Full Text

Richard Challacombe, 88, lets go of his walker and climbs down the steps
          of the warm water pool inside Berkeley High School’s landmarked Old Gymnasium
          Wednesday evening.
Riya Bhattacharjee
Richard Challacombe, 88, lets go of his walker and climbs down the steps of the warm water pool inside Berkeley High School’s landmarked Old Gymnasium Wednesday evening.
 

News

Departed City Manager Leaves Big Mess In Alameda

By John Geluardi Special to the Planet
Tuesday April 21, 2009 - 02:41:00 PM

Nearly two months after Alameda City Manager Debra Kurita resigned, the island city is still trying to sound the depths of the financial crisis caused by her falsely inflated budgets.  

Kurita quietly left her job Feb. 26 with little more than a one-paragraph public statement, which was posted on the city’s website. What Kurita did not mention in her statement was that she decided to resign after three intense, closed-session meetings to discuss her job performance. At issue, was the city’s 2008-2009 budget that suddenly turned up at least $2.1 million short.  

Councilmembers have been tight lipped about what was discussed during those meetings, but it’s safe to assume there was a lot of conversation about Kurita’s questionable accounting skills.  

The unexpected budget shortage, coupled with revenue losses due to a nationwide economic downturn, put the city into a financial crisis. In addition, the city may be on the hook for $30 million in lawsuits over the sale of Alameda Power & Telecom and the 2005 death of Dr. Zehra Attari, who inadvertently drove into the estuary on a cold, rainy night because the city had not properly posted warning signage at a boat ramp at the end of Grand Street.  

“This was on top of an already grim situation,” said Councilmember Frank Matarrese. “There’s going to be real impacts. We’re going to be cutting services and it’s going to hurt.” 

The council has not yet identified which services will be cut and whether there will be any layoffs of city employees.  

The problem occurred when Kurita failed to account for rapidly increasing workman’s compensation costs. Alameda’s workers' compensation claims had been rising by half a million dollars annually for the last three years, and each year Kurita failed to increase projections to compensate for the increases. As a result, the city’s general fund gave a false impression of financial health.  

It is uncertain whether Kurita deliberately doctored the budgets to make it appear there was more money in the general fund or if was simply a colossal blunder. Kurita did not return several calls from the Daily Planet to explain what happened.  

Interim City Manager Anne Marie Gallant said it is more important to solve the city’s financial problems then it is to cast blame. “There are a lot of urban legends about what happened, but the situation is a fact and we need to fix it,” she said.  

However, some in Alameda are upset that Kurita, to whom the city paid an $180,000 annual salary, was able to leave the city with six months worth of pay and full benefits.  

“It’s disgusting,” said David Howard, chair of the watchdog Alameda Community Group. “It sounds like she was hiding information and misleading the council. Why should she be rewarded for that?” 

Deputy City Attorney Terri Highsmith said Kurita was guaranteed the severance pay and benefits according to her contract with the city. “It was a standard contract,” Highsmith said. “It’s common for city managers to have such contracts because there is a high turnover in that position.” Highsmith said. “She is guaranteed six months salary and benefits unless she is fired.”  

The severance deal was a little hard to take and there may be some policy changes that would prevent similar situations in the future, said Matarrese. “Alameda honors its contracts and it will continue to do so,” he said. “But I don’t know if we will be making contracts like that in the future.”


Climate Action Plan: Chronicle Got it Wrong, Say Berkeley Officials

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Tuesday April 21, 2009 - 10:50:00 AM

Berkeley city officials are hitting back swiftly against a recent San Francisco Chronicle article which the officials say “mischaracterized” the city’s proposed Climate Action Plan (CAP). 

The CAP is an ambitious plan to meet the goal—established by Berkeley’s 2006 Berkeley Measure G—of reducing the city’s greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by the year 2050. The plan sets recommendations for action in three specific areas: sustainable transportation and land use, energy use in buildings, and waste reduction and recycling. 

The City Council is scheduled to take its first look at the CAP at tonight’s regular meeting at 7 p.m. at Old City Hall in downtown Berkeley. If the council recommends moving forward with the CAP, the plan will go through an environmental review process under the California Environmental Quality Act and will come back to the council for final approval May 19. 

On Saturday, April 18, the San Francisco Chronicle printed a front-page story on the council’s upcoming CAP debate, saying that energy standards upgrades mandated by the plan could cost individual Berkeley homeowners “upward of $33,800.” 

“Within the next few years,” the Chronicle article said, “the city is likely to mandate that all homes meet strict energy standards. In many cases this would mean new double-paned windows, insulation in the attic, walls and floors, a new white roof that reflects heat, a forced-air furnace and high-efficiency appliances.” 

In a letter to the editor released to the public Sunday, April 19, Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates took issue with the article’s contention that Berkeley homeowners “would be forced to do extensive energy retrofit work on their homes. While it is true that Berkeley does require energy audits at the time of sale or when extensive remodeling takes place, and requires wrapping water heaters and caulking windows and doors,” the mayor wrote, “no one is required to do expensive work. It is usually in people's best economic interest to make these upgrades to their home, and they are quickly paid back through energy savings. Berkeley has required these energy audits since 1989 and is now considering upgrading the requirements of the audit. It will also establish strong green building standards for new construction.” 

In a letter sent Monday to Mayor Bates and members of the Berkeley City Council, City Manager Phil Kamlarz said that, contrary to the Chronicle article’s contention, the Climate Action Plan contains no mandates, only energy efficiency goals, with the details “to be developed through a collaborative process with the community and subject, ultimately, to the City Council’s review and consideration.”  

Kamlarz said that the Chronicle’s report of mandated homeowner costs of upwards of $33,800 to meet the city’s energy standards was “false,” saying that such a cost would “contradict one of the fundamental goals of the CAP—to lower the cost of energy upgrades in homes and businesses.” 

“In the beginning,” the Chronicle article said, “the city will offer incentives, such as rebates and financial assistance, for homeowners to comply. But within a few years, the city will start imposing penalties for those who don't meet the standards, said Timothy Burroughs, the city's climate action coordinator.” 

In his letter to Bates and the council, Kamlarz said that it was “inaccurate” for the article to say that “the city would start imposing penalties within a few years for those who do not meet the energy standard.” Kamlarz said “the CAP does not recommend imposing penalties,” but, instead, “emphasizes the need for incentives to encourage the installation of these types of improvements.” 

Kamlarz also wrote that the Chronicle’s claim that compliance with the city’s energy standard would require extensive home renovations was “misleading.” “While staff may recommend some types of cost-effective energy efficiency improvements,” the city manager said, “those will not include replacement of roofs or single-pane windows that are not otherwise being replaced, as that would not be a cost-effective improvement.” 

 


Berkeley High Plans Safety Overhaul

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Tuesday April 21, 2009 - 12:33:00 PM

Berkeley High School officials plan to ramp up safety and security measures as a result of multiple written complaints from members of the school’s Safety Committee earlier this year. 

In an April 3 letter to the committee, district Manager of Student Welfare and Attendance Javier Mendieta said then-acting Principal Maggie Heredia-Peltz had responded to various safety issues in the complaints, and presented specific resolutions which she said Berkeley High administration and staff will follow up on. 

The issues include better communication with students and parents regarding crime; greater visibility for school safety staff; increased number of resources officers; and improved incident-reporting practices. 

Don Morgan, a parent and member of the Safety Committee, said several of the issues addressed by Heredia-Peltz were included in an updated version of Berkeley High’s safety plan approved by the School Governance Council April 14 and scheduled to be taken up by the Berkeley Board of Education in May. 

The school, Heredia-Peltz said in her response, will begin notifying parents and staff of “violent crime incidents on campus, during lunch or after school” as recommended by the Safety Committee via email or through the Parent, Teacher and Student Association newsletter. 

“Instead of having to deal with rumors, everybody has the right information,” PTSA President Mark Van Krieken said. “People can relax more when they get information like that. Before we’d have to get in touch with the Police Department and school authorities, and even then people would try to run information down.” 

Some high school parents said they had found the two alerts sent out by Heredia-Peltz in February helpful. The alerts concerned a possible gun incident on campus and a minor fire alarm. 

“Whether these improvements will continue under Principal Slemp or not, we will have to wait and see,” Morgan said. 

Margit Roos-Collins, another parent and Safety Committee member, said she hopes the school makes the alerts a permanent feature. 

“It’s dumb not to,” she said. 

District Superintendent Bill Huyett called the alerts a “good practice,” adding that he supported the school's response to the complaints. 

“Some of these things can be put into effect immediately,” he said. 

Neither Heredia-Peltz nor Berkeley High Principal Jim Slemp—who is back on the job after a medical leave—returned calls for comment. 

Heredia-Peltz also said Berkeley High was exploring recommendations by the Safety Committee to have the school’s safety officers wear easily identifiable uniforms, which would help tell them apart from criminals, but the matter would have to be negotiated with the union first. 

“It will help everybody know who the safety officers are—if they are part of the problem or adults trying to help," van Krieken said. 

Huyett said that both the Safety Committee and the Berkeley Police Department had made a request for the uniforms.  

In response to the committee’s call for additional school resource officers who would work with Berkeley police to address crime, Heredia-Peltz said the school was working with the Berkeley Police Department to coordinate services when Officer Mitch Collins, the current school resource officer, is unavailable. Collins works at the school four days a week. 

A school resource officer is a Berkeley police officer assigned to Berkeley High to advise students who witness or victimized in a campus crime. 

Huyett explained that while additional resources might not be possible this year given the district's budget deficit, there was money from safety grants for new uniforms. 

“I am extremely happy they are moving forward with it,” said Roos-Collins. “I just hope they don’t spend the money signing off on uniforms before consulting with the Police Department.” 

The school will also implement a more prominent incident-reporting program which will allow people to confidentially report incidents immediately in case they fear retribution. Morgan said students would be able to fill out forms easily available at the front desk to complain about thefts, fights, bullying and harassment. 

The administration, he said, would have to lay out clear plans about how they implemented “stop cards”—a card filled out by safety officers when they encountered non-students. 

“What is not clear to us is what happens with the stop cards, what is the procedure stop cards are part of,” he said. “The language provided by the administration is very vague when it comes to the legal requirements issuing restraining orders. That was something committee members were interested in pursuing this year but were not able to get around to.” 

The updated version of the safety plan aims to reduce robberies and thefts by 20 percent. 

The school reported a large number of strong-arm robberies in and around Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park last fall. Morgan said that although the string of robberies was curtailed by arrests, thefts continue to occur around campus. 

The committee also hopes to decrease physical and verbal altercations by 20 percent and cut back on drug and alcohol use by 10 percent. Survey results from the 2008 California Healthy Kids Survey show self-reported drug and alcohol use at Berkeley High to be twice the national average. 

The school also plans to craft a more comprehensive disaster plan to deal with earthquakes and other natural disasters. 

Roos-Collins said that although the high school had carried out the number of fire and earthquake drills required by state law, it was still working on finalizing a disaster plan. 

“The school has always had an emergency plan, but it ended with evacuation,” she said. “We never had a disaster plan—something we need when neither the Fire Department or Police Department will come to our help. The Safety Committee is working on a disaster plan, but we still have a long way to go.” 

Morgan said he hoped Berkeley High would also adopt a more open and transparent approach to improve the membership process for the Safety Committee. 

“There have been issues about who should represent parents, which has caused the meetings to not achieve the kind of success we anticipated,” he said. “Some members have resigned after being frustrated at the speed we were making progress. We want to welcome as many parents and teachers as possible.” 

The committee currently has five to six parents, at least one teacher and several administrators, including Heredia-Peltz and Dean of Students Alejandro Ramos, who serves as chair.


City Council to Consider Climate Action Plan Tuesday

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday April 17, 2009 - 09:37:00 PM

Creation of Berkeley’s Climate Action Plan heads into its final phase Tuesday night when the City Council will consider whether to send the 139-page document for environmental review. 

The council will also hold public hearings on applications for state and federal funding for community agencies and for a neighborhood stabilization program to address home foreclosures. 

The City Council meets at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 21, at Old City Hall on Martin Luther King Way in downtown Berkeley. 

Passage of the draft Climate Action Plan (CAP) by the council would not mean final approval of the plan itself, but is necessary in order for the draft plan to begin the environmental review process under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The council is tentatively scheduled to consider the final version of the CAP—once the environmental review process is complete—at the council’s May 19 meeting. 

And even if council passes the plan, expenditures to implement it—expenditures which are not already in the city’s budgeted mandates—will have to come back to the council for individual budget votes. 

Few have taken issue with the CAP’s targeted goal of an 80 percent reduction in the city’s greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2050. But the details of the plan’s implementation have been the subject of much debate. 

“I support most of this plan,” first-term Councilmember Jesse Arreguín told the Daily Planet. “But the land-use section is controversial. I’m concerned about its vagueness. If that section was taken out, I don’t think there would be any objection to the overall plan.” 

The genesis of the CAP was Measure G, passed by Berkeley voters in November 2006 by an 81-19 margin, which set the 2050 goal. The CAP was then developed by city officials to provide detailed plans through the year 2020 to get the city on track for 2050. The version of the CAP to be considered by the City Council Tuesday night is the third version. The second version of the plan was reviewed by the council in September 2008, and by the Planning Commission the following month. 

The third draft of the CAP, which is available online at http://www.berkeleyclimateaction.org/docManager/1000000251/BCAP_April%2009.pdf, sets recommendations for action in three specific areas: sustainable transportation and land-use, energy use in buildings, and waste reduction and recycling. 

Councilmember Arreguín says it is the land-use portion that concerns him. 

“Basically, the proposals make it easier for buildings of more substantial height to be built throughout the city,” Arreguín said. “In some of the areas of the city, such as the downtown area, that makes sense. But the plan only talks about this from a broad perspective, and it doesn’t measure the potential impacts of high-rises in all instances.” 

Arreguín said that one of those potential impacts, brought to his attention by a citizen at a recent meeting, concerns the possibility that building high-rises that throw shadows over single-story dwellings could then prevent those smaller dwellings from installing solar panels, thus increasing, rather than lowering, the overall carbon footprint in that area. 

Calling this one of the unintended consequences of some of the recommendations in the current version of the CAP, Councilmember Arregúin said, “I hadn’t thought about that one before until it was brought to my attention.” 

Arreguín said that he was afraid that “while the CAP is an exciting opportunity for the city to exert our leadership in environmental preservation,” some of the provisions of the CAP “might be used in a way that would have a detrimental environmental and quality-of-life effect.” 

Another critic of a portion of the plan is Councilmember Kriss Worthington, who says that a potential source of revenue to fund many of the plan’s ambitious goals is being put on the back burner. 

The CAP sets out its various goals in three separate categories: long-term, medium-range, and immediate. And in fact, City Manager Phil Kamlarz has already identified $3.5 million in proposed budgeted city funds for the CAP’s “immediate goals” that Kamlarz says he will recommend for council approval in the upcoming budget process. 

Worthington says one of the plan’s goals is to set up a service fee that developers must pay to account for transportation impacts of proposed developments. Worthington says this proposed fee, which Berkeley does not currently have but which is the policy of several other Bay Area cities, was moved in the various CAP drafts from long-range to medium-range, but he wants it made an immediate goal. 

“Many of the things we’re looking to do in the Climate Action Plan, we’re already asking where the money is going to come from,” Worthington said. “If we create this transportation service fee fund, the money will be there. It’s a potentially large source of revenue.” 

Worthington also said he wants the plan to be more specific about implementation for an Eco-Pass system, which provides free bus passes for workers. Berkeley already has such a plan for its own city workers; Worthington says the draft Climate Action Plan speaks vaguely about putting in place such a plan for all Berkeley residents. Worthington says that would be cost-prohibitive, but a more realistic plan would be for the plan to call for Eco-Passes for all workers in downtown Berkeley and along the Telegraph Avenue corridor. “This would allow the Eco-Pass proposal to be included in the overall Alameda County corridor plans for those areas,” Worthington said, “and would make the proposal eligible for county, state, and federal funding.” 

 

Public hearings 

In other significant action scheduled for Tuesday’s meeting, the council will hold public hearings on funding applications. 

These are: 

• $177,335 in Neighborhood Stablilization Program (NSP) funding through the State of California. NSP funds are available to solve the problem of abandoned and foreclosed homes. Included activities in the proposal will be establishing finance mechanisms for purchase and redevelopment of foreclosed homes and residential properties, outright purchase and resale of abandoned or foreclosed homes, demolition of blighted structures, and redevelopment of demolished or vacant properties. Because the state has set up a $1 million minimum for application funding, Berkeley is proposing bundling its application with five other Alameda County cities: Alameda, Fremont, Livermore, San Leandro, and Union City. 

• Allocations of funds for the city’s community agencies through Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), Emergency Shelter Grant (ESG), and Home Investment Partnerships (HOME) Program Community Housing Development Organization (CHDO) operating programs. $3.3 million is available from CDBG, $142,897 for homeless services and facilities through ESG, and approximately $1.2 million is available through HOME funds. Proposals from the city’s 69 community agencies were submitted to city staff late last year, with reviews of those proposals (including oral presentations and site visits) taking place between January and March.  

 


Air District Releases West Berkeley Air Monitoring Results

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Friday April 17, 2009 - 09:34:00 PM

The Bay Area Air Quality Management District this week released the results of the air monitoring it carried out near West Berkeley's Pacific Steel Casting last year. 

The study, carried out over a one-year period, says West Berkeley residents are not exposed to increased cancer or other health risks due to air quality. 

In an April 14 letter to Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates, air district Executive Officer Jack Broadbent said the study found that, “for the year 2008, West Berkeley air quality met all of the applicable state and national ambient air-quality standards, with the exception of the 24-hour national PM2.5 standard and the very stringent annual state PM standards, similar to most other Bay Area locations.”  

The Environmental Protection Agency describes PM2.5 as fine particles unhealthy to breathe and associated with premature mortality and other serious health effects. 

Broadbent’s letter identified secondary ammonium nitrate and wood smoke as the primary causes of elevated PM2.5 levels in the Bay Area. He said secondary ammonium nitrate forms in the atmosphere and is primarily a result of nitrogen oxide emissions from “mobile sources and other types of fossil-fuel combustion.” Wood smoke emissions, Broadbent said, were being addressed through the air district’s recently adopted law regarding wood-burning devices. 

The analysis also shows air quality in West Berkeley to be well below all of the acute and chronic "reference exposure levels"—the “concentration at or below which no adverse non-cancer health effects are anticipated in the general human population”—established by the state E.P.A. Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. 

“I’m deeply relieved that the comprehensive study found that West Berkeley residents are not exposed to increased cancer or other health risks,” Bates said in a statement Friday afternoon. 

Calls to the mayor’s office for further comment were not returned by press time. 

Air district officials analyzed a year's worth of data from an air-monitoring station located at the Picante restaurant parking lot at Sixth and Camelia streets. The results were compared with statewide air-quality measurements. 

Several environmental groups and community members called the air district’s report misleading, explaining that it did not address their concerns in a comprehensive manner. 

“The air district needs a reality check and to improve their science,” said Andrew Galpern, a West Berkeley resident advocating for cleaner air. “They need to visit the neighborhood, test the air and the strange dust that settles on the homes downwind, and conduct a health survey to find out who's getting sick and how often. I’m glad Mayor Bates is ‘deeply relieved’ with the results. The problem is, he and his family don't live here....we do, and the air still stinks." 

Pear Michaels, a founding member of Mothers and Others for Measuring Metals in the Air, questioned the authenticity of the Picante monitor data. 

“The fact that it collects heavy metals once every sixth day on a schedule known in advance to Pacific Steel Casting is problematic,” she said. “Should they wish to limit their operations on that day, they may do so and effectively control the data.” 

Pacific Steel spokesperson Elisabeth Jewel said company officials did not know which days the data were collected. 

“Our production schedule is based on customer orders only,” she said. “We have no idea when they are doing it. It’s determined by air district staff members.” 

The analysis will be forwarded to the Alameda County Health Department and the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment for review and comment. 

Local environmental activists had asked the air district to place the monitor near Pacific Steel at Second and Gilman streets to investigate the steel plant's emissions. 

Area residents have complained for years about a burned copper-like smell from the foundry. Pacific Steel responded by installing odor absorption systems in its plants. 

A recent report by USA Today, which placed three West Berkeley schools in the top 1 percent nationwide for poor outdoor air quality, led to many community members pointing to Pacific Steel as the source of the problem. 

  “The bottom line is that the air quality meets federal and state standards,” Jewel said. “Singling out Pacific Steel as a contributor to unhealthy air at school sites is clearly wrong. If these are the results two blocks from the plant, then clearly Pacific Steel is not contributing to unhealthy air quality more than a mile from the plant at the school sites.” 

Jewel attributed noxious emissions to wood smoke and to diesel particulate from the freeway. 

“The air district’s analysis is grossly misleading, because it did not take into account the correlation of nickel and manganese with iron, as well as factors such as wind direction and weather condition,” said Denny Larson of Global Community Monitor. “At this point the public has lost total confidence in the air district’s approach to the problem.” 

The air district’s assessment of the data says that although the average concentration of manganese at the parking lot is higher than other monitoring sites, a fact the district attributes to its proximity to Pacific Steel, the levels were well below reference exposure levels adopted by the EPA. 

“Manganese levels are way under any level that could cause health effects, even among sensitive populations,” Jewel said. 

The air district also compared Pacific Steel’s Health Risk Assessment results for the Sixth and Camelia location with the monitoring results, finding them consistent. 

“If the Health Risk Assessment is correct and the pollution controls installed at Pacific Steel are 99.5 percent effective, then the community should not be smelling such strong, acute releases of emissions as they are,” Michaels said. “West Berkeley has one of the highest rates for childhood asthma and hospitalization in the nation. We need these serious issues publicized and addressed.” 

Broadbent said district staff were exploring the idea of continuing the monitoring at the Picante parking lot through 2009. 

“While the monitoring results are encouraging, air district staff will continue to explore opportunities to further reduce odorous and toxic pollutant emissions in the West Berkeley area by continuing our compliance and enforcement efforts and by working with Pacific Steel Casting and other facilities to identify potential emission reduction options,” Broadbent said. 


Berkeley School District Will Receive Stabilization Funds

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 09:59:00 PM

The U.S. Department of Education Friday approved $4.9 billion in funds for California’s public schools over the next two years, which will help prevent teacher layoffs and improve student achievement. 

California was the first state to benefit from the State Fiscal Stabilization Funds, part of the Obama administration's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, State Board of Education President Ted Mitchell and State Superintendent of Schools Jack O’Connell applied for the funds a week ago. 

Both Schwarzenegger and O’Connell urged school districts to apply for their share of funds immediately. School districts and other local educational agencies will be able to apply for the funds online. 

Berkeley Unified School District officials have not announced how much the district will apply for, nor how much they expect the district to receive. Superintendent Huyett could not be reached for comment before press time. 

However, Huyett told the Planet in an April 8 interview that the state stabilization funds would help offset the district’s $8 million budget deficit and prevent layoffs. 

  The district handed out 130 layoff notices to teachers in March, but rescinded most of them. The total number of layoff notices is now down to 25, said district spokesperson Mark Coplan. 

          

             


School District Sends Out Pink Slips to Classified Employees

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 07:25:00 PM

The Berkeley Unified School District sent out at least 62 pink slips to classified employees Thursday to offset cuts to state public education funding, district officials said. 

On Wednesday night, the Berkeley Board of Education voted unanimously to approve the cuts, which will take place at the end of the current school year. 

The district is required to notify classified employees 45 days in advance of their last working day. 

Berkeley Council of Classified Employees President Paula Philips told the Daily Planet that the district sent out 57 layoff notices to her bargaining unit, including para-professionals working in classrooms, office technical staff, secretaries, clerks and accountants in business services, and others. 

Philips said that some members of Local 39, the union for stationery engineers working in Berkeley’s public schools, would also receive the notices. 

“It’s a disruption to their lives,” Philips said of the layoffs. “It’s a morale buster. There’s a lot of uncertainty. They want to know if they will get unemployment over the summer, if they are entitled to unemployment and if they will be called back by the district.” 

District officials said they would be doing their best to rescind the layoffs. 

However, Superintendent Bill Huyett remarked that the worst was not over yet because more classified jobs might be slashed in the future.  

Philips said 11 classified employees at the Berkeley Adult School—including clerks, budget analysts and computer technicians— would have their work hours and years reduced since the adult education program was planning to move from a 12-month schedule to a 10- or 11-month schedule next year to offset a $1 million budget deficit. 

The board will approve the schedule change at a later date. 


Students, Parents Thank School Board for Preserving Bilingual Program

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 09:40:00 PM
Angelica Perez talks with Franklin State Preschool and Parent Nursery students Isabella Perez and Amalia Flores at Wednesday night's Berkeley Board of Education meeting, just before they joined with many other students and parents in thanking the school board for preserving the school's half-day Spanish bilingual program.
Riya Bhattacharjee
Angelica Perez talks with Franklin State Preschool and Parent Nursery students Isabella Perez and Amalia Flores at Wednesday night's Berkeley Board of Education meeting, just before they joined with many other students and parents in thanking the school board for preserving the school's half-day Spanish bilingual program.

A large number of parents and students from Franklin State Preschool and Parent Nursery showed up at the Berkeley Board of Education meeting Wednesday night to thank the district for not changing the school’s half-day Spanish bilingual program. 

Parents were concerned that the program might be threatened by the state’s recent decision to integrate its preschool and parent nursery program with the Early Childhood Education program.  

District Superintendent Bill Huyett assured them Tuesday that the changes at the state level would not affect the program or how it was delivered. “We fully understand that the program at Franklin serves families differently from our other preschool programs, and we do not want to change that,” Huyett said in a letter to parents. “We still have to work out some of the details at the district level, but from the perspective of students and parents, the transition will be seamless.” 

Franklin’s half-day bilingual program, which is said to be the only one of its kind in the East Bay, has helped children from low-income families for the past 50 years. 

 


School Board Tells City to Proceed With Pools Plan

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 06:40:00 PM

The Berkeley Board of Education voted unanimously Wednesday night to ask the city to proceed with an environmental review of the citywide pools master plan. 

The board also affirmed the Berkeley Unified School District’s willingness to host the warm water pool—located at Berkeley High School’s Old Gym—at the West Campus, the former site of the Berkeley Adult School. 

Berkeley Unified collaborated with the city last year to assess the aquatic needs of the community and construct a new warm pool. Under Berkeley High School’s South of Bancroft Master Plan, the landmarked Old Gym and the warm pool inside it will be demolished in June 2011. The joint project also sought to fund renovations or other improvements necessary for Berkeley’s outdoor community pool centers and to outline options for new pools. 

An aquatic task force formed last fall incorporated extensive community input to create the master plan, comprising of a preferred option and two alternatives. 

“Community involvement was one of our strengths,” task force member Madelyn Stelmach—who also sits on the city’s Commission on Disability—told the board. “We went out of our way to do that.” 

Stelmach said the task force strove to serve the aquatic needs of the entire community amid a tough economic climate, funding constraints and a variety of opinions. 

Task force member Seth Goddard added that the limited land the district was offering for the West Campus pools was an additional challenge. 

The plan favored by the group seeks to construct a new 25-yard by 25-meter outdoor competition pool and renovate the locker rooms at King Middle School, removing the existing instructional and dive pools for $4.8 million. 

It will renovate the aging instructional pool and locker rooms at Willard Middle School and convert the dive pool into a children’s play pool with waterslides for $4 million. 

West Campus will have a new 2,790-square-foot, 92-degree indoor warm water pool and a 3,510-square-foot indoor recreational pool, costing around $20.3 million. The existing lap pool will be destroyed. 

Describing the West Campus as the master plan’s “focal point,” Goddard said the investment would have a positive influence on the surrounding neighborhood, one of the poorer and more disadvantaged parts of Berkeley. 

The overall price tag for all three projects is nearly $30 million, with operational costs ranging between $945,000 and $1.2 million—numbers that are much higher than current budgets. 

Goddard attributed this increase to the fact that under the new plan, the school district would no longer be paying utility bills for the warm pool. Instead, the city would be covering all costs. 

Currently the district pays utility bills for the warm water pool and covers part of the cost for the West Campus pool. The city covers the rest of the costs for the West Campus pool and all the expenses of King and Willard pools. 

The two alternative plans suggested by the task force reduce the West Campus warm water pool to nearly half the size proposed in the preferred plan and eliminate the new recreational pool. 

The first alternative talks about repairing the existing West Campus lap pool and operating it at the current hours. The second alternative proposes fixing the pool, but shelves plans to run it until funding becomes available. 

Construction costs for the two alternatives range between $18 to $16 million. 

Operational costs for both options still run higher than current expenses, with the second proposal, at only $15,000 above present-day costs, turning out to be the least expensive of all three options. 

JoAnn Cook, a task force member, told the board that the smaller warm pool suggested in the alternatives would not benefit its users. 

“We did a good job of designing the preferred plan and had good input from community groups, but it is a bit expensive,” she said. “We were pushed to develop alternative plans that would come in on a lower figure and that’s where we went off. There isn’t any way that a 14,000-square-foot pool will be adequate for our programs,” she said. “Once it’s built, keep in mind, we can’t change that.” 

School Board Director John Selawsky expressed some reservations about the exorbitant construction costs. 

He said the original goal of the district and the city had been the replacement of the warm pool and possible construction of new pools. 

“It’s grown to a much larger animal than the warm water pool,” he said. “Parts of this is a mistake—in this economy, it is a mistake. We will have a hard time convincing voters to support the plan.” 

The city is considering putting the pools on the June ballot for next year. 

Selawsky said he would “gladly support moving the warm water pool to West Campus,” but asked the task force to scale back on the rest of the plan. 

Goddard informed the board that the deteriorating condition of the Willard pool made its renovation extremely important. 

Huyett reminded the board that the school district had only a marginal interest in the pools. 

“Most of the decision-making will be done by the city,” he said. “We accept having the warm pool at West Campus, but this is not really our ball game. We as a board have said consistently that we don’t want to take responsibility for designing or operating the pools. We don’t want to be the decision maker on what goes on in the property. We are just leasing the land to the city.” 

The task force is scheduled to present the master plan to the Berkeley City Council April 21. The council is expected to vote May 5 on whether to ask city officials to move ahead with the environmental review. 

