a present even if she or he already had one. I’m saying this as a multiple-Felco owner, despite one of the major advantage of the brand: You’ll never have to buy another pair because every part is replaceable. Mostly it’s a new cutting blade that’s needed, and that only after several years’ resharpening.  

Felcos ain’t cheap but they’re a good investment. You might spend $50 to $75 on a pair, but those replacement blades cost less than $10 and they make the old pair feel brand-new.  

A sharpener for the blade is a good lagniappe—giving the shears a lick or two before every job, rather like steeling a kitchen knife, makes work a pleasure and a sharp blade is better for the plants you’re pruning too. I have a simple pair of flat diamond files that I’ve almost worn out after 20 years. They cost under $10 together and take up very little pocket space.  

The rub is this: It’s hard to surprise your gift-getter with Felcos because they really ought to be tried on first. There are 14 models, to fit all sorts of hands (including left ones) and uses. I use #8—in case some Felco Fairy would care to visit me.  

Next week: more gift ideas. 

Felcos:  

Hida Tool and Hardware Company 

1333 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley  

(510) 524-3700 or (800) 443-5512 

http://www.hidatool.com 

9:00 a.m.. - 6:00 p.m. Monday—Satuday  

Closed Sunday 

Mrs. Dalloway's Literary and Garden Arts  

2904 College Avenue, Berkeley  

(510) 704-8222 

Mon—Wed 10 a.m.—7 p.m. 

Thurs—Sat 10 a.m.—9 pmm. 

Sunday noon—6 p.m. 

http://www.mrsdalloways.com 

Also try the nearest hardware, nursery, or garden store, e.g.Yabusaki’s Dwight Way Nursery, East Bay Nursery, Berkeley Horticultural Nursery. 

Online: http://www.felcostore.com 

Welcome to my watershed. I really like it here but it is, basically, a big clay bowl and we’re all salad. 

Some of us get lucky by being up on the edge of the bowl or on one of the ridges on the inside, but most of are not and so it gets wet under our houses. 

This image is intentionally over the top but I want to get you started thinking about this in a larger context. We are in a watershed filled with creeks, springs, aquifers and culverted water-ways. If you put clay soils on top of this system of waterways, you can imagine that you end up with something like your first experience on the potter’s wheel. Everything is slippery and it’s hard to maintain a rigid or fixed form. 

You might imagine that it’s rather hard for a house to remain truly rectilinear, plumb and square when resting on this sort of thing. Add to this the fact that many houses were built on “filled” soils that were brought to the site to create a level surface (or because it was cheaper than hauling off the excess soil from local works such road building) and it’s easy to understand why these houses are so wracked and warped. The filled soils may have seemed stable when they were first installed but the loading of many tons of house combined with a few good rains and, voila, you’ve got Trouble (right here in River City!). 

“Filled” soils compact under load or when water is added and many houses have “differential” settlement (one area has settled more than another) that is attributable, in part, to this effect. 

When contractors started building here in the 1800s, they didn’t pay drainage or soils issues much heed and so many of the houses built up through the early 1900s have settlement which stems from these oversights. By 1940, foundations got much stronger and so could “bridge” over soft spots without settlement to a much greater degree. We also observed better site preparation beginning in this time period and the avoidance of filled soils was one such improvement. 

In short, the soils conditions we find locally (and in many other parts of the globe) require that buildings be able to withstand a certain amount of earth movement and poor drainage. 

Many of these issues are hard to resolve without great sums of cash. However, there is one factor in this scenario that is, at least somewhat, manageable and that is the water. 

Wet soils move more than dry soils.  

We can’t really change the soil we’re on (well you can but, boy, it’s really expensive) but you can keep it dryer. There’s no perfect drainage system but if we endeavor to keep the soil below our houses dry we can slow the movement quite a bit and have more stable, less weirdly shaped homes. 

If you’re on a hillside you have a more complex problem, although your water issue may not be as bad as some that I see in flatter areas. 

If your crouton is located on the side of the salad bowl, it’s working it’s way slowly to the bottom of the bowl. Add more dressing, it will get there faster. If your crouton is on the bottom of the bowl, it’s not moving so fast, although it may be sitting in too much Balsamic Vinaigrette. 

As water softens the soils below hillside homes, they will tend to move downhill more rapidly than they will when they’re dry. Those of us who get to live in the hills are, therefore, living in mobile-homes. Gravity not only pulls our houses downhill, it also applies force “differentially” and many hillside homes show separations or cracks that result from different parts of the house moving in different direction and/or at different rates. 

One cause of differential settlement is that the wetting of soils is never uniform. Even if the soils you rest upon are completely homogenous, they will not be getting wet in a uniform manner because water flows in funny and surprising ways, although some aspects of this are predictable. For example, water will flow down against the back of your house (if your house faces downhill), creating wetter soils there. This can make the back wall settle more than the rest. 

The result of uneven wetting is, often, uneven settlement. As I’ve indicated, this is more true with early foundation than with modern ones due to their breadth and strength. 

There also may be harder soil beneath some parts of your house and regardless of wetting, that part might always be held aloft while other parts drop away. 

Settlement can occur just as easily on soils of uniform strength when some parts are kept much dryer than others. Often the middle of the house is staying dryer and does not settle as much as the edges which are wetted to a greater degree. This is not consistent, though, since some houses have deep portion near the middle (especially hillside homes which are cut away for basements or garages). These houses often exhibit the reverse effect with the middle settling faster than the rest because the middle supports rest upon wetter soils in a depression that holds water. 

Just to make matters all the more confusing, our local clay bed has the disconcerting propensity to rise and fall as it wets and dries. Expansive clay soils will push houses upward as they get wet (because the clay takes on water and holds it) and then lower these structures down as they dry out. This is sometimes referred to as “clay-jacking.” 

This turns out to be a locomotive process when you add gravity. Hillside homes are driven downhill very slowly because every time they rise and fall, they get pushed a little further downhill. 

At this point I feel obliged to stop the drama and say that most of the houses I see are not being affected by these forces enough to require any significant repair. Few houses remain truly square after 6 or 8 decades of being subjected to these effects but, in most cases, these changes can be spackled and ignored. 

So, let’s review. You’re living in a crouton on the side of a bowl of Caesar. 

Remember to ask for the dressing on the side. 

Next time, I’ll explain about how to do that and the solution is French (the drain, not the dressing). 

TUESDAY, DEC. 4 

CHILDREN 

The Mountain Mushers and Their Sled Dogs at 6:30 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

FILM 

“Xperimental Eros” with a panel discussion at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

A Reading for “The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen” with Michael McClure, David Meltzer and Clark Coolidge at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Jeffery Broussard & The Circle Cowboys at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

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

BirdHead at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 5 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Strictly Speaking with Azar Nafisi, author of “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books” at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $18-$30. 642-9988.  

Christopher Felver on his historical record of tbe Beat Generation, “Beat” at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Thomas Lynch reads Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Oakland City Center Holiday Concert with Klezmania at noon at 12th and Broadway, Oakland.  

Helene Attia Octet, CD release party, at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Zoyres, Smyrna Time Machine at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Rovira Orquestra at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

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

THURSDAY, DEC. 6 

EXHIBITIONS 

“One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now” Guided tour at 12:15 and 5:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft. Free. 642-0808. 

FILM 

“Chaplin at the Mutual: Four Short Comedies” at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Free. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Lunch Poems with Monica de la Torre at 12:10 p.m. at the Morrison Library, inside the Doe Library, UC Campus. 642-0137. 

Peter Dale Scott reads his poems at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, Edith Stone Room, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 526-3720. 

“Jews, Chocolate and Tourism in the Diaspora” with Rabbi Deborah Prinz at 6:30 p.m. at the Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St. 549-6950. 

Monica de la Torre and Garrett Caples read at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

Corey Brooks reads from “Their Patriotic Duty: The Civil War Letters of the Evans Family of Brown County, Ohio” at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Jazz Night and Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School with the MLK, Jr. Middle School Jazz Band, the Equanimous Jones Quartet and the Jazz School Middle School Jazz Project at 7:30 p.m. at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School, 1781 Rose St. at Grant. Admission is free, but donations accepted to support the Jazz Band.  

The Claire Lynch Band at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Pete Madsen Quartet, CD release party, at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ.  

Lindsay Tomasic at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Singer Songwriter Expose with Rodney Brillante, Rick Hardin and Audrey Howard at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. 

Mucho Axé at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $8-$10. 849-2568.  

FRIDAY, DEC. 7 

THEATER 

Altarena Playhouse “The Man Who Saved Christmas” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Altarena Playhouse, 1409 High St., Alameda, through Dec. 16. Tickets are $17-$20. 523-1553. www.altarena.org 

Aurora Theatre Company “Sex” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St., through Dec. 23. Tickets are $28-$50. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

BHS Drama and Shift Theatre “Noises Off” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Florence Schwimley Little Theater, Berkeley High Campus. Tickets are $6-$12. 332-1931.  

Berkeley Rep “After the Quake” at the Trust Stage, 2025 Addison St., through Dec. 21. Tickets are $33-$69. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Black Repertory Group “A Rasin in the Sun” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2:30 p.m. at 3201 Adeline St., through Dec. 14. Tickets are $10-$20. 652-2120. 

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. ccct.org  

Impact Theatre “A Very Special Money & Run Winter Season Holiday Special” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave., through Dec. 22. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. http://impacttheatre.com 

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, through Dec. 15. Tickets are $18. 232-4031. www.masquers.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Duopolis” contemporary art from New York and San Francisco. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, 25 Grand Ave., upper level, Oakland. www.chandracerrito.com 

“Made In Equilibrium” works by Michele Elizabeth Lee, Brady Nadell and Ross Drago. Reception at 6 p.m. at ABCo Artspace, 3135 Oakland, Oakland. www.abcoartspace.com 

Radical Graphics of Taller Tupac Amaru Reception at 6 p.m. at 550 Second St., Jack London Square. www.proartsgallery.org  

Touchable Stories “Richmond: The Story Continues” Fri. at 8 p.m., Sat. at 2 and 6 p.m. at Old Kaiser Cafeteria, Shipyard #3, 1303 Canal Blvd., Richmond. Cost is $6-$12. Reservations required. 619-3675. www.touchablestories.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

The Best of Actors Reading Writers “The Tender Trap” at 8 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. 932-0214. ricaisabella@yahoo.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE  

Berkeley Ballet Theater “Nutcracker” Fri. at 7 p.m., Sat. at 2 and 7 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave., through Dec. 16. Tickets are $16-$22. 843-4689. 

“Amahl and the Night Visitors” at 8 p.m. at St Augustine’s Catholic Church, 400 Alcatraz, between Telegraph and College, Oakland. Free. 653-8631. 

Sacred & Profane Annual Holiday Concert with traditional and contemporary music for Swedish Lucia, Channukah and Christmas at 8 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. Tickets are $12-$15. www.sacredprofane.org  

Piedmont Choirs “Silver Bells” at 7:30 p.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd. Kensington, Cost is $10-$15. http://piedmontchoirs.org 

Bay Area Classical Harmonies “Messiah” at 7:30 p.m. at the Arlington Community Church, 52 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Tickets at the door are $12-$15.  

University Symphony Orchestra, 19th century masterpieces and and new works at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $4-$12. 642-4864. http://music.berkeley.edu 

The Christmas Revels at 7:30 p.m., Sat. and Sun. at 1 and 5 p.m. at Scottish Rite Theater, 1547 Lakeside Dr., Oakland. Tickets are $15-$50. 452-8800. www.calrevels.org 

Bobi Cespedes’ Grupo Bayano at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$15.. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Darryl Rowe & His Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Sambada, Omo Aiya, Afro-Brazilian-funk at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Oaktown Jazz Workshops at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

The Cowlicks at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Teada with Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $24.50-$25.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Star Ledbetter and Theresa Perez at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

The Go Girls Animal Rights Benefit Concert with Phonofly, Vanessa Van Spall, Aoede and Jenn Grinels at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Jennifer Johns & Doria Roberts perform for lesbian and bi-sexual women and their allies at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $7-$15. 548-1159.  

The Brothers Goldman at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

SATURDAY, DEC. 8 

CHILDREN  

Young People’s Chamber Orchestra Concert for school age children and up at 3 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with Gary Lapow at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5 for adults, $4 for children. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

“Children’s Theater Holiday Program” Sat. and Sun. at 12:30 and 3:30 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave., off Grand Ave., Oakland. Cost is $6. 452-2259. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Plein-air Landscape Paintings of Bodega Bay” by Adam Wolpert. Reception for the artist at 2 p.m. at the Environmental Education Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

ActivSpace Open House Sat. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 2703 7th St. 508-8943. 