 

 

 


Planning Commission Approves New Downtown Plan

By Richard Brenneman
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 06:38:00 PM

Planning commissioners voted 7-2 Wednesday, April 15, to approve their taller, denser rewrite of the plan that will guide the development of downtown Berkeley for the next 20 years. 

With the plan for downtown Berkeley out of the way, commissioner and non-profit housing developer Teresa Clarke said the city should now make similar moves to pave the way for major housing projects near the North Berkeley and Ashby BART stations. 

“What are we going to do to get more tall buildings near BART in North and South Berkeley?” asked Clarke after the vote. She compared neighbors who call taller buildings neighborhood-ruining “catastrophes” to critics of affordable housing projects who first say “the sky is falling,” then later hail the projects as “wonderful.” 

While several of the seven commissioners who supported their revisions described the result as an affirmation of the original plan drafted over the course of two years by the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee (DAPAC), commissioner and former DAPAC member Gene Poschman said the rewrite had gutted DAPAC’s vision. 

City Councilmember Jesse Arreguin, who attended Wednesday night’s meeting and several other commission sessions, agreed. 

“I have very serious concerns about the plan the commission has adopted,” he said. “It is not representative of the plan DAPAC adopted by a 17-4 vote, and which came out of two years of intense debates and concerns. Not only has the commission decoupled DAPAC’s requirement of green features and affordable housing requirements to build high-rises, but they have significantly expanded the area where high rises can be built, which will create serious problems for neighbors.” 

It is up to the City Council to decide the plan’s final shape, though the possible parameters have been defined by the already completed environmental impact report (EIR) which is based on the Planning Commission’s expanded development parameters, and not the lower skyline approved by DAPAC. 

While the majority of DAPAC members came from outside the development community, six of the commission’s nine members have drawn their paychecks from the building sectors, including three private-sector planners (Chair David Stoloff, Victoria Eisen and Clarke), two architects (James Samuels and James Novosel) and an attorney who represents developers (Vice Chair Harry Pollack). 

They were joined in their vote for the plan by Larry Gurley, a college mathematics professor. 

The two opposing votes came from retired professor Poschman—Arreguin’s appointee—and Patti Dacey, a private investigator picked by Councilmember Kriss Worthington. 

The plan, whatever its final form, results from the confluence of two powerful forces: the expansion plans of the University of California and the mandates of regional government in the form of the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG). 

The immediate impetus for the plan was the settlement agreement ending a city lawsuit challenging the university’s Long Range Development Plan 2020, which calls for the school to build 850,000 square feet of off-campus buildings in the heart of downtown Berkeley. 

In exchange for dropping the suit, the city accepted mitigation payments to offset impacts of the university expansion on city services and to help pay for the costs of creating a new downtown plan to accommodate the growth, giving the university an equal say in approving the ultimate draft. 

The May 25, 2005 agreement mandated City Council approval of the final draft within 48 months, calling for reductions in mitigation payments by $15,000 for every month of delay. City Planning and Development Director Dan Marks told commissioners earlier this month that university may agree to a brief delay to allow the City Council more time to iron out details of the final draft. 

ABAG’s role came from its mandate that Berkeley be willing to build more than 2,700 new residential housing units by 2014, and refusal could result in the loss of some state and federal funds administered through the regional agency. 

Marks told DAPAC members that the city wanted to allocated most of the units to the downtown area, since opposition from other neighborhoods could prove insurmountable. 

While the DAPAC majority held that the new housing could be accommodated without recourse to a significant number of high-rises, the committee compromised by allowing limited numbers of taller buildings in exchange for affordable housing “in-lieu” funds and payments to provide a public and environmental amenities. 

Samuels and others from the commission majority said the requirements had been rendered moot by the economic crash and the pressing need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But Juliet Lamont, a former DAPAC member and Sierra Club activist, told commissioners earlier this month that the environmental organization backs the DAPAC plan as the greener of the two documents. 

 

Comments 

Before commissioners began their own discussion of the final draft, several audience members offered their own comments, including downtown Berkeley’s leading private-sector developer, Patrick Kennedy. 

While the commission had already eliminated many of DAPAC’s would-be requirements for high-rise development, Kennedy said even more reductions were needed if the city center was to become anything other than “a fright show,” a “graveyard” peopled by doorway-sleeping drunks. 

“I’ve been trying to rent commercial space on Center Street for two years, and I haven’t had a single inquiry from a retailer,” he said. 

While Kennedy said he backed the commission’s elimination of additional payments for green amenities, he said the city needed to go further by eliminating all development fees currently charged. Property taxes alone would suffice, he said, citing the $484,988 in property taxes and business license fees paid last year by the Gaia Building, a structure built by Kennedy’s Panoramic Interests and subsequently sold to Equity Residential, a company owned by Chicago real estate investor Sam Zell. 

“Downtown is on life support,” Kennedy said, and only new housing construction will save it, a view echoed by another retired developer, Dorothy Walker, formerly of UC Berkeley’s capital projects department.  

But architect Novosel, who later voted for the plan, said, “I actually like the downtown.” 

Another developer echoed Kennedy’s views. “Our downtown is really deteriorating,” said Ali Kashani, a developer whose latest partner is the city’s former Land Use Planning Manager Mark Rhoades.  

 


Watchdog Group Sues Air District

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 07:12:00 PM

A Berkeley-based environmental group is suing the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, alleging that the agency violated the California Public Records Act by denying access to Pacific Steel Casting’s Odor Control Plan.  

The lawsuit, filed in the San Francisco Superior Court on April 6 by the Healthy Air Coalition, seeks to “compel the Bay Area Air Quality Manage-ment District to disclose specific public records, and to void unlawful ‘guidelines’ adopted by the air district that delay, interfere with, and prevent prompt release of certain records, all brought under the Public Records Act.”  

Environmental activists, community organizers and Berkeley chave for years pressured the air district to ask Pacific Steel—located at Second and Gilman streets—to control what they say are odors and toxic emissions harmful to human health.  

The issue received national attention in December when USA Today ran a report that identified three West Berkeley schools in the top 1 percent of educational institutions in the country with poor outdoor air quality. 

Although some community members charged that Pacific Steel was responsible for the problem, the foundry responded by saying that it was unfair to point the blame in one direction. 

Carole Marasovic, a spokesperson for the Healthy Air Coalition, said she hoped the lawsuit would force BAAQMD to release the Odor Control Plan to the community. Pacific Steel submitted the plan to the air district in October 2008 after being cited for multiple air-quality violations.  

The Oakland-based First Amendment Project, the coalition’s lawyers, claim that BAAQMD denied all requests by the Healthy Air Coalition, private citizens and governmental agencies for a copy of the Odor Management Plan, on the grounds that it contained trade secrets, and that BAAQMD instead invited Pacific Steel to file a lawsuit against BAAQMD to prevent release of any part of the plan.  

BAAQMD Director of Communications Lisa Fasano said the plan the air district had received from Pacific Steel had “trade secrets” marked on it. When trade secrets are identified as such, Fasano said, the air district goes back to the company and informs it that it has a certain amount of time to respond about whether the company would like to release the information to the public. If the company fails to respond within the given time frame, the air district can go ahead and release the information.  

In this particular case, Fasano said, Pacific Steel declined to make the information public.  

“We told that to the Healthy Air Coalition,” Fasano said.  

Fasano added that BAAQMD was also being sued by Pacific Steel Casting to prevent the air district from releasing the Odor Control Plan.  

“It’s now in the hands of the court to decide whether the information is a trade secret or not,” she said of Pacific Steel’s lawsuit. “The air district does not make that determination.”  

The Healthy Air Coalition contends that the community has a right to know about the steel foundry’s air emissions and its plans to control them. Coalition spokesperson Marasovic said BAAQMD’s “anti-consumer and corporate-biased guidelines,” under which they “invited Pacific Steel” to sue them to prevent releasing the report, was a violation of the Public Records Act.  

“They have shirked their responsibility,” she said. “BAAQMD was established to protect residents from unhealthy air quality. Yet it is BAAQMD who has made it difficult for the community to obtain information about these odors and emissions, information intended to be public under the California Public Records Act. It is BAAQMD that has forced us to challenge its guidelines to protect the rights of all citizens seeking public information regarding corporate polluters.”  

Fasano said she could not immediately comment on whether the air district had guidelines under which it had asked Pacific Steel to sue them.  

“I don’t have the answer to that question right now,” she told the Daily Planet. 

“I think the issue in the Healthy Air Coalition lawsuit is whether or not we can withhold the documents.”  


City Pools Plan Goes Before City Council, School Board

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 07:14:00 PM
Richard Challacombe, 88, lets go of his walker and climbs down the steps
              of the warm water pool inside Berkeley High School’s landmarked Old Gymnasium
              Wednesday evening.
Riya Bhattacharjee
Richard Challacombe, 88, lets go of his walker and climbs down the steps of the warm water pool inside Berkeley High School’s landmarked Old Gymnasium Wednesday evening.
Daniel Rudman (center), is surrounded by his friends Lori Kossowsky, Kate
              Berne-Barnett, Faye Clipson, Pam Scullen, Rich Moor and other warm pool
              users after a water-chi class Wednesday.
By Riya Bhattacharjee
Daniel Rudman (center), is surrounded by his friends Lori Kossowsky, Kate Berne-Barnett, Faye Clipson, Pam Scullen, Rich Moor and other warm pool users after a water-chi class Wednesday.

The Berkeley Board of Education and the Berkeley City Council were getting ready to vote on whether the city should proceed with an environmental review of plans to expand and improve the city’s pools as the Daily Planet went to press on Wednesday, April 15. If the board made its decision at its April 15 meeting, it will be found on the Planet website at berkeleydailyplanet.com. 

City officials and the Berkeley Board of Education joined forces last year to create a citywide pools draft master plan, which would help them get an idea about which public swimming pools and aquatic programs need to be upgraded or replaced.  

A task force was formed in September, and last month, after more than a dozen meetings and three public workshops, the draft master plan was finalized. The plan contains the task force’s preferred option as well as two alternatives.  

After reviewing at least 18 different pool sites owned by the city, the school district and a private entity—East Bay Iceland—the task force recommended keeping pools at Willard and King Middle schools and West Campus.  

West Campus would have a 2,790-square-foot indoor warm water pool and a 3,150-square-foot indoor recreation pool. The King pool would be expanded to 25 yards by 25 meters.  

The proposed warm pool is similar in size to the current warm water pool at the Berkeley High School Old Gym, which is slated for demolition in 2010 to make room for the school’s educational and athletic needs.  

Often described as a lifeline for the disabled East Bay community, the warm water pool has hundreds of supporters who have lobbied the city and the school district for years to save what they consider a valuable community resource.  

Both the West Campus and the Willard recreational pools will also have water features in which children can play.  

All three pools can be easily accommodated within their existing boundaries, according to a report by the school district’s facilities director, Lew Jones. The fencing at the north end of West Campus would be straightened out to add about 10 feet to the current pool.  

The price tag for the project is nearly $30 million, with $20.3 million going toward West Campus. The King and Willard pools will cost $4.8 and $4 million respectively.  

Two alternative options were also approved by the task force, both of which include a smaller warm pool and no recreational pool at West Campus. Constructions costs for the alternatives would fall between $16 million and $18 million.  

Jones told the Daily Planet that the board will decide at the meeting whether it would be appropriate for city officials to go ahead and hire a California Environmental Quality Act analyst who would examine the preferred option and the two alternatives.  

“There will be no decision about whether there is a good plan or a bad plan,” Jones said. “We want to study the most complicated plan. The environmental review will help to decide which plan will happen.”  

Jones said the task force had started with a large number of sites for the warm pool, including the Berkeley Iceland site and the old Hillside school property, but had eventually narrowed it down to four or five.  

“When we made the first cut, a whole group of sites fell off the table pretty quickly,” he said. “We didn’t want to shut people out, so we looked at all the possibilities.”  

The pools task force is scheduled to make a detailed presentation about the plans to the Berkeley City Council April 21.  

“I expect there will be quite a bit of dialogue about the preferred option at the council level,” he said.  

The council is scheduled to vote on whether to proceed with the environmental analysis on May 5.  

Depending on the outcome, the city will hire a consultant for the job.  

Jones said that it could take up to a year to decide the exact scale and size of the warm water pool.  

He said the City Council would have to vote on the plan in February or March of next year in order to put it onto the June 2010 ballot.  

Jones said the school district was presuming that, under a new plan, all the pools would be run by the city. Currently the district pays utility bills for the warm water pool and covers part of the cost for the West Campus pool. The city covers the rest of the costs for the West Campus pool and all the expenses of King and Willard pools.  

“If the school district needs to use the pool, we will make an arrangement with the city about the number of days and hours,” Jones said. “It just makes sense to have one clean budget instead of multiple budgets.”  

In his report to the board, Jones remarks that the current economic crisis will make it a challenge for the city to “absorb any new operational costs,” explaining that all the plans, and especially the alternatives, were developed with capital costs and operating costs in mind. City officials have said from the beginning that they need a plan that will be cost-neutral to the city’s general fund. Jones’ report says that this goal has been met in each plan “to varying degrees, depending upon the hours of use.”  

For more information on the citywide pools draft master plan visit www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ContentDisplay.aspx?id=28522.  

 

Correction: This story has been amended to correct an editing error regarding the West Campus proposal, which would include an indoor recreation pool, not outdoor.

 


Council to Vote to Send Refuse Fee Increase to Property Owners

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 07:14:00 PM

Berkeley property owners may soon be asked to approve a 20 percent increase in city refuse fees in a somewhat controversial “majority protest” mail-in voting procedure. The unusual ballot process automatically counts votes not received as “yes” votes. 

The Berkeley City Council is scheduled to consider sending the rate increase proposal to property owners at the council’s next regular meeting, Tuesday, April 21, following a March 23 Zero Waste Commission decision recommending the increase. 

If approved by property owners, residential refuse collection rates for the average 32-gallon can would rise $4.52 per month, from $22.58 to $27.10. Commer-cial rates would rise by a similar percentage. City Manager Phil Kamlarz says the measure will fail only if an absolute majority of all owners of commercial and residential property in the city send in no-votes to City Hall. 

Based on the city’s interpretation of state law, Berkeley citizens not owning property in the city will not be allowed to vote in the referendum, while nonresidents owning property in the city will be allowed to vote. 

Each property owner will be allowed one vote for every piece of property he or she owns in the city from which refuse is collected separately. 

Kamlarz says that the voting procedure is actually more democratic than the previous city system of approving refuse fees, and, in addition, the procedure is state-mandated under a recent state court ruling. His contention is that an absolute majority of all eligible property owners, not just those who send back ballots, must vote no for the proposal to fail. 

Further, Berkeley city officials say the increase is necessary to stave off a projected deficit in the city’s refuse fund that could reach close to $19 million by June 2013. 

In past years, Berkeley and other California cities were allowed by state law to raise refuse fees by a simple majority council vote following a public hearing. No citizen or property owner vote was required. 

In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 218, which, among other things, required majority voter approval for all local general taxes and two-thirds voter approval for all local special taxes. 

In the 10 years that followed, the Prop. 218 voter approval requirements were not applied to many of the service fee increases under the jurisdiction of cities within the state. 

In 2006, however, in a case entitled Bighorn-Desert View Water Agency v. Verjil, the California Supreme Court ruled that the Prop. 218 citizen approval requirements also applied to a broader range of city fee increases. That ruling is now being applied to refuse collection rate increases. 

The procedures for the “majority protest” vote on the proposed fees are spelled out in Prop. 218. Under those requirements, notice of the proposed fee increase and return mail-in ballots must be mailed to all the owners of property who would be subject to the proposed increase. Those notices and mail-in ballots must be mailed out to the property owners at least 45 days before a scheduled public hearing on the proposed increase. The ballots will then be counted at the public hearing. 

Berkeley resident Barbara Gilbert, who is opposing the rate increase, calls the rate increase proposal “another way of imposing higher taxes on city residents,” and says that the method of balloting being adopted is flawed in several ways. 

“There’s no opportunity for opposing ballot arguments on the ballots being mailed to the parcel holders,” Gilbert said by telephone. In addition, she said that ballots will be sent out to some 31,000 parcel holders in the city. “And in order for the rate to be rejected, 50 percent plus one of the parcel holders receiving the ballots must send back their ballots with a ‘no’ vote.” Gilbert called that threshold “almost impossible to achieve” even if there is majority sentiment against the increase. 

Gilbert also said that, by not using the parcel holder vote mandated in Prop. 218 after the measure was passed in 2006, “apparently, the city has been raising refuse fees illegally” since that time, and she suggested that citizens may be filing lawsuits against the city to collect refunds from past refuse fee increases. 

Kamlarz’s office is proposing that the council approve a public hearing on the proposed refuse fee increase for June 23, with the refuse collection rate increase to become effective July 1, if approved by the city’s property owners. 

 


Gaia Building Permit Review Postponed; Building’s Owners Given Month to Negotiate with Marsh Theater

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 07:15:00 PM
The Gaia Arts Center has been the subject of controversy following a few rowdy parties which drew police to the scene.
Richard Brenneman
The Gaia Arts Center has been the subject of controversy following a few rowdy parties which drew police to the scene.

The Berkeley Zoning Adjust-ments Board last week postponed discussion on whether the Gaia Building was adhering to its use permit, in order to give its owners, Equity Residential, a month to negotiate leasing terms with the Marsh Theater. The zoning board will resume the discussion May 14.  

Gaia’s permit mandates that a certain proportion of cultural activities take place at the building’s ground-floor Gaia Arts Center in return for two more stories above what the city’s zoning law normally allows.  

Originally, the Gaia Bookstore was set to move into the 10,000-square-foot space, but the store went out of business before construction was completed in 2004.  

Later attempts to find suitable cultural use for the space were unsuccessful.  

In 2007, Equity bought the Gaia Building from local real estate developer Patrick Ken-nedy, who retained a lease under which his company, Panoramic Interests, has rented out Gaia Arts for various events, including weddings, bar mitzvahs, parties and church services, which some argue abuse the “cultural use” requirement.  

Last fall, the Zoning Board agreed, under a request from Equity, to give the landlords six months to hire a consulting firm to prepare and implement a marketing plan for Gaia Arts.  

Berkeley Deputy Planner Wendy Cosin did not elaborate on the report at the meeting because the board voted to continue the discussion.  

Prepared by management consultant Niloofar Nouri, the report compares Gaia Arts with similar venues in the Bay Area and evaluates the amount of space potential tenants would require. The report is based on 19 interviews, informal conversations, an online survey, and site visits and tours.  

Nouri represented Kennedy in the redevelopment of the former Act I & II Theater on Center Street, a project approved by the Zoning Board last year.  

The Daily Planet was unable to reach Nouri for comment before press time.  

In her report, Nouri says that many Bay Area cultural organizations and theater groups are clueless about the Gaia Building’s existence and misinformed about its history.  

She adds that, despite the high concentration of cultural nonprofit organizations in the Bay Area, most are seeking smaller mixed-use office and rehearsal space.  

“In the case of the rare theater companies whose performances have limited cast and set requirements,” the report states, “the economics of the space make it unfeasible to lease.”  

A company must have an annual budget of $300,000 to rent Gaia on a permanent basis at current rents, the report points out, and organizations with similar budgets already have dedicated theater spaces and are committed to stay there, based on arrangements for city subsidies and a strong relationship with their audience.  

The report also talks about the current economic crisis, which has made it difficult for the creative and performing arts to flourish and receive grants and endowments.  

Average monthly expenses for Gaia Arts come to $18,881, which includes $7,500 in rent and around $10,000 in part-time staff.  

The report recommends extensive outreach to Bay Area cultural nonprofits likely to rent the space or revising the use permit to include mixed-use office and rehearsal space instead of a performance-event space.  

Another option, the report says, would be to lease the space, as well as that occupied by Anna’s Jazz Island, another ground-floor tenant at Gaia Arts, to the same tenant, which it suggests would settle disputes arising from noise and other issues.  

Cosin also informed the board about two out-of-control teen parties that took place at Gaia Arts in the last six months, one of which ended with gunshots.  

Both events attracted between 250 and 300 people, she said, and resulted in police action and neighboring businesses closing early to avoid unruly crowds.  

Cosin told the board that Kennedy had agreed not to hold any more teen dance or music events at the venue.  

“We don’t see any imminent problems,” she said. “If a theater company takes over, then these problems are unlikely to happen.”  

In the past, Cosin said, the city has closed down businesses due to rowdy behavior.  

Berkeley’s municipal code allows the Zoning Board to hold a public hearing for an abatement procedure that would give city officials more control over out-of-control parties at the Gaia Building.  

Board Member Terry Doran said that it would be premature to have a discussion on “nuisance abatement” without finding out how the negotiations with the Marsh Theater went. 

The Marsh Theater has held performances at the Gaia Building in the past. 

“We would love to come back,” said Stephanie Weisman, the theater’s founder and artistic director. “But there are some issues we still have to work on. We have to see if it’s financially viable for us.” 

Weisman said the theater had occupied the Gaia Arts Center all through 2006 and the first half of 2007, when the building was still owned by Kennedy. The Marsh subleased the space from a catering company at that time. A colleague of Weisman’s who knew Anna de Leon of Anna’s Jazz Island, had alerted her about the venue.  

“We were able to perform on weekends at first, and that was great,” she said. “But then we moved to weekdays, only because the caterers needed the space.” 

Weisman said the Marsh had to move out of Gaia Arts in 2007 after being told that the “catering company was not leasing anymore.” 

“We were told that things were up in the air,” she said. 

Weisman said, if the Marsh succeeded in finalizing the deal with Gaia Arts, then the focus would be on re-creating the old experience. 

“In time we’ll need to put in risers and things like that, but that’s all still to be determined,” she said. 


Award Will Help Animal Care Groups During Tough Times

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 07:15:00 PM

The Berkeley Alliance for Homeless Animals Coalition will receive $474,200 on April 23 for winning the Maddie’s Fund Lifesaving Award.  

The award, given by Maddie’s Fund and the Pet Rescue Foundation, a family foundation funded by Workday and PeopleSoft, will help the coalition to care for hundreds of homeless animals.  

The coalition consists of the Berkeley East Bay Humane Society, the City of Berkeley’s Animal Care Services and Home at Last, a Berkeley-based rescue organization. The Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society will receive $200,240, Berkeley Animal Care Services will receive $176,320 and Home at Last Animal Rescue will receive $97,440.  

The coalition was formed when the East Bay Humane Society submitted the application for the award last August on behalf of all three groups.  

Katherine S. O’Donnell, director of development and communications at the Berkeley East Bay Humane Society, said the award would help the shelter weather the economic downturn.  

“Our plan is to save as many animals’ lives as possible within our means,” she said. “The award money provides us the necessary support, but we will also need to rely on private donations.”  

The organization, located at 2700 Ninth St., closed its veterinary hospital to the public Feb. 1 due to financial losses and is focusing its effort on caring for its shelter animals. Its funding comes from adoption fees, private donations and grants.  

Jill Posener, a member of the city’s Citizens Humane Commission, praised the East Bay Humane Society for taking the lead in applying for the award.  

“I think they did a great job,” Posener said.  

Kate O’Connor, manager of Berkeley Animal Care Services, said she was very excited about the award, which she said would go toward building the new Berkeley Animal Shelter on the northern end of Aquatic Park.  

“I am very appreciative of it,” O’Connor said. “The first thing that popped into my mind is that we could use it for the new shelter.” She said that even with a capital fundraising campaign the shelter’s construction fund is short by about $1 million.  

O’Connor said the shelter is caring for 20 percent more animals compared with this time last year. It can cost between $500 and $1,000 to take care of old, injured or sick animals. Daily costs for every rescue are about $15, and many of the animals stay as long as six months.  

Both the East Bay Humane Society and Home at Last take a lot of animals from the city shelter.  

Posener said that the city’s animal shelter could have used the money in various ways if it wasn’t facing a construction budget shortfall.  

“I am very happy,” Posener said. “But it’s disappointing that in the longer term we don’t get to use the money for programs. Instead we have to use it for bricks and mortar. If we were not in bad financial straits it could have been used for education programs, additional spay and neuter sessions and broadening our outreach. It could also have been used to address staff shortage—the shelter has been having to close because of the lack of staff.”  

Posener said the funding shortage for the new building was so severe that city officials, in order to reduce expenses, were considering eliminating kennels, medical facilities and the “green element” from its design.  

A bond measure approved by Berkeley voters is providing $7.2 million for the new animal shelter, and the city manager’s office is contributing another $1 million, she said, adding that the amount still wasn’t enough to buy or finish construction on a property of a suitable scale.  

The shelter plans to move from 2013 Second St. to the old “Helmet Building” at 1 Bolivar Drive, Posener said, which was previously used by the Berkeley Fire Department and also as a treatment center.  

“It will probably be two years before the new shelter is up and running,” she said. “The old building there hasn’t been demolished yet.”  

Home at Last, which does not have an office and instead has volunteers working from home, will be using the award money to pay off bills and save the rest, said Traude Buckland, the group’s treasurer.  

“With the economy the way it is, it’s nice to get a little extra, and nice to get the recognition,” Buckland said.  

Buckland said her group had been instrumental in getting the euthanasia rates at the Berkeley Animal Shelter down to less than 15 percent. Seven years ago the rate was 60 percent.  

The Berkeley Animal Shelter currently has the lowest euthanasia percentage of any municipal shelter in California, Posener said.  

Cats and dogs rescued by Home at Last are cared for at foster homes until they get adopted, which happens through the groups website or mobile adoptions every Saturday at Fourth Street and the first Sunday of every month at PetCo in El Cerrito.  

Buckland said the coalition would have to report annual animal rescue and adoption numbers for three years to Maddie’s Fund after winning the award.


More Program Cuts Lined Up For Berkeley School District

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 07:09:00 PM

The Berkeley Unified School District is planning to eliminate at least 25 classified employee positions in response to state public education budget cuts, district officials said Wednesday. 

Positions that will come under the chopping block include administrative assistants, clerks, custodians, sous-chefs and instructional specialists. Some employees will have their work hours reduced. 

District Superintendent Bill Huyett said the cuts were necessary because of reductions in revenues in categorical and restricted funds. 

“Those are not all of the layoffs that will be made,” Huyett warned, explaining that the district had not analyzed the general fund yet. 

The Berkeley Board of Education was scheduled to vote on the layoffs Wednesday, April 15, after the Daily Planet went to press. If the board made its decision at its April 15 meeting, it will be found on the Planet website at berkeleydailyplanet.com. 

“We regret the hardship this notification process places on employees and the uncertainty of their future employment status,” acting Assistant Superintendent Cliff Wong said in a report to the board.  

Wong said the district expected that many of the positions could be saved in the future, although some might have reduced hours and others be eliminated completely due to a loss in funding. 

The district handed out around 136 potential layoff notices to teachers by March 15 but was able to rescind half of them a week later. 

The district is also proposing to eliminate staff positions and programs at the Berkeley Adult School to address a $1 million budget deficit in the adult education program in 2009-2010. 

The list of reductions includes cutting back on conferance and travel expenditures and eliminating teaching and classified positions. 

The school board is scheduled to vote on the district’s recommendations in May. 

The adult school was able to meet the $750,000 funding shortfall for this year by dipping into its reserves.


Activists Call on Police Union to Apologize for Disrespecting Dellums

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 07:11:00 PM

An ad hoc group of Oakland community leaders and activists demanded on Tuesday that the Oakland Police Officers Association (OPOA) police union apologize for its role in preventing Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums from speaking at the joint funeral of the four Oakland police officers killed in the March 21 MacArthur Boulevard shootings. 

“The exclusion of Oakland’s mayor was more than a disrespectful affront to the mayor himself, it was an act of insubordination to Oakland’s governing body, and a back-handed slap in the face to all of the citizens of Oakland who pay the generous salaries of the members of the Oakland Police Department,” Oakland business leader Geoffrey Pete told a Tuesday afternoon press conference at Frank Ogawa Plaza in front of Oakland’s City Hall. 

Pete said that “excluding the voice of Oakland’s mayor from the funeral of the fallen officers deprived Oakland citizens of their official voice at this event, making our presence, our prayers and our condolences appear to be expendable.” 

Pete also said that in the future, the Oakland City Council make it mandatory practice that the city’s elected mayor be allowed to “speak at any public event where public funds are used to sponsor such an event.” 

Oakland Police Officers Mark Dunakin, John Hege, Dan Sakai and Erv Romans were all shot and killed by Oakland resident Lovelle Mixon during two separate March 21 shooting incidents in the vicinity of MacArthur Boulevard and 74th Avenue. Mixon was also killed in an exchange of gunfire with police. 

While various newspaper accounts of the massive March 27 Oracle Arena joint police funeral services for the four fallen officers attributed the request to keep Dellums from speaking to various family members of the officers, none of the family members themselves have come out publicly to confirm, and Oakland city officials have said that the request for Dellums to keep silent was handled through the OPOA. 

The joint funeral was paid for in part by OPOA and in part by the City of Oakland. 

At Tuesday’s press conference, PUEBLO Director Rashidah Grinage, a longtime monitor of Oakland police activities, called it “entirely inappropriate” and “insensitive” for police officials to “sanction the disrespect of the mayor.” 

And Oakland small business owner and Neighborhood Watch block captain Lynette Neidhardt read from a recent San Francisco Chronicle op-ed in which she said, in part, that Oakland residents are “tired of the potshots taken at the mayor by a Chronicle columnist; parts of the Police Officers Association who don’t want reform; and politicians who have been trying to run for mayor for the last four years by politically shooting down the elected mayor. To these individuals we say: Please get on board and be part of the solution. The mayor is accomplishing a lot and we can’t let pettiness torpedo his efforts.” 

A group of some 35 community leaders and activists attended the press event in agreement with the call for an OPOA apology, among them former Alameda County School Board Member Gay Plair Cobb, political activist Pamela Drake, East Bay MUD Board Member Bill Patterson, and Nation of Islam Minister Keith Muhammad. 


City Warns of Traffic Delays For University Ave. Repairs

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 07:01:00 PM
University Avenue will be subject to traffic delays through Oct. 30.
Richard Brenneman
University Avenue will be subject to traffic delays through Oct. 30.