NIAD’s “Art from the Heart” Annual Holiday Festival from 2 to 5 p.m. at the National Institute of Art and Disibilities, 551 23rd St., Richmond. 620-0290. 

“The Great Outdoors” Group show of landscapes. Opening reception at 3 p.m. at A Different Day Gallery, 1233 Solano Ave., Albany. 868-4904. www.ADifferentDaygallery.com  

Albany Community Art Show from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin Ave., Albany. 524-9283 . 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

PEN Oakland, Josephine Miles 17th Annual National Literary Awards from 2 to 5 p.m. at the Rockridge Branch Library, 5366 College Ave., Oakland. Winners read from their works. www.penoakland.org 

Chad Sweeney and Kaya Oakes read their poetry at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

The Best of Actors Reading Writers “The Tender Trap” at 8 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. 932-0214. ricaisabella@yahoo.com 

Michelle Bautista, author of “Kali’s Blade,” Eileen Tabios, author of “The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes,” Jean Vengua, author of “Prau” at 3 p.m. at Eastwind Books of Berkeley, 2066 University Ave. 548-2350.  

Prosody Castle 4: Dont Rhine in Conversation at 7 p.m. at The Gallery of Urban Art, 1746 13th St., West Oakland. Cost is $5. 706-1697. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Ballet Theater “Nutcracker” Sat. at 2 and 7 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave., through Dec. 16. Tickets are $16-$22. 843-4689. 

Bella Musica Chorus at 7:30 p.m. at Chapel of the Great Commission, Pacific School of Religion, 1798 Scenic Ave. Donation $12-$15.525-5393. www.bellamusica.org 

Voci “Voices in Peace: VII: Winter Stillness” at 8 p.m. at St. Mary Magdalen Parish, 2005 Berryman St. Tickets are $15-$20, free for children under 12. www.vocisings.com 

University Symphony Orchestra, 19th century masterpieces and and new works at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $4-$12. 642-4864. http://music.berkeley.edu 

Oakland Youth Chorus “In the Arms of Winter” at 7 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Oakland 2501 Harrison St. Tickets are $5-$20. 287-9700. www.oaklandyouthchorus.org  

“Chimes Winter Starscape” with John Muir Holiday Choir at 3 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Other events from noon on. 228-3207. 

Musica Viva, violin, cello and harpsichord at 7:30 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 114 Montecito Ave. Tickets are $10-$15. www.stpauloakland.org 

Mahealani Uchiyama “A Walk By the Sea” at 8 p.m. at Regents Theater, Holy Names University, Oakland. Tickets are $30-$55. For reservations call 925-798-1300. 

North Country at 1 p.m. at Down Home Music on Fourth St. 525-2129. 

Bomberas de la Bahia at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $8-$10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Eric Swinderman’s “In Pursuit of the Sound” at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Motordude Zydeco at 7 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Zoyres with Sandor Elix Katz at 7:30 p.m. at 1236 23rd Ave. at International Blvd., Oakland, Admission by donation; no one turned away for lack of funds. Bring jars to fill, some veggies to chop, a cutting board, knife, and grater. RVSP to Zoyres@gmail.com 

Mike Eckstein and Marc DiGiacomo Trio at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Chris Williamson, Teresa Trull & Barbara Higbie at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $22.50-$23.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

The Snake Trio at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Matt Lucas and Cotillion at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

CV Dub at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

SUNDAY, DEC. 9 

EXHIBITIONS 

“One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now” Guided tour at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Bella Musica Chorus at 4 p.m. at St. Mary Magdalen Church, 2005 Berryman St. at Milvia. Donation $12-$15. 525-5393.  

Berkeley Ballet Theater “Nutcracker” at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave., through Dec. 16. Tickets are $16-$22. 843-4689. 

“Sounds of the Season” at 7 p.m. at First United Methodist Church, 201 Martina St., Point Richmond. Donation $10. 236-0527. 

“Amahl and the Night Visitors” at 3 p.m. at St Augustine’s Catholic Church, 400 Alcatraz, between Telegraph and College, Oakland. Free. 653-8631. 

Organ Recital by Christopher Putnam at 6 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. Donations accepted. 845-0888. 

Lucy Kinchen Choir Holiday Concert at 4 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 114 Montecito Ave. www.stpauloakland.org 

Michael Jones, violin and John Burke, piano, perform sonatas by Bach and Mozart at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Cost is $10. 644-6893.  

Soli Deo Gloria “Time Enough for Joy” at 3:30 p.m. at St. Philip Neri, 3108 Van Buren St., Alameda. Tickets are $20-$25, childen K-8 free. www.sdgloria.org 

Caffe Mediterraneum 50th Anniversary Party with music at 2, 7:30 and 8:30 p.m., poetry and anecdotes at 4 p.m. at 2475 Telegraph Ave. 549-1128. 

Chris Williamson, Teresa Trull & Barbara Higbie at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $22.50-$23.50. 548-1761.  

Mariusz Kwiecien, baritone, at 3 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $42. 642-9988.  

Jonathan Kreisberg Trio, CD release party, at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $15. 841-JAZZ.  

Tito y Su Son de Cuba at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15. 845-5373.  

MONDAY, DEC. 10 

CHILDREN 

“Snow Scene from the Nutcracker” by Kathryn Roszak’s Childrens’ Dance at 4:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz, 1317 San Pablo Ave., Free, but RSVP requested 233-5550. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Debbie Stoller on “Son of Stitch ‘N Bitch: 45 Projects to Knit and Crochet for Men” at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Poetry Express with Donna M. Lane for United Nations Human Rights Day at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Chanticleer at 8 p.m. at Firdst Congregational Churhc, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $22-$44. 415-392-4400.  

Jazz Mime at 7 p.m. at Le Bateau Ivre, 2629 Telegraph Ave. 849-1100.  

Parlor Tango with Baguette quartette at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Refugees: Cindy Bullens, Deborah Holland & Wendy Waldman at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. 

Christmas in wartime America—but it’s the First World War, and the administration is set to declare a moratorium on toy sales to encourage families to buy Liberty Bonds. 

Up to the plate steps A.C. Gilbert, toymaker of New Haven (whose Erector and chemistry sets appeared beneath many a tree in childhood for those now of a certain age) vigorously defending the joys—and toys—of the season, exhorting the Scroogelike bureaucrats to relive their own childhood through making young ones happy, those who are waiting for their fathers to come home from “Over There.” 

That’s the unusual historical hook for Ron Lytle’s original holiday musical, The Man Who Saved Christmas, at Alameda’s Altarena Playhouse for its second holiday season, this year’s production even more brisk and upbeat than the last.  

Hook it is, with a love story more nostalgic than old-fashioned hanging from it, which exercises the song-and-dance skills of a mostly new, enthusiastic cast.  

Nephi Speer plays the part of Johnny Eli, a young newspaper reporter (but one without vocation, as he later confesses), who seems to be barking up the wrong tree for a story, as Miss Alice Finch (Lisa Otterstetter), Gilbert’s busy personal secretary, firmly tries to convince him. It seems that the toy magnate whom Johnny wishes to interview has it in for “the honorable gentlemen of the Fourth Estate.” But Alice’s words—and visage—only rekindle Johnny’s ardor, and through a chain of musical comedy circumstances, he finds himself invited to join the company by the dynamic, if sanguine, Gilbert (a Teddy Roosevelt-ish Scott Phillips)—much to the chagrin of Dixon (John Erreca), the comic villain plant manager, who’s also enamored of Alice. 

The home front wartime theme crops up too in the Gilberts’ home, where Mrs. Gilbert (Jenifer Tice) cares for her precocious niece (Zooey Brandt), whose father is in France—and, unbeknownst to the little girl who dreams he’ll be home for Yuletide—missing in action. 

Speer puts a charming spin on Johnny, who could easily be just a bland, hail-fellow-well-met type, and gracefully paired with Overstetter, the romantic angle of the musical is secured. The return of Scott Phillips as Gilbert is fortunate; he’s got the drive and eccentricity of his enthusiast toymaker down pat. “Poppycock and balderdash!” he says.  

Jenifer Tice also returns this year as Mrs. Mary Gilbert, gentle counterpart, even a little bittersweet, to Phillips’ bluster. Erreca’s Dixon is all pop-eyes and gesticulations, a little bit the operetta ogre, especially when tormented by the seemingly ever-present kids, who provide the solution to the conundrum the busy grownups get all balled up in. 

There’s an ensemble of nine, including three kids, who exuberantly trade off parts, from newsboys yelling “Extra!” to doughboys saying good-bye to their families, to the harried factory workers, as well as the council of cabinet officers Gilbert and Eli approach for a rescission of the edict for a toyless Christmas. 

Tom Shaw directs a lively mostly ragtime-flavored ensemble in the flies. Lytle himself stage-directs. His songs are more than serviceable, and some evoke the period reasonably well, as do Alice’s various dresses and gowns, though there are occasional anachronistic howlers in the dialogue, more fitting in postmodern corporate America than during the Wilson administration.  

The Man Who Saved Christmas runs over two hours but is briskly paced; the children in the audience at the matinee last Sunday were attentive throughout. It’s a tip of the homburg to the nostalgic musicals of 50 years ago, of Meredith Willson, minus the lingering traces of Shaw. There’s plenty of holiday spirit on Altarena’s set, enormous Christmas presents that unwrap into the toy factory and the Gilbert family parlor.  

THE MAN WHO SAVED CHRISTMAS 

8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays through Dec. 16 at the Altarena Playhouse, 1409 High St., Alameda.  

$17-$20. 523-1553. www.altarena.org. 

Photograph by Patrick Tracy. 

Jenifer Tice as Mary Gilbert and Scott Phillips as toymaker A.C. Gilbert in Ron Lytle’s family musical The Man Who Saved Christmas currently playing at the Altarena Playhouse through Dec 16. 

TAJ MAHAL IN OAKLAND 

Legendary bluesman and Berkeley resident Taj Mahal will bring his electic music to Yoshi’s in Oakland Thurday through Sunday. 

www.yoshi’s.com.

A couple of odds and ends: Robert Sapolsky, the Stanford neurobiologist, published a collection of his provocative essays a few years back as The Trouble with Testosterone. Where do you begin? Sapolsky was mostly interested in the hormone’s effect on the behavior of East African savannah baboons (see his A Primate’s Memoirs for tales of fieldwork) and on humans. But it’s not just a primate thing, or even a mammalian one. Birds have testosterone too, as do reptiles, amphibians, even fish: a common vertebrate heritage. 

A recent study by Joel McGlothin at the University of Virginia and Ellen Ketterson at Indiana University Bloomington examined the relationship between testosterone levels and parental investment in male dark-eyed juncos. These are the birds my folks used to call “snowbirds,” because of the timing of their arrival in central Arkansas. There’s an old Appalachian, I guess, fiddle tune with the cryptic title “Snowbird in the Ash Heap.”  

Our local variety, with dark gray heads and reddish backs, used to be considered a distinct species, the Oregon junco. But it, along with the eastern slate-colored junco, the white-winged junco of the Black Hills, and the pink-sided junco of the Rockies, have all been lumped together as dark-eyed. I wouldn’t count on that lasting, though, the way things go in bird taxonomy. Juncos are common Berkeley yard and UC campus birds, and year-round residents. 

McGlothin and Ketterson studied an eastern subspecies. Their working hypothesis was that a male’s total testosterone level would influence both his aggressive tendencies and his monogamous behavior, or lack thereof. The expectation was that high-testosterone males would be more likely to abandon their families and move on to new partners rather than sticking around to tend the nestlings. 

It didn’t quite work out that way. What they found was that all males were willing to help with childcare, to a degree. “If they have higher testosterone they help less,” says Ketterson. “If they have lower testosterone they help more.” But the best predictor of a male’s involvement with the kids was the stability of his testosterone level. Males whose levels rose and fell quickly investing less time in parenting. 

So who is the more fit parent, in evolutionary terms? Do the juncos with less stable testosterone, who are also more aggressive, sire as many successful offspring through extra-pair liaisons as the monogamous fathers do? That’s apparently where the research will go next. 

From birds to snakes: I recently wrote about the rise and fall of the diamondback water snake colony at Lafayette Reservoir (and managed to omit the horror story of the brown tree snake, a New Guinea native that hitchhiked to Guam and ate its way through the island’s bird population, wiping out several endemic species), mentioning how irascible and prone to bite these critters are. This drew a snake-handling anecdote from reader Richard Hodges: 

Back in 1970, I was on faculty at UT Austin. Besides being a computer scientist, I was an inveterate explorer of nature, and part-time snake fancier. One day, walking along Shoal Creek I spotted a water snake. Though I had never seen one before, I had read about it and was familiar enough with the poisonous snakes to be certain it was not a water moccasin. I approached it very cautiously and managed to “collect” it, without stimulating its defensive reactions. I installed it in a cage in my office on campus and over a period of weeks, by sensitive handling I induced it to a state of toleration approaching tameness. 

One day a top researcher in my field, Artificial Intelligence, was visiting the department. I think she was interviewing for a position. I attended the interesting lecture she gave. She was a fairly young and attractive brunette. Hearing about my snake, she approached me and asked to see it. I gladly showed it to her. She asked if she could handle it, saying she was a snake fancier also. I said that while it was tame to my touch, the species was known to be aggressive. She acknowledged the warning. 

Imagine my shock when at her apparently careful approach, the snake struck with a quickness I had never seen in it and bit her viciously. Water snakes have long teeth, useful for capturing slippery frogs, and blood was streaming from her hand! I was quite concerned, not for her health since such wounds usually heal quickly, but for my reputation, perhaps my career. But she just smiled and said “Don't worry, this often happens to me.” She wrapped her hand in a towel somebody found. We talked about it later over a beer and it developed that she was one of those people whom snakes often bite. I was the opposite—I often had handled otherwise aggressive snakes without problems. 

Joe Eaton’s “Wild Neighbors” column appears every other Tuesday in the Berkeley Daily Planet, alternating with Ron Sullivan’s “Green Neighbors” column on East Bay trees. 

Photograph by Joe Eaton. 

The bird formerly known as Oregon junco, in Tilden Regional Park. 

TUESDAY, DEC. 4 

Tuesdays for the Birds Tranquil bird walks in local parklands, led by Bethany Facendini, from 7 to 9:30 a.m. Today we will visit Point Pinole. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233. 

Tilden Mini-Rangers Hiking, conservation and nature-based activities for ages 8-12. Dress to ramble and get dirty. From 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 1-888-EBPARKS. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704. 

Tai Chi for Peace at 1:30 p.m. in front of the Marine Recruiting Station, Shattuck Square. Open Sidewalk Studios at 3 p.m. 524-2776. 

“Mapping Stem Cell Research: Terra Incognita” A doumetary on the work of Dr. Jack Kessler at 6:30 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2022. 

“Hiking the Torres del Paine National Park in Chilean Patagonia” A slide presentation with Treve Johnson at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

“A Japanese Religion in Brazilian Religious Milieu: How Brazilians have accepted the Church of World Messianity” with Prof. Hideaki Matsuoka, Shukutoku Univ., at 6:30 p.m. at Jodo Shinshu Center, 2140 Durant Ave. 809-1444. 

Berkeley School Volunteers Orientation from 10 to 11 a.m. at 1835 Allston Way. Come learn about volunteer opportunities. 644-8833. 

Family Storytime at 7 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043.  

Train Week at Habitot Children’s Museum with a mini-train exhibit and hands-on activities at 2065 Kittredge St. 647-1111. 

End the Occupation Vigil every Tues. at noon at Oakland Federal Bldg., 1301 Clay St. www.epicalc.org 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 5 

Indigenous Autonomy and Resistance: A Report from Chiapas and the Indigenous Encuentro in Sonora at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña, 3105 Shattuck Ave. Suggested donation $7-$10. Proceeds Benefit Zapatista Autonomous Health Care in San Manuel. 654-9587. 

Cancer Prevention and Survival Cooking Class on Favoring Fiber at 8:30 a.m. at Bella Vista, 1025 E. 28th St., Oakland. To register call 595-6445. 

“Avalanche Awareness” A lecture at 6:30 p.m. at Marmot Mountain Works, 3049 Adeline St. Cost is $15. 209-753-6556 ext. 1. www.mtadventure.com  

American Red Cross Blood Services is holding a volunteer orientation from 10 a.m. to noon. Various East Bay opportunities available. Advanced sign-up is required; call 594-5165.  

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Heavy rain cancels. 548-9840. 

THURSDAY, DEC. 6 

“It’s the Economy, Stupid: The Growing Anxiety of the Middle Class and the Future of American Politics” with Jacob Hacker, Yale University Political Science, professor and author of “The Great Risk Shift” at 6:30 p.m. at UC Berkeley Labor Center, 2521 Channing Way. 642-6371. andreabuffa@berkeley.edu  

The Homeschool Make-and-Take Craft Fair with handcrafted items, and opportunity to make some; food, entertainment and raffle, from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at Grace North Church, 2138 Cedar St. Benefits the Women’s Daytime Drop-in Center in Berkeley. www.womensdropin.org 

America’s Current and Impending Wars: From Campus to the Middle East. A teach-in at UC Berkeley at 7 p.m. in 155 Dwinelle. www.btiaw.org 

Teen Book Club meets to discuss post-apocalyptic futures at 4 p.m. at Claremont Branch Library, 2940 Benvenue at Ashby. 981-6121. 

Juggling for Peace Learn juggling and plate spinning at 11:30 a.m. in front of the Marine Recruiting Station, Shattuck Square. 524-2776. 

Babies & Toddlers Storytime at 10:15 and 11:15 a.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

FRIDAY, DEC. 7 

Golden Gate Audubon Society Walk at Jewel Lake in Tilden Park. Meet at 8:30 a.m. at the parking lot at the north end of Central Park Drive. be prepared for muddy paths. Heavy rains cancels. 848-9156. 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Jim Wilson on “Education Finance in California” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925.  

“Fair Trade Fair” Learn about fair trade porducts with Laurie Lyser of TransFair at 7 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker School, 2125 Jefferson St., 2nd flr (not wheelchair accessible). Fair trade items will be available for purchase. 482-1062. 

“China’s Environment: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?” A forum on the scientific as well as social, political, economic, public health and cultural aspects, Fri. and Sat. Free and open to the public. http://ieas.berkeley.edu/events/2007.12.07w.html 

Teen Playreaders meets to read “Hamlet” and other plays based on the classic, at 4 p.m. at Claremont Branch Library, 2940 Benvenue at Ashby. 981-6121. 

SATURDAY, DEC. 8 

PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles 17th Annual National Literary Awards & 11th Annual PEN Oakland Censorship Award from 2 to 5 p.m. at the Rockridge Branch Library, 5366 College Ave. Free and open to the public. 228-6775. 

Golden Gate Audubon Society Bike Trip in Coyote Hills via Alameda Creek and Quarry Lakes. Meet at 9 a.m. on the east side of the Fremont BART for an all-day trip, returning to BART at 3 p.m. Total distance is about 24 miles. Bicycle helmet required. Bring lunch and dress in layers. 547-1233. 

Dramatically Speaking Toastmasters with Victor Bogart on “Explore the Undiscovered You” at 9 a.m. at 1950 Franklin St., Oakland. RSVP required. ID required to get into building. 581-8675. 

The East Bay Chapter of The Great War Society meets to discuss “The Military Career of George Patton” by A. Melomet at 10:30 a.m. at the West Berkeley Library, 1125 University Ave. 527-7118. 

“The Care Crisis: How Women Are Bearing the Burden of a National Emergency” with Ruth Rosen, visiting professor of History and Public Policy at UCB at 7 p.m. at Alameda Free Library, Conference Rooms A, 1550 Oak St. at Lincoln, Alameda www.alamedaforum.org  

Oakland Public Conservatory of Music Annual Open House with food, fun and music for the whole family, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. and Sun. from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. at 1616 Franklin Ave Oakland. 836-4649. 

Palestinian Bazaar with embroidery, glassware, wood, ceramics, textiles and more, from noon to 6 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. 548-0542. 

Berkeley Farmers’ Market Holiday Crafts Fair from 10 a.m. on with local crafts and live music. 

Berkeley Artisans Open Studios Sat and Sun. from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. through Dec. 16. 845-2612. www.berkeleyartisans.com 

Oakland Museum of California Community Celebration for differently-abled community members from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 10th and Oak St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2022. 

Berkeley Rent Board Housing Counselling available at 11 a.m. in the Berkeley History Room, second flr, Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 644-6128, ext. 116. 

Winter Fest Learn about snowshoeing, skiing, snowboarding and more from noon to 4 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Program for Adults on Children’s Financial Literacy with Lu Vazquez, Edward Jones Financial Advisor, and John Abrate, Wells Fargo Bank Business Banking Specialist from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library Community Meeting Room, 2090 Kittredge. 548-1240. www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org 

Mini-Farmers in Tilden A farm exploration program, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. for ages 4-6 years, accompanied by an adult. We will explore the Little Farm, care for animals, do crafts and farm chores. Wear boots and dress to get dirty! Fee is $6-$8. Registration required. 1-888-EBPARKS. 

Vegetarian Cooking Class “Healthful and Humane Cooking and Baking” featuring savory tofu spread, corn-meal-crusted tempeh, brussel sprouts, chocolate bread pudding, 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 

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.  

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755.  

SUNDAY, DEC. 9 

Progressive Democrats of the East Bay Annual Holiday Gathering, from 4 pm on, at Albatross Pub, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 601-6456. 

Make Natural Holiday Wreaths Learn about fir, bay and other flora and how to use them, from noon to 3:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Please bring a pair of small hand-clippers, a large flat box and a bag lunch. Not appropriate for children under 8. Cost of $25-$34. Registration Required. 1-888-EBPARKS. 

Caffe Mediterraneum 50th Anniversary Party with music at 2, 7:30 and 8:30 p.m., poetry and anecdotes at 4 p.m. at 2475 Telegraph Ave. 549-1128. 

“Building Commons and Community” A book launch party for the late Karl Linn's book at 3 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarion Universalists Hall, Cedar at Bonita. www.KarlLinn.org 

Grow Edible Mushrooms at Home A worksop from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at EcoHouse, 1305 Hopkins St. Enter via garden entrance on Peralta. Bring extra newspaper, cardboard, sawdust, wax, cordless drills, drill bits, and leave with some mushrooms of your own. Cost is $15, sliding scale. 548-2220 ext. 242. 

Berkeley Artisans Open Studios from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. through Dec. 16. 845-2612. www.berkeleyartisans.com 

Oakland Museum of California Community Celebration for differently-abled community members from noon to 5 p.m. at 10th and Oak St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2022.  

Archecture Tour of the Oakland Museum of California at 1 p.m. at 10th and Oak St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

“The Cross-Walk Walk” for war resistance, every Sun. at noon at the corner of Solano and San Pablo. Bring signs, ideas, young people. 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. 

Tibetan Buddhism with Sylvia Gretchen on “The Path of Liberation” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 809-1000.  

MONDAY, DEC. 10  

Berkeley Green Mondays with a presentation on “What Progressives Can Learn from the Disability Movement” with Paul Longmore and Anne Finger, at 7:30 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 848-4681. 

Human Rights Day 2007 “Update on Burma” with Nyunt Than, head of the Burmese American Democratic Alliance San Francisco, and Ruth Mauricio, educator at 7:30 p.m. at Home Room in International House, 2299 Piedmont Ave. www.unausaeastbay.org 

The logo for Berkeley’s Hillside Club was not designed by David Lance Goines as captioned in the last issue. The logo was designed by Hillside Club member Bernard Maybeck.

It’s time to submit your essays, poems, stories, artwork and photographs for the Planet’s annual holiday reader contribution issue, which will be published on Dec. 21. Send your submissions, preferably no more than 1,000 words, to holiday@berkeleydailyplanet.com. Deadline is 5 p.m. on Dec. 16.

FRIDAY, NOV. 30 

THEATER 

Altarena Playhouse “The Man Who Saved Christmas” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Altarena Playhouse, 1409 High St., Alameda, through Dec. 16. Tickets are $17-$20. 523-1553.  

Aurora Theatre Company “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.  

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.  

Berkeley Rep “After the Quake” at the Trust Stage, 2025 Addison St., through Dec. 21. Tickets are $33-$69. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Black Repertory Group “A Rasin in the Sun” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2:30 p.m. at 3201 Adeline St., through Dec. 14. Tickets are $10-$20. 652-2120. 

Contra Costa Civic Theatre “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., at Contra Costa Civic Theatre, 951 Pomona Ave., at Moeser, El Cerrito, through Dec. 9. Tickets are $11-$18. 524-9132.  

Impact Theatre “A Very Special Money & Run Winter Season Holiday Special” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave., through Dec. 22. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468.  

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, through Dec. 15. Tickets are $18. 232-4031.  

EXHIBITIONS 

“Site Revamped” Paintings by Marty McCorkle and Rachel Dawson. Opening reception at 5 p.m. at the Esteban Sabar Gallery, 480 23rd St., Oakland. 444-7411.  