Berkeley’s Public Works Department last week announced anticipated traffic delays and possible street closures due to street repairs on University Avenue, between Sixth and Grant streets. 

Over the next six monthS, contractors hired by the city will fix sanitary sewer lines, sidewalks and pavements, including: 

• Sewer improvements to replace aging sewer lines will be made from Sixth Street to Grant Street. 

• Sidewalk improvements, including fixing broken sidewalks, curbs and driveways and eliminating uplifts due to tree roots, will be made from Sixth to Sacramento. 

• Street paving and curb cut repair will be done from Sixth Street to San Pablo Avenue in the first phase. Depending on the federal stimulus money allocation, a second phase of street paving could smooth San Pablo to Sacramento. 

Construction will be done in phases until Oct. 30. Work hours will run between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, except in special circumstances.  

The city warns visitors and residents to expect traffic delays in certain spots. In the event that street closures are necessary, they will not exceed 12 hours at a time. 

Street parking will be forbidden along sections of University Avenue during construction hours because of the repaving. The affected blocks will have “no parking” signs posted by the city three days in advance, which will state exact hours and locations. Usual parking restrictions, including parking rules for street cleaning, will still be in effect. 

Access to residents’ driveways might be prohibited for most of the day during the repaving on their block, except during emergencies. 

The city does not anticipate any significant interruptions in sewer, water, electric, gas or phone service. City staff will distribute door hangers providing further information a minimum of three days before the start of sewer improvements on the block and before sewer lateral work is carried out. 

Business owners are encouraged to contact the city or the contractor to coordinate delivery schedules for their business. 

For emergencies, please call Public Works Customer Service at 981-6620.


Final EIR for Downtown Plan Released

By Richard Brenneman
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 07:08:00 PM

The final environmental impact report for the Downtown Area Plan, released Wednesday, April 15, has been posted online for public review. 

City planning commissioners were set to conduct their final hearing on their revisions of the plan Wednesday evening, giving it their imprimatur before handing it on to the city council for final action. 

While both the commission’s revisions and the original draft prepared by the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee (DAPAC) will go the City Council, the EIR that governs the new plan is based on the Planning Commission’s revisions, not the DAPAC document, which called for a downtown with fewer and lower high-rise towers than the commission’s rewrite. 

The EIR is available on the city’s website at www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ContentDisplay.aspx?id=33630. 


UC Berkeley Receives Record Number of Applications; Students Demand Increase in Minority Admissions

Bay City News
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 07:00:00 PM

UC Berkeley announced Tuesday, April 7, that the school had received a record number of applications for the 2009-2010 academic year and has accepted nearly 13,000 students to its fall freshman class. 

According to the university, 48,640 students applied to be incoming freshmen and 26.6 percent were accepted. The number is up slightly from last year, when 26.1 percent of freshman applicants were accepted. 

While some University of California campuses have had to reduce freshman enrollment in response to budget cuts, UC Berkeley’s target enrollment has remained the same as last year—about 4,300 students for the fall and another 950 for the spring semester, according to the university. 

Although more students already enrolled at the university have become eligible for financial aid, new applications for financial aid do not appear to reflect the current economic downturn, according to the financial aid office. 

Accepted students have until May 1 to decide whether to enroll at the university. 

About 20 UC Berkeley students marched through campus Wednesday, April 8, to protest the school’s admissions process, which they claim has denied acceptance to qualified minority applicants. 

The university announced Tuesday that black, Latino and American Indian students make up only 17 percent of the 13,000 students who have been accepted into the fall semester’s incoming freshman class, the same percentage of minority students the university accepted last year. 

The number of minority students that were accepted remained the same despite a rising number of qualified minority applicants, according to Ronald Cruz, a UC Berkeley law student and an organizer with the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary. 

Cruz also pointed out that the California Department of Education has reported that Latino students will make up the majority of kindergarten through 12th grade students in the state by the 2009-2010 school year. Minority students currently make up 44 percent of students graduating high school, Cruz said. 

Protesters are claiming that the university is “discriminating against Latina/o, black and Native American students by imposing a ceiling on the number of underrepresented minority students it admits,” Cruz said. 

“There is absolutely no ceiling for any type of student based on ethnicity—either in policy or in practice,” Assistant Vice Chancellor and Director of Undergraduate Admissions for UC Berkeley Walter Robinson said. 

Admissions are based on a comprehensive review of applicants in the context of the opportunities that have been made available to them, Robinson said. Gender, race, ethnicity or sexual orientation is not considered during the application process. 

The university had an affirmative action policy until 1996 when voters passed Proposition 209, which amended the state constitution to prohibit public institutions from considering race, gender or ethnicity. 

Before Proposition 209, the university accepted twice as many minority students as it currently accepts, according to Robinson. 

He said that, if the school were legally allowed to recruit students based on their race or ethnicity, he would do so, and he would be an advocate for a public policy change that would truly level the playing field and close the achievement gap between minority and non-minority students. 

Proposition 209 has, however, made it impossible for the university to influence the racial or ethnic makeup of the student body, Robinson said. 

He said that one of the unintended consequences of the proposition has, in effect, been to eliminate the university’s ability to look at someone in the totality of who they are. 

As a black man himself, Robinson said it was extremely difficult to be accused of participating in an admissions process that excluded people based on race. 

“We don’t admit students because they are the exception,” Robinson said. “We admit them because they are among the best and the brightest in the country. Do we want more? Of course we do. Who wouldn’t?” 

 


Police Blotter

By Ali Winston
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 06:58:00 PM

Glue in locks 

The glue bandit is back. Two more San Pablo Avenue businesses had their locks filled with a glue-like substance between Friday night and Saturday morning, according to the Berkeley police. On Saturday morning, an employee at Popeye’s on San Pablo and Delaware Street reported that both the front and back door locks were filled with some type of glue and could not be opened. Also that morning, the owner of the Country Cheese Shop on San Pablo Avenue and Addison reported the front door of the shop was filled with glue. Similar incidents took place last fall on San Pablo Avenue and Telegraph Avenue. 

 

Slept while robbed 

Two Prospect Avenue roommates slept while a burglar made off with a score of valuable electronics—from the very room in which they were sleeping. The two college-age men fell asleep around 3 a.m. on April 12. When they woke up around 9 a.m., an Xbox console, a laptop and a television were missing. According to police reports, they had left the front door unlocked the night before.  

 

Hate crime 

On April 10, Berkeley police were called to the 2900 block of Ellis Street for a report of a possible hate crime. A resident of the block told officers that sometime between midnight and 8 a.m., an unknown person had spray-painted a message referring to her son’s sexual orientation on the sidewalk in front of her house. Berkeley police are investigating the case as a bias crime. The mother reported no similar incidents prior to last Friday.


First Person: Hollywood Revisited

By Dorothy Snodgrass
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 06:57:00 PM

As an avid moviegoer since early childhood, I happily signed on for the Oakland Museum’s “Hollywood Revisited” tour, arranged through the History Guild this past March. The trip also included Los Angeles, about which I had misgivings, having been brainwashed by the late Herb Caen, who viewed this city with utter disdain. 

Departing from the Oakland Museum early on a Tuesday morning, with tour directors Inez Brook-Myers and Mary Lou Cianni at the helm, our coach headed south via the Grapevine. Passing through green, fertile vineyards and orchards, we arrived at our destination and settled into a Holiday Express Inn, our home for next four nights. 

The days that followed were, to put it mildly, packed to the brim with visits to movie studios, the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Fowler Museum at UCLA for its collection of exquisite textiles. Visiting Universal Studios, producer of Milk, we saw clips of this film and the outfits worn by Sean Penn. To our disappointment, at no time during our time in Hollywood did we spot a single movie personality. Perhaps today’s stars share Herb Caen’s contempt for “Tinsel Town.” 

Our most exciting and nostalgia-filled evening was that spent strolling leisurely along Hollywood Boulevard, stopping at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, famous the world over for the hand and foot prints of Hollywood’s most celebrated stars (the oldest being silent film actress Pola Negri). Tourists delight in having their pictures taken as they step into these footprints. Our group, of course, was much too sophisticated for such antics, although we did take photos. (I took one of Jimmy Durante’s nose, embedded in the pavement). A short distance from Grauman’s is the Kodak Theatre, site of the Academy Awards, evoking memories of all those actors, past and present, who have strode across that red carpet. Exhausted and famished after our walk, we next headed for dinner at Musso & Frank’s, the oldest restaurant in Hollywood. 

The final day of our trip took us to the Ronald Reagan Library, an event I had not particularly looked forward to. Surprisingly, this visit turned out to be a very rewarding experience. Driving up a long, winding road in the beautiful Simi Valley, we were all overwhelmed at the gorgeous panorama looking out over the valley. It was easy to understand why Ronnie chose to be buried there. Cynic that I am, I assumed the “library” would consist chiefly of Reader’s Digests and People magazines. Wrong! 

This impressive building presented a living history of America and of its presidents, with portraits of all 44 presidents lining the walls. As was to be expected, there were many statues of Reagan and videos of his films. It was our good fortune that an original Magna Carta, written on sheepskin in tiny print, was on display; there are only four such documents in existence. 

All in all, the “Hollywood Revisited” tour was pure joy for this dedicated movie aficionado who has never, ever lost her lifelong love for the magic make-believe world of motion pictures! 

 


Opinion

Editorials

Still More News About the News

By Becky O’Malley
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 06:39:00 PM

It’s time for another report on the state of the newspaper industry, Berkeley branch. This is beginning to look more and more like KQED’s pattern of incessant pledge breaks, but it’s unavoidable. Maybe it’s just our preoccupation, but it seems that every publication we pick up, every website we read, has a story on the dire and desperate fate of newspapers, which all over the country are dying like flies. Papers elsewhere, notably Europe and India, aren’t doing so well either. 

Katharine Mieszkowski at Salon.com has a good round-up of the bad news and some suggested strategies for counteracting it, notably converting to papers to nonprofits. Eric Alterman sums up his latest column in The Nation on the same topic thus: “It’s an argument for newspapers to give up on making a profit, stop pretending their editorial endorsements matter to anyone and embrace a nonprofit model for survival.” 

Well, sure. The traditional “Chinese wall” between newsrooms and financial management has ensured that most newsies don’t have to know too much about the sordid business of paying the bills, but it’s not quite as simple as they might imagine. Even for nonprofits, the money has to come from somewhere.  

Foundations, you say? In the current economy, all of the good works foundations are already supporting are hurting for money, and there’s just not enough money in all the foundations in the world to support all the newpapers in the world. Mieszkowski says that endowments have been down 40 percent even before newspapers started to get in line for money. 

Alterman’s comment refers to the federal tax law governing what are called 501(c)3 nonprofits—donations to these are tax-deductible for the donor, and they can get grants from similarly organized foundations. Tax-deductible nonprofits under federal law aren’t allowed to endorse candidates for office.  

Here at the Planet we’ve traditionally shied away from institutional endorsements anyhow, so that wouldn’t be a problem for us. We’re working toward getting nonprofit tax status so that individuals can get tax deductions for their contributions to the paper, but nonprofit status alone won’t guarantee revenue. 

Even without offering tax deductions, the support we’ve gotten from Planet readers recently is heartwarming. In the 11 weeks since Feb. 1, when we made our first major appeal for funds, we have raised about $21,000, most of it in the first few weeks. Last year contributions, largely unsolicited, totaled about $3,500. Contributions have come from 300 different people, on average about $70 per person. Ten people have agreed to give $10 a month, though in general the informal free-will subscription concept seems to have been too confusing for most readers. 

But do the math—it’s still less than $30,000 in a period where the paper has lost at least $40,000 each and every month.  

From the very beginning of our ownership of the Planet, now more than six years ago, we gave up on the idea of making a profit, as Alterman suggests, but that’s not enough. Advertising, here and everywhere, has continued to decline for many reasons well outside of local control. It almost seems that the retreat from newspaper advertising preceded retail sales losses, and might even have caused them. You’d think that when business is bad, it’s time to advertise, but advertisers haven’t seen it that way for many years now.  

(We’re happy to be able to report, by the way, that the ongoing campaign by a very small number of extremist fanatical crackpots—not to mince words—to persuade Planet advertisers to cancel seems to have had no effect at all. If anything, it’s strengthened the resolve of a growing loyal band who have been offended by the anti-Planet letters and haranguing telephone calls they’ve been getting from the lunatic fringe to keep on advertising.)  

It’s reasonable to expect that as the economy picks up, if it ever does, advertising might also pick up. But papers can no longer count on advertising alone to support their work. 

Is there another answer, for the Planet or for other news sources? It seems to us that the sober bottom-line is that consumers of news will have to support their own habit. For a long time readers (and television watchers and Internet junkies) have largely gotten a free ride, because the gathering and dissemination of information has been subsidized by others. Even the “free” news from Internet sources like Google News or the Huffington Post is primarily aggregation of work done and paid for by the conventionally supported media.  

Public radio is a partial exception. Public radio has been getting an increasing percentage of funding from what are euphemistically called “underwriters,” commercials by another name, though much more low-key and therefore less annoying. Still, both NPR and Pacifica are largely supported by listeners, though they receive a certain amount of foundation support as well  

The Nation magazine has been at this for years, with pretty good success. We just got a letter from them reporting excellent results from their March membership drive, when The Nation Associates gained more than 2,000 new members. That’s something to shoot for. 

We’ve decided to abolish the “free-will subscriber” category since it has confused so many. Mail subscriptions will still be available for those who need home delivery, but everyone else who’s ever contributed to the Planet, including as “subscribers,” is hereby designated a Supporter of the Planet Fund for Local Reporting. We’re working on getting nonprofit status to make such contributions tax-deductible, but don’t try deducting them just yet. In-kind contributions and volunteer services from Supporters are valued as much as cash. 

It seems clear to us, as of now, that there’s no single magic bullet that is going to create the sustainable local newspaper that we’d all like to see. It will take all the available revenue sources—advertising, foundations and reader support—to make it work, and it still might not be enough.  

Over the next two months, we plan to make an all-out effort to find out how much the readers in the urban East Bay really want to have a local paper, and what they’re willing to do to support one. We’re planning some special events for Supporters to give them a better idea of how their contributions are being used and to tap their wisdom on how the paper might survive. We hope you’ll join us in this effort.  


Public Comment

Letters to the Editor

Thursday April 16, 2009 - 06:40:00 PM

OFFICE DEPOT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

According to City Manager Phil Kamlarz, Office Depot was allowed to overcharge Berkeley by more than 50 percent “because there was a lack of attention to the management of our account.” He promised to do better: “Kamlarz said his office will monitor the remaining three months of the Office Depot contract on a quarterly basis.” 

Quarterly—that would be every three months. By an odd coincidence, that is exactly the number of months left in the Office Depot contract. This is very reassuring. Instead of paying no attention at all, the city manager now promises to monitor the proven price-gouger, Office Depot, once. Then, as added punishment, I guess, the city intends to exercise its option to extend its Office Depot contract through June of 2010. 

Behind these ridiculous antics is a more somber story: International vendor Office Depot, headquartered in Florida and with international sales of $14.5 billion, outbid local Radston’s on the city contract, and then hugely overcharged the city. Radston’s President Diane Griffin is about to be honored by the city for blowing the whistle on Office Depot. But Radston’s is no longer in Berkeley, and Office Depot still has our city’s office-supply business. Something is terribly wrong with this picture.  

I call on our City Council to make good use of this experience. Berkeley should prioritize supporting our local businesses, whose revenues circulate in our community and support beloved institutions like the Daily Planet. A local business would risk public shame and ostracism if it cheated its own city.  

Glen Hauer 

 

• 

SMALL SCHOOLS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I was a bit bemused by the recent article about claims of grade inflation at the Berkeley High small schools. Both my children were a part of the small schools program, my son for four years in CAS. As part of his college application process he wrote why he felt that small schools were so important and that the reason he was part of CAS and was sticking to it was his support for their mission to provide a quality learning experience for the spectrum of students that make up the BHS student body who come from a variety of socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. By way of bragging, let me say that he was accepted early admission to Brandeis and has made the dean’s list each semester there. He will always take pride in his training at CAS while at Berkeley High. 

David J. Cooper 

 

• 

MORE ON SMALL SCHOOLS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I regret that Berkeley High School’s small school program has been subjected to heavy criticism. While we have not followed the program in recent years, when our daughter participated in CAS under its founders, Rick Ayers and Bill Pratt, it was an extremely positive experience, not just academically (our daughter went on to Reed), but in bringing together a community of students from all backgrounds where they learned to get to know and appreciate one another across class lines which often divide high school students to their detriment. Most impressive was how the students worked as one raising money for trips to Vietnam and Cuba enabling all to go. I hope this esprit and rapport have not been lost. 

Tom Miller 

Oakland 

 

• 

CAS TESTIMONY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

My daughter graduated from the CAS program at Berkeley High Schohol, and with a BA comfortably finished in four years at UC Santa Cruz, is now trying to decide between graduate programs. She has been accepted at several top-flight universities. 

In the CAS program she became an excellent writer, vanquished some bouts of teenaged malaise, made longlasting friendships, successfully took the SAT and AP exams, including biology, and had a choice of colleges. She subsequently found that college reading material was about the same level as in the CAS classes. I was intrigued that when contemplating grad school she went right back to CAS teachers to discuss her options, and felt that they were trustworthy and informative, perhaps more so than some of her college professors. 

I believe that her continued connection with the program shows its value, and its success in creating a sense of community rather than drug-addled alienation in a huge school. The CAS program should continue and should be supported by the administration. 

Naomi Schiff 

Oakland 

 

• 

MORE SMALL SCHOOLS TESTIMONY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I cannot speak for all the small schools at Berkeley High, but I tutored a student in the CAS program for all four years of his high school career. I also had a daughter at Berkeley High who was not in a small school program a few years before I tutored this young man. I have to say if I had it to do over again I would have insisted that my daughter join the CAS program. It was clear to me that the teachers in the CAS program were tremendously committed to their students and to their subjects, and that was not always true in some of the classes my daughter took. Some teachers, in fact, seemed not to be doing much work at all.  

While tutoring the young man in the CAS program, I learned many things in the field of history that I had not learned at my prestigious high school, in my four years at a respected private college, or in graduate school at the University of California here in Berkeley (well, I didn’t take any history at CAL so that probably doesn’t count). I helped my student struggle through complex reports (he had a learning disability), read literature from countries all over the world. I listened to him talk about the exciting classroom discussions about world affairs and the personal lives of the characters of the books he was reading.  

He did get good grades and he earned them. He worked very hard for his grades.  

Connie Tyler 

 

• 

PROUD TO BE A PART OF IT 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

As the parent of one student in a BHS small school (International) and another who graduated in 2005 from another small school (CAS), I wanted to add our voice to those who believe, as my children both do, that the small school experience has been, and remains, exceptional, exciting, and, most importantly, reflecting the diversity of our community, state, country, and world.  

The small school movement as it has grown and matured at BHS has offered a unique and invaluable combination of high quality classes, student choice, and academic challenges. Accusations that these programs somehow dilute the grades of some students are unsupported and would be unconscionable both to me and to small school faculty I am sure.  

While the personal and educational horrors of the “achievement gap” continue, BUSD in general, and BHS small schools in particular, seem both aware of that and committed to fighting inequality with a combination of rigor and caring—the small schools seek to do just that. We are proud to be part of that. 

Stephen Blum  

 

• 

SMALL SCHOOLS FEEDBACK 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I would like as a parent and an educator contribute with a personal feedback about the experience of my son Arie Kuipers who graduated from the CAS program in June 2007. We are a French American family living in Berkeley since 1988. 

Arie came to Berkeley in 9th grade and was an average student with no great motivation for studies. After 3 years in the CAS program he was accepted at the University of Oregon, he is now for the second year in the row a straight A student with a major in Political Science. 

Arie is doing very well both as a student and as a young human being. His experience with CAS enabled him to do critical thinking which helped him down the road in College and in life in general. He is a boy who does not get easily brained washed and even if, at times, it was challenging he learned to stand up for his believes, and developed skills in political debates. 

He opened his eyes to world issues including the ones in Middle East. He went to the West Bank and Jerusalem last summ er, started studying Arabic and is now the president of a debate club that he founded on conflict in the Middle east.  

He wants to transfer back to Berkeley and apply for Law school later on. 

He is really motivated and wants to do make a difference in life. For me it is a huge success when I think that a few years ago he had no goals and envisioned going to the Army!!!! 

CAS is an excelllent program. Many of my former students graduated from it and are now doing very well.  

As parents and educators, we are planting seeds which grow later on. It takes time to see the fruit of our work sometimes but CAS has planted those seeds for our children. 

I will be happy to answer any questions you might have. 

Francine Kuipers 

 

• 

SCHOOL LUNCH PROGRAM 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The merits of the school lunch program aside, I must comment on the miserable marketing job that the “school lunch folks” are doing. 

I frequently drive past the banner-sized signs that have been put up at various school sites, pleading with students, parents or someone to “support our school lunch program.” What on earth are these people thinking? Are they selling a product or soliciting charitable donations?  

If the “school lunch folks” are indeed trying to sell a product, they should delegate the selling job to someone who has even just the slightest clue about marketing and advertising. They should create the desire in viewers, to want to purchase (or use) this product and not come across as if they were bleating lambs, soliciting alms for the poor. I suggest that the district engage the services of a competent ad agency to come up with a more aggressive campaign. It does not have to cost a lot; after all there is no need for expensive media buys, just some well-illustrated, professional-looking banners to make kids drool in anticipation of lunch period. Given Alice Waters’ connections, some agency might even be willing to take this on, on a pro bono basis. Of course they will then also have to deliver. But, based upon the recent articles, the food quality seems not to be an issue, only getting people to buy it, is. 

Peter Klatt 

 

• 

READY TO SACRIFICE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I for one am willing to give up my first amendment rights to rid the streets of menacing newsracks, which far outrank the economic crisis and global warming as threats to my cherished American way of life. 

Carol Denney 

 

• 

OTHER PERSPECTIVES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Good work Daily Planet! The outpouring of highly emotional letters condemning the Planet and Joseph Anderson and his commentary on the karmic justice of four Oakland cops being killed by Lovelle Mixon proves that dissent and free speech are alive and kicking. Unfortunately, the letter writers want that freedom to run only one way, theirs. 

Yes indeed there was much kicking—towards Mr. Anderson for even exercising his right to have his opinion published. (How dare he!) One writer went so far to say that Anderson’s piece shouldn’t have been printed because “[Berkeley] citizens want peace.” May I point out that peace is a nonviolent dynamic process? It’s not a passive, bland state where there is no dialogue between differing viewpoints. 

The Planet and its stalwart executive editor were assailed for printing the commentary. Anderson was called a sociopath, should be straitjacketed, ad nauseum. Such attacks are the products of amnesiacal logic. It is still very, very difficult for whites to give up white-skin privilege. This difficulty means that an African-American perspective on the killings is not only highly condemned (Go away! Go away!) but is clearly not comprehensible to the white letter writers. 

They have no idea where Mr. Anderson is coming from. Therefore, he must be insane, not them. This viewpoint is the most saddening and disturbing aspect of their letters. 

All the letter writers disassociate Mixon’s acts from the institutionalized violence that has been incessantly sicked on people of color since the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock. The letter writers are asking all of us to forget our bitter history as if that could help us understand Mixon’s actions. 

But it’s precisely because of that history that any encounter between people of color and the police instantly becomes racialized. When Mr. Anderson asks us to remember 400 years or just one year on MacArthur Boulevard with the police constantly stopping cars driven by other than white drivers for “routine traffic stops,” he is seen as a moral monster just as Mixon has been labeled. By this perverted thinking, Rodney King is guilty of causing his own beating and Oscar Grant III is guilty of causing his own death. 

By the way: How convenient that one day after the shooting, the Oakland Police Department announced that it had come up with DNA evidence linking Mixon to a rape. Not mentioned in the announcement is the fact that for previous DNA evidence to be valid, there must be a current sample taken for a certifiable match. No matter! “Mixon was a monster” is a more welcomed explanation for some minds to absorb. 

That write-off means nothing changes, not our criminalizing justice system, not our unequal schools, not soul crushing poverty, not armed cops on BART in preventing future confrontations, . 

People! We’ve got to do better. 

Maris Arnold 

 

• 

RACIST, CONDESCENDING  

EDITORIAL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

There are many black men who have never been stopped by the police. Ever. Not once. They don’t work at KPFA or the misnamed (as in lie) “Daily Planet.” While it’s true that blacks commit crime way in excess of their proportional numbers, not all are criminals who walk around with a giant chip on their shoulders. You remind me of the former, unlamented “Judge” Julie M. Conger who had a reputation for coddling black criminals and being a leftist white self-hater. She got her slimy ass off the bench and out of Berkeley. After the Daily Planet fails, you might consider the same. People have every right to boycott you and to peacefully encourage others to do the same. If I was an advertiser I’d pull out after garbage from Anderson, Damu and hyphen-Taylor, just for starters. I don’t agree with the Zionist crazies and “holocaustamaniacs” for their reasons for boycotting you. But one halfway good stand hardly makes up for years of the foulest, most putrid leftism. Every time another one of these lousy left-liberal (statist-collectivist) rags folds I have the same holiday in my heart that Begin did when hearing of the demise of British soldiers. Even the New York Times now has to rely on rightist Mexican mob money to stay afloat! I love it. Sales of Atlas Shrugged are going through the roof.  

Al Blue 

Richmond 

 

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FREE SPEECH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Seth Katz and Maureen Logan’s April 8 letter claims that the murderer of four Oakland cops, Lovelle Mixon, was a rapist. At this time that is unproven. I suggest they get their facts straight prior to writing. 

Regarding their assertions about what should, and should not, be printed, I say: Free speech only works when it applies equally to those whose views you find repugnant. 

Jeffrey L. Suits 

Kensington 

 

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TRADER JOE’S CHALLENGE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It’s unusual when one new retail project lands in the intersection of multiple Berkeley trends. But that’s why the Trader Joe’s opening next year on University at MLK will be watched so closely. It represents 1) a welcome change in use from auto-oriented to neighborhood-oriented retail; 2) a return to a full-selection grocery within walking distance of downtown; 3) an instructive example (with the rest of the building) of a mixed-used project bringing needed transit-friendly housing, retail and jobs to town. 

All that sounds great, but we’ll still have to see “how Berkeley they can be.” As the recent farmers markets’ decision to ban most packaging and all non-recyclable bags shows, many Berkeleyans will be shocked and disappointed if our new Trader Joe’s continues its current practice of selling most produce only in cardboard trays shrink-wrapped with plastic—“industrialized produce,” a seeming oxymoron that appears nowhere else in town. Even most of their store-brand shelved food, such as breakfast cereal, is excessively packaged—often with a cardboard box unnecessarily “protecting” an inner airtight bag that would do the job just fine on its own. Other TJ stores may be cool and bargain-oriented (I shop at one regularly), but they’re certainly not yet up to the green standards our Climate Action Plan calls for.  

Will Trader Joe’s adapt to Berkeley’s zero-waste commitments, or will they simply be out of touch? Their current fresh-produce policy is certainly not “tray cool.” 

Alan Tobey 

 

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PREPOSTEROUS PROPOSAL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Russ Tilleman writes (April 8) that no one in Berkeley has responded to his preposterous proposal, which he calls “The Express Lane” as though it were a solid idea thoughtfully conceived by people who know something about transportation planning, which he clearly does not.  

Well, I’ve lived in Berkeley since 1976, and I’m responding. 

Here’s my response: Whatever happened to the notion that Berkeley is a place filled with intelligent people with good ideas? When did Berkeley become a bastion of resistance to change, where people like Russ Tilleman are wasting so much time, energy, and paper as they stir up patently foolish discussions, making the rest of us long for the good old days when people argued about matters of real substance? 

Specifically referring to the obsessively car-oriented idea of “The Express Lane,” which would be advantageous to cars only and not to bus riders or pedestrians at all, whatever happened to the idea that Berkeley is trying to reduce the impact of the private automobile—not trying to build a freeway in disguise so drivers can go fast through those annoying intersections and stoplights? 

Give us a break, Russ, and move to Walnut Creek. No one even pretends to care about public transportation there—it’s so much more refreshing and honest than Berkeley’s hypocrisy about public transportation. Walnut Creek is one giant express lane. You’d feel right at home.  

And, by the way, Russ says Bus Rapid Transit would cost $400 million. Opponents of BRT have never been very strong on facts. The current price tag is approximately $250 million. Does Russ have any idea how much his glorious car-filled underpasses would cost? 

Hank Resnik 

 

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UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

We definitely do not need an “express lane” on Telegraph Avenue. The concept is to reduce the number of cars clogging our streets, not encourage more traffic. If we had a lot fewer cars, we might not need a bus-only lane for Bus Rapid Transit either.  

Steve Geller 

 

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AUTOS, TRANSIT, CLIMATE ACTION PLAN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Russ Tilleman’s proposal (“The Express Lane and Bus Rapid Transit,” April 8) to make it easier for users of private automobiles to drive the length of Telegraph “without stopping,” to the detriment of public transit service, continues to ignore current reality: Berkeley is not going to be building any new fast lanes for the added convenience of drivers. 

The best evidence is contained in the just-released final draft of our Climate Action Plan (http://tinyurl.com/finalcap), which the City Council should approve on April 21. Section 3B, “A Growing Problem: Dependence on Driving,” describes our recent history: while the population of Berkeley has remained essentially unchanged since the 1970s, the number of registered automobiles has increased by nearly 50 percent (to 59,500, nearly three for every five residents).  

So has the contribution to greenhouse gases (GHG) from this source: overall, nearly half of our GHGs now come from transportation (27 percent from gasoline- powered vehicles).  

The Climate Action Plan aims to reverse this trend. Its “vision for 2050,” by when our GHG production is to be reduced by 80 percent, includes this statement: “Public transit, walking, cycling, and other sustainable mobility modes are the primary means of transportation for Berkeley residents and visitors.” I find nothing in the CAP about helping drivers more easily speed through town “without stopping” on their way to local freeways. Berkeley, for well-considered reasons, is already a Transit First town and will only become more so. 

Mr. Tilleman needs to take off his driving cap and put on a thinking CAP instead. Eighty-one percent of Berkeley voters approved Measure G in 2006, and our resulting Climate Action Plan will help ensure that in years to come the fastest way down Telegraph will be on BRT, not in a private car.  

Len Conly 

Co-chair, Friends of BRT 

 

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BEST LAID PLANS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I understand that many Berkeley residents do not want any new buildings to be erected. I understand that many of the Planet’s readers are self-proclaimed preservationists. By all means, request that environmental impact report, check up on the contractor’s license. Make sure that no one involved in a new building project might make a profit. As we all know, Profit = Evil. This will of course require a sort of cognitive dissonance, since the houses that we, as Berkeley progressives, happen to live in were not built on a composite foundation of hopes and dreams, and the meter outside is run not by our good intentions, but by PG&E. Every single one of us is responsible in part for the impact of the whole. Those of us who are secure in our superiority should realize the impact that we have, even if we drive a Prius, even if we bring our reusable shopping bags to Berkeley Bowl, even if we compost and recycle and spare change. 

Matthew Mitschang 

South Berkeley 

 

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‘MY NAME IS RACHEL CORRIE’ 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

After all these years why hasn’t a theater group in Northern California staged a production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie, a play composed from the journal entries and e-mails of the 23-year-old from Washington state who was crushed to death in Gaza in March 2003 under a bulldozer operated by the Israeli army? The play had a successful run in London and the Royal Court got bids from around the world, including a theater in Israel, seeking to stage the production. The Royal Court wanted to stage the production in Rachel’s home country first. The New York Theatre Workshop agreed to stage the show in March 2006, but succumbed to “pressures” and delayed the production. The Royal Court took this as a cancellation.  

We keep hoping a theater group will have the courage to stage a production of the play. Given recent events in Gaza, the play seems timely. 

Judi Iranyi 

San Francisco 

 

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TRAFFIC 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In the April 8 Planet Russ Tilleman writes “David Vartanoff seems to feel that his neighborhood is somehow more important than mine, that he should have the right to simply move a problem from his street onto mine....”  

Having reread my March 19 letter, I fail to find that I made any such suggestion. As a nondriver, I am not interested in increasing traffic anywhere. I did, however, state that turning Telegraph into an expressway was a bad idea. Now, for Berkeley residents, please consider the following: As I went to campus Thursday last, my Telegraph bus was delayed in the last two blocks of Telegraph because the second traffic lane north of Durant was clogged by semi-trucks making merchandise deliveries. Having got off the bus, I hailed a parking control officer who responded that, under “the mayor’s orders” he could not ticket the trucks. Apparently “Green Tom” is more willing to increase smog from idling vehicles in a traffic jam than to enforce traffic laws.  

David Vartanoff 

 

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SCHOOLS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Congratulations to Berkeley Unified School District for the award of federal stimulus funds for serving low-income and special-needs students (Daily Planet, April 9). As a BUSD parent and former student school board member when I was a high school senior, I urge Superintendent Huyett and the school board to spend this money to set up systems that will reduce costs or increase revenue in the future. For example, 

1. Recover eligible expenses from health insurance companies. Establish a system to bill MediCal and other health insurance companies for special education services such as occupational therapy, speech services and staff time at IEP meetings. These are allowable costs under most insurance plans yet BUSD lacks a system to actually bill insurance companies. School districts throughout the state bill insurance companies, particularly MediCal, with great success. 

2. Reduce BUSD legal costs and settlement agreements requiring BUSD to pay for private school and other private services outside the district. BUSD needs to deliver free and appropriate education to all eligible special needs students in the District in the least restrictive environment in accordance with a student’s IEP. This is required under state and federal law; however, over 100 families showed up at a meeting last fall to complain to the state that Berkeley Unified was not delivering special education services as mandated by law. These same parents end up prevailing when they seek restitution for BUSD’s failure to comply with the law costing millions of dollars. BUSD must hire a competent Special Education Director who is seasoned in providing legally required services.  

3. Reduce outside consultants. Post and fill positions for special education services in the spring and summer so that all positions are full by the beginning of the school year, reducing the need to contract with outside vendors for more expensive services when parents begin pushing for the services that are mandated under their child’s IEP. 

4. Create a climate in Berkeley where district administrators work collaboratively with the parents of special-needs students. Currently, most parents feel district employees are dishonest and out to get away with providing minimal services when it comes to meeting legal requiremts under IDEA. Neighborhing districts have parent advisory boards that work side by side with district employees to develop systems that work for students and families. They wouldn’t have 150 parents show up at a public meeting to complain to the state about their districts. 

Parents of students with special needs are simply tired of hearing BUSD officials complain about the high cost of providing special education services when the district has failed to get its house in order. BUSD is missing out of being reimbursed for high costs and wasting money due to poor management. I applaud Superintendent Huyett and the Board for recently deciding to hire an experienced special education administrator. However, I beg district officials to stop groaning about the high cost of providing services until a complete overhaul of special education is done. 

Mark Chekal-Bain  

 

• 

CONTRARY TO . . . 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I read with disgust the commentaries by Jean Damu and Joseph Anderson in your April 2 edition. 

Contrary to Damu’s commentary, the families of the murdered officers did not “racialize” the shootings by their choice of speakers for the public funeral service. If people at the Hip Hop conference in Texas cheered the television broadcast news of the four murders, then there is something seriously wrong with them. 

Contrary to Anderson’s commentary, the shooting and killing of the four officers was not “karmic justice,” but foul, cold-blooded murder by a convicted violent felon on parole. The names of the four murdered officers will never be forgotten. 

Law enforcement officers put their lives on the line every day to protect and serve their communities. They are the thin blue line between civilized society and anarchy. 

Contrary to the letter by Dorothy Snodgrass, the NRA does not make our cities killing fields. The criminals do. 

Contrary to the letter of Jeffrey L. Suits, the Bill of Rights is still the law of the land. The Second Amendment guarantees to the law-abiding citizen the right to keep and bear arms for lawful purposes such as self-defense. The Fourth Amendment guarantees to the people the right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures. 

David R. Russell  


The Untold History of People’s Park

By Reverend Paul Sawyer
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 06:41:00 PM

Many of us are familiar with the Free Speech Movement on the Berkeley campus in 1964 that followed the Loyalty Oath Struggle of the 1950s, which cost the University of California 68 of its finest professors and teachers, who refused to sign it. The community movement to build People’s Park followed immediately after the drawn-out yet ultimately successful struggle to create ethnic studies programs both at the university and at San Francisco State College in the fall of 1968. The image of President Samuel Hayakawa tearing out the wiring on one of the movement’s loudspeaker trucks on the San Francisco campus at that time is still indelibly burned into the brains of those alive at the time. 

The context of the uprising of students across the whole nation—north, east, south and west; colleges and high schools—surging out of classrooms and campuses to protest the devastating Vietnam war is still vividly remembered in the 1960s history books. So ubiquitous was the upsurge of campus protest energy that the Nixon administration held a top-level conference of its leaders in Miami in April 1969 to decide what to do to bring order to the campuses. They realized that the spreading uprisings on campuses was hindering the pursuit of their war policies in Vietnam. The conduct of the war itself was being threatened by these campus upheavals.  

Berkeley was one of the most significant theaters of action for this justice and peace movement, and People’s Park was the newest challenge of all to the establishment’s system of law and order. As most people know, many Berkeley residents challenged the university’s control of a large block of vacant land where a community of older valuable houses, loosely identified as a “hippie’ area,” was bought and torn down by the university to displace this near-campus community. The University Regents, made up of “well-to-do” folks, appeared to believe that this area—“ridden with drugs, sex, rock and roll; activists and student hanger-ons”—was a turn-off to respectable parents of potential students. The regents voted to take it by eminent domain for future dorms. Yet they took so much time to implement that plan that the area became a free-for-all mud parking lot during its long vacancy. Beginning in the spring of 1969, activist shopowners, poets, students and citizens of our most active city of Berkeley started to build an incredibly attractive park and meeting place for its citizens on that central piece of land. It was one big party of workers and gatherers, parents and kids expressing a hunger for gathering together in the construction of a park, rather than the destruction of a militarized society. It was a little too much for the puritanical warriors of the mainstream bureaucratic culture to stomach. So the “power elite,” supported and goaded on by opportunistic politicians like Governor Reagan and the Nixon bunch, tried to make political hay by arousing the stressed-out, fearful public against the “spoiled” Berkeley students and radicals, which became a set-up target for free-floating public rage that had been stirred up by prolonged wars and egged on by the vested media and their demagogues. 

Kissinger, Mitchell, Kleindienst, Rehnquist, Agnew, and Nixon himself were all present at the Miami conference of April 1969 and decided to begin with a propaganda attack on “the student radicals.” William Rehnquist, future Supreme Court Chief Justice, called the students “criminal ideologues” and a slew of speakers from the administration, bolstered by Billy Graham, Bob Hope and other party followers, were sent all across the country to make speeches vilifying the activists on the campuses. This was such a threat to freedom on the campuses that several prominent presidents of universities, such as Nathan Pusey of Harvard, had to counter with a defense of students and the necessity for freedom of expression on campuses. The Nixon regime proceeded to send Vice President Agnew to Sacramento to advise Governor Reagan on making a concerted suppression and attack on Berkeley students, People’s Park and Berkeley citizens, part of a city-wide consensus movement that was building a park and gathering place—all right in the shadow of this widely influential campus—and becoming a hotbed of activists working for justice and peace in the world. The rest is well-known history, even though most people are to this day unaware that People’s Park was chosen as the first target of attack by the Nixon regime to injure and suppress the student antiwar movement in a series of violent planned attacks. The campaign culminated a year later in the Kent State massacre and the soon-to-follow—yet little-publicized because the victims were African-Americans—the Jackson State massacre that killed and wounded even more persons. Though the students went back to classes in the fall after the People’s Park assault by Reagan, the National Guard and the TAC squad of Alameda District Attorney Edward Meese on May 19th, 1969, the Kent State massacre of spring 1970 had the opposite effect, supercharging the movement of students and others all across the country against these murders and the expansion of the Vietnam war, a secret surge at first into Cambodia and Laos and the whole of Indochina. It was the beginning of a long drawn-out ending to a nearly 30-year-long war that ended at last in 1975. 

The Founders Forum of People’s Park will hold a 40-year anniversary celebration of this significant ongoing event and victory along this nonviolent path to peace and park-making that has long challenged the U.S. Imperium—which for two generations and many more has spewed devastation and death around the world, most notably now in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East. Friday April 24, beginning at 4:30 p.m. at the Ashkenaz Dance Center at San Pablo and Gilman, many of the legendary leaders of the People’s Park movement will gather with poets, musicians, and other revolutionary artists and activists to assess where we now stand and intend to put our energies to complete this revolution, long underway, to bring authentic democracy—“of, for and by the people”—the world over in this 21st century. The celebration will continue late into the evening, with dancing, poetry, and song. The bands include Marimba Pacifica, Wire Graffitti, the Funky Nixons; poets Julia Vinograd, John Simon and Jack Hirschman will be among the featured artists. Wavy Gravy will be the M.C. Tickets are $15, suggested donation, and are available at Ashkenaz and at Subway Guitars at Cedar and Grant streets. Celebrations will follow on Saturday and Sunday at People’s Park. Everyone is welcome in this spring renewal of our revolution. .  

 

Pasadena resident Reverend Paul Sawyer was a minister at Berkeley Unitarian Universalist from 1968 to 1994.


Quit Absolving Criminals

By Marty Price
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 06:42:00 PM

First off I would like to thank you for “Undercurrents.” J. Douglas Allen-Taylor generally hits the mark, and his stuff on Oakland has exposed Chip Johnson for the gossip columnist he is. I must take Jean Damu to task, though, for his recent commentary. I know Damu and admire his union work and his solidarity work, but his piece on “Black America and the Police” is almost embarrassing. I mean it was a step up from the garbage that was Mr. Anderson’s commentary, but in a way like it. 

I have worked with young people in Oakland since 1965. I have run a community center, continue to be an educator and coached as well. I have worked with our delinquent population as the Coordinator of the Court and Community Schools of Alameda County and retired as the Assistant Principal of Oakland Tech, my old high school. First off, this article was full of unnecessary hyperbole. The statistics on prison populations are bad enough without coming up with no source for the inflated figure of 50 percent used. The quote from Mixon’s sister, but tell me brother, here was a dude with no job, driving in East Oakland with a new car, rolling on dubs and armed to the teeth. Maybe not a monster, but how about predator? I will not say “there but for the grace of God I could have been he.” How did he find the funds for the car, why was he driving with that sort of weaponry ... could it be he was looking for other brothers and sisters to prey upon? Was he really looking for a job, or someone to take off on? 

The comparison to a classic film, The Battle of Algiers, is totally specious. “Occupation,” hell; the “occupiers” are the thugs that hold our community hostage and enforce a “you will be killed if you snitch” mentality. Thank God for the sister who led the cops to where this dude was hiding, and the brother who tried to give CPR. Man, does someone have to tell you that that statement was a total reach? 

Yes, some white cops live outside of Oakland, and so do some minority cops. Hell, all four of my sons at one time or another have bought property outside of Oakland, the oldest after he and his wife were subjected to a home invasion as they walked through the door, after he picked up his wife from her longshore work. Were these Klansmen who put a gun to my son’s head with his wife on the floor and his four kids in the house? No. I guess, since they lived in East Oakland, they were just trying to get paid. I guess, because my son and his wife work and rebuild salvaged cars, these poor unemployed youth had to do something?!?! 

How many of your readers have witnessed the dedication of the staff out at probation as they try to bring a little light into lives of misery? Damu, as far as I know, does not work with this population. Talk to some of the black men who coach soccer and are active in Oakland Babe Ruth. They will tell you that they teach young brothers that, yes, we live in an oppressive society, but there are ways to cope, and the first one is personal responsibility. Did you know that the two motorcycle officers might have had their guard down because they had just finished being escorts to our local Babe Ruth parade? That Hege had volunteered countless times to do duty at our high school games? 

We can no longer afford the luxury of these outdated stereotypes about cops and the black community. We have black seniors who live in fear on many of our streets, and it is not fear of the cops. Get a “fricking” clue, and get out and reread the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and try to figure out how we can stop being the worst self-oppressors in our community’s history. We have enough clowns writing news columns that serve to divide us without this tired old tripe. Damu has dedicated a large part of his life to the service of people of conscience, for that I hold him in esteem, but he is wrong on this count. We as a community need to bring the type of lessons back that our children no longer receive, those lessons that helped our forebears through the darker days of the past. We need say enough is enough. If you are selling drugs, form a cooperative (street wise) with your partners, and invest in your community not in flash and bling. But please stop killing one another over turf and material things. We need to dismiss the fools who are not constructive and are all flash. We have known historically that capitalism is unjust. There are all types of religious, educational and community groups trying to help men and women with, history like this young man had. Guys like Mixon are a part of the problem, and nowhere near the solution. Quit absolving them! 

 

Marty Price is a Berkeley resident. 


Chronicle Should Heed Local Advice

By Rio Bauce
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 06:42:00 PM

The San Francisco Chronicle is here to stay! As a lifelong reader of the San Francisco Chronicle, I am pleased to hear the news that Northern California’s largest newspaper will not shut down.  

A treasure of the Bay Area’s largest city, the Chronicle has been around since 1865. A well-established newspaper, which focuses on national, state, and local news coverage, the Chronicle employs reporters and photographers who have won Pulitzer Prizes. The economic downfall of October 2008 has hurt the newspaper business. In addition, according to a 2005 Knight Foundation study, the number of nonwhite employees at the Chronicle has decreased. In my own investigation on SFGate.com, in the last seven days, the Chronicle had only published 10 articles specifically about events in Berkeley. When 55 percent of national journalists believe that the economic concern is the largest problem that faces the journalism business, the newspaper business must try to cater to different demographics through expanding its local news coverage. 

As an undergraduate college student taking a course in microeconomics and a lifetime resident of Berkeley, I believe that, in order to be profitable, the Chronicle needs to pay more attention to the demographics it is serving: a group of diverse people who want to hear more about their own communities. Since the rise of the Internet, more people are turning toward the World Wide Web to get their news. In fact, 37 percent of the respondents in the Pew survey reported that they get their news online at least three times a week. While the Chronicle has created an interactive website with breaking news and blog opportunities, the local news blog has not been updated since December 2008. A Newspaper Association of America survey conducted from 1998-2007 reported that the more education you have, the more likely you are to regularly read a newspaper. In addition, according to the Pew Research Center, newspapers are typically read by the older generation, and the online portion is typically read by the younger generation. All this demographic data suggests that the Chronicle would benefit from expanding its coverage of issues that cater to all types of people. One way to attract more people to your newspaper is to concentrate on issues of local importance. A 2008 Project for Excellence in Journalism survey of newspaper editors found that 94 percent of respondents thought that local news was the most essential element of the newspaper. Because many citizens want to be informed of issues in their area, a newspaper that concentrates on local news that caters to many different demographics will improve business.  

A recent 2009 Rasmussen Reports survey concluded that 58 percent of adults think that it is very important for a community to have a local newspaper. Today there are many local newspapers, such as the Berkeley Daily Planet, that enjoy high levels of readership in the community, because of their coverage of a variety of local news topics, such as education, crime, development, and housing issues. Al-though the San Francisco Chronicle provides some coverage of the greater Bay Area, it is mostly centered on state and national news. In this economic climate, I find it more interesting to read about news that is closest to where I live, because it directly impacts my daily life. The San Francisco Chronicle would benefit from incorporating the elements of the in-depth local news coverage that the Berkeley Daily Planet provides into its business model. Because people prefer local news, the Chronicle should devote more space to in-depth articles on local news in the big cities, such as San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland. If it captures the readership from other local papers, such as the San Francisco Examiner or the Oakland Tribune, the paper will be more profitable in the future. It would be beneficial for the Chronicle to capture the 23 percent of people who turn to television and the Internet as their main news source. Local news is an important component of the success of community newspapers. While people who read newspapers for leisure enjoy local news, those who read for business also enjoy local news coverage. 

Congressional leaders, for example, benefit from and enjoy local news coverage. Oftentimes, local newspapers and news stations, such as the Oakland Tribune, are more sympathetic to leaders than a larger news organization, such as the New York Times. With less bias and more objectivity, these less politically motivated newspapers write more descriptive articles. If they are successful in projecting their message, congressional leaders can more easily highlight the significance of legislative policies in local communities. If the newspaper can improve rapport with members of Congress through the expansion of detailed local news coverage, its readership and donations would go up, lifting it farther out of economic trouble. 

Local news is the way of the future. If print media can expand their local news coverage, they may be able to stop falling subscriptions and advertisements. If these publications continue to use AP and Reuters wire news, they are not going to be able to distinguish themselves from both online and broadcast media. The San Francisco Chronicle should heed this advice in order to maintain its status as Northern California’s largest newspaper. 

 

Berkeley High School graduate Rio Bauce is a student at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif.


You Can’t Always Get What You Want

By Ted Friedman
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 06:43:00 PM

Even though you can’t always get what you want, you can’t even get what you need, try hard as you may. Not in Berkeley anyway. They not only tore down paradise, but also they tore down the parking lot (although later). 

Did the decline begin when Hinks department store (“A Great Store at Home”) closed, or was it the teardown of the Hinks parking lot, a theory that usually precedes such discussions? If so, the final straw fell when Penney’s closed (yes, Berkeley had one, but hardly a great store at home), then gave way to Ross (“Dress for Less”) and now stands naked. 

Of the legendary departed stores one might note Edy’s, where Eugene O’Neill ice-creamed, presumably after Hinking, or Tupper and Reid more recently (Berkeley’s last general downtown music store). And just when blame for Cody’s closure fell on Barnes and Noble, the former car dealership slipped out of town. 

Berkeley has additionally lost five movie venues, three of them irreplaceable single screens (the Berkeley, the UC, the Fine Arts) and more recently the artsy Act I & II. The last comprehensive newspaper and magazine shop (Fred’s) closed last year, after Whelans replaced the intellectual baggage of a magazine shop with a bunch of hookahs. 

Blame such losses on the usual suspects: King Internet. Why not? Everyone else does (an exception: closing day at Fred’s, the owner could be heard muttering, “No one reads anymore”). But you can read your computer (it can also be used as a musical instrument) and send away for anything but ice cream; if not a “store at home” then one from home. If this doesn’t satisfy, blame city government. But when blame fails, coping must step in. 

Berkeley does have its consolations, not to mention a smattering of what has been lost. Hinks has morphed into Shattuck Cinemas, your downtown multiplex, Berkeley style: five half-assed screens and three “viewing rooms” scrunched around the original Hinks columns. “New” books show up at UC Berkeley’s student union bookstore, and Pegasus (mainly used) has a few, as does the venerable Moe’s (quite a few, actually), but Moe’s is known for used and antiquarian. Black Oak has some (but how new?) and perhaps the biggest for new, the elegant University Press Books, although specializing in, what else, books from university presses. All of these stores stock some magazines. Your library (main branch) always has a shelf or two of the latest books and a DeLauer selection of magazines. As a footnote: the main library has become an art-house cinema lending library. Consolations to be sure, but scattered (better perhaps for around-town walks). 

Edy’s, Hinks, the UC, reflective of earlier times, cannot be replaced, and the loss of the Hinks parking lot (half a square city block, three floors) probably killed off nearby businesses. But all this city-sensitivity ignores (naturally) the King Kong that is UC Berkeley, a cultural monstrosity (often attacked here as more of a Frankenstein) yet it has it all. 

Berkeley has always had such attractions. There is just a lessening that needs to be noted and mourned. 

 

Ted Friedman is a Berkeley resident.


Remembering Jeremiah Chass

By Sheridith Maresh
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 06:43:00 PM

I am writing in response to Joseph Anderson’s April 2 commentary, “The Karmic Justice of Lovelle Mixon’s Act.” In the commentary, Anderson mentioned Jeremiah Chass. I am a close family friend of Jeremiah’s and his family’s and I wanted to take the time to clear up some misrepresented information. Although Jeremiah’s mother appreciated the objective of your article she was deeply affected by the misinformation. 

First, Jeremiah was her birth son, born to her and her first husband, who was a black man. He was adopted by her second husband after they were married. It is true that he was one of only a few African-American high school students, as Sonoma County’s population is only about 3 percent black. 

I would not describe the family as middle-class because that classifies them in a way that does not represent their lifestyle. They are a simple family that grow their own produce in their organic garden, while living a simple vegetarian and meditation lifestyle. They do not watch television. Jeremiah was not only loved by his community and fellow students, but was also a top honor student and a leader. He had a special interest in physics, and many considered him to be brilliant beyond his years on the subject. He was known for offering his selfless services by doing yardwork around the community, where he would rarely accept money for his back-breaking work. If people did insist on paying him, he never used the money for his own needs but would donate it to someone else who did need it. His dream was to go to Africa to offer his hard work and skills to a village in need. He had never ever experienced any kind of emotional disturbance in his life. We will never know what was truly going on with Jeremiah that morning as he never made it to the hospital for evaluation. We can say with certainty that he was confused but was calm when the officers arrived. There is much I could say here, but won’t. What I can say is any young boy who was greeted violently with pepper spray and was beaten horrifically would kick and fight back. He never had a chance to know what hit him, and then they just began shooting. We sadly know the outcome. The family had no idea what could happen, as they had never had any encounter with law enforcement or even had so much as a traffic ticket in their life. They did not call for law enforcement; they had called for medical aid. 

Jeremiah did not fit the picture that is often associated with young black males. The morning he was killed, the first articles that appeared in the Press Democrat, online and in print, stereotyped him. It wasn’t until his name was released and people came forward that a better portrayal was shown. But by then the damage had been done. 

Anderson’s commentary, and all its good intentions, brought us all back to that day when Jeremiah was wrongly portrayed. It may not seem like a big deal, but, to a mother who is trying her best to hold on to her son, and who he was, in the midst of this nightmare that took her son away in such a brutal way, everything is important. 

The headline, “Karmic Justice” is interesting because Jeremiah was a true spiritual seeker. He would get up at 5 a.m. before school to meditate for two hours. Instead of doing what average teens his age would be doing, he would be reading spiritual books and talking to anyone who would listen about God and devotion. I doubt Jeremiah had ever knowingly killed even a spider, as he believed in total non-violence in all areas of life. His death was karma. The plants and animals all have a life force. By eating a vegetarian diet, and doing selfless service, Jeremiah believed he was living the purest life he could. Even when a human eats vegetables, there is a karmic payoff. When a human takes the life of an animal for food, there is another level of the karmic payoff. This was the foundation of Jeremiah’s spiritual path. So when a human takes another human’s life, as Jeremiah’s life was taken, then that karmic payoff is beyond our understanding on this human plane. But there is certainly a payoff … even if it doesn’t happen within the justice system. 

Those officers did not know Jeremiah. The public never really knew Jeremiah. It is his mother’s wish for the public to have a better understanding of her son. I am not saying all these good things about him just because he is dead. I am saying these things because he was the most extraordinary young man I had ever known. I can’t help but wonder what he might have done in his life if at 16 he had already touched so many people. His death has to have a meaning, somehow, some way. 

When the officers locked the family in the house while their son lay dead in the driveway, they had already begun to treat the family as criminals. In the investigation photos by the Santa Rosa Police Department of Jeremiah’s bedroom, all that was in his room was a small futon on the floor with a white quilt, a desk with a journal of spiritual writings, his school books, a few photos of spiritual teachers on the wall, a vase of daffodils in full bloom next to a picture of his father. His dresser had only a few clothes, as he never wanted much and only wore the same pair of jeans and shirt each day. His closet was almost empty. His shoes were never worn in the house, so they were by the back door. What is important here is that his mother always wanted to take him shopping for new things, but he never wanted anything for himself. He would rather his family spent the money on his younger brother instead. 

Also on the wall was a painting he had done in art class. In the middle was a white figure in a sea of the colors red and orange. He told his mother it was a soul traveling in the higher planes of the spirit world. 

Jeremiah’s mother spoke repeatedly over the past few days about your article with both discontent over the misinformation concerning her family and on gladness at the truth you also spoke. She truly does appreciate the heartfelt passion you expressed in your article. It was sent around the country to her family and friends. She is my closest friend, and I wanted you to know that she was deeply affected by the misrepresentation. I felt you deserved to know more about the young man Jeremiah Chass. We celebrated his life this week, as it was his birthday on April 2. He would have been 19 years old. 

 

Sheridith Maresh is friend of the Chass family’s. 

 


Parties in Berkeley: Reducing Risks

By Tim Hansen
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 06:43:00 PM

Given the problems associated with the Jan. 30 party at the Gaia Building (“Another Gaia Building Riot—With Gun Fire,” Daily Planet, Feb. 4), it is appropriate and timely to take a step back and examine how we as a community address the social needs of our younger members. It is natural for people to seek social interaction with other people. This is particularly true for younger people. The type of interaction is varied, but parties usually play an important role. As with all social interactions, there are risks. It is appropriate for city officials—within the bounds of their authority—to attempt to reduce the risks. 

One approach to reducing risk is to attempt to reduce the number of parties or eliminate them altogether. This approach has the drawback that it may actually make those parties that do happen much more prone to overcrowding and its associated problems, leading to increased risks. As parties become less frequent because city officials have shut down venues or otherwise forbidden them, those parties that do happen become more important in the eyes of the attendees. Modern communications—text messaging, Twitter, group email, instant messaging, posting on Facebook—makes it so that, when a party does happen, the people who attend can very quickly pass the word on, and the crowd can grow very quickly. This is called a flash crowd, and it’s how things can get out of hand. If there were more parties, they wouldn’t be news, and consequently there wouldn’t be the flash crowds that the city is currently experiencing. Eliminate parties altogether and you will probably still get flash crowds, just totally unstructured. Bottom line: Efforts to eliminate parties can lead to greater risk associated with those events that do happen.  

A better approach to reducing risk would be to work with potential party venues—road houses, fraternities and sororities, churches and other groups—to establish procedures to follow when hosting a party or other event. The city could even provide workshops and facilitate training of house managers, security guards and party planners. Once a community goes down the road of attempting to eliminate parties instead of better managing them, it is difficult to change course, because institutions are not built back quickly. I believe that city officials who choose eliminating parties over helping people better manage them do a grave disservice to their communities and in the end make their constituents less safe.  

In Berkeley, it is no secret that city officials have already gone the route of eliminating parties. With the Gaia Building problems, city officials appear to be following the rules. Unfortunately, with others, they have sometimes used underhanded means of accomplishing their agenda. Instead of a nuisance abatement proceeding, they use code enforcement in unexpected ways to try to drive the target out of business or at least stop the parties. These officials have set themselves up as the judge, jury, and executioner and often abuse their authority and deny their targets their rights under due process. They make unlawful demands and misapply the codes. Their actions often are unethical, immoral, and illegal.  

This kind of behavior is not uncommon. Recently, in Oakland, 11 police officers were fired for lying in their efforts to secure search warrants. (See “Oakland to Fire 11 Cops in Search Warrant Case,” San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 16.) It is interesting to note the wide range of responses to the eleven officers’ behavior. The assistant police chief called it “procedural errors,” as if it was unimportant. A spokesperson for the victims described it as a number of rogue officers who were basically trampling on the rights of Oakland residents. The Oakland city attorney said, “These terminations are difficult for the city, but they show that honesty and integrity are non-negotiable for officers in the Oakland Police Department.” An independent monitoring team, created to monitor the Oakland Police Department (OPD) in the wake of the West Oakland Riders scandal said, “the underlying misconduct, if true, is clear indication that the organizational and community values that have been integrated into some parts of the department have not yet taken root throughout OPD.” 

Oakland was right to fire the 11 officers. Their actions cause mistrust in the community for the OPD and government as a whole. They are now viewed as abusive and corrupt, which makes it much harder for the department to address community problems. Taking illegal shortcuts to an end causes more problems in the long run than the short cut is worth. Honesty and integrity should also be non-negotiable in Berkeley code enforcement. 

One has to question how organizational and community values are integrated into Berkeley code enforcement. The city should undergo a review of the following properties to determine if there has been misconduct: the Dredge (Drayage, 651 Addison St.), Shipyard (1010 Murray St.), Iceland (2727 Milvia St.), The Crucible (1036 Ashby St.), The Hillside Club (2286 Cedar St.), and all UC Berkeley fraternities and sororities.  