“Commemorating 100 Years of the Hellenic Presence in the Bay Area” A pictoral exhibit and reception at 4 p.m. at Ascension Community Cener, 4700 Lincoln Ave., Oakland. www.ascensioncathedral.org 

“Radical Graphics of Taller Tupac Amaru” opens at 550 Second St., Jack London Square, Oakland. www.proartsgallery.org  

Touchable Stories “Richmond: The Story Continues” Fri. at 8 p.m., Sat. at 2 and 6 p.m. at Old Kaiser Cafeteria, Shipyard #3, 1303 Canal Blvd., Richmond. Cost is $6-$12. Reservations required. 619-3675. www.touchablestories.org 

“Purple Holidaze” Opening reception at 7 p.m. at Gallery Eclectix, 7523 Fairmount Ave., El Cerrito. 364-7261. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Mark Wilson on “Julia Morgan: Architect of Beauty” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Ross Dance Company “Speak” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Laney College, 900 Fallon St., Oakland. Cost is $15-$20. 428-9339. www.rossdance.com 

Summer of Love Salute to benefit Berkeley Liberation Radio with the Barry “the Fish” Melton Band, the Nick Gravenites Band at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12. 525-5054.  

Marvin Sanders, flute, Lena Lubotsky, piano, at 8 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery 2911 Claremont Ave., at Ashby. 848-1228. 

Circus Oz “The Laughing Gravity Tour” Fri. at 8 p.m., Sat. at 2 and 8 p.m., Sun. at 3 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $26-$48. 642-9988.  

UC Berkeley’s The Movement Fall 2007 Showcase at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $9 at the door. ucb.movement.showcase@gmail.com 

Babtunde Lea’s “Summoning of the Ghost” Tribute to Electric Miles and Beyond at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ.  

Xile and Xocolate with Meklit Hadero from Ethiopia and MamaCoatl from Mexico at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $15. 849-2568.  

Terrence Brewer Quintet at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$15. 845-5373.  

Euphonia at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Tom Paxton at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $26.50-$27.50. 548-1761.  

Kismet-Mahal at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

The Flux, Frame of Mind at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082.  

Swoop Unit at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Roy Haynes and Birds of a Feather at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $16-$28. 238-9200. 

SATURDAY, DEC. 1 

CHILDREN  

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with Colibri at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5 for adults, $4 for children. 849-2568.  

Andy Z, imaginative musical journeys, at 11 a.m. at Studio Grow, 1235 Tenth St. Cost is $7. 526-9888. 

“Short Attention Span Circus” with Jean Paul Valjean Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave, off Grand Ave., Oakland. Cost is $6. 452-2259. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Recent Landscape Photographs by Rob Reiter” Reception at 2 p.m. at The LightRoom Gallery, 2263 Fifth St. 649-8111. 

Poster Art of David Lance Goines on display from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sun. from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. 

“The Art and History of Early California” opens at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2022. 

“Caalliiffoorrnniiaa Baakkeelliittee” Photographs by Richard Toronto. Reception at 5 p.m. at The Gallery at Lavezzo Designs, 5751 Horton St., Emeryville. 

Beaded Artwork from South Africa, in commemoration of World AIDS Day, on display from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Vital Life Services, 5720 Shattuck Ave. at 57th St., Oakland. 593-6690. 

FILM 

“The Living End” with filmmaker Gregg Araki in person at 8:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Made In Equilibrium” works by Michele Elizabeth Lee, Brady Nadell and Ross Drago. Artist talk at 3 p.m. at ABCo Artspace, 3135 Oakland, Oakland. www.abcoartspace.com 

Anna Furtado on the second installment in her lesbian historical fiction series, “The Briarcrest Chronicles” at 7 p.m. at Laurel Book Store, 4100 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland. 531-2073. 

C.S. Giscombe, Susan Gevirtz, Brian Awehali and Catherine Meng read at 2 p.m. at Small Press Distribution Open House 1341 7th St. at Gilman. 524-1668.  

Bay Area Poets Coalition open reading, 3 to 5 p.m., at Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison St. Park on the street. 527-9905.  

Poetry Flash with Susan Kelly-DeWitt and Sandra McPherson at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Community Chorus and Orchestra “Puccini’s Messa di Gloria” at 8 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Free, donations appreciated. 

Showcase of Bay Area Chamber Music Artists from 3 to 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Piano Club, 2427 Haste St. at Dana. Free, reservations suggested. 415-820-153., www.sffcm.org 

Three Trapped Tigers with Tom Bickley and David Barnett, recorders, at 8 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana St. Cost is $8-$12. 549-3864. 

Terry Bradford with Voena children’s choir, at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $23-$26. 925-798-1300. 

Ross Dance Company “Speak” at 8 p.m. at Laney College, 900 Fallon St., Oakland. Cost is $15-$20. 428-9339. 

Erica Azim, traditional Shona mbira music of Zimbabwe at 8 p.m. at the Mahea Uchiyama Center for International Dance, 729 Heinz Ave. Cost is $15 at the door. 548-6053.  

Mike Glendinning, guitarist, songwriter CD release party at 2 p.m. at Pri Pri Cafe, 1309 Solano, Albany. Cost is $5. Proceeds will go to the Stroke Awareness Foundation. 528-7002. 

Anton Mitzerak & Kim Lorene, world music, at 7 p.m. at Unity of Berkeley, 2075 Eunice St. Donations welcome. 528-8844. 

Gamelan Sari Raras at 7 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $4-$12. 642-4864.  

Saed Muhssin’s Arab Orchestra of San Francisco & La Peña Community Choru at 8 p.m. at La Peña, 3105 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $15-$18. 849-2568.  

Lloyd Gregory Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ.  

“Musical Night in Africa” at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15. 525-5054. 

Sotaque Baiano at 8 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Katherine Peck and Michael Burles at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Ramblin Jack Elliott at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $24.50-$25.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

WeBe3 with Rhiannon, Joey Blake and David Worm, at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $20. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Pat Nevins and Ragged Glory at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Royal Hawaiian Serenaders at 9 p.m. at Temple Bar Tiki Bar & Grill, 984 University Ave. 548-9888. 

SUNDAY, DEC. 2 

CHILDREN 

Asheba with Women of the World at Ashkenaz at 3 p.m. Cost is $4-$6. 525-5054.  

EXHIBITIONS 

“One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now” Guided tour at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. 

Poster Art of David Lance Goines on display from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“For Keeps: Women Tell the Truth About Their Bodies, Growing Older, and Acceptance” with editor Victoria Zackheim, at 4 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Anthony Lappe and Dan Goldman introdce their graphic novel “Shooting War” at 3 p.m. at Comic Relief of Berkeley, 2026 Shattuck Ave 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Community Chorus and Orchestra “Puccini’s Messa di Gloria” at 4:30 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Free, donations appreciated. 

California Bach Society performs Charpentier’s “In Nativitatem Domini Canticum” at 4 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft at Ellsworth. Tickets are $10-$25. 415-262-0272. www.calbach.org 

Voci “Voices in Peace: VII: Winter Stillness” at 7 p.m. at Lake Merritt United Methodist Church, 1330 Lakeshore Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $15-$20, free for children under 12. www.vocisings.com 

WomenSing Holiday Concert at 4 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $10-$25. 925-974-9169. www.womensing.org 

“Messiah-Sing” in Baroque Style at 6 p.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, One Lawson Rd., Kensington. Suggested donation $10, no one turned away. 525-0302. 

Savoy Family Cajun Band at 1 p.m. at Down Home Music on Fourth St. 525-2129. 

“Roots, Sass and Jazz” with Rhonda Benin, Darlene Coleman, Muziki Roberson and others at 4 p.m. at Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, 1616 Franklin St. All ages. Tickets are $10-$15. 836-4649. www.blackmusiciansforum.org 

Laurel Ensemble with Lori Lack, piano, and Catherine Seidel, soprano, “All About Igor Stravinsky” at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Cost is $10-$15. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

Classical South-Indian Dance Performance with Zavain Dar and Rebecca Whittington at 5 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 301 Shattuck Ave. Tickets are $5-$7. www.brownpapertickets.com/event/23493 

Oakland East Bay Symphony “Let Us Break Bread Together” with the Oakland Symphony Chorus, Mt. Eden H.S. Choir, Kugelplex, Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir at 4 p.m. at Paramount Theater, 2025 Broadway. 625-8497. 

Twang Cafe featuring Doug Blumer and the Beer Hunters, Pam Brandon & Maurice Tani, Chickwagon, at 7:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $10. www.twangcafe.org 

Holly Near at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $26.50-$27.50. 548-1761. 

Junius Courtney Big Band from 3 to 6 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $15. All ages welcome. 841-JAZZ. 

Con Alma Jazztet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ.  

Girl Talk Band, world jazz, at 1:30 p.m. at Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720. 

The Troublemakers Union, international music for human rights, at 7 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $10. 849-2568.  

Ambrose Akinmusire at 4:30 at the Jazzschool. Cost is $20. 845-5373.  

Savoy Family Band at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15-$18. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Nate Cooper at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

MONDAY, DEC. 3 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Aurora Theatre Company Script Club “Born Yesterday” with Maureen McVerry and Paul Heller at 7:30 p.m. at 2081 Addison St. 843-4822. 

“If Lost Then Found” with Kristin Lucas, artist, at 7:30 p.m. at 160 Kroeber Hall, UC Campus. 643-9565.  

Frank Moore, poetry, at 6 p.m. at Cafe Leila, 1724 San Pablo Ave. 526-7858. 

Poetry Express with Sayre Mingan, youth poet, at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Ed Neff and Friends, bluegrass, at 7 p.m. at Le Bateau Ivre, 2629 Telegraph Ave. 849-1100. www.lebateauivre.net 

Trovatore, traditional Italian music, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

West Coast Songwriters Competition at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $5. 548-1761  

TUESDAY, DEC. 4 

CHILDREN 

The Mountain Mushers and Their Sled Dogs at 6:30 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

FILM 

“Xperimental Eros” with a panel discussion at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

A Reading for “The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen” with Michael McClure, David Meltzer and Clark Coolidge at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Jeffery Broussard & The Circle Cowboys at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

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

BirdHead at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 5 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Strictly Speaking with Azar Nafisi, author of “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books” at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $18-$30. 642-9988.  

Christopher Felver on his historical record of tbe Beat Generation, “Beat” at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Thomas Lynch reads Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Oakland City Center Holiday Concert with Klezmania at noon at 12th and Broadway, Oakland.  

Helene Attia Octet, CD release party, at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Zoyres, Smyrna Time Machine at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Rovira Orquestra at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

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

THURSDAY, DEC. 6 

EXHIBITIONS 

“One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now” Guided tour at 12:15 and 5:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft. Free. 642-0808. 

FILM 

“Chaplin at the Mutual: Four Short Comedies” at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Free. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Lunch Poems with Monica de la Torre at 12:10 p.m. at the Morrison Library, inside the Doe Library, UC Campus. 642-0137. 

Peter Dale Scott reads his poems at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, Edith Stone Room, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 526-3720. 

“Jews, Chocolate and Tourism in the Diaspora” with Rabbi Deborah Prinz at 6:30 p.m. at the Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St. 549-6950. 

Monica de la Torre and Garrett Caples read at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

Corey Brooks reads from “Their Patriotic Duty: The Civil War Letters of the Evans Family of Brown County, Ohio” at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Jazz Night and Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School with the MLK, Jr. Middle School Jazz Band, the Equanimous Jones Quartet and the Jazz School Middle School Jazz Project at 7:30 p.m. at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School, 1781 Rose St. at Grant. Admission is free, but donations accepted to support the Jazz Band.  

The Claire Lynch Band at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Pete Madsen Quartet, CD release party, at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ.  

Lindsay Tomasic at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Singer Songwriter Expose with Rodney Brillante, Rick Hardin and Audrey Howard at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. 

Mucho Axé at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $8-$10. 849-2568.  

James Rosen’s paintings at the Graduate Theological Union library are called “Homage.” They are indeed in praise of the old masters as chosen by the painter, who sees himself as a messenger, detecting his signals from the past so that he can employ his artistic talent to send them on to us, the viewers. Rosen, like all good artists, is aware that his work is part of a flow which goes back to Paleolithic times. 

His paintings are metaphors transporting meaning from one place to another. They transfer the selected works from the past to our current attention and delectation. The art he has chosen as the source of his own painting is selected largely on impulse, which itself is founded on long years of looking at art and on his work as artist and teacher. Among the painters he has honored by reassembling their work, are Giotto, Duccio, Piero della Francesca, Titian, Veronese, Chardin and Courbet. The current show at CTU includes homages to Sassetta, Poussin, Albert Pinkham Ryder as well as Gruenewald and the Master of Avignon.  