 

Tim Hansen is a Berkeley contractor. 


Columns

The Public Eye: Is the Recession a Teachable Moment?

By Bob Burnett
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 06:56:00 PM

The financial crisis has raised public awareness that corporations deemed “too big to fail” have to be broken into manageable units. And there is widespread anger about colossal CEO salaries. Clearly, big is no longer beautiful. What remains to be seen is how far this understanding will extend and whether this is a teachable moment, where Americans will embrace major social changes. 

As investigators study the failures of the nation’s largest banks, as well as AIG, Chrysler, and General Motors, it has become apparent there was a fatal combination of greed, guile, hubris, and blind faith. Greed because corporate executives were locked into a deadly competition to see who had the biggest salary. Guile because business leaders manipulated laws to facilitate their pursuit of wealth and power. Hubris because personal aggrandizement supplanted the best interests of stockholders and the public. And blind faith because CEOs believed that if all else failed, the federal government would bail them out. 

Now the feds are “winding down” AIG and General Motors with Citigroup and Bank of America likely to follow. Meanwhile, Americans have become aware that, over the last 16 years, the wages of corporate executives grew by 393 percent while the wages of working Americans were flat. In 2008, the average CEO’s salary was more than 300 times that of the average worker. 

American culture is at a tipping point. While there will be blowback against corporate excess and a narrowing of the gap between America’s haves and have-nots, it’s unclear that the lifestyle of the rich and famous will be impaired. For it’s not only their salaries that have to be changed, but also it’s their lifestyle. CEOs have to learn to live with less. And so do the rest of us. 

If “every problem is an opportunity,” America’s financial crisis presents multiple opportunities: Corporations can be wound down to a manageable size. The gap between the rich and the poor can be narrowed. The social safety net can be repaired. And substantial progress can be made toward ending poverty. 

Nonetheless, the most challenging task will be to get Americans to address their materialistic, myopic lifestyle. While there’s anger at corporate excesses—executives using millions in bailout funds to redecorate their offices—the public has yet to condemn executive lifestyles: multiple mansions, yachts, and profligacy in general. And we have not renounced the zeitgeist of living beyond our means. 

Writing in the New Yorker, David Owen observes that, if Americans want to solve their financial, energy, and environmental problems, they’ll have to change their lifestyles. “Increases in fuel efficiency could be bad for the environment,” Owen writes, “unless they’re accompanied by powerful disincentives that force drivers to find alternatives to hundred-mile commutes.” 

As a result of the recession, America’s financial system will be reformed. But will Americans generalize from the crass behavior of corporation executives to the values and attitudes that shape mainstream society? 

There’s some evidence public behavior is changing in response to the recession. We’ve begun to save money rather than chronically spending beyond our means. And President Obama understands that the long-term viability of the U.S. economy depends upon fundamental changes in the public psyche. That’s why conservation is a major feature of his energy plan. Some of us have stopped driving our cars and instead are using public transportation or riding our bicycles. 

In 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney observed, “Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.” Cheney’s quip summarized the Bush economic ideology: Americans love their materialistic lifestyle and are unwilling to change. Accordingly, Republican policy promoted consumerism and the belief that no matter the social problem, the free market would solve it. 

This conservative ideology has failed. What’s needed is a clear progressive alternative. President Obama has three challenges: reform our economic system, describe what it will take to get to a just society, and ask Americans to join together in sacrifice to achieve our goals. It’s not enough to drive fewer miles or to turn down our thermostats or quit eating imported beef. Fundamental changes are required in American culture. We have to downsize our lifestyle. 

American history indicates that in moments of national crisis citizens are willing to sacrifice for the common good. During World War II there was rationing of food, gasoline, clothes, and other items. Citizens accepted this because they understood that survival depended upon everyone doing their part. 

Obama’s message should recognize this history. America is in the midst of a national crisis where our survival is at stake. We have to work together, and all of us must sacrifice. Our financial, energy, environmental, and social problems won’t be solved unless Americans radically change our lifestyle.  

 

 

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


UnderCurrents: Investigation Needed Into Who Sent Oakland SWAT Team In

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 06:55:00 PM

Interesting, isn’t it, what catches the interest of our local news commentators, and what does not. 

Last week, we talked about how four separate local newspaper columns and their five columnists—Phil Matier and Andrew Ross of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Matier & Ross column, Chip Johnson of the Chronicle, Tammerlin Drummond of the Contra Costa Times and the Oakland Tribune, and Robert Gammon of the East Bay Express—all found time to focus on the actions and allegations of inactions of Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums on the day of the March 21 MacArthur shootings, as well as the disinvitation of Mr. Dellums to the police memorial that followed. 

Of course, Mr. Dellums had no command responsibilities over the March 21 MacArthur events, nor should he have. This was a police operation. 

So one hopes that now they have taken what has become the obligatory run at the mayor, the five local columnists will use their considerable influence to help get answered two of the most important questions that surround the March 21 events: who gave the orders for the SWAT officers to storm the 74th Avenue apartment where Lovelle Mixon was hiding and why was that order given? It is those questions which lead to the most important question of that day, which is not what did Dellums do, but what caused the deaths of the two SWAT officers in the apartment shootout. 

And if you are satisfied with the answer that it was Mr. Mixon, who caused their deaths, case closed, you are missing the point. 

According to police and media accounts, Mr. Mixon shot and killed two Oakland police motorcycle officers—Mark Dunakin and John Hege—following a traffic stop near 74th Avenue and MacArthur. Mr. Mixon then fled to an apartment on 74th Avenue, where police were led two hours later following a citizen’s tip. SWAT team members forcibly entered the apartment and in the ensuing gunbattle two of them—Dan Sakai and Erv Romans—were shot and killed by Mr. Mixon, who had hidden himself in a closet. Mr. Mixon himself was killed by police gunfire. 

What is missing from this narrative are the exact circumstances at the 74th Avenue apartment in the period immediately before the SWAT team broke in. The SWAT team took what is unquestionably the most dangerous tack in attempting to apprehend Mr. Mixon, entering an enclosed space occupied by an armed and dangerous suspect who they believed had already shot and killed two police officers, and without the team knowing either the layout of the space or any of the circumstances inside. If there was a probability—or even strong possibility—that Mr. Mixon would have escaped without that immediate entry, or if Mr. Mixon posed some clear and immediate mortal danger to police or civilians at the time the SWAT team surrounded the apartment, then one could make the reasonable argument that entering the apartment as the SWAT team did was tragic, but necessary. 

But without knowing the details of what the officers knew or suspected in the moments before the apartment entry, it is impossible to say whether the forced entry decision was justified, or whether there was an alternative strategy that might have reasonably led to capturing—or, if necessary, killing—Mr. Mixon without the same danger to the SWAT officers. 

There is also the question of whether or not the police action itself in entering the apartment posed a danger to civilians in the vicinity, in particular any individuals who may have been present in the other apartments in the building in which the two officers and Mr. Mixon were killed. We know that an uninvolved civilian, Mr. Mixon’s sister Reynete, was in the apartment at the time and was slightly injured by the concussion grenades thrown by the officers. As for the other tenants, was any attempt made by police to evacuate the building prior to the entry? Would such an attempt have jeopardized the police action, alerting Mr. Mixon to the police presence, or was it simply the case that the commander in charge on the scene—whoever that might have been—did not take into account any possible civilian casualties? Again, we do not have the information necessary to make any judgment. 

From an article by Associated Press writer Paul Elias published in the Oakland Tribune, we learned this week that the Oakland Police Department plans to conduct an internal investigation of the March 21 MacArthur shootings, to “include a review by outside SWAT experts.” 

That is commendable, but not nearly enough. In the past, such internal investigations have sometimes served to obscure public scrutiny of certain actions of the Oakland Police Department, rather than to enhance it.  

In this instance, for example, the AP’s Mr. Elias writes in the Tribune that “Police officials have said the SWAT team entered the apartment to clear and search it, but precisely what prompted their decision is unclear. The department turned down requests to interview a SWAT team commander and [Acting] Police Chief Howard Jordan. ‘The whole incident is still under investigation and OPD is not releasing any details or reports,’ police spokesman Jeff Thomason said in an April 2 e-mail. ‘This is to protect the integrity of the investigation until it can be completed.’” 

It should be noted that Mr. Jordan held two press briefings in the immediate aftermath of the March 21 shootings, but now has chosen to avoid the press on the issue at precisely the point that more difficult questions are being asked. 

It is certainly proper for the police department to keep its internal investigations closed-door affairs, and OPD has had a long habit of making spokespersons available when they feel it important, but then refusing media access when tough or embarrassing questions might be asked. But that does not mean that the Oakland public has no alternative to finding out the details—and the truth—about March 21. 

One alternative would be in the form of a public hearing and investigation of the March 21 shootings by the Public Safety Committee of the Oakland City Council. Several Councilmembers have recently been making much noise about asserting their oversight roles in city government. Now is the chance for them to show if this was merely political rhetoric to bring down Mayor Dellums, or if they are serious about taking on more of this responsibility, even on difficult ground. 

For a long time Councilmember Larry Reid, the chair of Council Public Safety, has identified himself as a champion of the police force. We have no reason to doubt his sincerity, although we have often wondered at his committee’s lack of interest in looking into many of Oakland’s pressing public safety issues. But we can think of no better way for Mr. Reid to demonstrate his support for Oakland police officers than for him to lead his committee into an investigation into whether the two SWAT officers, Mr. Sakai and Mr. Romans, lost their lives in the apartment on 74th Avenue because there was no reasonable alternative to storming the apartment, or whether it was either caused by an improper command decision, a lack of proper procedures or training, or a lack of proper command. The answers to those questions will not bring back the two officers, but it might force a change in police department policy or personnel that could prevent other officers in the future from being hurt or killed.  

If Oakland is sincere in honoring the four fallen officers of March 21 as heroes, then we can honor their memories best by searching for and determining the truth about how and why they died, no matter what dark corners of city policy and personnel that search might take us. 

If the council’s Public Safety Committee is not willing or able to step in and help determine why four Oakland police officers lost their lives on March 21, what is that committee’s relevance to the public safety of this city? 

And, of course, the field is certainly open for Mr. Matier and Mr. Ross and Mr. Johnson and Ms. Drummond and Mr. Gammon to turn their powerful attention to these questions, as well. This is one time when the howling of the dogs in the neighborhood’s yards would seem to be appropriate. 

Meanwhile, on an entirely different matter… 

Last week, the East Bay Express published a cover story on Bayview newspaper and KPFA reporter JR (Cleveland Valrey Jr.). The article was—to put it most succinctly—unflattering. Mr. Valrey is a public figure open to criticism, and I have criticized him myself in this column, at least once. He has several forums with which to answer, and can answer the Express’ criticism for himself. 

My particular concern, however, is with the article’s title, “JR Valrey Is An Agent Provocateur.” 

That title has a particular and definite meaning, listed in my Webster’s New World College Dictionary as “a person hired to join a labor union, political party, etc. in order to incite its members to actions that will make them or their organization liable to penalty.” During the Movement years of the ’60s and ’70s, the federal government used such “agents provocateur” to infiltrate Movement organizations, either getting gullible members jailed or stirring up animosities that ended up in shootings and deaths between various organizations. Many people believe that the old Black Panther Party was destroyed by the use of such tactics. It is, therefore, both a dangerous and serious charge to make. 

Nowhere in the Express article on Mr. Valrey is there any hint or indication that the article’s author, Benjamin Taylor, believes that Mr. Valrey has been hired by the government to cause havoc in the Bay Area progressive movement, and no proof or allegation appears. The term “agent provocateur” itself, in fact, does not appear in the body of the article, only in the headline. One can only surmise that whoever wrote the headline was only making a play on the fact that Mr. Valrey is “provocative” in his reporting, and that no other implication should be attached. If that is true, our friends at the Express ought to clarify and correct. On the other hand, if it is the paper’s belief that Mr. Valrey is a government informant and agent, they need to produce the evidence on which they hold that belief.  

As I said, calling someone an “agent provocateur” is a deeply serious charge, and ought to be done only if the charger believes it to be true, and can back it up with proof.


Wild Neighbors: The Berkeley Meadow — Restoration and its Discontents

By Joe Eaton
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 06:49:00 PM

I don’t know much about Pete Najarian, other than that he is a plein air painter and prolific writer of letters to the editor, and that he is chronically unhappy about what the East Bay Regional Park District has been doing at the Marina. What set him off this time was a pair of columns I wrote about what I thought was a hopeful instance of civic vigilance and official flexibility. These inspired a long diatribe that appeared in last week’s Planet. 

I suspect Najarian is one of those people whose version of reality is impervious to facts or logic. I’m not going to try to convince him that he’s wrong about the restoration of the Berkeley Meadow. But I can’t let his accusations pass unchallenged. 

To recap, the northwest corner of the meadow—the area north of University Avenue, west of 80, and east of the Marina proper—has been a longtime nesting site for one or more pairs of northern harriers, a hawk which has been listed as a “species of special concern” by the California Department of Fish and Game. An ongoing Park District restoration project reached the harriers’ habitat this winter, and one of two historic nesting locations was cleared of brush and weeds.  

Corinne Greenberg, a longtime hawk observer, discovered this after the fact and acted to protect the remaining site. District representatives agreed to alter their plans and leave the area alone, at least for this nesting season. That was pretty much the story. I pointed out the irony of the district’s having to deal with a sensitive wildlife species that relied on non-native vegetation for nest cover, the kind of dilemma that restoration efforts are bound to run into.  

But that was enough to make me an apologist for the Park District in Najarian’s eyes: “those whom you support,” as he keeps saying, as if reluctant to use the name of the evil entity. He seems to believe that the district has destroyed habitat (“an innocent wilderness”), displaced wildlife, and locked out the public by limiting access to fenced trails through the meadow. 

None of this holds water. The rabbits and rodents are not gone; we ran into a jackrabbit on our walk-through with Greenberg and the Park District folks, and an abundance of ground squirrels. There are enough mice—California voles, most likely—to sustain the harriers plus a pair of white-tailed kites, plus visiting raptors like red-tailed hawks and short-eared owls. The finches and blackbirds are not gone. Such claims don’t do much for Najarian’s credibility.  

I suspect that the meadow restoration, far from driving out wildlife, has increased the area’s quality as wildlife habitat and its biological diversity, creating a healthy mix of wetland, grassland, and shrubby upland. The new seasonal wetlands alone are waterbird magnets, attracting such locally uncommon species as greater white-fronted geese, blue-winged teal, and red phalaropes. A burrowing owl stopped by this winter. The district’s planting plan has created more microhabitats for native creatures, from pollinators to predators. They’ve phased the work so as to minimize impacts on wildlife, and are using adaptive management to fine-tune the process. 

Yes, the district has been replacing exotic invasive plants with native species like willow and blue-eyed grass. Najarian mourns the loss of the “fields of fennel and lace.” I don’t know what he means by “lace”—maybe poison hemlock, the stuff that killed part of the tule elk herd at Grizzly Island a few years back? 

He plays the well-worn “we’re all non-natives” card. I have no problem calling a weed a weed, though. If the goal is to establish a natural plant community, there’s no place for aggressive exotics like fennel. The district is also concerned—properly so—about eliminating the seed bank for unwanted weeds, so they can’t recolonize the restored area. 

Yes, the area has been fenced. Najarian refers to “the baloney about the dogs.” That’s no baloney; off-leash dogs are devastating to ground-dwelling birds. The meadow is, after all, next door to dog-ridden Cesar Chavez Park. (There’s also a feral cat problem that needs to be addressed by other means.) The waist-high fences along the trails are no barrier to wildlife observation. 

Restoration is a human activity, and as such is subject to error: I’m still not sure what the National Park Service was trying to accomplish with their Limantour Beach project at Point Reyes National Seashore. But in general the recreation—or creation from scratch, in places like the meadow—of natural habitat to balance what has been lost is good and necessary work, too important to be hindered by willful ignorance. 

It’s also good to have alert and informed citizens like Greenberg to hold the restorers accountable when they make a misstep. Knowing what you’re looking at is the critical difference between the Greenbergs and the Najarians of the world.


East Bay Then and Now: Captain Thomas Offered City Land for a Park

By Daniella Thompson
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 06:49:00 PM
he Samuel Hume Castle at 2900 Buena Vista Way is located on the
              former site of Captain Thomas “Fort La Loma.”
Thos W. Tenney, 1971
he Samuel Hume Castle at 2900 Buena Vista Way is located on the former site of Captain Thomas “Fort La Loma.”
Richard Parks Thomas.
San Francisco Call, March 15, 1897
Richard Parks Thomas.
Captain Thomas’ estate, La Loma Park, in an 1891 bird’s-eye view
              map of Berkeley.
Captain Thomas’ estate, La Loma Park, in an 1891 bird’s-eye view map of Berkeley.
The eucalyptus trees surrounding the Maybeck Studio are descended
              from those planted by Captain Thomas.
House & Home, Dec. 1957
The eucalyptus trees surrounding the Maybeck Studio are descended from those planted by Captain Thomas.
Captain Thomas arranging a soap exhibit at the Mechanics’ Institute
              Fair.
San Francisco Call, Aug. 17, 1895
Captain Thomas arranging a soap exhibit at the Mechanics’ Institute Fair.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second in a series on Captain R.P. Thomas and La Loma Park. 

 

Captain Richard Parks Thomas, whose Standard Soap Works was Berkeley’s largest factory, expanded into banking in 1886. Within two years, his California National Bank of San Francisco went into receivership, and one of its stockholders, John Chetwood, Jr., sued the three members of the bank’s executive committee, seeking to recover the bank’s losses from them. 

In December 1892, the plaintiff won a preliminary decision, but before a final judgment had been rendered, Chetwood settled with two of the defendants, who paid $27,500 to have the suit against them dismissed. Thomas was left as sole defendant, owing $139,419. 

Not one to hand over money quietly, Thomas took every measure to make himself judgment-proof. Naturally, he appealed the judgment, but this was only the first step. In July 1894, Thomas convened a meeting of the bank’s stockholders for the purpose of electing an agent to represent them. His own majority stock—1,020 shares out of a total of 2,000—helped elect railroad agent Thomas K. Stateler, who from then on became the person empowered to collect monies on behalf of the stockholders. 

In December 1894, Thomas filed a petition to be declared insolvent, having concealed his most liquid assets. “All of his assets are exempt from taxation,” the San Francisco Call reported. “They comprise five shares in the Standard Soap Company, $200 worth of personal property and a homestead in Berkeley valued at $10,000. Even this however, is encumbered by a mortgage for $7,516.80.” 

Two months later, Thomas was called before Judge Frick on an order of examination to show what property he had in his possession. Although most of his answers consisted of “I don’t know” and “I can’t remember,” it was finally revealed that his 9,500 shares of soap stock had been transferred to J.G. Pohle, one of his allies among the bank’s stockholders, in exchange for a mine in Colorado that proved worthless. Thomas claimed there was no money in the soap stock, although Standard Soap Co. had done $176,000 worth of business in one year. 

His bank stock was also hard to track down, but eventually it was discovered that Thomas had assigned his 1,020 shares to D.E. Dowling, his second-in-command at Standard Soap. Dowling, in turn, told the court that these shares were acquired by one D.F. Parker, who later turned out to be another Standard Soap employee. 

The enraged Chetwood next tried to go after Thomas’ 32-acre North Berkeley estate, La Loma Park, which he said was valued at $40,000. Thomas claimed that as a homestead, the estate was exempt. Chetwood also tried to oust Stateler and have a receiver appointed for the Standard Soap Company, which, so he claimed, Thomas was proposing to wreck in order to keep it from falling into the hands of his creditors. 

In July 1896, Thomas’ appeal finally reached the California Supreme Court and found receptive ears. The court concluded that since Chetwood’s lawsuit had been launched against the executive committee and not against its individual members, his compromise with two of the members was held to be tantamount to a withdrawal of the suit. 

The case was dismissed, and Chetwood next took a writ of error to the United States Supreme Court. That august body ruled in October 1898 that it had “no jurisdiction to review a decision of a state supreme court based entirely on grounds arising under the laws of the state.” The writ of error was dismissed. 

Fighting court cases for a decade did not diminish Captain Thomas’ civic spirit. He continued to attend reunions of the Grand Army of the Republic—a Union army veterans’ organization—traveling as far as Washington, D.C. Certain holidays were celebrated in grand style at La Loma Park. The San Francisco Call twice described these celebrations, and the accounts are worth quoting verbatim. On Sept. 10, 1896, the Call reported: 

Admission day was celebrated very quietly by the town people, but up on the hill, three-quarters of a mile back of Berkeley, Captain R. P. Thomas, the Soap King, kept up a continuous bombardment from daybreak to sunset with his two historic howitzers, stationed at his celebrated “Fort Thomas.” 

Down in the dense grove of eucalyptus trees, planted by his own hand, a short distance from the fort, the captain and his wife entertained between 300 and 400 visitors from San Francisco, Oakland, Alameda and Berkeley, who had come to show their love for the Golden West by feasting together and listening to the patriotic addresses. 

A musical and literary programme was rendered, and addresses in keeping with the occasion were delivered by Attorney George W. Haight, Charles Keeler and Rev. E. B. Payne. Tables were set under the trees and in a huge tent, and refreshments were served by the ladies of the party. 

And here is the story published on May 2, 1897: 

On the highest point of the captain’s land, and at an eminence not far from the summit of the mountain, he has erected what he calls a fort, and which he declares to be the only private affair of the kind in the State. On an esplanade surrounded by a circular parapet three 20-pound guns have been mounted in embrasures, and they command the entire country. On the right lie San Pablo Bay and the straits of Carquinez, San Quentin and the Golden Gate, while a discharge from the piece on the left might rake the streets of Oakland. A house is built within the inclosure and used as a powder magazine, and every Fourth of July the powder in this arsenal is brought out and the guns boom all day long. The Fourth is a great day with the captain. He sets aside $500 for its celebration, hires a caterer to bring coffee and sandwiches on the mountain, and then invites the town. They come in hundreds, and for that day La Loma is a public pleasure ground. 

The same article described the captain’s log cabin, a precursor in design to the Arts & Crafts homes that would eventually dot his hill: 

A unique feature of the captain’s place is a log house which the owner built with his own hands, requiring seven years for its completion. It is two stories in height, has two rooms below and a large apartment above. It is a comfortable lodge, and the captain uses it as such, having fitted it up for a museum and smoking cabin; here he lounges during evenings amid his relics of the long past, an aggregation which covers the whole of the captain’s life. 

Many of the curios collected in the cabin were mementos of Thomas’ Civil War days. The Call reproduced one of the most precious: a letter from General Ulysses S. Grant to General William Tecumseh Sherman, written in Grant’s hand and dated Aug. 8, 1862. Thomas had picked it up on the grounds that had been occupied by the federal forces in Memphis, after the troops’ withdrawal. 

His civic spirit wasn’t confined to pageants. In March 1897, Captain Thomas offered to deed his estate to Berkeley, to be used as a pubic park. He had planted his 32 acres with eucalyptus and many other tree varieties, and though it a splendid location for Sunday strollers and picnickers. “I had thought somewhat of giving the property to the university, but I have concluded that the town can make more use of it, since I desire that the place should always be kept intact,” he said. 

To facilitate access to the park, Thomas proposed to build a suspension railroad of his own patented design along Cedar Street and through his grounds to Grizzly Peak. He stipulated two conditions for his gift: that the city convert the property into a park with walks, drives, and shrubbery and maintain it in good condition, and that a strip of several acres adjoining his property be purchased by the town and included in the park. 

The town did not jump at the offer. Captain Thomas died of a stroke on May 28, 1900, leaving the estate to his wife, Jane. She did not wait long to subdivide the land. On October 29 of that year, the San Francisco Call was able to report:  

The old Captain Thomas place in North Berkeley, otherwise known as “La Loma Park,” has been sold in building lots by Easton & Eldridge. The purchasers were largely the university people. The land is nearly 500 feet above the level of the bay. The lots brought from $1,200 to $1,500 at private sale, as reported by the brokers. Upon them handsome residences will be erected. The running of an extension of the Telegraph avenue electric road to North Berkeley has bought a large section into market and made it desirable. 

Among the first nine lot purchasers was Professor Andrew C. Lawson, the famed geologist. He would wait seven years to build his La Loma Avenue house, designed by Bernard Maybeck. The architect himself would not buy land in La Loma Park until 1905 or 1906, but once he began building there, he created the largest concentration of Maybeck houses to be found anywhere. Several of those, including three that Maybeck built for his own family, will be open for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association’s May 3 Spring House Tour. 

 

MAYBECK COUNTRY 

Berkeley Architectural Heritage Spring House Tour. 1-5 p.m. Sunday, May 3. $40; BAHA members, $30. 841-2242. www.berkeleyheritage.com. 

 

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

 


About the House: Notes on Civility

By Matt Cantor
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 06:47:00 PM

It’s a function of my age and m-m-m-my generation that I consider civility as important a societal imperative as I do. Not that I’m all that civil, mind you. I do have my bad days. I could excuse that by saying that everyone has their bad days, but I don’t actually think that’s adequately justifiable. I believe that it behooves each of us to do the best we can. I don’t expect someone with Tourette’s syndrome to spare me a litany of curse words (thought I’m usually writing them down as fast as possible to augment my woeful vocabulary) but I do expect those who don’t suffer from either limbic failings or horrible upbringings to do the best they can; to try to smile; to cheer those around them as best they can and to make the party (which eventually comes to an end) as pleasant as possible. 

It was with this in mind that this week, for the second time (perhaps third, I’ll have to review the e-mails) that I expressed Victorian shock (if I’d had snuff on me, I’d-a used it) at the e-mail replies from a contractor to a client of mine. 

The client has sent a list of items that they, themselves, had paid for, to the contractor (actually a high-level subordinate) in something like an Excel spreadsheet in an effort to clear up any question about who had paid for various items so that the final tally could more accurately reflect how each of the two parties stood in their respective debts. 

This particular e-mail has been sent to several persons at the same time and was not addressed to one particular person. The reply, which I viewed as one of the several cc’s, stated that the e-mail had failed to address itself to his particular personage and would be duly ignored until it was addressed properly to himself. The harrumph was nearly audible as I closed my eyes to avoid the dust from his virtual wig. 

The prior e-mail said (and I won’t quote verbatim for the sake of confidentiality) that the client was failing to address the “real” issues in his e-mail to the contractor. 

Without going into too much detail and to summate, the contractor was having a hissy. A snit. He was taking his ball and going home because the other boys wouldn’t play nicely. 

Actually, the clients (let’s call them Bob and Sue) are pretty good. True, the male counterpart, Bob, has gotten upset a few times and expressed some suspicions or worries but, for the larger part, he’s been pretty reasonable. Truth be told, I’ve been much more critical of the contractor than either of the clients, but in a very different way.  

I’m largely working in the background, walking through the site, identifying bits of work that are either clearly incorrect or are simply inadvisable for any number of reasons and then bringing them to the client’s attention. We discuss the merits of each of these things and together decide what we’ll bring to the contractor’s attention. 

In the case of this particular contractor, it did not make sense to try to get them to correct or change every item that I’d noted. These guys were very low bidders and it was clear form the first day on the job that they were not the top drawer. They were able to get big chunks right (well, close enough) but many smaller issues, various codes and practices were largely foreign to these crew and it was important to understand that the clients (and me as adviser) were not going to be able to turn the pumpkin into a coach. Our hope was to simply keep it from rotting on the way home from the ball. But, as usual, I digress. 

I’d been watching the e-mails go back and forth between the parties (I get cc’ed on most of these by the client as a way of keeping tabs on the job) and was increasingly seeing these little hissies glide though my air-space to my unrelenting awe. It seemed to me (and I shared this with my clients) that this fellow was either from some very strange school of contracting or was perhaps just another undiagnosed psych patient wandering the streets of Berkeley. Why would someone who wants to get paid for services rendered act so pugnaciously.  

Now, I’ve been complaining about bad service for years (“if you can’t say something nice, come and sit by me”) and really have to scratch my head when my waiter or waitress flings plates onto the table and acts like it’s some magnificent burden that I’m seated in their section that day. My feeling is, if you don’t want to smile, say hello and aren’t happy to be of service, get a job in a cubicle. Take up space-flight.  

In fairness, contractors aren’t waiters, but they are privy to our lives in very intimate ways and are service providers. Why would someone who wants a happy client and a final payment fail to employ the most basic manners. Number One: Don’t pick fights. 

If you’re having a bad day, take a time out. If you’re drunk, don’t show up. Check your blood sugar, apologize in a timely fashion for your mistakes and did I mention—don’t pick fights. Sheesh. 

We contractors (yes, I still consider myself a part of the club, though I’m usually wearing a different hat) have responsibility, as those who get given keys and very large checks, to bow, shake hands, say thank you and, when disputes arise, as they surely will, to smile, sit down, use our inside voices, and work toward resolution in a spirit of camaraderie. Clients will do well to use the same rules but can not be expected to know the landscape as well as the contractor since we as contractors have so much more familiarity with the playing field. 

E-mail is a nasty form of communication. It’s far too easy to seem curt, flip or cavalier. Since so much of this is used in the contracting world these days, I suggest we start by cleaning up our acts around this. When writing, go out of your way to be clearly friendly, seem helpful and, definitely, to vacate any sense of malice or threat. If you want that sort of thing, you don’t have to hire a contractor. You can just go out to lunch. 


Arts & Events

Arts Calendar

Thursday April 16, 2009 - 09:58:00 AM

THURSDAY, APRIL 16 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet” Guided tour at 112:15 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

FILM 

Berkeley Filmmakers Screening Series “Ripe for Change” with director Emilo Omori at 7 p.m. at Zaentz Media Center, 2600 Tenth St. Reservations required. reservations@berkeleyfilmscreening.com 

“Reefer Madness” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

National Poetry Month Showcase a multi-generational poetry conversation featuring Coptic poet Matthew Shenoda at 7:30pm at La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave Tickets are $5-$10. www.myspace.com/poetryforthepeople 

Poetry Flash with Julie Carr, Carol Snow and Brian Teare at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Michelle Goldberg on “The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World” at 7:30 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Cost is $5-$10. berkeleyarts.org 

Maria Laurino reads from “Old World Daughter, New World Mother” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

7th Street Sound, reggae, at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $TBA. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Jack Hardy at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Dave Mathews Birthday Blast with Tony Lindsay at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Beat Beat Whisper, The Porchsteps, All My Pretty Ones at 9 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Mojo Stew at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

FRIDAY, APRIL 17 

THEATER 

Aurora Theatre “Miss Julie” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m., at 2081 Addison St. to May 10. Tickets are $40-$42. 843-4822. auroratheatre.org 

Berkeley Rep “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” at Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison St. through May 15. Tickets are $33-$71. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Black Repertory Group “Mrs. Streeter” Fri. at 8 .m., Sat. at 2:30 and 8 p.m. at 3201 Adeline St., through April 25. Tickets are $15-$20. 925-812-2787. www.blackrepertorygroup.com 

Brookside Rep “Basha Rubenchek from Minsk, Comrade of Petaluma” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, through May 3. Tickets are $19-$24. www.BrooksideRep.org 

Contra Costa Civic Theater “Saint Joan” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at 951 Pomona Ave., El Cerrito, through May 10. Tickets are $11-$18. 524-9132. www.ccct.org 

Masquers Playhouse “The Last Five Years” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2:30 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond, and runs through May 2. Tickets are $18. 232-4031. www.masquers.org 

Shotgun Players “Skylight” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., though April 26. Tickets are $25. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

TheatreFIRST “Old Times” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at Gaia Arts Center, 2120 Allston Way, through April 25. Tickets are $23-$28. 436-5085. www.theatrefirst.com 

EXHIBITIONS 

“You, Me, and Everyone We Know” Group show of nineteen contemporary artists. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Alphonse Berber Gallery, 2546 Bancroft Way. 649-9492. alphonseberber.com 

“Body & Soul” Works by James Gayles, Ajuan Mance and Karen Senferu. Opening reception at 7 p.m. at JanRae Community Art Gallery, Women’s Cancer Resource Center, 5741 Telegraph Ave. www.wcrc.org 

“Portraits from Far & Near” Figurative paintings by Lisa Esherick and Susan Matthews. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at the Addison Street Window Gallery, 2018 Addison St. Exhibit runs to May 30. 981-7546. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Oakland East Bay Symphony “Russian Easter Overture” at 8 p.m. at Paramount Theater, Oakland. 444-0801. www.oebs.org 

Harpsichord and Organ Music of the Italian Renaissance before 1550 at 8 p.m. at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, 1501 Washington Avenue, Albany. Free, suggested donation $10. 525-1716. 

Berkeley Dance Project 2009 “Equal Footing” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m., through April 26, at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC campus. Tickets are $10-$15. 642-8827. tdps.berkeley.edu 

David Glass pianist, composer will perform works from “Beginning the Journey” at 7:30 p.m. at Arlington Community Church, 52 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Tickets are $15. 526-9146.  

Angela Dean-Baham in concert at 7:30 p.m. at Allen Temple Baptist Church, 8501 International Blvd., Oakland. Donations at the door. 544-8910. 

Orquesta La Moderna Tradicíon at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Mz. Dee’s Blues Revival at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $12-$15. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

SoVoSo at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Sambada with Mucho Axé at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Belle Monroe & the Brewglass Boys at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

The California Honeydrops at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

One+ at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7-$10. 597-0795. 

Todd Shipley at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

“420 Bash” with Planting Seeds, Lavish Green, Space Monkey Gangstas at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $10. 548-1159.  

Tres Mojo at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

SATURDAY, APRIL 18 

CHILDREN  

Celebration of Children’s Literature with authors, illustrators, costumed characters, storytelling and activities from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at Tolman Hall, UC campus. http://gse/berkeley.edu/childlit.html 

Opera Piccola “Magic Journeys” An interactive performance for all ages at 6:30 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Fallon, Oakland. Suggesd donation $5-$25. 482-0967, ext. 303. 

“Orca, The First Whale” A puppet show based on a tale from Native Americans in the Northwest, at 11 a.m., and 2 and 4 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave., Oakland. Cost is $7. 452-2259. www.fairyland.org 

Active Arts Theatre for Young Audiences “Alice in Wonderland” a circus adaptation Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. TIckets are $14-$18. 296-4433. activeartstheatre.org 

Dana Smith and his Dog Lacey, Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave., Oakland. Cost is $7. 452-2259. www.fairyland.org 

Guy Gash and his Sharp Five Jazz Band at 2 p.m. at Habitot Children’s Museum, 2065 Kittredge St. 647-1111. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Spring Has Sprung” Group art show. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Expresions Gallery, 2035 Ashby Ave. 644-4930. www.expressionsgallery.org 

RAC Artist Members’ Showcase Artists’ reception at 2 p.m. at the Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Ave., at 25th St., Richmond. Exhibition closes May 16. 620-6772. www.therichmondartcenter.org 

“Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet” Guided tour at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Rhythm and Muse with poet Julia Vinograd at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St., between Eunice and Rose. 527-9753. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

University Symphony Orchestra at 11 a.m. at Hertz Hall, UC campus. Tickets are not required. 642-4864. http://music.berkeley.edu 

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra “Handel’s Wicked Queen” at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are Tickets are $30-$72. 415-392-4400. www.philharmonia.org 

“The Secret of the Muse: Music for the Pardessus de Viole” at 7:30 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College. Tickets are $10-$25. 528-1725 www.sfems.org  

UC Berkeley’s Cal Taiko “Nagare” Spring 2009 Showcase at 8 p.m. at The Julia Morgan Young People’s Performing Arts Center, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $7-$10. www.juliamorgan.org 

“Partisans Armed with Music: Songs of Holocaust Musicians” at 8:30 p.m. at Chochmat Ha Lev, 2251 Prince St. Tickets are $8-$12 at the door. 704-9687. 

Rajeev Taranath Hindustani classical music on the sarod at 8 p.m. at Mills College Concert Hall, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland. Tickets are $6-$12. 430-2025. 

La Peña Community Chorus at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $13-$15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Mo’Rockin Project at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Zydeco Flames at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Moment’s Notice improvised music, dance, and theater at 8 p.m. at Western Sky Studio, 2525 8th St. Tickets are $8-$15. 992-6295. 

Mike Sweetland & A Lot of People at 1 p.m. at Down Home Music, 10341 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. 525-2129. 

Palm Wine Boys at 8 p.m. at Wisteria Ways, Rockridge, Oakland. Not wheelchair accessible. Cost is $15-$20. Reservations required. info@WisteriaWays.org 

Tangria Jazz Group at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

The Folk Collection at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Melanie O’Reilly at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$15. 845-5373.  

“A Night of Free Jazz, Folk, and Experimental Music” with Country Joe McDonald at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar St. at Bonita. 841-4824. www.bfuu.org 

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

The ZaZous at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Shiela G & the Jazz Riffs at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7-$10. 597-0795. 

Reality Playthings improvisation with Frank Moore at 8 p.m. at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St., Oakland. fmoore@eroplay.com 

Casey Nell and the Norway Rats, Bonfire Madigan at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

SUNDAY, APRIL 19 

THEATER 

Queer On Their Feet – An Evening of Stand Up Comedy and Improv at 1 and 7 p.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, One Lawson Rd., off Arlington at Moeser/Terrace. Tickets are $10-$20. brownpapertickets.com  

EXHIBITIONS 

“Up Against the Wall: Berkeley Posters from the 1960s” Opening reception at 3 p.m. at the Berkeley Historical Society, Veterans Memorial Building, 1931 Center St. Exhibit runs to Sept. 26. 848-0181.  

“Touching the Land” Contemporary Aboriginal art from Australia. Opening reception at 4 p.m. at Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, 2301 Vine St. Exhibition runs through May 22. 707-762-3296. 

“Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet” Guided tour at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“The Intricacies of Cultures” Photographs by Opal Palmer Adisa. Reception at 3 p.m. at Prescott-Joseph Center for Community Enhancement, 920 Peralta St., off 10th St., West Oakland. 208-5651. 

FILM 

“Routine Pleasures” with Jean-Paul Gorin in person at 2 p.m. at at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808.  

From Riches to Rags: Hollywood and the New Deal “Wild River” Introduced by Charlotte Brody, program director of Green for All, at 6 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Marcuse & Remmel: A New Approach” with Woody Minor at 7 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church, 2001 Santa Clara Ave., Alameda. Cost is $5. Sponsored by Alameda Architectural Preservation Society. 986-9232. www.alameda-preservation.org 

Egyptology Lecture “Sunset - the End of the Amarna Period” with Dr. Aidan Dodson, Bristol University at 2:30 p.m. at Barrows Hall, Room 20, Barrow Lane and Bancroft Way, UC campus. 415-664-4767. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“Dances and Songs of Remembrance, Resistance, and Hope” A tribute to the memory of those who died in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, with Ruth Botchan and Yale Strom and Elizabeth Schwartz, at 5 p.m. at Western Sky Studio, 2525 Eighth St. #13A, at Dwight. Tickets are $12-$25, reservations recommended. 848-4878. www.berkeleymovingarts.com 

Howard Kadis, French, German and English music from the 16th century at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Tickets are $12-$15. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra “Handel’s Wicked Queen” at 7 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are Tickets are $30-$72. 415-392-4400. www.philharmonia.org 

The Pinderhughes, 17- year old pianist, Samora, and 13-year old flautist, Elena, at 7 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $10-$15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Kellye Gray & Her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Flamenco Open Stage with Adela Clara at 7:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Trumpetsupergroup at 4:30 p.m. and riff-raff at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15. 845-5373.  

108, Pulling Teeth, Lewd Acts, Skin Like Iron at 5 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $8. 525-9926. 

MONDAY, APRIL 20 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Jon Carroll in Conversation with Rita Moreno at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Rep, 2025 Addison St. Tickets are $25. Benefit for Park Day School. 653-0317, ext. 103. www.ParkDaySchool.org 

Poetry Express with Stephen Kopel and John Rowe at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

TUESDAY, APRIL 21 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Mystery Made Manifest” New work by Susan Dunhan Felix opens at the Bade Museum, Pacific School of Religion, 1798 Scenic Ave. and runs through July 21. 848-0528. www.susandunhanfelix.com 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“A Life in Japanese Film” Donald Richie in conversation with Tom Luddy at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way at Dana. Cost is $5-$10. berkkeleyarts.org 

Mark Rudd describes “Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen” at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“40th Anniversary People’s Park Potluck and Folk Show” featuring Darryl Cherney with Carol Denney at 7 p.m. at Unitarian Fellowship Hall at Cedar and Bonita in Berkeley, sponsored by the 40th Anniversary People’s Park Organizing Committee. www.peoplespark.org 

Laura Klein, piano, and Ted Wolff, vibraphone, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198. 

Bluesbox Bayou Band at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Singers’ Open Mic with Kelly Park at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 22 

FILM 

“Crips and Bloods: Made in America” A documentary on the civil war that has lasted 40 years in South Central Los Angeles, at 6:30 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St. www.pbs.org/independentlens 

“The Day I Became a Woman” with lecture by Marilyn Fabe at 3 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Independent Filmmakers Screening Night Bring your 5 - 10 minute shorts & selects to screen every Wed. at 6:30 p.m. at Café of the Dead, 3208 Grand Ave., next to the Grand Lake Theater. Oakland. 931-7945. cafedeadscreening@gmail.com 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Mid-Century Modernism” with Henrik Bull at 7:30 p.m. at The Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Tickets are $15. Sponsored by Berkeley Architectural Heritage Assoc. 841-2242. berkeleyheritage.com 

Raymond Nat Tuner, Clive Matson and Cesar A. Preciado-Cruz read their poetry in celebration of National Poetry Month, followed by an open mic, a 6:30 p.m. at Richmond Public Library, Madeline F. Whittlesey Community Room, 325 Civic Center Plaza, Richmond. 620-6561. 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik and Three Blind Mice, at 8 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Wednesday Noon Concert, with University Baroque Ensemble at Hertz Hall, UC campus. Free. 642-4864. http://music.berkeley.edu 

University Chorus & chamber Chorus performs Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem” at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC campus. Tickets are $8-$25. 642-9988. www.calperformances.net 

UC Jazz Ensembles at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Hoedown Throwdown Square Dance with East Bay Clodhoppers with caller Jordan Ruyle at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Boriquen at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Salsa dance lessons at 8:30 p.m. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Joshi’z at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

THURSDAY, APRIL 23 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Lyric Escape: Paintings by Lawrence Ferlinghetti” Opening reception at 5:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Exhibition runs through May 10. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

“Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet” Guided tour at 12:15 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“Mystery Made Manifest” Works by Susan Duhan Felix. Opening reception from 4 to 6 p.m. at the Badè Museum, 1798 Scenic Ave. 848-0528. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

People’s Park 40th Anniversary “People’s Voice Poetry” with poets Al Young, Julia Vinograd, John Oliver Simon, Alta, HD Moe, Kirk Lumpkin, Paradise, Christian, Arnie Passman, and more at 7 p.m. at Caffe Mediterraneum, 2475 Telegraph. 390-0830. www.peoplespark.org 

Holloway Poetry Series with Ariana Reines at 6:30 p.m. in the Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall, UC campus. http://holloway.english.berkeley.edu 

Joel Harvey Schreck, author of “A Patient’s Guide to Chinese Medicine: Dr. Shen’s Handbook of Herbs and Acupuncture” at 7:30 p.m. at PEgasus Books, 1855 Solano Ave. 525-6888. 

David Weingarten and Lucia Howard give a slide show and discuss “Ranch Houses: Living the Dream” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Cheo Tyehimba on “Like Loving Backward: Stories” at 6:30 p.m. at Marcus Bookstore, 3900 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Oakland. Seating limited, Please RSVP to 652-2344. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

The Dance, Butterfly Bones at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $6. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Ronny Cox at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Kelly Park & His Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Tippy Canoe and Mikie Lee Prasad, Madame Pamita and her Parlour of Wonders at 9 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Speak the Music, beatboxing at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $8. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Adrian Gormley Jazz Ensemble at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

FRIDAY, APRIL 24 

THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley “Luv” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. at Berryman, through May 23. Tickets are $12. 649-5999. www.aeofberkeley.org 

Arts Research Center “The Botany of Desire” theatrical adaptation of Michael Pollan’s book at 5:30 p.m. at Wheeler Auditorium, UC campus. Discussion with artists and author following performance. Free, but tickets required. 642-9988. 

Aurora Theatre “Miss Julie” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m., at 2081 Addison St. to May 10. Tickets are $40-$42. 843-4822. auroratheatre.org 

Berkeley Rep “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” at Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison St. through May 15. Tickets are $33-$71. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Black Repertory Group “Mrs. Streeter” Fri. at 8 .m., Sat. at 2:30 and 8 p.m. at 3201 Adeline St., through April 25. Tickets are $15-$20. 925-812-2787. www.blackrepertorygroup.com 

Brookside Rep “Basha Rubenchek from Minsk, Comrade of Petaluma” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, through May 3. Tickets are $19-$24. www.BrooksideRep.org 

Contra Costa Civic Theater “Saint Joan” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at 951 Pomona Ave., El Cerrito, through May 10. Tickets are $11-$18. 524-9132. www.ccct.org 

Masquers Playhouse “The Last Five Years” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2:30 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond, and runs through May 2. Tickets are $18. 232-4031. www.masquers.org 

Shotgun Players “Skylight” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., though April 26. Tickets are $25. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

TheatreFIRST “Old Times” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at Gaia Arts Center, 2120 Allston Way, through April 25. Tickets are $23-$28. 436-5085. www.theatrefirst.com 

EXHIBITIONS 

Kala’s 35th Anniversary & Grand Opening Celebration at 5:30 p.m. with a preview of the re:con-figure exhibition, the celebration will include live music, performances. www.kala.org 

“The Art of Amusement” with artists and artwork on amusement, at 6 p.m. at Playland-Not-At-The-Beach, 10979 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. Art show is free, but $10-$15 for entire museum. 232-4264, ext. 25. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Larry Fink “Night at the Met” The photographer will discuss his latest book at 7 p.m. at UCB Graduate School of Journalism, 105 Northgate Hall, Hearst and Euclid. Tickets are $10. Reception at 6 p.m. The photographer will also hold a workshop on Sat. www.fotovision.org.  

“Creativity in the Face of Climate Change” A symposium at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“And Counting ...” with artist Nigel Poor on how to document life and what is worthy of preservation, at 7:30 p.m. at JFK Univ. Berkeley Campus, 2956 San Pablo Ave., 2nd flr. 647-2047. 

Shawna Yang Ryan reads from her book about Chinese immigrants in a small California town in 1928, “Water Ghosts” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Friday Noon Concert, with Dept. of Music students at Hertz Hall, UC campus. Free. 642-4864. http://music.berkeley.edu 

En Pointe Youth Dance Company “Impulse” at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Theater, 2460 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$18. 800-838-3006. www.brownpapertickets.com 

“Dance Anywhere” with Levi Toney, Sonja Dale and Tammy Cheney at noon at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2621 Durant Ave. Free. danceanywhere.org 

“The Cooking Show: Dance, Music, and Soupmaking” Fri. and Sat. at 7 and 9 p.m. at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St., Oakland. Cost is $10, no one turned away for lack of funds. www.thecookingshowoakland.blogspot.com 

Berkeley Dance Project 2009 “Equal Footing” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m., through April 26., at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC campus. Tickets are $10-$15. 642-8827. tdps.berkeley.edu 

Marimba Pacifica, Funky Nixons, Wire Graffiti in a People’s Park 40th Anniversary Celebration at 5 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Suggested donation $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

An Evening of Korean Art Songs at 7:30 p.m. at Pro Arts Gallery, 550 Second St., Oakland. Cost is $12-$18. 868-0695. proartsgallery.org 

Quetzal at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Tamar Sella at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Frankye Kelly & Her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Krista Detor at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Red Meat, Tremoloco, Rick Shea at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

R&B Fridays featuring Bobby Tinsely at 9 p.m. at Maxwell’s Lounge, 341 13th St., Oakland. Cost is $20. 839-6169. 

The P-PL at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Curtis Bumpy at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

SATURDAY, APRIL 25 

CHILDREN  

Songs of Earth and Spirit A family concert in celebration of Earth Day with Betsy Rose at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5 for adults, $4 for children. Please bring seeds for planting. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Jean Paul Valjean “Short Attention Span Circus” Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave., Oakland. Cost is $7. 452-2259. www.fairyland.org 

Active Arts Theatre for Young Audiences “Alice in Wonderland” a circus adaptation Sat. at 2 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 4:30 p.m., at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave., TIckets are $14-$18. 296-4433. activeartstheatre.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Squeak Carnwath: Painting is no Ordinary Object” exhibition opens and runs through Aug. 23, at Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak at 10th, Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

“Steel Life” Works by David Wayrynen. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at MC Artworks, 10344 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. 375-9235. www.mcartworksgallery.com 

“A Rare Alchemy” Pinhole photography by S. McGrath Ryan, Glass sculptures of David Ruth. Closing party at 6 p.m. at FLOAT Gallery, 1091 Calcot Place #116, Oakland. 535-1702. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Adam Mansbach reads from “End of the Jews” at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

En Pointe Youth Dance Company “Impulse” at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Theater, 2460 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$18. 800-838-3006. www.brownpapertickets.com 

“The Cooking Show: Dance, Music, and Soupmaking” at 7 and 9 p.m. at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St., Oakland. Cost is $10, no one turned away for lack of funds. www.thecookingshowoakland.blogspot.com 

The Temescal String Quartet “Muss Es Sein? Es Muss Sein!” at 8 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana St. Tickets are $8-$12. 549-3864. www.trinitychamberconcerts.com 

Javanese Shadow Play with Gamelan Sari Raras at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC campus. Tickets are $5-$15. 642-9988.  

Pacific Boychoir Academy with Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra at 7 p.m. at the First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $20. 652-4722. www.pacificboychoiracademy.org 

“Piano, Poetry, Jazz and Lyrics” with Raymond Nat Turner and Tammy Lynne Hall at 3 p.m. in the third flr. Community Room, Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6107. 

Pete Yellin All-Stars at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Kotoja at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. African dance lesson at 9 p.m. Cost is $10-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Mayne Smith with Johnny Harper at 2 p.m. at Down Home Music, 10341 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. 525-2129. 

Sashamon, reggae, ska, at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $12-$15. 548-1159. www.shattuckdownlow.com 

The Venzuelan Music Project with Jackeline Rago at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $16-$18. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Ralph Stanley & the Clinch Mountain Boys at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $48.50-$49.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org  

Wakefield Jazz Quartet at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15-$18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Dgiin at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

The Unreal Band at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Socket at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

SUNDAY, APRIL 26 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet” Guided tour at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“5 Takes” Photographs by Fraser Bonnell, Eric Kaufman-Cohen, Cathy Lozano, Martha Snider and Ted Williams opens at Photolab, 2235 Fifth St. 644-1400. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“The Miracle of the Negro Spiritual” Lecture and song with Lucy Kitchen Chorale at 2 p.m at First Presbyterian Church of Oakland, 2619 Broadway, Oakland. Donations accepted. 444-3555. 

University Wind Ensemble at 3 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC campus. Tickets are $5-$15. 642-9988. www.calperformances.net 

Chamber Music Sundaes, with members of the SF Symphony and friends at 3 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets at the door are $20-$25. 415-753-2792. www.chambermusicsundaes.org 

Karen Blixt & Her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Café Bellie at 5:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $8. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Le Jazz Hot at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Tim Eriksen at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

 

 

 

 


‘The Last Five Years’ at Masquers

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 06:44:00 PM

“I’m breaking my mother’s heart / And my grandfather’s rolling in his grave ... .” Jamie, a young, ambitious writer sings with energetic sarcasm about breaking out of his Midwestern Jewish family circle, “Finally breaking through / Waiting for someone like you ... Hey hey shiksa goddess / I’ve been waiting for someone like you / You, breaking the circle / You are the story I should write ...” —as he embarks towards the distant horizon of his new life. 

All the while, Cathy is moving in the opposite direction, beginning five years after they meet, picking up a notepad on a stool—two of the few scenic elements in the Masquers Playhouse production of Jason Robert Brown’s almost completely sung duo musical of the course—and reflux—of a relationship, The Last Five Years. 

The notepad has a goodbye note scribbled on it. Against Jamie’s boisterous excitement, Cathy’s mood is wistful, elegiac even, yet acerbic: “Jamie is over, there’s nowhere to turn.” The pitch goes up; she sings bitterly that it’s time to “run away / Run and find something better,” a little staccato against the sonorous instrumentation of Pat King on piano, leading a chamber group of bass, guitar, violin and cello, just visible at the back of the stage, but close enough to be felt everywhere, like the omnipresence of the music in a nightclub. 

The two are moving in time cross-grain to each other in mood and awareness. Mostly it’s contrasting songs, or a tradeoff, coming from different places. When they cross paths, the singing seems to bend a little, over the music, like a lyrical Doeppler Effect. And they rush—or slog—on. 

A few years back, when William Bolcom and Joan Morris were in town, performing their history of American song at that year’s Ernst Bloch Lectures at the UC Department of Music, their last program was entitled “Towards an American Cabaret.” It dealt out the songs and anecdotes of both native efforts and the role of European emigre composers and musicians in establishing the urbanity of art song and cabaret in the often-provincial musical setting of American life, public and private—and explored the trajectory, a little, of the post-Sondheim musical that slowly usurped, along with pop music, the role of Tin Pan Alley, which had provided the standards for everything from at-home sing-a-long song sheets, to Broadway, to jazz bands. 

The Last Five Years is a child of that movement, a spin-off of that trajectory. The five years in question—has that been the standard length of a serious romance for a while now, as standardized as the renewable commercial lease was, or the old Soviet Five Year Plan?—are 1997-2002. The young people who grow up so quickly and slip past each other, one in orbit, the other retrograde, are both in showbiz—or The Media—he an author, she an aspiring actress, but the glitz at the end of the tunnel doesn’t make them any less ordinary. In fact, they come into adulthood, career choices and love during a time when the arts and entertainment had become more than just a personal dream, a social relaxation, a regional industry, but a metaphor for society—Arts & Entertainment aspired to be the postmodern image of society itself, and the fountainhead of careers, lifestyles, not just self-expression, or pastime or hobby. 

(The cause of the preemptory scorn and dismissal of The Last Five Years by another East Bay reviewer could be the deliberate confusion of banalities people usually try to escape through music and song—whether practicing it or just listening, humming along—with the songs, the shows themselves, the ambition to make them and make a life out of what expressed the unrealized longings, the failures of ordinary existence. Here, the protagonists express both hope and ambition, frustration and failure as they mistake each other, ream out the possibilities in their ordinary existences by being practicitioners of that very thing, that special form of expression. There’s something in this akin to blaming the messenger for the message.) 

In the case of the show at the Masquers, the messengers do themselves proud. Danny Cozart as Jamie captures the boyish energy and charm—and self-absorption—as he sings “Moving Too Fast” (“I found a woman I love / And I found an agent who loves me ... I’ve got a singular impression things are moving too fast.”) and later an ambidextrous self-justifying streak (“I will not lose / Because you think you can’t win”), which culminates in his writing and leaving the note on the stool Cathy opened the play reading. And Jennifer Ekman’s Cathy bravely goes to her auditions (“I’m a Part of That”), struggling to overcome her self-effacement (“See I’m Smiling” and “I Can Do Better Than That”), and passes from bitterness at the end to the hope of new love at the beginning, singing “Goodbye Until Tomorrow” while Jamie, having gone from beginning to end, sings “I Could Never Rescue You,” a disparate duet, one of three in a show more song cycle than play. 

Director and scenic designer Daren A. C. Carollo, his assistant director and costume designer Dana Zook, and lighting designer David Lam have kept the design spare, accenting the sense of intimacy the director says made him think of the Masquers Playhouse for this show. The rich harmonies of the strings, driven by Pat King’s piano, are scenery enough. The sparsity of decor and the absence of supporting cast concentrate the production and lend it just a touch of irony—an art of silence, not attitude.  

 

THE LAST FIVE YEARS 

8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Sundays through May 2 at Masquers Playhouse, 105 Park Place, Point Richmond. $18. 232-4031. www.masquers.org. 

 


Historical Society Exhibits 1960s Berkeley Poster Art

By Steven Finacom, Special to the Planet
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 06:45:00 PM
A vivid “Speak out Against the War” poster is one of several
              Vietnam-era examples in the exhibit.
Courtesy Lincoln Cushing.
A vivid “Speak out Against the War” poster is one of several Vietnam-era examples in the exhibit.

Working on the UC campus and walking daily through the streets of Berkeley, I’ve seen thousands of posters and flyers over the years, many commercial, but many also cultural or political, displayed everywhere from official bulletin boards to telephone poles.  

They range from event announcements with dramatic graphics, to hastily scrawled flyers calling people to action on this or that cause, to the rantings of lunatics, all of them particularly ephemeral cultural signposts. 

Fortunately for our understanding of local history over the past generation, Free Speech Movement activist Michael Rossman began collecting local posters in the 1960s. By the time he died in 2008 he had amassed more than 25,000 items, a varied and irreplaceable record of the local past. 

An eclectic and intriguing sampling of Rossman’s collection—plus graphic material loaned by other collectors—is being unveiled Sunday, April 19, when the Berkeley Historical Society will open a new exhibit, “Up Against the Wall: Berkeley Posters from the 1960s,” curated by archivist and collector Lincoln Cushing. 

Cushing calls the period covered by the exhibit the “Long ’60s.” History rarely pivots on an exact calendrical cycle. What we think of as “The Sixties”—political ferment, cultural change, social conflict, especially in places like Berkeley—didn’t really begin until about 1964, and didn’t end until the mid-1970s. 

“As 1950s America woke up from the deep chill of McCarthyism and the Cold War, a new genre of popular culture blossomed in the streets of Berkeley during the mid-1960s,” Cushing writes. “Spurred by the success of local rock and counterculture posters, political posters were vibrant public documents that promoted a wide range of social issues.” 

Cushing will give a brief talk and introduction to the exhibit at the Sunday event, which also doubles as the Berkeley Historical Society Annual Meeting. 

Younger Berkeley residents and readers, weaned on 24-hour-a-day, ever-changing Internet ubiquity, text messaging and personal cell phones, may not quite realize the impact of paper posters in previous decades. Often times the primary publicity for an event, particularly something like a quickly organized political rally, would be posters or flyers on the street corners, and word of mouth.  

The posters for the exhibit chronicle the era in vivid graphics and color. They include announcements of local concerts by iconic artists like Pete Seeger and Country Joe and the Fish, political causes ranging from Stop the Draft Week to People’s Park, political campaigns, social movements—including posters for a gay Valentine’s dance in the UC Berkeley Student Union, and the Berkeley Women’s Health Collective--and early expressions of environmental causes from recycling, to banning the pesticide DDT. 

The exhibit text also outlines how poster production evolved, including workshops and programs at local colleges and artist and activist collectives, and the parallel evolution of the posters themselves from utilitarian event and cause announcements to works of art that ornamented many a local apartment and commune wall as well as museum collections. 

 

"Up Against the Wall: Berkeley Posters from the 1960s" 

3-5 p.m. Sunday, April 19, at the Berkeley History Center in the Veteran’s Memorial Building, 1931 Center St. The History Center’s regular hours are 1-4 p.m. Thursday through Saturday. The exhibit runs through Sept. 26. Free admission. A detailed outline of the exhibit can be seen at www.docspopuli.org/articles/BHS2009.html. 

 

Steven Finacom is a member of the Berkeley Historical Society Board. 


Aurora Stages Strindberg’s ‘Miss Julie’

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 06:45:00 PM

The kitchen of an old country estate: stove at the rear, a long table cuts through the middle of the room. (Like a pagan fetish, a tree hangs upside-down above the table.) On a diagonal axis, the servants’ bedrooms, female and male; cook’s off to one side, the valet’s opposite—like wings in an old theater, to enter and exit. At right angle, beneath an electric bell with telephone to summon the servants upstairs, another entrance, through which comes the sound of fiddles, of a barn dance. It’s Midsummer’s Eve. The master is away from home; his daughter dances with the peasants. 