Concurrently with the show in Berkeley he has an exhibition at the Paule Anglim Gallery in San Francisco, which is based entirely on paintings by Walt Kuhn, an early 20th century modernist painter who had been responsible for finding the European artists to participate in the seminal Armory Show of 1913. Homages to Matthias Gruenewald’s Crucifixion from the Isenheim Altarpiece and the Pieta d’Avignon, painted by an unknown French artist in the middle of the 15th Century, are the centerpieces in the Berkeley exhibition. The latter, a masterpiece which I have often admired in the Louvre, shows the body of Christ, lamented by Mary , Magdalene and St.John, with the donor kneeling in prayer below the figure of St. John and an image of Jerusalem in the background.  

Rosen’s pictures, done in wax-oil emulsion are painted in a great many layers and executed over a long period of time. When the artist spoke at GTU he mentioned the inumerable strokes which he brushed onto the picture, but they are no longer visible in the finished work, which sets him in great contrast to the Action Painters who dominated the art world when he was a student.  

The complete work has a strong physical presence to which Rosen refers to as an “event.” It takes time and quiet attention to see these paintings, to allow the image to emerge gradually from the many layers of veils which the painter has used to reveal the painting by concealing it. But, gradually,the light which is embedded in the layers of paint emerges and permits us to be astonished by the work.  

JAMES ROSEN: HOMAGE 

Through Jan. 25 at the GTU Flora Lamson Hewlett Library, 2400 Ridge Road. 

649-2500. www.gtu.edu. 

Image: James Rosen’s Pieta d’Avignon.

See 100 posters by David Lance Goines at the Hillside Club this weekend. 

Rather than pay a museum to see art by dead artists you can see, free, great work by a living Berkeley craftsman, and meet him in a rustic building surrounded by his work. 

Like the club, the work of Goines invites you into domesticity, to hearth and home. The posters and the building often feel like a comforter. Subdued colors and soft curving images soothe the eyes - intimate and homey. 

To preview the posters go to www.goines.net. At www.hillsideclub.org view the arts & crafts clubhouse. Introduce yourself, children, guests and people new to Berkeley to a great Berkeley craftsman and a historic neighborhood club. 

Goines came to Berkeley in 1963 to study classics. Advocating free speech, he was among 800 students arrested for occupying Sproul Hall. This landed Goines, then 19, in jail. His personal account of these times is told in his compelling book, The Free Speech Movement; Coming of Age in the 1960s. 

The university reinstated Goines but he had lost his appetite for school. Apprenticing to a printer, he became a journeyman by printing radical literature. In 1970 Goines bought the business and moved it to 1703 Grove Street, later renamed Martin Luther King Junior Way. Goines still prints there because, “I have no desire to go anywhere else. This pays enough to keep soul and body together. And, I like doing it!” 

In 1968 Goines and a partner did a monthly food column in the San Francisco Express. This collaboration led to a publication, Thirty Recipes Suitable for Framing, compiled and edited by Alice Louise Waters, calligraphy and illustrations by David L. Goines. Every year his Saint Hieronymus Press makes a new poster for Waters’ restaurant, Chez Panisse. 

Goines designs posters. He prints them on his photo offset press. He prints every poster himself. Each color gets printed separately; his posters have 1 to 22 colors. As his skills evolved his work became more sophisticated, more elegant. 

Goines posters are in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Hiroshima Museum of Modern Art, the Musée de la Publicité of the Louvre in Paris and homes all over Berkeley. 

David Goines has qualities common in Berkeley. He has opinions. He has passions. He is intelligent, thorough, inventive and his own person. He is proud of being on the board of the Northern California American Red Cross. A seventeen gallon blood donor, Goines warns, “Not enough people donate blood. You never know when you will need it.” 

Six days a week Goines walks the mile from his home to his press and back again. 

Hillside Club member Bill Woodcock planned this show to celebrate 40 years of St. Hieronymus Press and the 110th anniversary of the Hillside Club. Woodcock says, “Goines is an internationally recognized craftsman for whom local recognition is long overdue. The authenticity of his work resonates well with the arts and crafts clubhouse.” 

Silicon Valley PR connector and club enthusiast Sylvia Paull says she believes that “The club has all the strains of Berkeley—community, enjoying cultural events together, being part of living history. For me it’s a spiritual place....and I’m an atheist!” 

The club began in 1898: a group of Berkeley women met to preserve nature and to promote art. Activist Annie Maybeck, incensed that the town was about to cut down a tree for Le Roy Street, near Ridge Road, campaigned to save the tree. “Annie’s Oak” was saved a century ago. Now, nearby, some people occupy a grove of oak trees, also trying to save them. 

The 1906 clubhouse, designed by Annie’s husband, Bernard Maybeck, burned in the Berkeley fire of 1923. By 1924 the clubhouse was rebuilt. The building, rarely noticed because it so thoroughly blends into the neighborhood, has long vertical windows for shafts of daylight, a massive stone fireplace and a copper lamp from the original clubhouse. 

The Hillside Club hosts many community events: cybersalons, dances, potlucks and movies. Members form groups around their interests. The Etude Club, for club members who are musicians, has been meeting and playing music together since 1904. 

Come to the Hillside Club for five minutes or an hour this weekend. Treat yourself to a relaxing, stimulating visit. You can meet members of Berkeley’s oldest community club and the club’s gracious managers, Erma Wheatley and John Feld. Consider buying a poster or joining the club. See 100 posters and meet their maker, David Lance Goines. 

DAVID LANCE GOINES 

10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Sunday at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. www.goines.net.  

www.hillsideclub.org.

In the 1940s, jazz drummer extraordinaire Roy Haynes worked with Lester Young, Charlie Parker (“My Little Suede Shoes”), Bud Powell (“Dance of the Infidels”) and Miles Davis.  

He spent the 1950s in the company of Sarah Vaughan and Thelonious Monk. The 1960s saw him propelling the free jazz of Eric Dolphy and, while substituting for Elvin Jones in the John Coltrane Quartet, handling the sticks on the 1963 Live at Newport performance of “My Favorite Things,” arguably Trane’s greatest version of that number, not least because of Hayne’s incredibly disciplined freedom and nuanced power.  

Last November, in his 80th year, he brilliantly backed up Alice Coltrane on her final concert tour. You will not want to miss his group Birds of a Feather playing classic Parker material at Yoshi’s in Oakland through Sunday where he continues to outperform drummers one quarter his age.  

For more information, see www.yoshi’s.org. 

Though he is often credited with more than he contributed, D.W. Griffith is undoubtedly the first of the great cinematic artists. He did not create the tools of the trade, nor invent its techniques, but he imbued them with meaning, gave significance and weight to them, and thus established the grammar of motion pictures. 

He did not invent the close-up, but he was the first to exploit its dramatic and emotional potential; he did not invent cross-cutting between different lines of action, but he further developed the technique and used it to devastating effect. In short, he took the technological novelty of the moving picture and transformed it into an art form; he elevated what was considered the lowliest of entertainments into the most powerful artistic medium of the 20th century. 

Griffith, after honing his skills with hundreds of one- and two-reel films for the Biograph company, electrified the world with The Birth of a Nation (1915), and followed it with what is still one of the most grandiose cinematic undertakings of all time, Intolerance (1916). This three-hour epic, told in four interwoven but separate episodes, gets a rare theatrical screening at the Castro Theater at 2 p.m. Saturday as part of the San Francisco Silent Festival’s annual winter program, along with a series of early Vitaphone sound films of vaudeville acts, and Flesh and the Devil (1926), the first pairing of silent-era superstars Greta Garbo and John Gilbert. Scores for the two feature films will be provided by Wurlitzer maestro Dennis James, one of the foremost practitioners of silent film accompaniment. 

Griffith sustained his grasp on motion picture dominance with a few more large-scale classics: Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920), Orphans of the Storm (1921), and a string of smaller, more intimate tales such as the often overlooked True Heart Susie (1919). But though he led the charge, his brigades soon overtook him. His influence waned as his innovations unleashed a tide of experimentation and artistry that quickly subsumed him, leaving his work appearing quaint and outdated long before his productivity subsided. 

In the 1920s, this still young medium was just beginning to reach its peak. The ‘20s would become the first Golden Age of the movies before silent pictures were abruptly killed off by the advent of synchronized sound technology. Cinema was getting more and more sophisticated. The camera was beginning to move with increasing grace and fluidity; editing was fast becoming an art form unto itself; acting styles were growing more restrained and naturalistic; and the avant-garde was rapidly expanding the boundaries of the medium. 

Griffith, meanwhile, was a product of the Reconstruction-era South. His attitudes and world view had been shaped by the myths and legends of the Confederacy. In Griffith’s films, the ante-bellum South is the apotheosis of civilization, women are saintly madonna figures or conniving vamps, and African Americans are wayward children at best, devilish defilers of white womanhood at worst. His most effective work pits pastoral elegance against the dark tide of “progress”: bucolic village life threatened by the moral degradation of the city; old social orders undermined by the rise of an underclass. He may never have filmed a woman tied to the railroad tracks, but that sort of melodrama was his forte: the virtuous damsel in distress, rescued at the last minute from the heaving iron monster of industrial progress. 

It’s no wonder then that this artist of 19th century values should quickly find himself lost amid the moral ambiguity, metropolitan glamor and sexual liberation of Jazz Age America. For how could Griffith's pastoral romances compete with the bold gothic horror of Nosferatu? With the stonefaced absurdity of the universe of Buster Keaton? With the mechanized terror of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis? This was a brave new world of motion picture artistry so confident in its talent and so optimistic about its future that it simply hadn’t the time or inclination to honor its past. And Griffith had quickly come to represent the past.  

But for a few bright years, Griffith was not just at the center of the industry, he was the industry. And his artistic powers and immense popularity granted him the clout to dictate his own terms, to abandon the sure-fire box-office draw of the short-form melodrama and embark on grandiose projects with commensurate budgets.  

While racking up unprecedented box office receipts, The Birth of a Nation elicited storms of protests for its racist portrayal of African Americans. Griffith, stung by these criticisms, decided to fight back by decrying the cruelty of calls for censorship of his film. As Richard Schickel states in D.W. Griffith: An American Life, “Griffith never once...saw any reason to recant anything he had said in Birth... . No, far from being an apology, Intolerance...is a direct and bold assault on his critics and their ‘intolerance’ of his right to say what he wanted to say.”  

The film originated even before Birth of a Nation, as a simpler film called The Mother and the Law. But after the phenomenal success of Birth, Griffith knew he couldn’t return to small-scale filmmaking, that he had to uphold his reputation for spectacle. After seeing Cabiria, a feature-length Italian film with huge sets and dynamic camerawork, Griffith began to expand his tale, adding other episodes. And while visiting San Francisco to research prison conditions at the city jail and at San Quentin for his film’s modern story line, Griffith found inspiration for the Babylonian sequence in the architectural wonders of the San Francisco Exhibition of 1915. He had not only found a project to combat his critics, he had discovered a way to compete with the Italian epics. He hired the San Francisco workers to construct monumental sets on a size and scale previously unseen in the village of Hollywood.  

It is these sets from the Babylonian sequence that would provide the film with its iconic image. Griffith and cameraman G.W. Bitzer mounted the camera on an elevator that dollied forth along tracks, the platform lowering as it pushed forward, producing a slow, sweeping zoom that captures the vastness of the set while gracefully pulling in tighter on the spectacle and human drama contained within. 

Yet what he was up to was still a mystery to his colleagues. There was no script; it was all in his head. The project was growing ever larger as he worked. The final film contains four episodes: the death of Christ; the fall of Babylon; the massacre of the Huguenots, and a contemporary drama that questions the morality of the death penalty. The four stories are told concurrently, melding together in the end for a dizzying 30-minute sequence in which Griffith crosscuts rapidly between them. And it is here that the Southern gentleman brings his passion for melodrama together with the cutting-edge sensibilities of the avant-garde in the creation of his boldest achievement. 

INTOLERANCE (1916) 

Showing at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Castro Theater as part of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s winter program. Vitaphone sound shorts (1926-1930) screen at 11 a.m. Flesh and the Devil (1926) screens at 8 p.m. www.silentfilm.org. 429 Castro Street, San Francisco. (415) 621-6120. 

Image: The signature shot of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, in which the camera slowly angles down and toward the vast Babylonian set.

D.W. Griffith is known these days primarily for his large-scale epics Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). And while these films contributed greatly to the history and art of motion pictures, they do not fully convey the range and power of Griffith's talent, nor are they his most enjoyable films. 

Some of his most satisfying work was done a much smaller scale. Some of the short films he made for the Biograph company prior to Birth of a Nation are among his best work, like tales in miniature told with deft skill and economy. And some of his less grandiose features are more heartfelt, more sincere, and far less bombastic than the epic crowd-pleasers on which his reputation rests today. 