So lies the setting at the start of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, directed by Mark Jackson at the Aurora, from an adaptation by Helen Cooper. Much of what happens onstage—between just three characters, though others never seen are felt as presences—seems to be in real time, about society, class distinctions and hatred, sexual mores in late 19th century Scandinavia. So the play is often dubbed Naturalistic.  

But Strindberg, one of the greatest innovators of the newly-modern theater, borrowed throughout his career from many forms, reaching back to the Baroque for his History Plays (seldom performed in America), to the poetic theater of the Romantics and Symbolists for his Dream Plays, cannibalizing novels, erotica, French “well-wrought” drama (whence came the commercial screenplay), and back to Medieval Morality and Miracle Plays for his Inferno period, and that Northern European dark carnival, the Dance of Death.  

(As quoted in the program, Strindberg said it himself: “My characters are conglomerations of past and present stages of civilization ... patched together as is the human soul.” A Euripidean—even Shakespearean—sense.)  

The carnival here, though, is only heard offstage, as the lower classes celebrate the season with sexual provocativeness. David Graves’ music keys it in well, as do his more reflective tones on strings and keyboard in the intimate chamber of the kitchen, where time seems to float, to get tangled up in pauses and long looks, to change the very color of the air as the three come out with their emotions and secrets, peaking with a slow dance on the kitchen table as if on stage, ending in a deadly game of hypnosis, of self-hypnosis. 

Miss Julie is the natural daughter of the master of the estate, torn between her father’s patriarchial uprightness and her late mother’s radical bluestocking tendencies. Grown-up tomboy, she teases Jean the valet, orders him to put on her father’s jacket and dance with her. (The jacket, her father’s boots Jean is to polish, the bell above the door—all hang over his head like a riding crop.) Her provocativeness upsets the apple cart between Jean and his intended, shrewd, churchgoing Christina the cook. And it stirs Jean’s deepest desires and ambitions, a young man from poorest peasant, not servant, stock. 

All this is played out in a chamber, a cube into which light and sound descend, as it were, and into and out of which the three characters appear and disappear like the figures in an illustrated book, dreamlike in the way sharp line drawings are. The designers contribute much to this mood—Guilio Cesare Perrone’s set; Heather Basarab’s lights; Fumiko Bielefeldt’s costumes. 

The action within the room feels at times like that of figures in a music box. The dramatic action seems within the story, or to arise from it as illustration, the characters contained within the illustrated figures. 

The actors work well. Lauren Grace as Miss Julie reminds Aurora goers of her role in The Master Builder—maybe it’s time for her to play Hedda Gabler, Ibsen’s answer to Strindberg by appropriating “his” kind of woman. Beth Deitchman’s Christine is alert, pert even, when called for, having the sense of a witness, someone who sees and hears without acting on what she witnesses. But she has her moments (as when she lays into Jean while “straightening out” the kitchen) and chooses them. Grace is an unusual actress, mostly seen on North Bay stages. 

Mark Anderson Phillips is best as Jean in his brooding glances, gazing at the unapproachable or looking for an opening; now like a whipped dog, now like the dog’s master. Opening night, his dynamics, his rhythm—especially vocal—tended to be pushed, distracting from the texture. There’s unquestionably chemistry between him and Grace, especially in the pauses, the glances (a little reminiscent of Pinter, a student of Strindberg’s style). 

Overall, there was this kind of flattening; the action didn’t completely find a motor within. Jackson—and Helen Cooper, in her translation, which takes some of Strindberg’s great mastery of offstage, ambiguous, action, making it explicit—simplifies it somewhat, painted in broad strokes. 

Jackson seems interested in the relation between narrative, storytelling—and spectacle. The tableaux are often the thing, more than the transitions, as the dreamlike dance on the kitchen table, Jean brushing aside the tree’s branches above, then shaking himself, as if awake.  

These figures call to mind storybook illustrations, Anime even. It would be interesting to watch him stage Dickens—or, more American, Winesburg, Ohio, which Sherwood Anderson originally titled “The Book of the Grotesque.”  

It’s a fascinating experiment, searching for stylization, which Gilbert Sorrentino described in Jack Spicer’s poetry as “an art at once subservient to, and dominant over, a set of ideas”—or Meyerhold, who Jackson’s studied, characterized as “The Grotesque: Triumph of Form over Content.” Not yet stylized—a difficult thing, when you look at traditional theaters: Noh, Kabuki, Chinese Opera, even Commedia, Italian Opera and Ballet—the figures can be bland, lack savor (except a whiff of the false naive, when a character knows less than author or audience). They’re not yet personae, that triumph of the classical drama of yore that modern theater and poetry have sought to restore.  

But Jackson’s working at it, in his own way. This’s his most challenging production of the past half dozen, possibly because of the encounter with Strindberg. He seems to have Emersonian, even Carlylean, sensibilities. His next project is Faust, Part One, at Shotgun—the great revelation for these English-language masters. It could be for us, too. 

 

MISS JULIE 

8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday and 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays thorugh May 10 at Aurora Theater, 2081 Addison St. $40-$42. 843-4822. auroratheatre.org.


Dorothy Bryant Honored With Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award

By Estelle Jelinek, Special to the Planet
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 06:46:00 PM

Finally! Dorothy Bryant is getting the recognition she deserves. For more than four decades Dorothy Calvetti Bryant has been churning out book after book—novels, plays and nonfiction—with an amazing versatility in themes and characters.  

Take, for example, Ella Price’s Journal, her very first novel, about a re-entry student at a junior college struggling to sort out her life. At the time the book was published, I was teaching at a junior college that offered its first course in women’s literature, so when the jacket copy noted that the author lived in Berkeley, I called her up and invited her to the class. The students were thrilled to meet an author in the flesh and whose book they loved. And so was I. 

“Work” is the operative word in this writer’s life, every day, every morning. One dare not call her at that time of day, and her devoted husband, Bob Bryant, protects her privacy. In 1976 Dorothy and Bob started Ata Books, their very own press, which, beginning with Miss Giardino, published most of Dorothy’s books. 

“When I first started to self-publish,” Dorothy said, “I was angry at the larger publishers. But then I learned how big business works, and I realized it was just a matter of economics. The way publishers run their business, they just can’t handle the kind of products I offer. If they did, they’d have to retool their entire operation, and why should they? They do what they do. And now, so do I.” 

In addition to Miss Giardino, others followed in quick succession: The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You (1976), The Garden of Eros (1979), Prisoners (1980), Killing Wonder (1981), A Day in San Francisco (1983), and Confessions of Madame Psyche (1986)—and two works of nonfiction—Writing a Novel (1983) and Myths to Lie By (1984). 

When, in the 1990s, Dorothy turned to writing plays, thanks to our connection through a feminist study group, I was able to attend several readings of her plays in progress—Dear Master (1991), a dialogue between George Sand and Gustave Flaubert; The Trial of Cornelia Connelly (2003); The Panel (1994), about Simone Weil; Tea with Mrs. Hardy (1992); and Eros in Love (2006). 

Along the way has come recognition: In 1997 the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award for Confessions of Madame Psyche, which was also performed in a shortened version by Word for Word; and Aurora Theatre’s choosing Dear Master as its debut production in 1991, as well as naming its theater after Sand’s real first name. 

It seems that Dorothy can turn any subject or event into a creative work, and all of her novels traverse the space between the real world and her character’s inner psyche or soul. Take, for example, A Day in San Francisco, about the then-unknown onset of the AIDS epidemic. When it got a trouncing for being “hysterical,” she began her collection, Literary Lynchings. Others who suffered similar attacks by “literary lynch mobs” include Turgenev, Hardy, Kate Chopin, Orwell, Arendt, and Styron—all of whose essays you’re free to read at your leisure at holtuncensored.com/literary_lynching. 

The Northern California Book Reviewers 28th annual awards ceremony will be held April 19. The awards honor the work of Northern California authors of novels, nonfiction, poetry, andchildren’s literature, plus translators. Dorothy Bryant is being given the Fred Cody Award, a lifetime achievement award to honor a Northern California literary figure with an important body of work. The annual award honors those, who like Fred Cody, have given much to the community. Don’t miss this celebration of Dorothy Bryant’s lifelong achievement.  

 

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA  

BOOK REVIEWERS 28TH ANNUAL AWARDS CEREMONY 

1 p.m., followed by a book signing and reception from 2:30-4 p.m. Sunday, April 19, at the Koret Auditorium at the San Francisco Public Library, 100 Larkin St. Free admission.


Philharmonia Baroque Presents Handel’s ‘Athalia’

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 06:46:00 PM

Philharmonia Baroque will close its season with Georg Frideric Handel’s third English oratorio, Athalia, at First Congregational Church this weekend.  

The performance will be conducted by musical director Nicholas McGegan and will feature soprano Dominique Labelle as Athalia; soprano Marnie Breckenridge as Josabeth; soprano Celine Ricci as Joas; countertenor Robin Blaze as Joad; tenor Thomas Cooley as Mathan; bass-baritone Roderick Williams as Abner; and the Philharmonia Chorale, directed by Bruce Lamott. 

Handel composed and premiered his first two oratorios in Italy (1707-08), with Italian texts and no action onstage. When he arrived in England in 1710, there was no oratorio tradition; the composer wrote Italian operas (of recent popularity in London) and church music. In 1718, after writing anthems and other choral music, Handel composed a pastoral dramatic piece, Acis and Galatea, and the first English oratorio, Esther, based on Racine’s Biblical play of 1689 for the girls of St. Cyr school. It was performed privately until 1732, when it was introduced at court, paradoxically a dramatic form without acting, due to a longstanding ban on staging sacred stories. Oscar Wilde’s Salome, used by Richard Strauss as libretto for his opera, was banned in London 150 years later for the same reason.  

Athalia, Handel’s third English oratorio, was based on Racine’s last play (and on the story of the Biblical queen of Judah, daughter of Ahab and Jezebel), one of his greatest, in 1691, also written for the girls of St. Cyr, which utilized a chorus, modeled on Greek tragedy, that both commented on and participated in the action of the story. Handel’s librettist, Samuel Humphreys, adapted Racine’s story by cutting much exposition, keeping mostly key moments, including Racine’s addition to the Biblical story, the Israelite festival celebrating the harvest. 

The story of Athalia comes from 2 Kings 11 and 2 Chronicles 23. Athaliah, a worshipper of Baal, has taken over the throne, ordering the male children of the Jewish royal house to be killed. One royal child, Joas, is kept in secret by his aunt Josebeth, and brought up in the temple of Jerusalem as ward of the High Priest, Joad (Jehoida)—one of the few countertenor roles written by Handel.  

The action takes place in the temple, with Athalia and her entourage entering at one point, the queen recounting her bad dreams, and seeking the boy she saw in in them, wearing shining priestly robes, who wins her over, only to kill her. The story ends in a revolt that overthrows Athalia, bringing Joas to the throne—an ancestor of David, so of Jesus, which accounts for the great dramatic tension concerning the boy’s safety, Racine and Handel’s audiences knowing the future ramifications of his survival. There has been speculation that the story of a hidden prince regaining his rightful throne from a usurper would have appealed to nationalistic and Jacobite sentiments prevalent in Oxford. 

“This work brings together the best of what Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra offers,” says Nicholas McGegan. “A dramatic story, in a musical style the musicians play with virtuosity and verve, an international cast of the best vocal soloists from around the world, and the fabulous Philharmonia Chorale—a chorus unmatched in singing the music of Handel. For me, conducting Handel with PBO is like driving a Rolls Royce!” 

 

ATHALIA 

Performed by Philharmonia Baroque  

Orchestra at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 7 p.m. Sunday at First Congregational Church,  

2345 Channing Way. Additional performances will take place the April 25 adn 26 in  

San Francisco and Palo Alto. $30-72.  

(415) 392-4400. www.philharmonia.org.


East Bay Symphony’s ‘Russian Easter Overture’

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 06:47:00 PM
Sara Beuchner.
Sara Beuchner.

The Oakland East Bay Symphony is performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1, featuring pianist Sara Buechner, and Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Petroushka, this Friday night at the Paramount Theatre with musical director Michael Morgan conducting.  

The program also features contemporary composer Mark Lanz Weiser’s Four Scenes from The Story of Tocatta and Fugue and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Overture, from 1888. 

Rimsky-Korsakov said of his work: “This legendary and heathen side of the holiday, this transition from the gloomy and mysterious evening of Passion Sunday to the unbridled pagan-religious merrymaking on the morn of Easter Sunday, is what I was eager to produce in my Overture.” 

Rimsky-Korsakov used in his overture liturgical themes from the first published music in Russia, the Obikhod (1772), a collection of Orthodox Church canticles.  

“The capering and leaping of the biblical King David before the Ark, do they not give an expression to the mood of the idol-worshipper’s dance?” he said. “Surely the Russian Orthodox Obikhod is instrumental dance music of the church, is it not? And do not the waving beards of the priests and sextons clad in white vestments and surplices ... transport the imagination to pagan times?”  

Or, as Morgan said of the Paramount program: “It’s Spring—Celebrate!”  

The concert, opening with Russian Easter Overture, coincides with Good Friday of Holy Week in the Eastern Orthodox calendar. 

The four scenes of the “burlesque” of Petroushka, from the 1947 version, rescored by the composer for smaller orchestra, follow the Rimsky-Korsakov overture. The original, a triumph of polytonality and syncopation, was written in 1911. 

Stravinsky recalled that, while working on sketches for what would, three years later, become The Rite of Spring, “I wanted to refresh myself by composing an orchestral piece in which the piano would play the most important part ... I had in mind the distinct picture of a puppet, suddenly endowed with life, exasperating the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggios. The orchestra in turn retaliates with menacing trumpet blasts. The outcome is a terrific noise which reaches its climax and ends ends in the sorrowful and querulous collapse of the poor puppet.”  

When Vaslav Nijinsky premiered the role, Sarah Bernhardt reportedly pronounced herself afraid, “Because I have just seen the greatest actor in the world!” 

(Petroushka replaced on the program the earlier-announced Rite of Spring, which requires a bigger orchestra.) 

Weiser has written an opera, Where Angels Fear to Tread, from the E.M. Forster novel; a setting for W.B. Yeats’ two character one-act play, Purgatory; and Rendezvous of Light, a one-woman show about Emily Dickinson. Four Scenes from The Story of Tocatta and Fugue is taken from the score for Neal Thibedeau’s film thriller of that title. The four scenes are scored for strings.  

“Though each scene is a cue from the film,” Weiser said, “I don’t think it would be necessary to describe what’s happening in the movie when they are being played—hopefully, they can stand on their own as abstracts. In performance, they proceed one to the next without much pause, and are titled ‘Moons,’ ‘Body,’ ‘Passacaglia’ and ‘Taxi Ride.’”  

Morgan has compared it, as a film score for strings, to Bernard Hermann’s score for Hitchcock’s Psycho—“but without the insanity.” 

Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major, written after his second but published first, was possibly introduced in 1795 at Beethoven’s first Vienna appearance as both composer and pianist, organized by his teacher—though the piece is often said to be inspired by Mozart’s concerti. Piano soloist Buechner is known for her interpretations of Mozart, of Ferruccio Busoni’s arrangement of J.S. Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” of George Gershwin and of Hermann’s piano concerti. She has more than 100 concerti in her repertoire. 

 

RUSSIAN EASTER OVERTURE 

Presented by the Oakland East Bay Symphony at 8 p.m. Friday at the Paramount Theater, 2025 Broadway, Oakland. 444-0841. www.oebs.org.


Around the East Bay: Mz. Dee at Blake's

Thursday April 16, 2009 - 12:41:00 PM

East Bay R&B vocal stylist Mz. Dee, a featured singer with the Johnny Otis band, and whose Medicine Show plays on local BETV Channel 28, is playing at 9 p.m., Friday, April 17, at Blake’s On Telegraph, with her band, The VIPs, for the first time in years, featuring her Blues Revival in advance of a European tour. Show $12 advance; $15 at the door. 2367 Telegraph Ave. 843-0886. blakesontelegraph.com. 


Around the East Bay: Crucible Open House

Thursday April 16, 2009 - 01:18:00 PM

The Crucible, West Oakland’s unique fire arts studio and performance space, is celebrating its Spring Open House this from 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday, April 18, with an art show, fire performance artists, a parade of art bikes, and demonstrations of glassblowing, blacksmithery and, bronze casting. Refreshments available. 1260 Seventh St., West Oakland. Free admission. 444-0919. thecrucible.org.


Around the East Bay: 'Confessions of a Refrigerator Mother'

Thursday April 16, 2009 - 01:42:00 PM

East Bay performer Carolyn Doyle, a familiar face on local stages, is performing a challenging solo show she’s written, Confessions of a Refrigerator Mother, about a day in the life of raising an autistic 9-year-old boy. 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays through April 25 at The Marsh, 1062 Valencia St., San Francisco. $15 and up, sliding scale. (800) 838-3006. themarsh.org.


East Bay Then and Now: Captain Thomas Offered City Land for a Park

By Daniella Thompson
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 06:49:00 PM
he Samuel Hume Castle at 2900 Buena Vista Way is located on the
              former site of Captain Thomas “Fort La Loma.”
Thos W. Tenney, 1971
he Samuel Hume Castle at 2900 Buena Vista Way is located on the former site of Captain Thomas “Fort La Loma.”
Richard Parks Thomas.
San Francisco Call, March 15, 1897
Richard Parks Thomas.
Captain Thomas’ estate, La Loma Park, in an 1891 bird’s-eye view
              map of Berkeley.
Captain Thomas’ estate, La Loma Park, in an 1891 bird’s-eye view map of Berkeley.
The eucalyptus trees surrounding the Maybeck Studio are descended
              from those planted by Captain Thomas.
House & Home, Dec. 1957
The eucalyptus trees surrounding the Maybeck Studio are descended from those planted by Captain Thomas.
Captain Thomas arranging a soap exhibit at the Mechanics’ Institute
              Fair.
San Francisco Call, Aug. 17, 1895
Captain Thomas arranging a soap exhibit at the Mechanics’ Institute Fair.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second in a series on Captain R.P. Thomas and La Loma Park. 

 

Captain Richard Parks Thomas, whose Standard Soap Works was Berkeley’s largest factory, expanded into banking in 1886. Within two years, his California National Bank of San Francisco went into receivership, and one of its stockholders, John Chetwood, Jr., sued the three members of the bank’s executive committee, seeking to recover the bank’s losses from them. 

In December 1892, the plaintiff won a preliminary decision, but before a final judgment had been rendered, Chetwood settled with two of the defendants, who paid $27,500 to have the suit against them dismissed. Thomas was left as sole defendant, owing $139,419. 

Not one to hand over money quietly, Thomas took every measure to make himself judgment-proof. Naturally, he appealed the judgment, but this was only the first step. In July 1894, Thomas convened a meeting of the bank’s stockholders for the purpose of electing an agent to represent them. His own majority stock—1,020 shares out of a total of 2,000—helped elect railroad agent Thomas K. Stateler, who from then on became the person empowered to collect monies on behalf of the stockholders. 

In December 1894, Thomas filed a petition to be declared insolvent, having concealed his most liquid assets. “All of his assets are exempt from taxation,” the San Francisco Call reported. “They comprise five shares in the Standard Soap Company, $200 worth of personal property and a homestead in Berkeley valued at $10,000. Even this however, is encumbered by a mortgage for $7,516.80.” 

Two months later, Thomas was called before Judge Frick on an order of examination to show what property he had in his possession. Although most of his answers consisted of “I don’t know” and “I can’t remember,” it was finally revealed that his 9,500 shares of soap stock had been transferred to J.G. Pohle, one of his allies among the bank’s stockholders, in exchange for a mine in Colorado that proved worthless. Thomas claimed there was no money in the soap stock, although Standard Soap Co. had done $176,000 worth of business in one year. 

His bank stock was also hard to track down, but eventually it was discovered that Thomas had assigned his 1,020 shares to D.E. Dowling, his second-in-command at Standard Soap. Dowling, in turn, told the court that these shares were acquired by one D.F. Parker, who later turned out to be another Standard Soap employee. 

The enraged Chetwood next tried to go after Thomas’ 32-acre North Berkeley estate, La Loma Park, which he said was valued at $40,000. Thomas claimed that as a homestead, the estate was exempt. Chetwood also tried to oust Stateler and have a receiver appointed for the Standard Soap Company, which, so he claimed, Thomas was proposing to wreck in order to keep it from falling into the hands of his creditors. 

In July 1896, Thomas’ appeal finally reached the California Supreme Court and found receptive ears. The court concluded that since Chetwood’s lawsuit had been launched against the executive committee and not against its individual members, his compromise with two of the members was held to be tantamount to a withdrawal of the suit. 

The case was dismissed, and Chetwood next took a writ of error to the United States Supreme Court. That august body ruled in October 1898 that it had “no jurisdiction to review a decision of a state supreme court based entirely on grounds arising under the laws of the state.” The writ of error was dismissed. 

Fighting court cases for a decade did not diminish Captain Thomas’ civic spirit. He continued to attend reunions of the Grand Army of the Republic—a Union army veterans’ organization—traveling as far as Washington, D.C. Certain holidays were celebrated in grand style at La Loma Park. The San Francisco Call twice described these celebrations, and the accounts are worth quoting verbatim. On Sept. 10, 1896, the Call reported: 

Admission day was celebrated very quietly by the town people, but up on the hill, three-quarters of a mile back of Berkeley, Captain R. P. Thomas, the Soap King, kept up a continuous bombardment from daybreak to sunset with his two historic howitzers, stationed at his celebrated “Fort Thomas.” 

Down in the dense grove of eucalyptus trees, planted by his own hand, a short distance from the fort, the captain and his wife entertained between 300 and 400 visitors from San Francisco, Oakland, Alameda and Berkeley, who had come to show their love for the Golden West by feasting together and listening to the patriotic addresses. 

A musical and literary programme was rendered, and addresses in keeping with the occasion were delivered by Attorney George W. Haight, Charles Keeler and Rev. E. B. Payne. Tables were set under the trees and in a huge tent, and refreshments were served by the ladies of the party. 

And here is the story published on May 2, 1897: 

On the highest point of the captain’s land, and at an eminence not far from the summit of the mountain, he has erected what he calls a fort, and which he declares to be the only private affair of the kind in the State. On an esplanade surrounded by a circular parapet three 20-pound guns have been mounted in embrasures, and they command the entire country. On the right lie San Pablo Bay and the straits of Carquinez, San Quentin and the Golden Gate, while a discharge from the piece on the left might rake the streets of Oakland. A house is built within the inclosure and used as a powder magazine, and every Fourth of July the powder in this arsenal is brought out and the guns boom all day long. The Fourth is a great day with the captain. He sets aside $500 for its celebration, hires a caterer to bring coffee and sandwiches on the mountain, and then invites the town. They come in hundreds, and for that day La Loma is a public pleasure ground. 

The same article described the captain’s log cabin, a precursor in design to the Arts & Crafts homes that would eventually dot his hill: 

A unique feature of the captain’s place is a log house which the owner built with his own hands, requiring seven years for its completion. It is two stories in height, has two rooms below and a large apartment above. It is a comfortable lodge, and the captain uses it as such, having fitted it up for a museum and smoking cabin; here he lounges during evenings amid his relics of the long past, an aggregation which covers the whole of the captain’s life. 

Many of the curios collected in the cabin were mementos of Thomas’ Civil War days. The Call reproduced one of the most precious: a letter from General Ulysses S. Grant to General William Tecumseh Sherman, written in Grant’s hand and dated Aug. 8, 1862. Thomas had picked it up on the grounds that had been occupied by the federal forces in Memphis, after the troops’ withdrawal. 

His civic spirit wasn’t confined to pageants. In March 1897, Captain Thomas offered to deed his estate to Berkeley, to be used as a pubic park. He had planted his 32 acres with eucalyptus and many other tree varieties, and though it a splendid location for Sunday strollers and picnickers. “I had thought somewhat of giving the property to the university, but I have concluded that the town can make more use of it, since I desire that the place should always be kept intact,” he said. 

To facilitate access to the park, Thomas proposed to build a suspension railroad of his own patented design along Cedar Street and through his grounds to Grizzly Peak. He stipulated two conditions for his gift: that the city convert the property into a park with walks, drives, and shrubbery and maintain it in good condition, and that a strip of several acres adjoining his property be purchased by the town and included in the park. 

The town did not jump at the offer. Captain Thomas died of a stroke on May 28, 1900, leaving the estate to his wife, Jane. She did not wait long to subdivide the land. On October 29 of that year, the San Francisco Call was able to report:  

The old Captain Thomas place in North Berkeley, otherwise known as “La Loma Park,” has been sold in building lots by Easton & Eldridge. The purchasers were largely the university people. The land is nearly 500 feet above the level of the bay. The lots brought from $1,200 to $1,500 at private sale, as reported by the brokers. Upon them handsome residences will be erected. The running of an extension of the Telegraph avenue electric road to North Berkeley has bought a large section into market and made it desirable. 

Among the first nine lot purchasers was Professor Andrew C. Lawson, the famed geologist. He would wait seven years to build his La Loma Avenue house, designed by Bernard Maybeck. The architect himself would not buy land in La Loma Park until 1905 or 1906, but once he began building there, he created the largest concentration of Maybeck houses to be found anywhere. Several of those, including three that Maybeck built for his own family, will be open for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association’s May 3 Spring House Tour. 

 

MAYBECK COUNTRY 

Berkeley Architectural Heritage Spring House Tour. 1-5 p.m. Sunday, May 3. $40; BAHA members, $30. 841-2242. www.berkeleyheritage.com. 

 

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

 


About the House: Notes on Civility

By Matt Cantor
Thursday April 16, 2009 - 06:47:00 PM

It’s a function of my age and m-m-m-my generation that I consider civility as important a societal imperative as I do. Not that I’m all that civil, mind you. I do have my bad days. I could excuse that by saying that everyone has their bad days, but I don’t actually think that’s adequately justifiable. I believe that it behooves each of us to do the best we can. I don’t expect someone with Tourette’s syndrome to spare me a litany of curse words (thought I’m usually writing them down as fast as possible to augment my woeful vocabulary) but I do expect those who don’t suffer from either limbic failings or horrible upbringings to do the best they can; to try to smile; to cheer those around them as best they can and to make the party (which eventually comes to an end) as pleasant as possible. 

It was with this in mind that this week, for the second time (perhaps third, I’ll have to review the e-mails) that I expressed Victorian shock (if I’d had snuff on me, I’d-a used it) at the e-mail replies from a contractor to a client of mine. 

The client has sent a list of items that they, themselves, had paid for, to the contractor (actually a high-level subordinate) in something like an Excel spreadsheet in an effort to clear up any question about who had paid for various items so that the final tally could more accurately reflect how each of the two parties stood in their respective debts. 

This particular e-mail has been sent to several persons at the same time and was not addressed to one particular person. The reply, which I viewed as one of the several cc’s, stated that the e-mail had failed to address itself to his particular personage and would be duly ignored until it was addressed properly to himself. The harrumph was nearly audible as I closed my eyes to avoid the dust from his virtual wig. 

The prior e-mail said (and I won’t quote verbatim for the sake of confidentiality) that the client was failing to address the “real” issues in his e-mail to the contractor. 

Without going into too much detail and to summate, the contractor was having a hissy. A snit. He was taking his ball and going home because the other boys wouldn’t play nicely. 

Actually, the clients (let’s call them Bob and Sue) are pretty good. True, the male counterpart, Bob, has gotten upset a few times and expressed some suspicions or worries but, for the larger part, he’s been pretty reasonable. Truth be told, I’ve been much more critical of the contractor than either of the clients, but in a very different way.  

I’m largely working in the background, walking through the site, identifying bits of work that are either clearly incorrect or are simply inadvisable for any number of reasons and then bringing them to the client’s attention. We discuss the merits of each of these things and together decide what we’ll bring to the contractor’s attention. 

In the case of this particular contractor, it did not make sense to try to get them to correct or change every item that I’d noted. These guys were very low bidders and it was clear form the first day on the job that they were not the top drawer. They were able to get big chunks right (well, close enough) but many smaller issues, various codes and practices were largely foreign to these crew and it was important to understand that the clients (and me as adviser) were not going to be able to turn the pumpkin into a coach. Our hope was to simply keep it from rotting on the way home from the ball. But, as usual, I digress. 

I’d been watching the e-mails go back and forth between the parties (I get cc’ed on most of these by the client as a way of keeping tabs on the job) and was increasingly seeing these little hissies glide though my air-space to my unrelenting awe. It seemed to me (and I shared this with my clients) that this fellow was either from some very strange school of contracting or was perhaps just another undiagnosed psych patient wandering the streets of Berkeley. Why would someone who wants to get paid for services rendered act so pugnaciously.  

Now, I’ve been complaining about bad service for years (“if you can’t say something nice, come and sit by me”) and really have to scratch my head when my waiter or waitress flings plates onto the table and acts like it’s some magnificent burden that I’m seated in their section that day. My feeling is, if you don’t want to smile, say hello and aren’t happy to be of service, get a job in a cubicle. Take up space-flight.  

In fairness, contractors aren’t waiters, but they are privy to our lives in very intimate ways and are service providers. Why would someone who wants a happy client and a final payment fail to employ the most basic manners. Number One: Don’t pick fights. 

If you’re having a bad day, take a time out. If you’re drunk, don’t show up. Check your blood sugar, apologize in a timely fashion for your mistakes and did I mention—don’t pick fights. Sheesh. 

We contractors (yes, I still consider myself a part of the club, though I’m usually wearing a different hat) have responsibility, as those who get given keys and very large checks, to bow, shake hands, say thank you and, when disputes arise, as they surely will, to smile, sit down, use our inside voices, and work toward resolution in a spirit of camaraderie. Clients will do well to use the same rules but can not be expected to know the landscape as well as the contractor since we as contractors have so much more familiarity with the playing field. 

E-mail is a nasty form of communication. It’s far too easy to seem curt, flip or cavalier. Since so much of this is used in the contracting world these days, I suggest we start by cleaning up our acts around this. When writing, go out of your way to be clearly friendly, seem helpful and, definitely, to vacate any sense of malice or threat. If you want that sort of thing, you don’t have to hire a contractor. You can just go out to lunch. 