True Heart Susie (1919) is one of a series of films Griffith referred to as his "short story" pictures. It is a small, gentle film, one of the director's pastoral romances in which he celebrates with warmth and nostalgia the sort of rural village life in which he was raised. The film has just been released on DVD by Image Entertainment in an excellent transfer produced by David Shepard. 

Lillian Gish plays a country lass, a plain girl in love with the boy (Robert Harron) across the way. When his father denies him the chance to go to college, Susie quietly sells her cow and a few other belongings to anonymously pay the boy's tuition. But when he returns from college to become the village teacher, he is seduced by and marries another girl in the village, a wild one of questionable sincerity.  

The plot becomes a bit contrived from there, as Griffith does everything he can to ensure that, through no fault of the boy or Susie, the vampish wife is taken ill and dies as two secrets come to light: the wife had concealed transgressions against the husband, and Susie was in fact the boy's true benefactor. Thus Griffith's 19th century morals are conveniently kept intact as he reunites his two saintly characters while focusing all blame on the vamp. 

But this is in part what makes the film so engaging. It's a simple tale, with simple plot points and simple emotions. And Lillian Gish handles the role beautifully. For viewers not familiar with Gish, the performance may seem a bit odd, for Gish is in a sense playing with her own screen image, gently chiding the simple girlish role she has been given on the one hand, yet delivering wonderfully understated emotions scenes on the other.  

While epic dramas full of action and showmanship may have satisfied Griffith's ego, it is the smaller films like True Heart Susie that reveal the true soul of the director—his warmth, his sentimentality, his reverence or a 19th century vision of female purity, and his passion for the everyday drama of everyday life.  

The disc comes with a bonus feature, Hoodoo Ann (1916), a Griffith-supervised light comedy which he wrote under a pseudonym.  

True Heart Susie 

Directed by D.W. Griffith.  

Starring Lillian Gish, Robert Harron. 

Image Entertainment, $24.99. 

www.image-entertainment.com

The great thing about DVD is that it has given the major studios the opportunity to finally do right by the classics in their archives. For the first six or seven years of the format’s existence, the studios were, for the most part, content to simply reissue their back catalogues in cheap editions, often without any attempt to remaster the image.  

But over the past few years, as box-office receipts have declined, studio bosses finally seem to be coming around to the reality that if these films are going to survive and be seen, they will be seen in the home, and thus it pays to provide definitive editions that will endure. 

Thus Warner Bros. has just released a lavish boxed-set edition of the film that put the studio on the map back in 1927. The Jazz Singer almost single-handedly ended the silent era and launched Hollywood on whole new trajectory. 

D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation ushered the art form into its maturity in 1915, kicking off the first great era of motion picture innovation and achievement; The Jazz Singer brought the great cinematic decade of the 1920s to a close, halting the entire medium in its tracks for a couple of years as filmmakers struggled to harness and master the new sound technology.  

One of the unfortunate aspects of these two cinematic milestones is that they are both marred by racism, a fact that greatly obscures their legacies. In 1999 the Directors Guild of America changed the name of its highest award, which since 1953 had been named for Griffith, in light of the stereotypes perpetuated in his most famous film. And The Jazz Singer, though widely known by name, is rarely seen today. 

The fact is, The Jazz Singer isn’t that good a film anyway. Important, yes, and largely misunderstood, but not good. It’s really a silent film, with just a handful of sound sequences, most consisting of the ever-energetic Al Jolson singing and sweating and dancing, often in blackface. The combination of silence and sound proves an awkward hybrid at best. 

The legend says that it was Jolson’s singing that drove a stake into the heart of silent film, but the truth is both more subtle and more interesting. Audiences had experienced sound pictures before, usually in the form of musical interludes, but these were of such crude quality that the innovation didn’t stick; the clumsiness of the available technologies only intruded on the dream-like quality of silent film. What startled audiences of The Jazz Singer and got them hooked on sound was a few improvised minutes of dialogue. Jolson, seated at the piano, finishes a song, turns to his mother and engages in some insignificant patter. The off-hand nature of the exchange gave the illusion that the audience was eavesdropping on a real-life moment, and it was that sense of intimacy and verisimilitude that truly launched the sound era.  

Sound had been a huge gamble for Warner Bros. At the time, the studio was at the bottom of the heap and desperate to climb to the top. So they took a chance on sound and came up with the hit they so desperately needed. Their success sent them to the forefront of the industry, with all the other studios playing catch-up. The new medium brought with it a host of technical problems—satirized with great accuracy in Singin’ in the Rain (1950)—leading to a period of static, stage-bound films with little artistic merit. As stated in The Dawn of Sound: How Movies Learned to Talk, an excellent documentary included in the set, it seemed that audiences preferred mediocre sound films to great silent films. 

The new three-disc set includes a wealth of material placing the film in its proper historical context, including commentary by film historians Ron Hutchinson and Vince Giordano; short films of Jolson from the era; The Dawn of Sound, which provides a great overview of the advent of synchronized sound, the impact of The Jazz Singer, and the demise of the silent film; and a full disc of Vitaphone sound shorts, films of Vaudeville acts of the 1920s. These films may be quaint, static and strange by modern standards, but they provide a valuable and rare historical record of the sort of entertainment that movies replaced, and to which The Jazz Singer pays tribute. 

THE JAZZ SINGER 

(1927) 

Three-disc set featuring commentary, documentary and Vitaphone sound films of Vaudeville acts. $39.95.

When Bertolt Brecht and G.W. Pabst decided to collaborate in bringing the former's Threepenny Opera to the screen, both men were at the peak of their careers. But the collaboration would be anything but smooth. Indeed it was fraught with conflict, as so many Brecht projects were.  

The film has just been released on DVD by Criterion in a two-disc edition that features a beautiful transfer of the German film along with a host of features, including commentary by film scholars David Bathrick and Eric Rentschler, the French version of the film, and a documentary and essay on the adaptation from stage to screen. 

Brecht drafted the original screenplay, but delivered something far different than he was asked for. Rather than simply bringing the original play to the screen, he drastically altered it, adding and removing scenes, rearranging the structure, and greatly altering the content and focus of the tale.  

Brecht had already clashed with composer Kurt Weill over the play itself, each man claiming credit for the production's success. Now he clashed with Pabst, who took Brecht's script and bent it to his own aims. But as Bathrick and Rentschler point out in the disc's commentary track, the two men may not have been so far apart as they claimed. Each was perhaps reluctant to credit the other with the film's better qualities and reserved the right to scapegoat the other should the critics be unkind. 

Shortchanged by the film, however, is Kurt Weill, for few of his compositions made it onto the screen. 

The final product, though it may bear relatively little resemblance to the stage production, is an excellent film and a milestone of early sound cinema. Pabst often replaces scenes of dialogue with imagery, with long gazes, with near-silent shots in which the actors convey the plot without words. And at a time when the camera had been rendered almost stagnant by cumbersome sound equipment, Pabst's camera roams through the sets with fluidity and ease. If the camerawork at times seem similar to Fritz Lang's M, released that same year, there is good reason: Both films were shot by legendary cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner. 

There are other similarities between the two films. Both examine the criminal underworld, and do so with a blend of humor, intrigue and distaste. And both feature wonderfully sustained sequences of cat-and-mouse amid the squalid streets. One image in Threepenny Opera is especially striking: One of Mack the Knife's henchmen has stolen an armchair and is running through the streets with police in pursuit. He crosses a courtyard, invisible beneath the chair, looking like an ant carrying its booty back to the nest. He scurries across the courtyard and out of view, only to appear again with the police right behind him, firing bullets into the upholstery. 

In America, the reaction to synchronized sound technology had been extreme. The first couple of years worth of American sound films were filled with wall-to-wall talk; the audience was rarely given a break from the endless chatter of showgirls and dandy men about town. It seemed everyone was a wit, armed with a ready punchline for every situation. In Germany, by contrast, sound was being used more judiciously and with greater sophistication. Filmmakers like Pabst and Lang did not give up the virtues of the more image-focused cinema of silent pictures. Rather than treating sound as an end in itself, they used it as a means to an end, as another tool in the creation of compelling cinema. Sound was used as atmosphere, or fused into the story as a plot point, and often employed in one sequence merely to draw greater attention to the silence of another sequence. 

The result is a film of richness and depth, with sound and image combining in the creation of a sharply rendered underworld. The words of Brecht, the music of Weill, the images of Pabst and Wagner — a fruitful collaboration of some of Germany's greatest talents. 

Threepenny Opera 

Directed by G.W. Pabst 

Criterion Collection, $39.95. 

www.criterion.com

Vocalist and Berkeley resident Lorna Kollmeyer—Lorna K. to her many Bay Area fans—is topping off her 15-year “overnight success” career of singing the American songbook with a live recording session for her first CD at the Plush Room in San Francisco Monday evening, Dec. 3. 

Titled In My Room, her CD will feature songs by Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, “along with ‘Nature Boy,’ and two French numbers inspired by Petula Clark,” said Kollmeyer. “I grew up in L.A.’s South Bay area, not far from the Beach Boys, and have been integrating their songs into my repertoire the past couple of years, interpreting them in a jazz idiom. They belong in the American songbook along with Gershwin and Rodgers and Hart—as Leonard Bernstein also believed.” 

Kollmeyer, who took up Afro-Cuban conga drumming in the mid-’80s, began singing after meeting guitarist Ned Boynton, her first husband, and playing for his indie rock group out of Oakland, The Bunyups. “My first exposure to jazz was sitting in with Ned’s combo on Latin numbers,” Kollmeyer recalled, “and listening to Ella and Sarah in his record collection—then hearing Paula West when some friends hired us to back her up at a party.” 

She has attracted a large, loyal fan base from her remarkable sense of contact with her audience and constant enriching of her repertoire. “I wasn’t inspired till now to record,” she said, “But I’ve found my voice doing covers of these tunes, and am finally in the realm where I’m comfortable with my improvisational skills enough to honor a song yet do something different with it, make you want to listen to it.”  

Much of her performing has been in the city, at Enrico’s and Shanghai 1930, but Lorna K. has performed at Downtown in Berkeley—and her band, The Dunes, is all Berkeley High graduates: Greg Sankovich, piano; Tom Griesser, saxophone; Kurt Ribak, bass; Bryan Bowman, drums. The Plush Room gig will be one of the last for that important cabaret venue; after New Year’s, Rrazz Productions, which handles Kollmeyer, will relocate to the Nikko Hotel. 

In 1948, University of California enrollment at the Berkeley campus reached 22,000 students, making adequate housing the number-one problem facing the student body. That year, the California Alumni Association published the book Students at Berkeley, which contained a large chapter devoted to housing and analyzed potential student housing sites. 

The Northside was judged unsuitable for student housing owing to “very unfavorable topography” and “remoteness from the center of student activities.” Older buildings—the Victorians and Colonial Revivals now prized as historic resources—were also deemed inadequate for student habitation. 

As an example of “adaptation of old and unsuitable buildings,” the book displayed two photos of Victorians, one of which was the North Gables boarding house at 2531 Ridge Road. The 19th-century houses were unfavorably compared with the university-owned Stern Hall, built in 1942. 

The 1962 Long-Range Development Plan (LRDP) for the campus proposed new university buildings to be constructed on four Northside city blocks facing the campus between Highland Place and Scenic Avenue. Existing structures—public or private—were to be demolished, including the historic Cloyne Court Hotel, North Gate Hall, and Drawing Building, all designed by John Galen Howard, and the former Beta Theta Pi chapter house, designed by Ernest Coxhead. 

On the Southside, the housing development suggested by the Alumni Association dictated a radically clean sweep of the twenty city blocks between College Avenue, Bancroft Way, Fulton Street, and Dwight Way, retaining only “institutions of quasi-public and social character” and the Telegraph Avenue-Bancroft Way business district. The rest was to be occupied by “elevator-type living centers” with “generous open space for recreation and amenity.” 

Miraculously, the sweep wasn’t quite as radical as intended, and many historic buildings on both sides of the campus were spared. On the Northside, Cloyne Court Hotel, North Gate Hall, the Drawing Building, Beta Theta Pi, and many pre-1923 residences were eventually designated as landmarks. The Victorian at 2531 Ridge Road—for which a landmark application was never written owing to insufficient information—not only survived but continues to house students. 

This charming, turreted house, now divided into six apartments, was one of the earliest homes built in the Daley’s Scenic Park tract. The first improvement on the site was recorded in 1892, and by the following year it had more than doubled. After passing through two owners in as many years, the property was acquired by one William Fisher, who may have briefly lived in the house but never long enough to be listed in the Berkeley directory. 

Next door, at 2527 Ridge Road, another Victorian went up at the same time. This house was acquired by James and Margaret Pierce, who lived in it until 1904, when they became managers of the newly completed Cloyne Court Hotel and sold their home to the Swiss vice-consul, John Freuler. Until the mid-1910s, Strawberry Creek ran in its natural channel across the back yards of both houses. 

Unlike its next-door neighbor, 2531 Ridge Road was always occupied by renters. Beginning in 1899, it was the home of Mrs. Annie E. Benson, a 65-year old widow from Pennsylvania. In the 1900 U.S. census, Mrs. Benson listed her occupation as Landlady. This in itself was not remarkable, but the 1900 census revealed two facts about Mrs. Benson that were remarkable indeed. For one, her race was listed as Black, making Annie Benson the only African-American head of household on the Northside. The one other person listed as Black in the neighborhood at the time was a domestic living in the household of her employers. (Five other persons—the wife and four children of realtor Herman Murphy—were also listed as Black in 1900; however, all subsequent census records marked them as White.) 

The second revelation about Mrs. Benson is even more interesting. In 1900, her tenants at 2531 Ridge Road were Austin and Ethel Lewis and their three children. 

Attorney, writer, socialist, and civil libertarian, Austin Lewis (1865–1944) was a highly visible figure in his day. Born in England, he immigrated to the United States in 1890 with his parents and siblings. The family arrived in Berkeley circa 1898 and established the private Glenholm School in their home on the corner of Shattuck Ave. and Berryman Street, at the current entrance to Live Oak Park. 

Why Austin Lewis, who was practicing law in San Francisco, chose to leave the family home and move into a rental on Ridge Road is not apparent, unless he did so expressly to help Annie Benson. 

Lewis was a tireless activist and lecturer in support of labor and women’s suffrage. Shortly after his arrival in Berkeley, Lewis published a series of books on socialism. The first was a translation of Friedrich Engels’ Feuerbach: The Roots of the Socialist Philosophy (1903), followed by his own The Church and Socialism (1906), The Rise of the American Proletarian (1907), The Militant Proletariat (c. 1911), and Proletarian and Petit-Bourgeois (1910s). 

In 1901, Berkeley gained another socialist in the figure of future mayor J. Stitt Wilson (1868–1942), a former Methodist Episcopal minister turned lecturer, who in 1903 bought a Maybeck-designed house on Highland Place, two blocks to the east of the Benson-Lewis household. The house—built in 1896 and destroyed in 1956—is known to architectural historians as the Laura G. Hall House, but considering that Ms. Hall occupied it for no more than a year, while Stitt Wilson owned it for several decades, it might be more appropriate to name it after him. 

Like Lewis, Wilson published socialist tracts, including The Message of Socialism to the Church and The Impending Social Revolution, or The Labor Problem Solved (both in 1904). Unlike Lewis, Wilson was obliged to publish them at his own expense. 

Lewis and Wilson were the two luminaries of the Socialist Party, and both ran in California gubernatorial races on their party’s ticket. In 1906, Lewis garnered 5.1% of the votes in a four-way race won by Republican James N. Gillett. Four years later, Wilson collected 12.4% of the votes in a three-way race won by Republican Hiram W. Johnson. Lewis, who ran for the U.S. Congress from the Fourth District that year, came in third behind the Republican and Democratic candidates. 

As friend, mentor, and sometime lawyer to a large coterie of writers and poets, Austin Lewis counted Jack London, Herman Whitaker, and George Sterling in his circle. Influenced by Lewis, London wrote The Iron Heel, a dystopian novel set in the future and depicting the triumph of capital over socialism. 

In September 1909, Lewis was one of 25 literary figures who organized the Press Club of Alameda, which would evolve into the California Writers’ Club. At the time, the club was the only California organization of its kind to include both men and women members. Lewis was elected as the club’s first president. 

Among the causes that engaged Lewis’s interest were the efforts to free Tom Mooney and Warren Billings—two labor leaders falsely accused of planting a bomb in a 1916 San Francisco parade—and to repeal California’s criminal syndicalism law, which classified dissident speech as a felony punishable by imprisonment. 

The Lewis family stayed at 2531 Ridge Road only briefly. By 1901 they had moved to 3108 Harper Street, and two years later they decamped for Oakland, where they lived at 3103 Stuart Street (in 1927, Highland Hospital would be built across the street from their house). Annie Benson, now listed in the directories as a cook, continued living at the Ridge Road house until 1904, when she moved to 1536 Shattuck Avenue. Her new house stood on the site now occupied by the parking lot between the French Hotel and Bank of America. 

While the Swiss vice-consul was living next door, 2531 Ridge Road became the home of William O’Brien, a blacksmith. In 1919, the house was taken over by Edna G. White (1884–1957), a former school teacher from Illinois, who established in it a boarding house for female students. She called it North Gables. 

North Gables was run along the lines of a co-operative. Residents paid $25 a month ($30 in the ’40s) for room and board, supplementing their rent payments with five weekly hours of work that included cleaning, cooking, serving, dish washing, gardening, and repair. About a quarter of the thirty lodgers worked an additional two hours a day and lived rent-free. 

Like all such living accommodations, North Gables required the approval of the Dean of Women and underwent regular inspections. During the 1920s, it was expanded fore and aft—the front façade, which had originally featured a polygonal window bay in the southeast corner and a small entrance porch at the southwest, gained a deep porch running across its entire length, with a sleeping porch above it. 

North Gables weathered the Depression and World War II, enabling a great many girls of slender means to obtain university education. The boarding house ceased operation in 1949, after Miss White’s health deteriorated. The building has since passed through many hands and was eventually converted into apartments. Its former next-door neighbor is long since gone, having made way for the Hotel Slocum, now known as the Stebbins Hall co-op, named after Dean of Women Lucy Ward Stebbins, who in 1933 awarded North Gables third-place honors for scholarship. 

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

Photograph: Daniella Thompson  

2531 Ridge Road, built in 1892, is one of the oldest buildings on the Northside. 

It’s post-Thanksgiving: socially, it’s December. Time to think about holiday shopping.  

Sure, some people have got all their gift-shopping done, either in mid-July or in last year’s post-holiday sales. They have more storage space than anyone I know, and/or they lack the true Spirit of the Wild Hunt. (You didn’t think the Wal-Mart frenzy had anything to do with that newfangled Christ guy, did you?) The rest of us are just now getting into gear. 

If you have a gardener to shop for, it shouldn’t be too hard. First: You have live stuff to consider. There are seeds, late bulbs, and plants for the garden and house all over the place. In this season an indoor plant is a good idea; there’s no need to worry about late freezes and it’s always good to have one more bit of green living at one’s elbow to make the wait for Spring easier.  

For elegant and practical gifts, go browse at Hida Tool and Hardware. Be prepared to walk sideways, because the shop is tiny and full of good stuff. Sometimes you can find things you never knew you (or your giftee) needed, like cuffs that cover the arm just above glove level, for working on junipers or roses or any prickly plant. They look all superhero-cool too.  

Check out the long-reach pruners, the various hoes and weeders, the incomparable saws, the irreplaceable hori-hori trowel/knives. My personal art-object favorite is the right- or left-handed one-side-beveled grafting knife. This is one piece of shaped metal with a wicker wrap around the handle for a Neolithic look, which would make it retro even if it’s a 500-year-old design.  

Hida doesn’t sell Felco brand pruning shears, oddly enough. Sure, Felcos are a Swiss brand, but where’s the International Luv?  

If you really really love your gardener, consider a pair of Felcos as a present even if she or he already had one. I’m saying this as a multiple-Felco owner, despite one of the major advantage of the brand: You’ll never have to buy another pair because every part is replaceable. Mostly it’s a new cutting blade that’s needed, and that only after several years’ resharpening.  

Felcos ain’t cheap but they’re a good investment. You might spend $50 to $75 on a pair, but those replacement blades cost less than $10 and they make the old pair feel brand-new.  

A sharpener for the blade is a good lagniappe—giving the shears a lick or two before every job, rather like steeling a kitchen knife, makes work a pleasure and a sharp blade is better for the plants you’re pruning too. I have a simple pair of flat diamond files that I’ve almost worn out after 20 years. They cost under $10 together and take up very little pocket space.  

The rub is this: It’s hard to surprise your gift-getter with Felcos because they really ought to be tried on first. There are 14 models, to fit all sorts of hands (including left ones) and uses. I use #8—in case some Felco Fairy would care to visit me.  

Next week: more gift ideas. 

Felcos:  

Hida Tool and Hardware Company 

1333 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley  

(510) 524-3700 or (800) 443-5512 

http://www.hidatool.com 

9:00 a.m.. - 6:00 p.m. Monday—Satuday  

Closed Sunday 

Mrs. Dalloway's Literary and Garden Arts  

2904 College Avenue, Berkeley  

(510) 704-8222 

Mon—Wed 10 a.m.—7 p.m. 

Thurs—Sat 10 a.m.—9 pmm. 

Sunday noon—6 p.m. 

http://www.mrsdalloways.com 

Also try the nearest hardware, nursery, or garden store, e.g.Yabusaki’s Dwight Way Nursery, East Bay Nursery, Berkeley Horticultural Nursery. 

Online: http://www.felcostore.com 

Welcome to my watershed. I really like it here but it is, basically, a big clay bowl and we’re all salad. 

Some of us get lucky by being up on the edge of the bowl or on one of the ridges on the inside, but most of are not and so it gets wet under our houses. 

This image is intentionally over the top but I want to get you started thinking about this in a larger context. We are in a watershed filled with creeks, springs, aquifers and culverted water-ways. If you put clay soils on top of this system of waterways, you can imagine that you end up with something like your first experience on the potter’s wheel. Everything is slippery and it’s hard to maintain a rigid or fixed form. 

You might imagine that it’s rather hard for a house to remain truly rectilinear, plumb and square when resting on this sort of thing. Add to this the fact that many houses were built on “filled” soils that were brought to the site to create a level surface (or because it was cheaper than hauling off the excess soil from local works such road building) and it’s easy to understand why these houses are so wracked and warped. The filled soils may have seemed stable when they were first installed but the loading of many tons of house combined with a few good rains and, voila, you’ve got Trouble (right here in River City!). 

“Filled” soils compact under load or when water is added and many houses have “differential” settlement (one area has settled more than another) that is attributable, in part, to this effect. 

When contractors started building here in the 1800s, they didn’t pay drainage or soils issues much heed and so many of the houses built up through the early 1900s have settlement which stems from these oversights. By 1940, foundations got much stronger and so could “bridge” over soft spots without settlement to a much greater degree. We also observed better site preparation beginning in this time period and the avoidance of filled soils was one such improvement. 

In short, the soils conditions we find locally (and in many other parts of the globe) require that buildings be able to withstand a certain amount of earth movement and poor drainage. 

Many of these issues are hard to resolve without great sums of cash. However, there is one factor in this scenario that is, at least somewhat, manageable and that is the water. 

Wet soils move more than dry soils.  

We can’t really change the soil we’re on (well you can but, boy, it’s really expensive) but you can keep it dryer. There’s no perfect drainage system but if we endeavor to keep the soil below our houses dry we can slow the movement quite a bit and have more stable, less weirdly shaped homes. 

If you’re on a hillside you have a more complex problem, although your water issue may not be as bad as some that I see in flatter areas. 

If your crouton is located on the side of the salad bowl, it’s working it’s way slowly to the bottom of the bowl. Add more dressing, it will get there faster. If your crouton is on the bottom of the bowl, it’s not moving so fast, although it may be sitting in too much Balsamic Vinaigrette. 

As water softens the soils below hillside homes, they will tend to move downhill more rapidly than they will when they’re dry. Those of us who get to live in the hills are, therefore, living in mobile-homes. Gravity not only pulls our houses downhill, it also applies force “differentially” and many hillside homes show separations or cracks that result from different parts of the house moving in different direction and/or at different rates. 

One cause of differential settlement is that the wetting of soils is never uniform. Even if the soils you rest upon are completely homogenous, they will not be getting wet in a uniform manner because water flows in funny and surprising ways, although some aspects of this are predictable. For example, water will flow down against the back of your house (if your house faces downhill), creating wetter soils there. This can make the back wall settle more than the rest. 

The result of uneven wetting is, often, uneven settlement. As I’ve indicated, this is more true with early foundation than with modern ones due to their breadth and strength. 

There also may be harder soil beneath some parts of your house and regardless of wetting, that part might always be held aloft while other parts drop away. 

Settlement can occur just as easily on soils of uniform strength when some parts are kept much dryer than others. Often the middle of the house is staying dryer and does not settle as much as the edges which are wetted to a greater degree. This is not consistent, though, since some houses have deep portion near the middle (especially hillside homes which are cut away for basements or garages). These houses often exhibit the reverse effect with the middle settling faster than the rest because the middle supports rest upon wetter soils in a depression that holds water. 

Just to make matters all the more confusing, our local clay bed has the disconcerting propensity to rise and fall as it wets and dries. Expansive clay soils will push houses upward as they get wet (because the clay takes on water and holds it) and then lower these structures down as they dry out. This is sometimes referred to as “clay-jacking.” 

This turns out to be a locomotive process when you add gravity. Hillside homes are driven downhill very slowly because every time they rise and fall, they get pushed a little further downhill. 

At this point I feel obliged to stop the drama and say that most of the houses I see are not being affected by these forces enough to require any significant repair. Few houses remain truly square after 6 or 8 decades of being subjected to these effects but, in most cases, these changes can be spackled and ignored. 

So, let’s review. You’re living in a crouton on the side of a bowl of Caesar. 

Remember to ask for the dressing on the side. 

Next time, I’ll explain about how to do that and the solution is French (the drain, not the dressing). 

FRIDAY, NOV. 30 

“The Camden 28” a documentary on the nonviolent antiwar resistors who were arrested in the summer of 1971 for the break-in at the Camden NJ draft board, at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Friends Church, Sacramento & Cedar. 923-1853. 

East Bay Paratransit A community meeting with Assemblywoman Loni Hancock at 1 p.m. at North Oakland Senior Center, 5714 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, entrance at parking lot at 58th St., Oakland. 559-1406. 

Teen Playreaders meets to read “Hamlet” and other plays based on the classic, at 4 p.m. at Claremont Branch Library, 2940 Benvenue at Ashby. 981-6121. 

Berkeley School Volunteers Orientation from noon to 1 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. Come learn about volunteer opportunities. 644-8833. 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Donald H. Blevins, Chief Probation Officer, Alameda County, “How the Alameda County Probation System Serves its Citizens” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925.  

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310. 

SATURDAY, DEC. 1 

Native American Pow Wow with drumming, dancing, Native American crafts and foods, and activities for children, from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. and on Sun. from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. at Laney College Gymnasium, 900 Fallon St. at 10th, Oakland. Benefits American Indian Child Resource Center. 208-1870, ext. 310. 

Spinning a Yarn Listen to fairy tales inpired by spinners and watch the spinning wheel turn at 2 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Alternative Gift Market, with gifts that can change the world - medical supplies for Darfur, reforestation in Haiti, or shelter for our neighbors here in the East Bay, from 1 to 5 p.m. at Hillside Community Church, 1422 Navellier St., El Cerrito. 236-4348. 

East Bay Sanctuary Covenant’s Crafts Fair with world crafts and art from Africa, Central America, Haiti, Palestine, Afghanistan and Tibet, Sat. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way at Dana.  

California College of the Arts Holiday Fair from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Oliver Art Center, CCA’s Oakland campus, 5212 Broadway, at College Ave.  

Berkeley Artisans Open Studios Sat and Sun. from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. through Dec. 16. 845-2612. www.berkeleyartisans.com 

Richmond Art Center Holiday Art Festival with art and craft sale, hands-on art activities for children and silent auction, from noon to 5 p.m. at 2540 Barrett Ave., at 25th St., Richmond. 620-6772. www.therichmondartcenter.org 

Alameda Artists Holiday Open Studios Sat. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. A map of open studios is available at www.ci.alameda.ca.us/arpd 

Masala Artist Collective Holiday Bazaar from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Swarm Gallery, 560 Second St., Oakland. 654-9180. 

Small Press Distribution Holiday Open House with a book sale and readings from noon to 4 p.m. at 1341 7th St. at Gilman. 524-1668.  

Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library Holiday Book Sale with books, pamphlets, and more, at 10 a.m. 595-7417. 

Berkeley Historical Society Walking Tour of “The Hillside School” Built in 1925 by Walter Ratcliff, led by Kay Dolit and Carolyn Adams. Walk is from 10 a.m. to noon. Cost is $8-$10. To register and for information on meeting place call 848-0181. www.cityofberkeley.info/histsoc/ 

Plant Natives on Berkeley Paths Join Friends of Five Creeks and Berkeley Path Wanderers to plant natives along pathways in the Upper Codornices Creek watershed. Call to RSVP. 848-9358. www.fivecreeks.org 

Weed-Pull on the Bay Trail Help remove broom, fennel and ice plant from 10 a.m. on, at Pt. Isabel, Rydin Road, off Central Ave. Richmond. Please bring gloves if you have them, water, some lunch, hats, and sun block. 

Walk the Upper Claremont with Berkeley Path Wanderers Explore history, trails, and hidden open spaces in the upper Claremont area on a Berkeley Path Wanderers Association walk. Meet at 10 a.m. at Peet’s Coffee, 2916 Domingo. 849-1969. www.berkeleypaths.org 

French Broom Removal Volunteers needed to remove the broom in Redwood Regional Park. We provide the tools. Meet at 9:30 a.m. at the Skyline Gate staging area, 8500 Skyline Blvd. 812-8265. 

Fungus Fair: A Celebration of Wild Mushrooms Explore the mysteries of the mushroom, with exhibits, slidetalks, mushroom marketplace, tasty mushroom soup for sale, and hands-on fungus fun for the whole family, Sat. from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sun. from noon to 5 p.m. at Oakland Museum of CA, 1000 Oak St., at 10th St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. 

Book Drive for West County Reads Bring your book donations to Jenny K at 6927 Stockton Ave. and Well Grounded Coffee and Tea, 6925 Stockton Ave., El Cerrito, Sat. and Sun. between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. www.westcountyreads.org  

“Sowing Seeds” Humane Education Workshop for teachers and advocates for social justice and environmental preservation, Sat. from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sun. from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 240 Mulford, UC Campus. Registration is $125, students $35. Financial aid available. sowingseeds@HumanEducation.org 

Behind the Scenes at Pixar Animation Studios Benefit for the Emery Ed Fund at 11 a.m. at Pixar Animation Studios, 1200 Park Ave., Emeryville. Tickets are $100 and up. 601-4911. 

Political Affairs Readers Group “Class Struggle in a Socialist Market Economy” A discussion at 10 a.m. at the Niebyl-Proctor Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Sponsored by the Communist Party USA, Oakland Berkeley Branch. Articles available at www.politicalaffairs.com 

Produce Stand at Spiral Gardens Food Security Project from 1 to 6 p.m. at the corner of Sacramento and Oregon St. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

SUNDAY, DEC. 2 

Oak Grove Tree-Sit One Year Anniversary from noon to 6 p.m. at Memorial Oak Grove, Piedmont Ave. just north of Bancroft. Berkeley Grandmothers for the Oaks request that non-perishable food and water in 1 to 5-gal. jugs be brought to the tree sitters at 2 p.m. 938-2109. www.saveoaks.com 

The Before Columbus Foundation announces the winners of the 27th Annual American Book Awards at 4 p.m. at Laney College Theater, 900 Fallon St. Free and open to the public. 228-6775. 

22nd Annual Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners from 3 to 6 p.m. at Berkeley Unitarian Universalists, 1606 Bonita Ave. at Cedar. Cost is $5-$10. 839-0852. 

Making Natural Holiday Wreaths Learn about fir, bay and other flora and how to use them, from noon to 3:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Please bring a pair of small hand-clippers, a large flat box and a bag lunch. Not appropriate for children under 8. Cost of $25-$34. Registration required. 1-888-EBPARKS. 

Berkeley Artisans Open Studios from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. through Dec. 16. 845-2612.  

Richmond Art Center Holiday Arts Festival with arts and crafts, silent auction, children’s art activities from noon to 5 p.m. at 2540 Barrett Ave., Richmond. 620-6772. 

Albany Holiday Art Show and Sale, with watercolors, drawings, paintings and etchings, acrylic paintings, cards, bookmarks and more, from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave., Albany. 559-7226. 

Masala Artist Collective Holiday Bazaar from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Swarm Gallery, 560 Second St., Oakland. 654-9180. 

Berkeley Green Party meets at 7 p.m. at the Grassroots House, 2022 Blake St., with a special guest, food and drinks, and planning action for 2008. www.berkeleygreens.org  

Old Time Radio East Bay Collectors and listeners gather to enjoy shows together at 5 p.m. at a private home in Berkeley. For more information email DavidinBerkeley at Yahoo.com. 

“Using Filters in Photoshop” with Don Melandry, photoimager, at 2 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6107.  

Cool Schools Warming Campaign for middle and high school students to learn how to take action against global warming in their schools and communities, from 2 to 4 p.m. at the College and Career Center, Berkeley High School, 1980 Allston Way, at Milvia. RSVP to 704-4030. chicory@earthteam.net 

“The Cross-Walk Walk” for war resistance, every Sun. at noon at the corner of Solano and San Pablo. Bring signs, ideas, young people. 

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 Jack Petranker on “Are We Ready for the Truth?” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 809-1000  

MONDAY, DEC. 3 

“Protecting North Richmond Wetlands” with Rich Walkling of Natural Heritage Institute at 7 p.m. at the Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin at Masonic. Free. 848-9358.  

TUESDAY, DEC. 4 

Tuesdays for the Birds Tranquil bird walks in local parklands, led by Bethany Facendini, from 7 to 9:30 a.m. Today we will visit Point Pinole. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233. 

Tilden Mini-Rangers Hiking, conservation and nature-based activities for ages 8-12. Dress to ramble and get dirty. From 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 1-888-EBPARKS. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704. 

Tai Chi for Peace at 1:30 p.m. in front of the Marine Recruiting Station, Shattuck Square. Open Sidewalk Studios at 3 p.m. 524-2776. 

“Mapping Stem Cell Research: Terra Incognita” A doumetary on the work of Dr. Jack Kessler at 6:30 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2022. 

“Hiking the Torres del Paine National Park in Chilean Patagonia” A slide presentation with Treve Johnson at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

“A Japanese Religion in Brazilian Religious Milieu: How Brazilians have accepted the Church of World Messianity” with Prof. Hideaki Matsuoka, Shukutoku Univ., at 6:30 p.m. at Jodo Shinshu Center, 2140 Durant Ave. 809-1444. 

Berkeley School Volunteers Orientation from 10 to 11 a.m. at 1835 Allston Way. Come learn about volunteer opportunities. 644-8833. 

Family Storytime at 7 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043.  

Train Week at Habitot Children’s Museum with a mini-train exhibit and hands-on activities at 2065 Kittredge St. 647-1111. 

End the Occupation Vigil every Tues. at noon at Oakland Federal Bldg., 1301 Clay St. www.epicalc.org 

Street Level Cycles Community Bike Program Come use our tools as well as receive help with performing repairs free of charge. Youth classes available. Tues., Thurs., 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 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 5 

Indigenous Autonomy and Resistance: A Report from Chiapas and the Indigenous Encuentro in Sonora at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña, 3105 Shattuck Ave. Suggested donation $7-$10. Proceeds Benefit Zapatista Autonomous Health Care in San Manuel. 654-9587. 

Cancer Prevention and Survival Cooking Class on Favoring Fiber at 8:30 a.m. at Bella Vista, 1025 E. 28th St., Oakland. To register call 595-6445. 

“Avalanche Awareness” A lecture at 6:30 p.m. at Marmot Mountain Works, 3049 Adeline St. Cost is $15. 209-753-6556 ext. 1. www.mtadventure.com  

American Red Cross Blood Services is holding a volunteer orientation from 10 a.m. to noon. Various East Bay opportunities available. Advanced sign-up is required; call 594-5165.  

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Heavy rain cancels. 548-9840. 

THURSDAY, DEC. 6 

America’s Current and Impending Wars: From Campus to the Middle East. A teach-in at UC Berkeley at 7 p.m. in 155 Dwinelle. www.btiaw.org 

It’s the Economy, Stupid: The Growing Anxiety of the Middle Class and the Future of American Politics with Jacob Hacker, Yale University Political Science, professor and author of “The Great Risk Shift” at 6:30 p.m. at UC Berkeley Labor Center, 2521 Channing Way. 642-6371. andreabuffa@berkeley.edu  

The Homeschool Make-and-Take Craft Fair with handcrafted items, and opportunity to make some; food, entertainment and raffle, from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at Grace North Church, 2138 Cedar St. Benefits the Women’s Daytime Drop-in Center in Berkeley. www.womensdropin.org 

Teen Book Club meets to discuss post-apocalyptic futures at 4 p.m. at Claremont Branch Library, 2940 Benvenue at Ashby. 981-6121. 

Juggling for Peace Learn juggling and plate spinning at 11:30 a.m. in front of the Marine Recruiting Station, Shattuck Square. 524-2776. 

Babies & Toddlers Storytime at 10:15 and 11:15 a.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043.