Community Calendar

Wednesday April 15, 2009 - 07:16:00 PM

THURSDAY, APRIL 16 

Walkers age 50+ Discovering Albany and North Berkeley Small Gardens Meet at 9 a.m. at Albany Sneior Center, 843 Masonic. Free, but numbers limited. Register at Albany Senior Center. 524-9122. 

Tilden Tots Join a nature adventure program for 3 and 4 year olds, each accompanied by an adult (grandparents welcome)! We’ll look for signs of spring, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 1-888-327-2757. 

Community Meeting on Berkeley’s Housing Needs at 7 p.m. at the South Berkeley Senior Center, 2939 Ellis St. 981-7416.  

“The Falcons of San Francisco and San Jose City Hall” with Glenn Stewart, conservation biologist, at 7 p.m. at Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 843-2222. 

Marine Mammals of the California Coast through Deep Time with Dr. Nick Pyenson at 12:30 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak at 10th, Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

“Jews, Arabs, and Government Officials: Power Relations Inside Israel Today” with Israeli author David Wesley at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, Cedar and Bonita sts. 548-3048.  

Take Back the Night Rally and reception with guest speakers, music, prose, poetry, and an open mic from 5 to 8 p.m. at Sproul Plaza, UC campus. geneq.berkeley.edu 

Berkeley High School Red and Golden Girls Annual Reunion Luncheon at the Berkeley City Club. Women who graduated from BHS fifty or more years ago are eligible to attend. 526-3619. 

8th Annual Master Hsuan Hua Memorial Lecture “In Search of an Authentic Buddhism: Voices from Ancient Texts, Calls from the Modern World” at 7 p.m. at the Graduate Theological Union’s Chapel of the Great Commission, 1798 Scenic Ave. Free and open to the public. 848-9788.  

Circle of Concern Vigil meets on West Lawn of UC campus across from Addison and Oxford, at noon to oppose UC weapons labs contracts. 848-8055. 

Fitness Class for 55+ at 9:15 a.m. at Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237. 

Buddhist Class on Shikan Meditation at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, Cedar at Bonita, through May 28. http://caltendai.org 

Free Meditation Class Tues and Thurs. at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarians, 2nd flr., 1606 Bonita Ave. 931-7742. 

FRIDAY, APRIL 17 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Brian Williams, Founder and CEO of the Red Panda Network on “In Search of the Red Panda” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $15, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 524-7468.  

“Show and Tell” Bring a found object, a poem, a memory, or something you have created and share why it inspires you, at 6 p.m. at Mercury 20 Gallery, 25 Grand Ave. at Broadway, Oakland. mercurytwenty@gmail.com 

Faith into Action Conference Empowering African American families and communities through community organizing, Fri. and Sat. at Beebe Memorial Church, 3900 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Free, but registration required. 639-1444.  

“Compassionate Violence, Torture and Warfare in the Bodhisattva Ideal” with Prof. Steve Jenkins, Humbolt State Univ., at 5 p.m. at Jodo Shinshu Center, 2140 Durant Ave. RSVP to 809-1444. 

“Cinema Dreaming: In the Mood for Love” at 7 p.m. at The Dream Institute, 1672 University at McGee. Cost is $10. 845-1767. http://dream-institute.org 

Demonstrate for Peace! Bring your signs and determination from 2 to 4 p.m. at Acton and University aves.  

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. 

Three Beats for Nothing Mostly ancient part music for fun and practice meets every Fri. at 10 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, Hearst at MLK. 655-8863. asiecker@sbcglobal 

Berkeley Chess Club meets every Fri. at 7 p.m. at the Hillside School, 1581 Le Roy Ave. 843-0150. 

SATURDAY, APRIL 18 

People’s Park 40th Anniversary “Acoustic Music and Park Action Day” from noon until dark, with performances by Little Boy Blue, Human Wine, Little B & J, Hungry Theater, Corey the Comedian, and others. 390-0830. www.peoplespark.org 

Berkeley Historical Society Spring Walking Tour “The Radical Sixties and People’s Park” led by Dale Smith, from 10 a.m. to noon. Cost is $8-$10. For reservations and starting point call 848-0181. 

Berkeley Path Wanderers: Improved and Impassible Paths Theme Walk The walk will cover many paths improved in recent years by BPWA. We will also pass by and look at several not-yet-improved paths to show how much is involved in building the new paths. This walk is moderately strenuous, come prepared for a lot of ups and downs, interspersed with some flat stretches. Meet at 10 a.m. at the fountain across from new hills Fire Station #7, 3000 Shasta Rd., 1/2 block from Grizzly Peak Blvd. www.berkeleypaths.org 

Native Plant Restoration from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Martin Luther King Jr. Shoreline, Oakland. Located near Arrowhead Marsh, this site is a great place to bird-gaze while getting your hands dirty. Enter the park from Swan Way and follow the road to the end parking lot. Then look for the wooden observation platform adjacent to Arrowhead Marsh. jrobinson@goldengateaudubon.org 

Edith Coliver Festival of Cultures with dance, drama, food and exhibits, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at International House, 2299 Piedmont Ave. 642-9461. 

Celebration of Children’s Literature with authors, illustrators, costumed characters, storytelling and activities from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at Tolman Hall, UC campus. http://gse/berkeley.edu/childlit.html 

Cal Day on the UC Berkeley Campus with tours, lectures, performances and more. For a schedule of activities see calday.berkeley.edu 

Berkeley Alliance of Neighborhood Associations meets at 9:30 a.m. in the Calvin Room at First Presbyterian Church Berkeley, 2407 Dana St. 

Home Front Youth Corps Celebration of the completion of a new video about the WWII home front produced by Richmond youth, at 5 p.m. at the Seaver Gallery, Richmond Museum of History, 400 Nevin Ave., Richmond. Free. 232-5050. 

Spring Open House at The Crucible with an art show and information on classes in glassworking, bronze casting, ceramics, fire performance and the Youth Hyphy Bike class, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 1260 7th St., Oakland. www.thecrucible.org 

Earth Day at Chabot with activities including solar cars, vacuum chambers, glitter globe and more from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Chabot Space & Science Center, 10000 Skyline Blvd., Oakland. Cost is $10.95-$14.95. www.chabotspace.org 

Homebuyers Education from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at The HomeOwnership Center, 3301 East 12th St., Suite 201, Oakland. To register call 535-6943. homeownership@unitycouncil.org 

California Writers Club “Yes, Grammar Can Be Fun” with Janis Bell, author of “Clean Well-Lighted Sentences” at 10 a.m. at Barnes & Noble, Jack London Square, 98 Brioadway, Oakland. 272-0120. www.berkeleywritersclub.com  

Weekend with John Sherman Sat. from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. and Sun. from 1 to 5:30 p.m. at Grace North Church, 2138 Cedar St. Free, but registration required for Sun. workshop. www.riverganga.org 

Beginning Internet Class “How to Google or Search the Web” at 10 a.m. at El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Ave., El Cerrito. Free, but call to sign up 526-7512. 

Small Animal Adoption Fair with Earth Day activities from 1 to 5 p.m. at RabbitEARS, 377 Colusa Ave., Kensington. 525-6155. 

Arroyo Viejo Creek Work Day Help clean up the creek at the Oakland Zoo, from 9 a.m. to noon. All ages welcome. 632-9525, ext. 207. 

Shortest Triathlon Ever Join a 100-yard swim, a 2.5 mile bike ride and a 2.1 mile run to benefit Emeryville School District’s Health and Fitness programs, at 6:30 a.m. at City Hall, 1333 Park Ave., Emeryville. Cost is $35-$55, $1 for Emeryville students. To register see www.sportsdrs.com 

“Write for your Life: Victories and Defeats and How they Shaped my Life” A workshop with Beth Glick-Rieman from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. Cost is $40, bring bag lunch. 525-0302, ext. 306. 

Preschool Storytime, including crafts and finger plays at 11 a.m. at The Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 526-3720 ext. 16. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Lawn Bowling on the green at the corner of Acton St. and Bancroft Way every Wed. and Sat. at 10 a.m. for ages 12 and up. Wear flat soled shoes, no heels. Free lessons. 841-2174.  

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, held every Sat. from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552. 

SUNDAY, APRIL 19 

Golden Gate Audubon Bird Walk from 9 a.m. to noon at Martin Luther King, Jr. Shoreline, Arrowhead Marsh, Oakland to look for passerines and lingering over-wintering waterfowl and shorebirds, some coming into breeding plumage. www.goldengateaudubon.org 

Nature Crafts for Early Educators Learn to make easy crafts that reinforce concepts in nature from noon to 3 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Bring a bag lunch. Cost is $20-$22. Registration required. 1-888-327-2757. 

Paddle Demo Day at San Pablo Reservior at 10 a.m. for REI members and noon for the general public. For information see www.rei.com/paddledemo 

Earth Day at the Oakland Zoo with activities for families including learning about animals, recycling, and environmental organizations, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at 9777 Golf Links Rd., Oakland. Bring a used cell phone to recycle, and receive a free train ride. Cost is $5-$12. 632-9525. 

“Constantine's Sword” James Carroll’s documentary on the history of Christianity and the U.S. government’s complicity in militarism and war, at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar St. at Bonita. Cost is $5-$10. 841-4824. www.bfuu.org 

Personal Theology Seminars with Rabbi Harry Manhoff on “Little Known Facts and Other Trivia about the Passover” at 10 a.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302, ext. 306. 

Beginning Meditation from 8 to 9:15 a.m. at 3654 Grand Ave., Oakland. 834-COZY. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. Call to confirm. 841-8732.  

Tibetan Buddhism with Olivia Hurd on “Meditations to Open the Heart” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 809-1000. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

MONDAY, APRIL 20 

“A New President Takes Office: 28th Panel on the Presidency” at 7:30 p.m. at 155 Dwinelle, UC campus. To reserve a space call 642-4111. 

People’s Park 40th Anniversary A Celebration of Medical Marijuana at 4:20 p.m. in the Park. 390-0830. www.peoplespark.org 

People’s Park 40th Anniversary “Visual History of People’s Park Film Fest” at 7 p.m. at Redwood Gardens, 2951 Derby St. See selected clips of Claire Burch’s new film “People’s Park, Then and Now,” Newsreel’s 1969 short, David Blackman slideshow and more. 390-0830. www.peoplespark.org 

“Living Well with Parkinson’s Disease” from 10:30 a.m. to noon at Studio One, 365 45th St., Oakland. To register call 479-6119. info@pdactive.org 

Week of the Young Child, with events for children and families, Mon. through Fri. Cost is $7-$8. For details see www.habitot.org 

Community Yoga Class 10 a.m. at James Kenney Parks and Rec. Center at Virginia and 8th. Seniors and beginners welcome. Cost is $6. 207-4501. 

Morning Meditation Every Mon., Wed., and Fri. at 7:45 a.m. at Rudramandir, 830 Bancroft Way at 6th. 486-8700. 

Small-Business Counseling Free one-hour one-on-one counseling to help you start and run your small business with a volunteer from Service Core of Retired Executives, Mon. evenings by appointment at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. For appointment call 981-6148.  

World Affairs/Politics Discussion Group, for people 60 years and over, meets at 9:45 a.m. at Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave, Albany. Cost is $3.  

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

TUESDAY, APRIL 21 

Earth Week Activities at Berkeley City College Author Raj Patel will discuss “Stuffed and Starved” at 12:15 p.m. in the BCC Auditorium, 2050 Center St. http://vistawww.peralta.edu 

“Got Free Speech” panel and community discussion at 6 p.m. in Berkeley Public Library’s 3rd Floor meeting room, 2090 Kittredge St. Sponsored by the 40th Anniversary People’s Park Organizing Committee. 390-0830. www.peoplespark.org 

“People’s Park Potluck & Folk Show” with Darryl Cherney and Carol Denney at 8 p.m. at Unitarian Fellowship, 1924 Cedar. 390-0830. www.peoplespark.org 

Free Urban Bicycle Safety Class: Learn to Drive a Bike A 3.5-hour classroom course teaches the basics of safe cycling, riding in traffic, equipment, crash avoidance, rights and responsibilities. Must be 14 and over. No bike needed. From 6 to 9:30 p.m. at Berkeley City College, Conference Room 415. www.ebbc.org/safety 

Foreclosure Survival Guide with Stephen Elias, the author of “Foreclosure Survival Guide” from 4 to 5:30 p.m. at Barnes & Noble, Jack London Square, Oakland. Presented by The Alameda County Law Library in conjunction with Nolo Press and Barnes & Noble. 208-4832. 

Tilden Explorers An after-school nature adventure program for 5-7 year olds. We will learn about wildflowers from 3:15 to 4:15 p.m.. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 1-888-EBPARKS. 

Berkeley Garden Club Spring Tea and Floral Design Presentation with Kay Wolff on “Making Arrangements” at 2 p.m. at the United Methodist Church 1953 Hopkins St. 524-7296. 

“Growing Sustainability in a Low-Carbon World” Speaker series sponsored by Inst. for Urban and Regional Development at 5:15 at Wurster Hall, UC campus. http://iurd.berkeley.edu 

“On Developments in Nepal and the Stakes for the Communist Movement” at 7 p.m. at Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way. 848-1196. www.revolutionbooks.org 

“Ashram Diary in India with Bed e Griffiths” with Father Thomas Matus at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Buddhist Monastery, 2304 McKinley Ave. www.ahimsaberkeley.org 

“How Our Thoughts Affect Our Health” with Irma Botvin and Larry Berkelhammer at 12:30 p.m. at Maffley Auditorium, Herrick Campus, Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, 2001 Dwight Way. 644-3273. 

“Job Hunting 2.0” Learn about some of the new oneline tools available to help you find a new job at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 20. 

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. 

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., Sat. and Sun. 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. 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. 

Bridge for beginners from 12:30 to 2:15 p.m., all others 12:30 to 4 p.m. Sing-A-Long at 2:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190. 

Rhythm Tap Exercise Class Tues. at 5 p.m. at Redwood Gardens, 2951 Derby St. Donation $2. 548-9840. 

Qi Gong Meditation 7:30 p.m. at 830 Bancroft Way, Lotus Room 114. Cost is $5-$10. 883-1920. tgif@tiangong.org 

Wheelchair Yoga at 4:30 p.m., Family Yoga on Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at Niroga Center for Healing, 1808 University Ave. between MLK Way and Grant St. All classes by donation. 704-1330. www.niroga.org 

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 22 

Earth Week Activities at Berkeley City College with Frank Snapp on “Water-Wise Urban Ecology” at 12:30 p.m. in the BCC auditorium, 2050 Center St. http://vistawww.peralta.edu/ 

Golden Gate Audubon Society Bird Walk at Lake Merritt and Lakeside Park Meet at 9:30 a.m. at the large spherical cage near Nature Center at Perkins and Bellevue. www.goldengateaudubon.org 

Easy Does It Emergency Services Health Fair with blood pressure screenings, information on health and disability services, massages and more from 2 to 5 p.m. at People’s Park. 704-2179. 

“Broke State? Will the May 19th Ballot fix it? Does the 2 / 3 Budget Vote Rule Hold the Legislature Hostage?” at the Berkeley-East Bay Gray Panthers meeting at 1:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst, corner of MLK. 486-8010. 

“From Fungi to Genetically Modified Organism (GMOs)” A presentation and discussion with UCB Prof. Ignacio Chapela at 7 p.m. at Revolution Books at 2425 Channing Way. 848-1196. 

Earth Week Activities at Berkeley City College Laura Harnish from the Environmental Defense Fund will be speaking on “California’s Drought, Policy, and the California Delta” at 6:30 p.m. in the BCC Auditorium, 2050 Center St. http://vistawww.peralta.edu/ 

“The Intersection of Sustainability and Social Justice” with Jakada Imani of the Ella Baker Center at 7 p.m. on April 22 in the Windrush Library, Windrush School, 1800 Elm St., El Cerrito. 970-7580. 

“Made in America” A documentary by Stacy Peralta on gang violence among young African Americans in South Los Angeles, at 6:30 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak at 10th, Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

Conservation Speaker Series “All About Bears” at 6:30 p.m. in the Marian Zimmer Auditorium, Oakland Zoo. Donation is $10-$20, $5 for high school students. www.oaklandzoo.org 

“Green” Kids Day at Habitot Children’s Museum Activities for children ages 0-6 to celebrate Earth Day. Cost is $7-$8. www.habitot.org 

Tour of the Berkeley City Club, designed by Julia Morgan, from 1 to 4 p.m. at 2315 Durant Ave. Sponsored by the Landmark Heritage Foundation. 848-7800. 

“Walking Tours: Exploring Cities on Foot” with author Tom Downs at 6 p.m. at West Auditorium, Oakland Main Library, 125 14th St. at Oak. 238-3136. 

Open House at Kehilla School A Jewish learning after-school Program in Piedmont for Grades 1-6. Come observe classes and learn about our educational philosophy, Wed. and Thurs. from 4 to 6 p.m. at Kehilla Community Synagogue, 1300 Grand Ave., Piedmont. RSVP to 547-2424 ext. 104. Rosh@KehillaSynagogue.org 

Women of Color Resource Center Brown Bag Lunch with Frances M. Beale on gnder, race, and women’s liberation in the age of Obama at 12:30 p.m. at WCRC, 1611 Telegraph Ave., Suite #303, Oakland. RSVP to 444-2700, ext. 304. 

“Changing Your Life in a Changing Economy” with presentations by real estate and financial planning advisors at 2:30 p.m. at Salem Lutheran Home, 2361 East 29th St., Oakland. Free. 434-2871. 

Confused by Computers? Novice computer users can get one-on-one assistance from noon to 1:45 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. Sign up for an appointment at the reference desk or call 526-3720 ext. 5. 

“Benefits of Meditation and Spiritual Lifestyle” with Jimi Bridges at 7:30 p.m. at Fireside Room, upstairs, Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1606 Bonita Ave. 290-3013. 

Problem Gambling Regional Summit to raise awareness about problem gambling from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. in downtown Oakland. RSVP to 213-625-5795. nicoschc.org 

Red Cross Blood Services Volunteer Orientation from 6 to 8 p.m. at 6230 Claremont Ave., Oakland. Registration required. 594-5165. 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. 548-9840. 

Theraputic Recreation at the Berkeley Warm Pool, Wed. at 3:30 p.m. and Sat. at 10 a.m. at the Berkeley Warm Pool, 2245 Milvia St. Cost is $4-$5. Bring a towel. 632-9369. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Sing for Peace at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

Tibetan Buddhism with Sylvia Gretchen on “The Healing Power of Tibetan Art” at 8 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 809-1000. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

Teen Chess Club from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. at the North Branch Library, 1170 The Alameda at Hopkins. 981-6133. 

Berkeley CopWatch Drop-in office hours from 6 to 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. 548-0425. 

Stitch ‘n Bitch at 6:30 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

THURSDAY, APRIL 23 

Earth Week Activities at Berkeley City College Merrian Fuller and Timothy Burrows on Renewable Energy at 12:15 p.m. in the BCC Auditorium, 2050 Center St. http://vistawww.peralta.edu/ 

People’s Park 40th Anniversary “People’s Voice Poetry” with poets Al Young, Julia Vinograd, John Oliver Simon, Alta, HD Moe, Kirk Lumpkin, Paradise, Christian, Arnie Passman, and more, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Mediterraneum, 2475 Telegraph. 390-0830. www.peoplespark.org 

Tilden Explorers An after-school nature adventure program for 5-7 year olds. We will learn about wildflowers from 3:15 to 4:15 p.m.. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 1-888-EBPARKS. 

“Prefab Green” with Michelle Kaufmann at 7:30 p.m. at Builder’s Booksource, 1817 Fourth St. 845-6874. 

“What I Saw in Gaza” with Middle East Children’s Alliance Executive Director Barbara Lubin at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists Hall, 1924 Cedar at Bonita. Donation $5-$10. 526-2900. www.bfuu.org 

“Straightlaced” A film with unscripted high school youth from around the country speaking candidly about harmful pressures caused by rigid gender roles and homophobia at 7 p.m. at Grand Lake Theater, 3200 Grand Ave. Oakland. Benefits MetWest High School and the Straightlaced educational campaign. Tickets are $10-$30 (sliding scale) and available online at www.groundspark.org 

LiveTalk@CPS with Prof. Ron Hassner “Religion and Counterinsurgency” at 7 p.m. at College Prepatory School, Buttner Auditorium, 6100 Broadway. Tickets are $5-$15 at the door. www.college-prep.org/livetalk 

“Project Joy: Healing and Strengthening our Children through Play” with a showing of the documentary “A Break in the Clouds” at 7 p.m. at the Greenlining Institute, 1918 University Ave., 2nd flr. www.projectjoy.com 

College Admissions and Career Planning Information Sponsored by UC Berkeley Extension, at 5:30 p.m. at 1995 University Ave. To reserve a space call 642-4111. 

Circle of Concern Vigil meets on West Lawn of UC campus across from Addison and Oxford, Thurs. at noon and Sun. at 1 p.m. to oppose UC weapons labs contracts. 848-8055. 

Fitness Class for 55+ at 9:15 a.m. at Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237. 

“Revolutionary Love and Martial Non-violence” with Buddhist leader Sulak Sivaraksa at 7:30 p.m. at Wheeler Auditorium, UC campus. Free. 

Buddhist Class on Shikan Meditation at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, Cedar at Bonita. http://caltendai.org 

FRIDAY, APRIL 24 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Kevin Ambrogi, former volunteer, Nature Elephant Camp, Chiang Mai, Thailand, on “The Elephant in Thailand’s Culture: The Legend and the Reality.” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $15, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 524-7468. www.citycommonsclub.org 

People’s Park 40th Anniversary “Founders Forum” with the Park’s original creators: Wendy Schlesinger, Michael Delacour, Frank Bardacke, Sim Van der Ryn and others, with poetry and music, at 5 p.m. at Ashkenaz, 1317 San Pablo Ave. Suggested donation $15. 390-0830. www.peoplespark.org 

“How to Belive in God: Whether You Believe in Religion or Not” with author Clark Strand at 7 p.m. at the Jodo Shinshu Center, 2140 Durant Ave. Free, donation accepted. 809-1460. www.cbe-bca.org 

Dance Around the Pacific School of Religion Campus, 1798 Scenic Ave. from noon to 12:30 p.m. in celebration of National Dance Week. Everyone is welcome to join. 

Lunar Lounge Express A night of interactive exhibits, telescope viewing, and live music from 7 to 11 p.m. at Chabot Space & Science Center, 10000 Skyline Blvd., Oakland. Cost is $15-$20. www.chabotspace.org 

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. 

Three Beats for Nothing Mostly ancient part music for fun and practice meets every Fri. at 10 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, Hearst at MLK. 655-8863. asiecker@sbcglobal 

Berkeley Chess Club meets every Fri. at 7 p.m. at the Hillside School, 1581 Le Roy Ave. 843-0150. 

SATURDAY, APRIL 25 

Berkeley Earth Day with cultural performances, activities, community information booths, food and crafts, from noon to 5 p.m. at Civic Center Park, MLK and Allston.  

Swap Your Old Floor Lamp for a new energy saving version, free at Berkeley Earth Day! Do you have a tall halogen floor lamp in your home? These lamps waste electricity, and are dangerous: they can overheat and start fires. Bring along your old 300-watt halogen floor lamp with your PG&E bill to Berkeley Earth Day, and Rising Sun Energy Center will give you a new fluorescent version of the same light quality and brightness, for free. For more information call 665-1501. 

Community Clean-up and Barbeque Work on projects to beautify the James Kenney neighborhood, from 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at James Kenney Recreation Center, 1720 Eighth St. 981-6650. 

“How To Be An Informed Citizen” Informational displays on local water resources, food supply, energy needs and consumption the Atrium of Berkeley City College, 2050 Center St. 

The New School of Berkeley International Family Fair and raffle with games and activities for children, live entertainment and food, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Bonita St. between Cedar and Virginia. 548-9165. 

Contra Costa Civic Theatre in El Cerrito Preview Party to announce the shows for the 50th season, introduce their directors, and reveal further celebration plans. Tickets are $20. www.ccct.org 

Women’s Multicultural Leadership Conference for women and multicultural communities, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. at UCB’s Life Sciences Building, to activate and train women to become leaders in work, media, and politics. For admission and more information see www.engageher.org 

Benjamin Jealous, National President of the NAACP speaks on his vision for the organization as it celebrates its 100th anniversary, at 6 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak at 10th, Oakland. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

Establishing a Home Culinary Herb Garden Learn how to cultivate, fertilize, plant and tend a productive annual herb garden and how to incorporate plantings of perennial herbs into your backyard landscape. Herb plants started by the students of King Middle School will be offered for sale to participants in this class. From 2 to 4 p.m. To register, contact Kyle Cornforth, Program Coordinator at kyle@chezpanissefoundation.org 

Vegetarian Cooking Class: Hearty Homestyle Italian from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at First Unitarian Church of Oakland, 685 14th St. at Castro. Cost is $55, plus $5 food and material fee. Advance registration required. 531-COOK. www.compassionatecooks.com 

“Flow: For Love of Water” Documentary by French filmmaker Irena Salinas on why corporations control our most precious resource and what is being done, what we can do, at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar at Bonita. 495-5132. www.bfuu.org 

“The Wisdom of Sustainability: Buddhist Ecnomics for the 21st Century” with Sulak Sivaraksa at 10:15 a.m. at Berkeley Zen Center, 1933 Russell St. 

Golden Gate Sacred Harp Singing School from 1 to 4 p.m. at All Saints Episcopal Chapel, 2451 Ridge Rd. Donation $10 requested. 451-6299.  

Oakland Free Dance Festival featuring 27 free introductory one hour social dance classes in four rooms from 1 to 7 p.m. at Oakland Veterans Hall, 200 Grand Ave., Oakland. www.bayareandw.org 

Monthly Go Tournament Come play or watch the world’s oldest board game, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center, 388 Ninth St., Suite 290, Oakland. Registration opens at 9 a.m. www.bayareago.org 

Preschool Storytime, including crafts and finger plays at 11 a.m. at The Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 526-3720 ext. 16. 

Beginning Internet Class “All About Email” at 10 a.m. at El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Ave., El Cerrito. Free, but call to sign up 526-7512. 

Volunteer training for Circle of Care, a program of the East Bay Agency for Children in Oakland. For more information email Shoshana at Shoshana@ebac.org wwww.ebac.org 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Lawn Bowling on the green at the corner of Acton St. and Bancroft Way every Wed. and Sat. at 10 a.m. for ages 12 and up. Wear flat soled shoes, no heels. Free lessons. 841-2174.  

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, held every Sat. from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552. 

SUNDAY, APRIL 26 

People’s Park 40th Anniversary “People’s Park 40th Anniversary Concert” noon till dusk in People’s Park with performances by Jonathan Richman, Terry Garthwaite and Family, Shelley Doty, Country Joe, Wavy Gravy, Phoenix, All Nations Singers, Nefer Tem Belly Dance, Carol Denney, “IS” from Berkeley High and more! Also children’s activities and food. 390-0830. www.peoplespark.org 

Save Strawberry Canyon 5 Mile Fun Run at 9 a.m. in Strawberry Canyon. Participation donation is $15. For informarion email savestrawberrycanyon@gmail.com  

Albany Spring Art & Music Festival from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Memorial Park on 1325 Portland Ave. There will be music by Jimbo Trout and the FishPeople, puppet shows, art and craft booths, poetry, food, low cost bike tune ups, chalk art and much more. 

Help Restore the Berkeley Meadow with Friends of Five Creeks by removing invasives and resotring habitat. Meet at 10 a.m. at the north side of University Ave., opposite Sea Breeze market. Tools, gloves and snacks provided. Dress for all weather, in clothes that can get dirty. 848-9358. www.fivecreeks.org 

Secret Gardens of the East Bay A self-guided tour from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. to benefit Park Day School. Tickets are $45. A Village Marketplace will be held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Park Day School, 370 43rd St., at Shafter, Oakland. To register for the tour call 653-0317, ext. 103. www.SecretGardenTour.org 

A Tribute to Rev: Celebrating the Life of Ron Stallings at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $12 at the door. 849-2568. 

“Four Legends of Feminism: Gloria Steinem, Dolores Huerta, Aileen Hernandez, and Yuri Kochiyama” interviewed as part of Engage Her’s Multicultural Women’s Leadership Conference at 7 p.m. in the Life Sciences Auditorium, UC campus. Tickets are $25. www.engageher.org 

Salsa Dancing in the Stacks Celebrate National Dance Week with salsa lesson from Gale Robinson, from 3:30 to 5 p.m. in the Historic Lobby, 2nd flr of the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. All skill levels welcome. 981-6241. 

Medicinal Plants of the Bay Area: A Bioregional Exploration from 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at Huckleberry Botanical Preserve, Skyline Blvd., Oakland. Make sure to bring water, snacks/lunch, hat/sunscreen, a notebook, and a camera. Cost is $25. To register call 428-1810. 

Mad Hot Klezmer Dance Party Lessons at 7 p.m., dance party at 8 pm. at JCC East Bay, 1414 Walnut St. Tickets are $5-$20. 848-0237. www.klezcalifornia.org  

Oakland Aviation Museum Open Cockpit Day with docent guided tours of the Short Solent Flying Boat featured in the movie Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark are available all day from noon to 4 p.m. at 8252 Earhart Rd., Bldg. 621, Historic North Field, Oakland Intl. Airport. Cost is $5-$9. 638-7100. www.oaklandaviationmuseum.org 

Free Hands-on Bicycle Clinic Learn how to maintain your bike in excellent working condition, from 11 a.m. to noon at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. Bring your bike and tools. 527-4140. 

Free Sailboat Rides from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Cal Sailing Club, Berkeley Marina. Wear warm, waterproof clothing and bring a change of clothes in case you get wet. Children 5 and over welcome with parent or guardian. www.cal-sailing.org 

“An Eco-Materialist Critique of Historical Materialism” with Craig Collins from 10 a.m. to noon at the Niebyl Proctor Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave. Oakland. 595-7417.  

Personal Theology Seminars with John McNally on “How Studying Near Death Experiences Has Benefitted and Informed my Spiritual Life” at 10 a.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley,