Bayer Healthcare AG—Berkeley’s sixth largest employer and the city’s largest corporate job source—announced a 11 percent workforce reduction Thursday, a move that will leave 190 Berkeley employees without a job. 

The move was announced as part of a consolidation and realignment of the German corporation’s biotech research division. 

Clelia Baur, director of public policy and communications for the Berkeley facility, said the changes will transfer Berkeley jobs to sites in West Haven, Conn., and Wuppertal, Germany, where the company is based. 

The facility’s two other divisions—diagnostics, which conducts nucleic acid diagnostics, and manufacturing, the department responsible for producing the leading biotechnology therapy Kogenate, a treatment for hemophilia—won’t be affected, she said. 

According to Baur, changes to the biotech division had been scheduled for some time. According to other reports however, the move to consolidate followed an unsuccessful search for a partner company to aid the struggling division. 

Many employees, including a sizable number of Ph.D.s, according to Baur, will have the opportunity to fill openings in other divisions at the Berkeley facility. 

“This particular group had known for some time that the pharmaceutical group had been looking at different options,” she said. 

Those not rehired will be phased out over either a 3-, 6-, or 12-month period and will be given severance packages.  

“We will be working aggressively to find them other positions either in Bayer or close by,” said Baur. 

Of the 190 affected by the cutbacks, 17 are represented under a contract with the International Longshoreman and Warehouse Worker’s (ILWU) Union Local 6 which represents 500 of facility’s 1700 employees.  

“The impact we hope is minimal,” said Fred Pecker, the Secretary Treasurer for the local. “We’re hopeful that most of [the union employees] are absorbed into other positions.” 

Also affected are 75 people at a Bayer facility in Kyoto, Japan, who will lose their jobs during the first half of 2004 when the company moves their positions to Germany.

NO PROBLEM 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Father Bill and I drove together to get arrested at a Presidio Housing takeover, and I recited a song I’d just written about unconditional love. 

‘You should enroll in the seminary,” he said. 

“I thought they didn’t take women?” I asked. 

“They will someday,” he replied. I told him I didn’t believe in God, and that that might be considered a problem. 

“That doesn’t matter,” he responded. “You’d be perfect.” I think we laughed the rest of the way. And saved the housing. 

Carol Denney 

• 

ORGANIZE! 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

When I saw the front of your paper the other day my heart sank and I immediately felt a great loss upon thinking of not being able to see Father Bill at the next protest, or trying to catch him at St. Joseph’s when he wasn’t napping. I thought about how one of the last times I saw him was at St. Joseph’s, and how for once he wasn’t wearing his collar and the infamous black jacket, but a simple black t-shirt with “troublemaker” across the front. I also thought about how he was kicked out of Berkeley Bowl last June after I asked him to come down and help encourage Berkeley Bowl workers to form a union. It didn’t take long for management to catch on to him, and he was kicked out of the store that day and told to take his “commie shit” elsewhere. 

But of course we all loved Father Bill for stuff like this, and in true Irish tradition we can’t let ourselves mourn his death for too long, but rather focus on his amazing life and seek to continue to struggle for the things he held dear. I was reminded of this tonight as I went to a rally he would have attended, in support of workers’ rights, had he not passed away on Monday. A friend in the labor community said that the last time she talked to him he asked her when she was going to organize an action at a local Safeway in support of the Southern California grocery workers. So as we celebrate Father Bill’s life in the coming days, let’s make damn sure to continue to fight the bastards he always fought so hard against, and not let Father Bill’s passion for peace and justice die with his body. I think that he would have it no other way. 

Chuck McNally 

Fired Berkeley Bowl Worker and Irish Catholic  

Berkeley and its environs are known as a treasure trove of inimitable shops, each worth a visit. 

Let’s start with the hardware stores, for in Berkeley each one is unique. That’s because they’re Ace Hardware stores, members of a buying cooperative whose collective purchasing power enables its 5,000 participating businesses to get good prices but also allows them to buy from outside vendors, to display their merchandise as they please and to run their stores as they like. That’s a boon to holiday shoppers in search of interesting gifts.  

Bolfing’s Elmwood Hardware, 2951 College Ave. at Ashby. 843-3794.  

Where else in town can you get Pétards de Fête—beautifully wrapped favors to set beside each plate on your holiday table? Pull each end, and they open with a burst of sound, spilling out party hats, jokes and riddles and other cheering surprises. Made in Canada, the petards come in red and green for Christmas and blue and white for Chanukah. $18-$24.50 for boxes of eight or 10 in different sizes and colors. 

Everything your favorite environmentalist needs to clean green is in Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day Basic Cleaning Kit. In either lavender or lemon verbena scent, this prettily packaged assortment of aromatherapeutic household cleaners includes biodegradable window cleaner, dish soap, furniture polish, all purpose cleaner and a soap bar. All hard-working yet gentle. $24.99. 

Wonderfully whimsical anthropomorphic plastic stands and holders for the kitchen and bath: a Tweety vegetable brush, a dish brush with human feet (must be seen to be fully appreciated), a warrior toothpick holder, among others. From Germany in a range of colors. $5-$14. 

Exceptionally good buys on assorted drill bit sets and driver bit sets by SKIL. $6-$13.  

Pastime Ace Hardware, 10057 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. 526-6615.  

It’s cold out there! Help somebody special warm up with the new Longhi electric oil-filled radiator heater. Shorter and wider than the old style, with a built-in GFCI (ground fault circuit interrupter) that allows bathroom usage, three power settings and a 24-hour programmable timer. Good-looking white metal case on wheels. $89.99. 

Get a foot up (literally). Cute, colorful and convenient: the E-Z Foldz folding step stool in sturdy yellow, green, white, black, blue or red plastic. Bright colors are easy-to-find. Holds up to 300 lbs. $12.99. 

Barbeque anywhere! Weber has just come out with the Q portable gas grill. The large 280 sq. inch cooking surface is covered with a cast aluminum hood and flanked by two shelves that fold out to hold food and utensils. The Q operates on a 14.1 oz. propane cylinder controlled by a regulator that allows cooks to set the temperature just where they want it. $179.99.  

Berkeley Ace Hardware, 2145 University Ave. 845-0410.  

The Panther Vision Handsfree Lighted Eyeglasses, with two ultra-bright high intensity LED bulbs and 1.5 magnification, will put an end to groping when your fixing something under the sink or beneath the car. Handy in case of power outages, too. Includes 3-volt Lithium batteries. $26.99. 

For the gadget-lover who has almost everything, consider the Oregon Scientific Jumbo Exact Set Clock. Made in the U.S.A., this wondrous, radio-controlled invention automatically sets the time, day and date to the United States Atomic clock and displays a U.S. map with time zones. The three-inch-high numbers can be seen across a room. Also displays indoor and outdoor temperature. All this, plus a wake-up alarm and snooze bar. Runs on 4 AA batteries (included), measures 8” x 10”. $69.99. 

Finally—a way to hang pictures without having to climb up and down a ladder: The Black & Decker “Crosshair” Auto Laser Level” automatically provides perfectly vertical (plumb) and horizontal lines. A hanging pin fastens the Laser Level to the wall for hands-free convenience. Comes boxed with a 9V battery and a storage case with a belt loop. $54.99.  

Reprint Mint, 2484 Telegraph Ave. 841-9423.  

Now that you’ve purchased a gift laser level or two, why not get some hangable objects to go with them? You could start with the posters or prints from the Reprint Mint—the biggest bricks-and-mortar poster print and poster store in the country and probably in the world. Choose from among thousands of items in every conceivable category: classics, Asian, old ads, Latino, African-American, autos, music—the list could go on and on—and from among a range of quality and sizes in the same category and even the same prints. Each piece can be beautifully mounted on a sturdy wood backing, sealed with a clear lacquer (so it could go in a bathroom), braced, and fitted with a hanger. The wood backing makes a permanent, reasonably priced alternative to framing. Small mounted pieces start at about $13. Larger ones run from $30 to $100. And while you’re in the shop, you can choose from the Reprint Mint’s huge selection of cards to go with your gifts.  

Talavera Ceramics, 1805 University Ave. 665-6038.  

Here you’ll find more of the famous Talavera hand-crafted folkloric pottery from Mexico than anywhere else in the United States. Twelve different workshops, mostly family-based, and working in traditional designs, create tiles, mugs, pots, pitchers, plates, mirror frames, umbrella stands, urns, platters, fountains, sinks, drawer pulls and more, all hand-painted in rich blue, green, yellow, orange and russet reds. Calla lilies and sunflowers abound. Of special note: whimsical frog planters, curvaceous covered canisters and an exclusive line of tiles decorated with intricate botanical and geometric patterns. Lead-free, dishwasher- and microwave-safe. From $5 for a 2” square tile to $490 for an exceptional mirror, with many items priced under $50.  

Ninepatch, 2001 Hopkins St. 527-1700.  

This charming boutique is stocked with all manner of mermaids—mermaids of cloth, mermaids suspended in deep blue bounce balls, Peruvian pottery mermaids, mermaid mirrors, wind-up mermaids that shimmy forward on their stomachs as they look at their reflection in a mirrors. $2.50-$12. 

Add a peaceable glow to a Christmas tree or embellish a doorway yearlong with a string of dove lights. The sparrow-sized, dove-shaped bulbs cast a soft warm light. $20. 

Ninepatch has a nice assortment of Russian nested dolls (matrioschki) $8-$75. 

Unusual rustic red Chinese wooden boxes, hand-painted with floral motifs, can be used as keepsake boxes or for show. In a range of sizes. $28-$68. 

Bibelots, 2403 San Pablo Ave. 549-1091.  

Another fetching Berkeley boutique that’s off the beaten path, Bibelots has lavender wands made with estate-grown lavender from Sonoma. Victorian women wove such wands and used them to cure a headache or to gently scent a drawer of lingerie. Thirteen inches long, in soft yellow, cream, lavender, pink rose, green, or lavender. $39. 

Beautifully wrapped, embossed and perfumed soaps from Portugal come in a set of various violet or floral scents. The wrapping paper is so lovely that lucky recipients will be tempted to save it. $7 a bar, $40 a box.  

The prettiest neckrolls you’ll ever see are filled with buckwheat and lavender, covered in pale gold silk brocade and buttoned with mother-of-pearl. $20. 

Hand-tooled leather notebooks will delight a tasteful journal-keeper. From India in chestnut, green, brown, deep magenta. $20-$50. For $10, you can fill a notebook with beautiful papers infused with pressed flowers.

FRIDAY, DEC. 12  

FILM 

Yasujiro Ozu: “There Was a Father” at 7:30 p.m. and “The Record of a Tenement Gentleman” at 9:20 p.m. at Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

THEATER 

Berkeley High School, “You Can’t Take it With You,” by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, directed by Rachel Rudy, at 8 p.m. at the Florence Schwimley Little Theater. Tickets are $10, $5 with student i.d. 

Wilde Irish Productions, “Endgame” by Samuel Beckett, at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Runs through Dec. 21. 644-9940. 

Oakland Opera Theater, “Four Saints in Three Acts,” an opera by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein, at 8 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway, at 2nd St. Tickets are $15-$25 and are available from www.oaklandopera.org 

“The Christmas Revels” at the Scottish Rite Theatre, 1547 Lakeside Drive, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $17-$35 and are available from www.calrevels.org or by calling Frantix at 415-621-1216.  

“A Night of Drama and Music” presented by Arrowsmith High School at 7:30 p.m. at the Parish Hall, 2300 Bancroft Ave. Tickets are $5 for adults, free for students and children. 540-0440. 

California Shakespeare Student Company, “A Comedy of Errors” at 7 p.m. at Cal Shakes Rehearsal Hall, 701 Heinz Ave. Tickets are $5. 548-3422, ext. 130. www.calshakes.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Jean Shinoda Bolen reads from “Crones Don’t Whine: Concentrated Wisdom for Juicy Women,” at 7:30 p.m. at Boadecia’s Books, 398 Colusa Ave., Kensington. 559-9184. www.bookpride.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Mark Morris Dance Group, The Hard Nut at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$56. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Berkeley Ballet Theater, “The Nutcracker,” at 7 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Tickets are $18 and are available from 843-4689. www.berkeleyballet.org 

Making Waves and Samsara, a cappella trios, with Storm Florez, Inka, and True Margrit at 7:30 p.m. at Rose Street House of Music. For location call 594-4000 ext. 687. www.rosestreetmusic.com 

“Shining Star” a hip-hop dance concert and fundraising event, featuring performances by the New Style Motherlode Dance Company and Diamond Dance Company, at 8 p.m. at The Regent’s Theatre, Holy Names College, 3500 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. Tickets are $25 available from 597-1056. www.newstylemotherlode.com 

Molly Holm, jazz tunes with trombonist Wayne Wallace, pianist Bill Bell, and drummer, Deszon Claiborne, at 8 p.m., at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $13 in advance, $15 at the door. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Jazzschool Student Recitals from 5 to 9 p.m. at the Jazz- 

school. Free. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Melanie O’Reilly and Sean O Nuallain, Celtic music and jazz night at the 1923 Teahouse at 8 p.m. Suggested donation of $7-$15. 644-2204. www.epicarts.org 

Pick Pocket Ensemble, Married Couple, Odd Shaped Case Ensemble perform modern jazz at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Sliding scale donation $10-$15. 649-8744. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Stephen Kent and Trance Mission at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Hot for Teacher, Damage, Inc. at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $7. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Kevin Cadogan, Jesse DeNatale, Noelle Hampton at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

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

Danny Caron at 8:30 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Due West, contemporary bluegrass, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Toys That Kill, Frisk, Scattered Fall, Scissorhands, Love Songs at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

SATURDAY, DEC. 13 

CHILDREN  

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with Bonnie Lockhart at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $4 for adults, $3 for children. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Meet Ms. Frizzle at 1 p.m. at Lawrence Hall of Science, Centennial Drive. Cost is $4.50 to $8.50. 642-5132. 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

“Hall of Relfections” Remembrances of the Iranian Immigrants of Northern California, a collective art project by Taraneh Hemami, reception from 6 to 9 p.m. at the Persian Center, 2029 Durant at Shattuck. 848-0264. 

THEATER 

Berkeley High School, “You Can’t Take it With You,” by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, directed by Rachel Rudy, at 8 p.m. at the Florence Schwimley Little Theater. Tickets are $10, $5 with student i.d. 

Destiny Arts Center Youth on the Move “Love in Action,” with dance, martial arts and spoken word at 7 p.m. at McClymonds High School, 2607 Myrtle St., at 26th near Market. This celebration marks the 15th anniversary of Destiny Arts arts education and violence prevention programs. 597-1619. www.destinyarts.org 

“The Christmas Revels” at the Scottish Rite Theatre, 1547 Lakeside Drive, at 1 and 5 p.m. Tickets are $17-$35 and are available from www.calrevels.org or by calling Frantix at 415-621-1216.  

California Shakespeare Student Company, “A Comedy of Errors” at 2 and 7 p.m. at Cal Shakes Rehearsal Hall, 701 Heinz Ave. Tickets are $5. 548-3422, ext. 130. www.calshakes.org 

“The Wakefield Cycle,” a selection of medieval religious miracle plays at 6 p.m. at All Souls Episcopal Church, 2220 Cedar St. A medieval-themed banquet will preceed the performance. Childcare provided. 848-1755. 

Oakland Opera Theater, “Four Saints in Three Acts,” an opera by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein, at 8 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway, at 2nd St. Tickets are $15-$25 available from www.oaklandopera.org 

FILM 

Yasujiro Ozu: “Early Summer” at 4 and 8:45 p.m. and “A Hen in the Wind” at 7 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Rhythm & Muse holds its yearly all-open mic. Sign-up at 6:30 p.m., reading and perfor- 

mance at 7 p.m. Free. Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. 527-9753. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Ballet Theater, “The Nutcracker,” at 2 and 7 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Tickets are $18 and are available from 843-4689. www.berkeleyballet.org 

Berkeley Youth Orchestra’s Winter Concert, Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” narrated by John Grappone, and Holst’s “Jupiter” at 11 a.m. at the Laney College Theater, 900 Fallon St. in Oakland. Tickets are $5 at the door. 663-3296. www.byoweb.org 

San Francisco Early Music Society, The Concord Ensemble, performs ancient English carols, plainsong, Renaissance polyphony, and poetry at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing. Tickets are $22 for SFEMS members and seniors, $25 for non-members, $10 for students. 528-1725. www.sfems.org 

Voci, “Voices in Peace III: The Promise of Peace” women’s vocal ensemble presents six centuries of Magnificat settings and other selections celebrating the promise of peace at 3 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way at Dana. Tickets are $15-$20, children under 12 free, available at the door or online at www.angelfire.com/la/VOCI 

Slavyanka - San Francisco Men’s Russian Chorus performs “Echoes of the Soul: Songs of Russian Spirit, Season and People” at 8 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way at Dana. Tickets are $15-$18, available from 866-468-3399. www.ticketweb.com 

Kensington Symphony Orchestra Holiday Concert, conducted by Tomothy Smith, performs Strauss, Corelli and Mendelssohn at 8 p.m. at Northminster Presbyterian Church, 545 Ashbury Ave. El Cerrito. Suggested donation is $10; seniors $8. Children admitted free. 534-4335.  

Oakland East Bay Gay Men’s Chorus, “I Got Yule, Babe,” at 8 p.m. at Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church, 3534 Lakeshore Ave. Tickets are $12 in advance; $15 at the door. 800-706-2389. www.oebgmc.org 

SEVA Foundation 25th Anniversary Benefit Concert, a donor-supported nonprofit foundation that builds partnerships to respond to locally defined problems with culturally sustainable solutions throughout the world, features performances by Jackson Brown, The Dead, Steve Earle and others at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Community Theatre, 1930 Allston Way. Tickets are $50-$75. For information call 845-7382.  

Diana Stork, Holiday Harp Performance at 1 p.m. at Bansuri’s Spring Gallery, 3929 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. 415-259-8629. 

Rose Street House of Music with Emily Shore, Irina Rivkin, Maria Quiles, Lily Wilson, Kiki Ebsen, Rebecca Crump at 7:30 p.m. For directions call 594-4000 ext. 687. www.rosestreetmusic.com 

Singing Out Against War and Empire with Robert Temple and Soulfolk Ensemble, Errotator and Paradise Freejahlove at 8 p.m. at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St. at Telegraph. Cost is $10, no one turned away. wwwroberttemplemusic.com 

Bolshevik Cafe, a cabaret variety show featuring Bay Area music and comedy acts with and anti-capitalist slant, at 8 p.m. at Finnish Hall, 1819 Tenth St. Dinner available at 6:30 p.m. Come early as the dinner and show always sell out. 

Talent Show featuring Sapo Loco from the Funky Aztecs at the 1923 Teahouse at 9 p.m. All ages welcome. Suggested donation of $7-$10. 644-2204. www.epicarts.org 

“Shining Star” a hip-hop dance concert and fundraising event with a holiday theme, featuring performances by the New Style Motherlode Dance Company and Diamond Dance Company, at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. at The Regent’s Theatre, Holy Names College, 3500 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. Tickets are $25 available from 597-1056. www.newstylemotherlode.com 

Married Couple at 9 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Jazzschool Student Recitals from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Free. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com  

Dmitri Matheny Winterfest at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com  

Suzy Thompson celebrates the release of her solo album, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761.  

www.freightandsalvage.org 

Tom Rigney and Flambeau at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson with Diana Castillo at 8:30 p.m. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Maria Marquez, CD release party, at 8 p.m. at La Peña. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Rogue Wave, Six Eye Columbia, The Red Thread at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $6. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Robin Gregory, jazz vocalist at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Sliding scale donation $8-$15. 649-8744. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Nicole McRory at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Pinback, Aspects of Physics at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Denise Perrier at 8:30 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

The Phantom Limbs, Nigel Peppercock, Funeral Shock, Annihilation Time, Case of Emergency at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, DEC. 14 

THEATER 

“The Christmas Revels” at the Scottish Rite Theatre, 1547 Lakeside Drive, at 1 and 5 p.m. p.m. Tickets are $17-$35 and are available from www.calrevels.org or 415-621-1216.  

California Shakespeare Student Company, “A Comedy of Errors” at 2 p.m. See listing for Dec. 13. 

Oakland Opera Theater, “Four Saints in Three Acts,” an opera by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein, at 2 and 7 p.m See listing for Dec. 13. 

FILM 

Yasujiro Ozu: “Passing Fancy” at 5:30 p.m. and “The Story of Floating Weeds” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Aurora Stories, “Stories of the Season” celebrate with readings of great works of wintertime, at 7:30 p.m. $20 suggested donation, first-come, first-served, available at 5 p.m. at 2081 Addison St. 843-4822. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Ballet Theater, “The Nutcracker,” at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Tickets are $18 and are available from 843-4689. www.berkeleyballet.org 

Christmas Concert with the Chancel Choir and Pro Sonos Chamber Symphony at 7:30 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church, corner of Channing and Dana. Admission is free, child care available. 848-6242. 

Chamber Music Sundaes San Francisco Symphony musicians and friends, perform the Dvorak Quintet, Mendelssohn Quartet, and the Golubev Violin Sonata, at 3:15 p.m. at St John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $7-$18, available at the door. 415-584-5946. 

Organ Recital with Charles Rus performing works of Sweelinck, Boehm and Bach at 6:10 p.m. St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. Donations requested. 845-0888. 

Live Oak Concert with Gyan Riley on guitar at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Center. Tickets are $8-$10. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

Beethovan’s Birthday Bash at 4 p.m. at Crowden Music Center, 1475 Rose St. Tickets are $12. 559-6910. www.thecrowdenschool.org 

Café de la Paz's 10th Anniversary and Flamenco Celebration at 2 and 5 p.m. Cost is $20-$45. 843-0662. cafedelapaz.net 

Cafe Bellie: Bellie Dance Showcase at 7:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Belly Dance class at 6:30 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Gyrlz Will Rock You, Stiletta, Sea of Sorrow, Implied Five at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $3. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Jazzschool Student Recitals from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Free. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com  

Wayne Wallace Latin Jazz All-Stars and salsa dance party at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com  

Don’t Look Back, acoustic stringband, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $16.50 in advance, $15.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org

Berkeley High Principal Jim Slemp plans to keep the controversial Identity and Ethnic Studies (IES) course mandatory for ninth graders despite a petition reportedly signed by more than 1,000 students calling for its demise. 

In a proposal outlined to the high school’s Shared Governance Committee, Slemp recommended bolstering the academic content of the class, including instituting an honors curriculum and ensuring that it meets UC enrollment requirements and state content standards. 

Critics have derided the class for years as a fluff course that only satisfies the district’s penchant for political correctness. But opposition has intensified in recent months because next year BHS must implement a school board policy requiring students graduate with four mandated social science courses instead of the current three.  

To staff all four courses without funds to hire more teachers, Slemp has proposed axing 23 elective sections from at least six departments, including the Good Food Cafe, a cooking program primarily for developmentally disabled students that is one of the school’s last vestiges of vocational study. 

Bradley Johnson, high school senior and student representative on the Board of Education, circulated the petition this semester, calling on the school to dump ISE, which meets neither state standards nor UC admission requirements. He told the Berkeley High Jacket, “I don’t think IES is an academic class. I think students are bored.” 

The class has been controversial since the early 1990s, when a dedicated collection of parents, students and teachers fought to make ethnic studies a district requirement. 

Originally, ninth graders took the one-semester class. But in 2000, the school board moved their three required history classes—which had begun in the freshman year—to start a year later to align them with recommended state standards and corresponding English classes.  

To fill the gap for ninth graders who needed a full-year social science core class so the school could qualify for a grant that kept class sizes low, the board combined ethnic studies and social living—a health class—and mandated it as a fourth social science class. 

But with the cost-saving move last year cutting eight academic periods to six and the requirement for seniors to take American Government and Economics, there is little room for social science electives, which some teachers and parents argue are more useful than IES. 

“I don’t support IES as mandatory for ninth graders,” said Robert McKnight, chair of the African American Studies Department. “Berkeley is one of the most diverse cities in the country. I don’t see a crisis of identity,” He added that Principal Slemp had assured him that his electives would be spared. 

Parent Samuela Evans questioned why the school would keep IES and “cut classes that already meet UC admission requirements that students know and love.” 

The department has cut Women’s History, Sociology and Anthropology, and classes rumored to be targeted for the new round of cuts include Politics and Power, Theoretical Psychology, two sections of English, three of Fine and Performing Arts, three of Physical Education and three others yet to be decided. A spokesperson for Slemp denied that he had settled on any of the seven sections of social science electives slated for cuts. 

Slemp said a solution wasn’t simple. “People think that if we get rid of IES that would magically get rid of the problem. We’d still have 900 ninth graders who need a class. We don’t have the resources to offer everything we ought to be offering.” 

IES starts off exploring notions of culture and then delves into issues of race, immigration, psychology, liberation movements, media literacy and sex education. 

Students interviewed Wednesday were evenly split on the merits of the course, though most agreed it was an easy A or B. 

History teacher Annie Johnston, who helped design the course, insists the curriculum is already rigorous enough to meet UC enrollment requirements, and that complaints about its academic pedigree stem more from administrative neglect than a lack of rigorous course work. 

Budget cuts forced the district to remove Johnston as program coordinator and pink slip many of the teachers she had trained to instruct the class, she said. 

As a result, several teachers assigned to the class express no interest in teaching it. “IES was imposed on some people,” she said. “Certainly we shouldn’t be doing Social Living with history teachers.” 

While the debate over IES rages on the high school campus, parents have remained mostly on the sidelines of late. In November the School Site Council hastily handed on without debate Slemp’s recommendation to Shared Governance, a body of faculty, students and parents which has final say over the plan. 

[The council president] Claudia Wilken introduced the topic saying the site council supported IES and pushed it through in five minutes, said council member Cynthia Papermaster, who added that she wanted the site council to call a public hearing on the course. 

Johnston defended the merits of ISE, saying it helped students entering a racially diverse 2,700-student school develop a better sense of identity and examine delicate issues in a way that doesn’t increase antagonism. 

To protect that mission, Johnston opposes Slemp’s plan to introduce an honors curriculum as well as AP American History and AP or Honors World History because it would further segregate students who would be better served learning alongside each other. 

Many students, especially current freshmen backed ISE. Lawreece Cox, a freshman, said the class “teaches you about how to deal with each other,” and Pete Monfort said it’s the class he looks forward to most every morning. 

Upperclass students tended to recall negative experiences. Junior Chris Hamilton said it was one of his least favorite classes, too similar to the ethnic studies class he took as an eighth grader at King Middle School. 

Slemp’s plan calls for summer staff development time to develop the revised IES curriculum and train the new teachers. If approved at the January Shared Governance meeting, the revised program will be reviewed at the end of the following school year by an outside evaluator. 

“It’s easy to see how the school came to doing [ISE],” Slemp said. “We just need to look and see how we can make it better.”

Bill O’Donnell was no saint. In fact, I think he would object to any pious reference with his name. Why? Because he was one of the most honest human beings who ever walked the earth. 

That’s the thing about a man like Bill O’Donnell: He didn’t have a drop of guile in his blood. And as far as his spiritual side—though I’m really in no position to make this assumption, since I did not know him all that well—but my feeling, my sense was that his was a tormented soul. Yes, that’s right, tormented.  

Why? Because people who are genuinely honest, who can step outside of themselves—men and women who want to be good human beings, who aspire to be pure and honest—they know they are not perfect. They know it because they understand what it means to be perfect: They can actually conceptualize it, something most of us could never even begin to do.  

Yes I believe Bill experienced distressing moments of doubt, and that those moments tormented him. Bill may have even had moments when he questioned his own faith. 

Such incredibly rare individuals deal with their own demons and weaknesses in their own way—and Bill’s way was to fight for social justice, for peace, for love. Yes, love. Father O’Donnell was a man whose heart was overflowing with love—so much so that I would guess it damn near killed him.  

But he was no saint.  

It’s well known that Bill was a outlaw, having been arrested over 300 times. He was a jailbird as well, recently serving a six month sentence for trespassing at the School of the Americas. Prior to doing time at Atwater Penitentiary, at a going-away party, a friend told him, “I’m proud to know a priest that is going to jail for something other than pederasty.”  

I once shared a flask of Irish whiskey with Bill at a friend’s house as we watched a heavyweight fight on television. It was a good fight, though many may be shocked to learn that a man like Bill liked to watch the fights. But he did.  

Bill also had a devilish sense of humor—a wry, tell-it-as-it-is, loving, sarcastic wit that would bring a demagogue to their knees, and lift those up who felt discouraged by the darkness that sometimes seems to have enveloped the world. He would cock his head to one side, his eyes would sparkle, and with a phrase, he would turn the tables on those he believed were hypocrites, thieves, liars, and – what to him were perhaps the greatest sinners of all—the greedy. 

Still Bill had his moments of doubt and pain. But if you ask me, that is the sign of a truly great man. Here was someone who gave his life to the church, to his Savior —a man who believed the Way to the Kingdom of Heaven was a path created by one’s work, by their actual physical and spiritual dedication to people and the earth and the future—here, on this planet, in this world, now… Bill was such a truly incredible, intelligent, honest human being that it seems only natural that he would question everything – even his own faith.  

One thing is for certain—Bill often questioned his own intentions, and whether he did what he did to satisfy his own ego, out of anger, or for honest reasons.  

Personally, I am not a religious man. I’m not devout enough to even consider myself an agnostic. But if there ever lived a man, or a woman, who, by their example, moved me to even consider becoming a religious person, it was Bill O’Donnell. He actually practiced what he preached. 

That is why Bill O’Donnell was more than just a spiritual leader, more than a soldier in the battle for social justice, freedom, and peace – he was a living testament to the power of one’s actions if one follows their heart and thinks about others. Yes, Bill O’Donnell was flesh and blood, all right, and he never pretended to be anything else. In fact, if one had ever told him to his face he was a saint, my guess is that Bill’s eyes would have sparkled, he would have laughed that warm, loving laugh, then say something like “that’s the funniest damn thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life…” 

God bless Father Bill O’Donnell. May he rest in peace.  

James Carter is an Albany resident.

Anyone struggling to get into a holiday mood can find delightful solace in the array of notable musical and theatrical performances taking place this weekend in the greater Berkeley area. 

• The Voci women’s vocal ensemble will perform six centuries of music celebrating the promise of peace at 3 p.m. Saturday at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way at Dana Street. 

• The San Francisco Early Music Society is offering a selection of ancient English carols, plainsong and Renaissance polyphony at 8 p.m. Saturday, at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. 

• Slavyanka, the San Francisco Men’s Russian Chorus, will present Berkeley with songs of Russia starting at 8 p.m. Saturday at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way at Dana Street. 

• The Kensington Symphony Orchestra will give a traditional holiday concert will be presented by at 8 p.m. Saturday at Northminster Presbyterian Church, 545 Ashbury Ave. El Cerrito. 

• For a touch of the lighter side, the Oakland East Bay Men’s Chorus performs “I Got Yule Babe” at 8 p.m. Saturday at Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church, 3534 Lakeshore Ave., Oakland. 

• Berkeley Youth Orchestra’s Winter Concert begins at 11 a.m. Saturday at the Laney College Theater, 900 Fallon St. in Oakland, featuring Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” narrated by John Grappone, and Holst’s “Jupiter.” 

• Berkeley High School students perform “You Can’t Take it With You” at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday in the Florence Schwimley Little Theater. 

• Children and families will enjoy the holiday classic, “The Nutcracker,” performed by Berkeley Ballet Theater in the Julia Morgan Theater on College Ave., at 7 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, and 2 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. 

• The Christmas Revels are at the Scottish Rite Theater at 1 and 5 p.m. on Saturday. 

• Berkeley’s own Bolshevik Café, a cabaret show and dinner kicks off at 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, at Finn Hall on 1819 Tenth St., and a Sing Out Against War and Empire with Robert Temple and Soulfolk Ensemble begins at 8 that same evening at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St. at Telegraph. 

Details of these events can be found in our Arts Calendar beginning on Page Sixteen. 

—Anne Wagley 

When some people think of West Berkeley, the first thing that comes to mind is a greasy fried-chicken smell, and that’s enough to make neighbors of Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits on San Pablo Avenue broiling mad. 

Even after Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits at San Pablo and Delaware Street upgraded their odor control system this fall, residents say the smell many of them loathe hasn’t gone away. 

“It is definitely still present,” said Tim Arai, who lives one block away from the restaurant. “It all depends on what the wind is doing now.” 

Since the franchise opened on July 3, neighbors have sent a slew of complaints to the Berkeley City Council about the odors emanating from the restaurant. Arai said he’s been trading e-mails with other neighbors whose territories have also been invaded by the pungent smell. Some people, he said, tell him their houses are “smoked” with it. 

“What the hell is that smell?” Arai mused while sitting outside of a cafe in downtown Berkeley on a recent afternoon. “It’s not only fried chicken. It smells (like) dirty grease!” 

As a vegetarian, Arai finds the odors particularly unbearable. At one point, he said, the odors became “a mixture of grease and fried chicken and some kind of deodorizer.”  

The smell is also unpredictable, he said. “Sometimes it’s faint, sometimes strong. Sometimes it lasts twenty minutes, sometimes a couple of hours.” 

“It’s just fried-chicken smell,” said Larry Velasco, a Popeyes manager who runs a handful of branches in the Bay Area. “It’s kind of normal.” 

The restaurant is open 12 hours a day, seven days a week, 363 days a year. Though Velasco acknowledged they had already made technical adjustments to better control the odors, he declined to make any further comment over the ongoing skirmish. 

“What I can tell you now is that we’ll be able to solve the issue,” he said. 

Still, neighbors aren’t convinced. They say the smell travels randomly, wafting between blocks. 

“I’m cultivating a rose garden,” said Elaine Eastman who lives on the corner of Hearst Avenue and Curtis Street, more than a block away from the restaurant. “I want to smell my roses, not fried chicken.” 

Eastman said she enjoys spending a lot of time in her backyard, so even though she only intermittently encounters the odors, she deems it “bothersome.” 

Linda Maio, a Berkeley city councilwoman who represents the area, said the city has been working hard to find a good solution. 

“We want to make sure they’ve done anything possible to control the smell,” Maio said of Popeyes. “We are not going to tolerate any offensive smell in the neighborhood.” 

In a recent letter to the city, Popeyes said the restaurant has installed the best possible odor-reduction unit, given the limited available space on the restaurant’s roof. 

The city has checked out the equipment, said Maio, who was on a similar smell mission in Berkeley almost a decade ago. 

“It seems to me it’s working now, although it really depends on what they’re doing inside and if it’s a windy day,” she added. 

Eastman said neighborhood residents were already worried about the fried-chicken smell when Popeyes first proposed to replace Rich’s Bulky Burger over two years ago.  

“But we were assured by Popeyes that it would not be a problem because they would put in special equipment,” said Eastman. “We thought they were trying to be a good neighbor, so when the zoning adjustment board passed the project, we didn’t appeal it to the City Council.”  

“It must be understood that they promised there would be no smells at all emanating from the restaurant,” said Paul Shain, who lives at the opposite end of the block from Popeyes. Shain said the restaurant’s building permit required it to be odor-free. 

The city permit orders Popeyes to control cooking odors to “prevent complaints from residents in the adjacent neighborhood and to minimize adverse impacts on neighboring properties.” 

“If I were going to buy a house, I certainly wouldn’t buy a house if it smells like that,” said Eastman. “Would you? I wouldn’t.” 

Eastman said she’s never been to the restaurant because she simply doesn’t want to show any support to “such a poor neighbor.” 

To properly document the smell, Maio said, the city has asked the neighbors to report any odors as soon as they smell them. 

“As long as the neighbors are not comfortable about it, we’ll keep on working on it,” she said. “That’s my job.” 

Maio assigned aide Brad Smith to go down and “sniff” whenever the councilwoman gets incoming calls from neighbors—even during off-hours. 

Smith said he’s been unable to smell the odors since the restaurant recently installed the new system. There are “a bunch of different noses” in the neighborhood, he said, and he designates himself an independent “common nose” assigned to help verify the odors. 

Though the city requires residents to log the times and dates when they encounter the odors, Eastman isn’t complying because she said it’s a pain to carry a piece of paper all the time—but Arai is. 

“If it’s not solved, I’d imagine the neighbors will come together to sue the restaurant,” said Arai. “We might start looking into that as an option.” 

Not every neighbor suffers. 

“I made it a point to park a half a block away and walk up to the place, sniffing as I went,” Zan Turner said in an e-mail. “Couldn’t smell a thing until I was inside—and even then it wasn’t disgusting.” 

“I bet neighbors complain about anything new and different,” said Tibet Willis, a Wells Fargo employee who has frequently driven over to Popeyes to buy meals since the branch was open. “My grandmother lives here and she’s never complained.” 

But Arai is determined to fight to the end. 

“We’ll keep on nagging until things get done,” he said.

STREET ARTISTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I wish to comment on the state of affairs of the Telegraph Avenue Street Artists, a group of licensed street art and craft vendors to whom the City of Berkeley owes much of its character. 

We are a poor but proud lot, all makers and vendors of handcrafted items ranging from jewelry and leather goods to art, clothing, hats, incense, soaps, candles, pens and much more. The operant word here is “handcrafted.” We spend our lives making these gifts, then enduring all kinds of weather to sell them on the street, the only roof over our heads (and the heads of our customers) is that which we bring with us. Some of us don’t make enough money at our art or craft to make a decent living, eat well, or provide ourselves with good living and working quarters; some of us are more fortunate because we have other sources of income, such as a husband or wife with a steady job, or we have wholesale and website customers. 

Nevertheless, we are real businesses selling products you won’t find anywhere else. Many of our items are one of a kind, many are made in quantity, but all are handmade from raw materials, the old-fashioned way. We have no factories making our wares, no underpaid sweat shop workers laboring to make cheap goods to the masses. We have no marketing department, no advertising budget, no professional association to support our endeavors. We just survive or thrive, depending on the mood of the crowd that day, or that week, or that month. And if sales are good, we eat and pay our rent; if not, we suffer. 

So why write about it? Simple: to get the local media to devote as much attention to us as we can get. To draw crowds of people to our booths, our street stores which we put up and take down every day and night. To support the local economy, the Berkeley economy. To get you people out of the malls, away from the cheap junk that’s sold for fashion, art or beauty, and to get you to stroll by our booths and spend your money on the beautiful crafts we make. You’ll find gifts for your family and friends that you’ll not find anywhere in the world. You’ll not be disappointed and, believe me, neither will we. 

Ed Livingston 

• 

PUBLIC TRANSIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Steve Geller writes (Letters, Daily Planet, Dec. 5-8) in praise of public transportation in Berkeley. I would be delighted if that were so, but just look at the schedules. My wife and I just spent a day in San Francisco using public transportation. The bus we rode came every four minutes in mid-day and was crowded. Too many buses in the East Bay seem to come about every 30 minutes in mid-day. San Francisco Muni transfers are free and are good in any direction for a generous period of time. AC Transit charges for transfers. BART, however, is fast, frequent, and comfortable, but then there is a charge to transfer to AC Transit from BART. The infrequent schedules of East Bay buses is discouraging; and when schedules have been revised to be even less frequent, there is even less reason to patronize AC Transit. 

Alan R. Meisel 

• 

HALF OF HISTORY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

When Gov. Schwarzenegger asked Californian Indians to pay their fair share of taxes, he never once asked the same fairness of wealthy Californians. It seems to me that Mr. Schwarzenegger doesn’t want to offend his wealthy friends who donated millions of dollar to his campaign. I call it hypocrisy at its worst. 

Mr. Schwarzenegger only learned one half of the United States when he was still in his home country of Austria. He wasn’t taught about the other half of the United States which had to do with American Indian sovereignty. While there might be legitimate concern over Indian casinos, Gov. Schwarzenegger’s argument about fairness of taxes in California is one-sided. 

Billy Trice, Jr. 

Oakland  

• 

ENDORSEMENT 

Dear Council Member Hawley, 

Thank you for announcing your choice of a successor in District 5. Now I definitely know for whom not to vote. 

Your candidate’s willingness to be in consensus with other councilmembers appears to be of great importance in your estimation. I’m so glad he wants to be liked so that his dance card will be full! 

How about a candidate being of good moral character, committed to specific principles, with innovative notions about how a city in a financial crisis should move forward? 

When you ran, you specifically touted your financial expertise. However, now the only solution you have put forward to solve the financial crisis is to burden homeowners with an additional property tax. 

May I suggest that it would be an honorable thing for you to do is to recognize that you no longer represent the views of the majority of voters in District 5. This was demonstrated at the last NEBA meeting. 

You should graciously acknowledge this situation, resign, and let the person who polled the next highest vote assume the remainder of your term of office. This would save the city the cost of a possible recall and another election. 

Viki Tamaradze 

• 

FREE TRADE CHOCOLATE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thanks for the yummy info from Marty Schiffenbauer (“Decadent Delights Await the Chocoholic’s Palate,” Daily Planet, Nov. 28-Dec. 1). Here’s my two cents: You can be “chewing good while doing good” by buying free-trade organic chocolate at Global Exchange. They carry three brands from Germany and Switzerland, large and small bars, dark, milk, and bittersweet, powdered cocoa too. Global Exchange is in San Francisco at 24th and Noe and here in Berkeley at 2840 College Ave. Also, Global Exchange is one of the few places you can find organic free-trade coffee; they have a great assortment of handsome items to wear and for the home, most from small village collectives all over the globe. 

Rhoda Slanger 

• 

CONFERENCE CENTER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

UC’s proposal for a conference center and museums does not only include underground parking on the site. It also includes a new parking structure north of Addison Street.  

This parking structure is not really part of the conference center/museum project, and it should be studied separately. I would like to see the main project built as soon as possible, but not the new UC parking structure.  

This parking structure would be used by UC employees and not by the general public. It seems to be part of UC’s long range development plan, which calls for parking to expand more rapidly than the number of people on campus expands—actually promoting a mode shift from other forms of transportation to the automobile.  

On the more general question of whether downtown needs more parking to stimulate business, I think UC’s conference center/museum project shows that we can attract more customers without attracting more cars.  

Almost all of the people coming to conferences will arrive by air, and when they get to Berkeley, they will not need cars. The hotel will actually reduce demand for parking: Many people visiting UC now stay in hotels in Emeryville and drive to Berkeley, because there is not enough hotel space here.  

The museums will draw people whether or not they provide parking, particularly the museum of anthropology, which will be one of the largest museums of its kind in the country.  

Automobile use expands to fill the amount of parking that is available. If UC builds its parking structure north of Addison, more UC employees will commute by car. If the conference/museum center includes more parking than is necessary, more visitors will come by car. All this parking will not bring more people downtown, but it will cause more traffic congestion and leave us with a less livable city.  

In the long run, more parking will make downtown less attractive and less successful. Berkeley’s downtown will never compete successfully with freeway-oriented shopping centers by providing more parking than they do. Downtown will compete successfully by providing the liveliest, most interesting shopping area in the East Bay—and that requires an intensity of use that you can only get with transit-oriented development.  

Charles Siegel  

• 

FAIR TAXATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Developer Patrick Kennedy appears to be saying (Letters, Daily Planet, Dec. 9-11) that vacant space within new buildings in Berkeley isn’t subject to city taxation. If this were true, it would be a powerful argument for immediate cessation of the mixed-use building boom currently in progress. Most of the commercial space in the existing mixed-use projects is empty—due to the lack of parking and to the economy, it is likely to remain empty for a very long time. 

Now that city revenue has been lost, it is time for fairness in taxation to begin. 

Gale Garcia 

• 

AUDITING THE AUDITOR 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Our city auditor has come out of the closet as the chief city policymaker and financial incompetent. In two recent articles in the Daily Planet (Commentary, Dec. 5-8) and Berkeley Voice (Dec. 5), the city auditor told us what cuts we will be making in our city budget and what our public safety services cost. 

The cuts: I was not aware that it was in the city auditor’s job description to assume City Council’s role in determining the cuts we may be making in our city budget. Silly me, I thought that was the job of our elected City Council, with input from the city manager and the citizenry. Do we not have numerous meetings and negotiations ahead to discuss such matters? Perhaps, in the interest of saving more money, a worthy goal, we should simply cancel these meetings and ask for the auditor’s royal fiscal decree. 

The arithmetic: I would not trust this auditor with one cent of my money if I had a choice. In her article, written I presume to correct the city’s “failure to communicate”, she stated that the “current year General Fund budget includes over 76 million in police and fire costs.” The truth, as uncovered by Berkeley budget maven Gale Garcia (and acknowledged by Auditor Hogan) is that the current year General Fund costs for police and fire are $48.47 million. So our auditor was off only by $27.5 million (41 percent). 

Recall Hogan! Garcia for auditor! 

Barbara Gilbert 

• 

MIDEAST VIOLENCE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

If George Bisharat didn’t have the little credibility he has garnered as a professor of law, he would have no credibility whatsoever. About the kindest thing one could say about his op-ed on the Palestinian “diaspora” is that Bisharat has an astounding capacity to transform real events into fiction. This is hardly surprising, when one remembers that Mr. Bisharat once penned an op-ed published in the San Francisco Chronicle positing the absurd claim that Zionists were the primary influence behind Bush’s invasion of Iraq. 

The reality is the very day the UN declared Israel as a state, it was invaded by armies from five Arab nations. The majority of Palestinians fled as a human and logical response to the terrifying situation of seeing their families caught between an invading Arab army and furious Jews whose very existence was threatened by that force. A smaller number of Palestinians left because, as has been well documented regardless of Bisharat’s denial, they were exhorted to leave by Arab radio. These broadcasts exclaimed that after what was dubbed the easy victory to come, the Palestinians would be able to reclaim both their land and that of the annihilated Jewish infidel as well. 

And finally, yes, a still smaller percentage of Palestinians was forced out by angry Jews whose lives the invading Arab army threatened. 

Mr. Bisharat attempts to butress his case with quotes he deems as factual from those who oppose a Jewish state and fabrications the Palestinians regularly trot out to justify their ceaseless acts of terror against the Israeli civilian populace. 

Indeed, if anyone needs to apologize for unethical acts, it is the Palestinians for homicide bombings of innocent Israelis, the rendering of second class citizenship and honor murders of Palestinian wives and daughters, and the abuse of their own children by teaching them from pre-school on that the most honorable role they could play in the future would be that of a martyr-murderer of Jews. 

Dan Spitzer 

• 

SHAMBHALA BOOKSELLERS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I was still in mourning over the closure of Shambhala Booksellers—undoubtedly one of the finest independent bookstores in the country, truly a one-of-a-kind jewel right here at our doorstep—until I read Alta Gerrey’s delightful article (“Shambhala Booksellers Closes After 35 Years,” Daily Planet, Dec. 9-11). She cheered me up by reminding us that Berkeley still offers a rich, vibrant and diverse array of many eclectic bookstores and independent publishers. Happily, while the business end of spiritual book selling might be depressed, the vitality of the community is definitely still alive. We in the practicing Buddhist community are still saddened by this irreplaceable loss, but we’re grateful to be living in such splendid and unique places as Berkeley where such bookstores can live such long, fruitful lives and become cultural icons. We’re also quite hopeful that perhaps someday soon we’ll see another reincarnation of Shambhala Booksellers, and we trust Berkeley is the best place for its rebirth. 

Perry Brissette 

Berkeley Shambhala Center 

• 

IMPLEMENT THE PLAN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Acton Court illustrates the future of University Avenue without planning: huge cubic monoliths that present unwelcoming facades to passersby, and that tower over the tidy little bungalows in adjoining neighborhoods. The University Avenue Strategic Plan provides a way to provide high density residential and commercial space that enhances rather than detracts from the quality of life on and around the avenue, and that provides an attractive gateway to our city. I strongly encourage the city to follow the recommendation of Mayor Bates’ Permit and Development Task Force, and implement the University Strategic Plan without delay. 

Judy Stamps 

• 

TRASHCAN GUY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I know who the trashcan artist is (Daily Planet, Dec. 9-11). Or at least I’ve seen him retouching his work on a frequent basis. I never really looked at the trashcan in detail before but the face you show as a possible clue definitely is him. Except I think he doesn’t wear glasses and he wears a baseball hat instead of a knit cap. He hangs out at Nomad Café, which is nearby, and I’ve seen him walking around North Oakland. Unfortunately I’ve never approached him to find out his name but he certainly lives in the area. Sorry I don’t have more information to solve the clues of “Trashcan Guy” but I’ll keep my eyes peeled. 

Chris Douglas 

Oakland 

• 

CLARIFICATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am writing to clarify and correct comments attributed to me in a recent article (“City, UC Disaster Meet Provokes Citizen Complaints,” Daily Planet, Dec. 9-11). 

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Molecular Foundry project is proposed for a hill site location approximately 600 meters east of the Alquist-Priolo (A-P) Earthquake Fault Zone, but very close to the East Canyon and the Wildcat Fault Zones. The Molecular Foundry site has a history of landslides and just south of the site is the Strawberry Canyon Fault, a cross fault which connects the Hayward Fault and the faults referred to above. 

However, LBNL’s proposed Building 49, a six-story, 65,000-square-foot office building is located entirely in the A-P Earthquake Fault Zone, as is also Building 88, one of the Lab’s large remaining accelerators. UC Berkeley’s North East Quadrant Project (Stanley Hall replacement) is partially in the A-P Fault Zone as is a section of LBNL’s Donner Lab. 

The Alquist-Priolo Earthquake Fault Zoning Act, signed into law in December 1972, requires the delineation of zones along active faults in California. The purpose of the Alquist-Priolo Act is to regulate development on or near fault traces to reduce the hazard of fault rupture and to prohibit the location of most structures for human occupancy across these traces. (LBNL’s Draft EIR for Building 49, page IV.E-11) 

It appears that last Friday’s “Community” Forum lacked any discussion related to the ramifications of both UCB’s and LBNL’s proposed developments (of both laboratory and office buildings) within this earthquake fault zone, deemed one of the most dangerous in the state. The city can’t afford to bury its head in the sand, by excluding knowledgeable community groups and commissions from these meetings, but instead must from now on spearhead open, honest, truly community-wide meetings, to address development in the Alquist-Priolo Earthquake Zone versus “Promoting a Disaster Resistant Berkeley.” 

Pamela Shilova 

• 

THE OTHER 9/11 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

A couple of days ago MSNBC interviewed Henry Kissinger about general political problems. Among his responses was a reference to the “victims of 9/11.” 

I am sure he was not thinking of that Sept. 11 in Chile, when the CIA, with Kissinger’s connivance, overthrew a legal democratic government. That coup caused many more victims that the 9/11 event in New York two years ago and the misery caused by the bloody dictator, Pinochet, lasted several decades. So, there is more than 9/11, but Americans remember only the one that affected them. 

Max Alfert 

Albany 

• 

THE PEOPLE’S GOVERNOR 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Gov. Schwarzenegger is “going to the people” to win support for his budget proposals. His method of balancing the budget will destroy care for the most helpless in our society. He intendes to suspend the Lanterman Act, which protects the civil rights of people with developmental disabilities. He will also severely cut home services, lunches and transportation for seniors and the elderly and will deeply reduce medical care for the most needy. It’s obvious that he will cause untold hardship to thousands of Californians. Can “the people” he is trying to win over see clearly what is at stake? 

Cynthia Weber

FRIDAY, DEC. 12 

Rally for Undocumented Immigrants at 11:30 a.m. at the Berkeley BART station, followed by a march to UC Campus. 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Luanne Linnar-Palmer, RN, PhD, “Who Has the Final Say on Children’s Health?” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $11.50 - $12.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For reservations call 526-2925.  

“So How’d You Become an Activist?” with Joe MacDonald, veterans advocate, singer and composer and Terri Compost, Food Not Bombs volunteer, at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar St., at Bonita. Suggested donation $5. For more information call 528-5403. 

“Literacy and Beyond” hosts a scholastic book fair from 6 to 9 p.m. at the Downtown Berkeley YMCA., 2001 Allston Way. 665-3271. 

Literary Friends meets at the Berkeley Senior Center at 1:15 p.m. 232-1351. 

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

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

Berkeley Critical Mass Bike Ride meets at the Berkeley BART at 5:30 p.m. 

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

SATURDAY, DEC. 13 

East Bay Sanctuary Covenant’s Holiday Crafts Fair, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the First Congregational Church, Channing and Dana. Items are fair trade and most are from indigenous women’s cooperatives in Central America, Asia, Haiti and Africa. Free admission. All proceeds benefit local work with refugees. 524-7989. 

Benefit Holiday Crafts Sale Handicrafts from reused and recycled materials, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 1720 Rose St. Backpacks, purses, jewelry, slippers, carved coconut shell containers, and more, made in cooperatives in India and the Philippines. Affordable prices. All proceeds will be distributed by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, www.no-burn.org to communities working to stop waste around the world. 

Artists with Heart, art show benefit from noon to 6 p.m. at 2033 and 2041 Center St. More than 50 artists and community members are donating their work to benefit the individuals and families served by BOSS (Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency). 649-1930.  

Telegraph Avenue Holiday Street Fair between Bancroft and Dwight, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. 649-9500. www.telegraphberkeley.org  

Holidays on Solano Ave. with photos with Santa from 1 to 3 p.m. at Peralta Park, 1561 Solano. 

Berkeley Farmers’ Market Holiday Crafts Fair from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., with handcrafted gifts and music at Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park. 548-333. www.ecologycenter.org  

Amsterdam Art Studios Holiday Sale, with a dozen artists’ paintings and crafts, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at 1007 University Ave., between 9th and 10th Sts. 

Studio 1509’s Winter Open Studios from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 1509 San Pablo Ave. 

Berkeley Artisans Open Studios every weekend through Dec. 21. 100 professional artists and craftspeople at studio buildings in Berkeley open their doors to the public. Crafts include blown glass, functional and decorative ceramics, ornaments, Menorahs, clocks, lamps and lighting, painted and custom furniture, garden art, bird houses, egg dioramas, floor cloths, clothing, textiles, jewelry, sculpture, photography, paintings, original prints, and other works on paper. All work is handcrafted, many pieces are one-of-a-kind. A self-guided tour presents opportunities to meet the artists and see working craft studios. For a map of participating studios call 845-2612. www.berkeleyartisans.com 

33rd Annual KPFA Community Crafts Fair from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at The Concourse, 8th and Brannan, San Francisco.  

High Tea at the Berkeley City Club with holiday decorations, sweets and savories from noon to 2:30 p.m. Cost is $24.95 adults, $14.95 children under 12. Call for reservations, 848-7800. 

East Bay Wetlands Restoration from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Join us for our regular drop-in volunteer days at Arrowhead Marsh, for a chance to learn about the ecology of the Bay and see some of the last remaining wetland habitat in the East Bay. We will be planting for the native plant project. Gloves, tools and snacks are provided. Please dress in layers and bring sunscreen and water. All ages and physical abilities are welcome. Please RSVP groups with 10 or more. Martin Luther King, Jr. Regional Shoreline, Oakland. 452-9261. mlatta@savesfbay.org  

Greens at Work will be volunteering for the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. We will be clearing ivy and other invasive plants from the Tamalpais Path. Meet at the intersection of Euclid at Eunice. Bring gloves, study shoes, and water.  

Winter Tonics and Herbal Remedies from the Kitchen and Yard Stay healthy this winter with the aid of common plants from your kitchen and yard. Learn how to boost your immune system with herbs, spices and weeds. Leave the class with a homemade remedy. The class is taught by naturalist Terri Compost. From 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave, near Dwight Way. Cost is $10 EC members, $15 general, no one turned away for lack of funds. 548-2220, ext. 233.  

Conifers, with Garth Jacober at 10 a.m. at Magic Gardens, 729 Heinz Ave. 644-2351. www.magicgardens.com 

Small Press Distribution Open House and Book Sale from noon to 4 p.m. at 1341 7th St. at Gilman. 524-1668. www.spdbooks.org 

Kol Hadash Brown Bag Family Shabbat with Rabbi Kai Eckstein, on “King Solomon,” from noon to 1:30 p.m. at the Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin Ave. Come and find out why King Solomon was special. Please bring lunch for your family, and (finger) dessert to share; juice provided. We also collect non-perishable food for the needy. 428-1492. kolhadash@aol.com 

Shamanic Journeying Meditation, starts at noon. Free. For information and directions call 525-1272. 

Yoga for Seniors at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St., on Saturdays from 10 to 11 a.m. Open to non-members of the club for $8 per class. For further information and to register, call Karen Ray at 848-7800. 

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

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, held every Sat. from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552. 

SUNDAY, DEC. 14 

Celebration of the Life of Fr. Bill O’Donnell at 4 p.m. at the Berkeley Community Theater, Berkeley High Campus. Candlelight procession at 6 p.m. to St. Joseph the Worker Church for a vigil at the church.  

Bamboo Building Strong as steel in tension, timber bamboo can grow three feet in a day, be sustainably harvested every year and uses a small fraction of the land required by trees. We will cover proper tool usage and joinery as well as design ideas that avoid the more difficult, time-consuming joints. From 7 to 10 p.m. at the Building Education Center, 812 Page St. Cost is $35. 525-7610.  

East Bay Sanctuary Covenant’s Holiday Crafts Fair, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the First Congregational Church, Channing and Dana. Items are fair trade and most are from indigenous women’s cooperatives in Central America, Asia, Haiti and Africa. Free admission. All proceeds benefit local work with refugees. 524-7989. 

Telegraph Avenue Holiday Street Fair between Bancroft and Dwight, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. 649-9500. www.telegraphberkeley.org  

Studio 1509’s Winter Open Studios from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 1509 San Pablo Ave. 

Amsterdam Art Studios Holiday Sale, with a dozen artists’ paintings and crafts, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at 1007 University Ave., between 9th and 10th Sts. 

Holidays on Solano Ave. with photos with Santa from 1 to 3 p.m. at Sweet Potatoes, 1224 Solano. 

Teach-in on Militarism from 4 to 6 p.m., followed by spoken word, speakout on militarism, art, dancing and music. Admission is $5-$15 sliding scale or free with a donation for homeless veterans shelter (blankets, gloves, hats, warm clothes, socks, shoes, etc.) No one turned away for lack of funds. Humanist Hall, 390 27th St. Oakland. 547-7486. 

Anti-Militarist Festival of Resistance, with poetry and music by Lynx, International Maggot Theatre, Six Pack Four, Live Ammo, and Tragedians of the City, at 6 p.m. at The Fellowship of Humanity, 390 27th St., Oakland, between Telegraph and Broadway. 547-7486.  

Free Sailboat Rides from 1 to 4 p.m. Bring warm, waterproof clothes - it can be wet! At the Cal Sailing Club at the Berkeley Marina 287-5905. www.cal-sailing.org  

Chanukah Celebration for the entire community. Activities, music, storytelling and, of course, latkes, from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237, ext. 112. www.brjcc.org 

MONDAY, DEC. 15 

City of Berkeley Budget Work Session and discussion of Implementation Plan for Budget Crisis Recovery at 5 p.m. in City Council Chambers, 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way. 981-7000. 

Tea at Four Enjoy some of the best teas from the other side of the Pacific Rim and learn their cultural and natural history. Then take a walk to see wintering birds and dormant ladybeetles, from 4 to 5:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. Registration required. Cost is $5 for residents, $7 for non-residents. Wheelchair accessible. 525-2233. 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 6 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

TUESDAY, DEC. 16 

Wellstone Democratic Club meets at 6 p.m. for a pot luck and social hour, followed by a meeting at 7 p.m., at the First Congregational Church, 24th and Harrison. 733-0996.  

Sauerkraut-Making Demonstration, with Sandor Ellix Katz, at 3 p.m. at Berkeley Farmers’ Market, Derby St. and Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. www.ecologycenter.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Sharon Stalkfleet will speak about her ministry in local nursing homes at 11 a.m. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

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

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 525-3565. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 17 

Holiday Blood Drive Hosted by Berkeley Rep The Red Cross Blood Mobile will be parked in front of Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2025 Addison St. from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Walk-ins are welcome, but you can also can sign up online by logging on www.BeADonor.com (sponsor code: BRT) or by calling 1-800-GiveLife. 

Berkeley Communicators Toastmasters meets the first and third Wednesdays of the month at 7:15 a.m. at Hide-A-Way Café, 6430 Telegraph Ave. For information call Fred Garvey, 925-682-1111, ext. 164. 

Fun with Acting class meets at 11 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Free, all are welcome. 985-0373. 

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

com/vigil4peace/vigil 

Prose Writers Workshop We're a serious but lively bunch whose focus is on issues of craft. Novices welcome. Experienced facilitator. Community sponsored, no fee. Meets 7 to 9 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut, at Rose. For information call 524-3034. 

Berkeley CopWatch open office hours 7 to 9 p.m. Drop in to file complaints, assistance available. For information call 548-0425. 

Community Dances, traditional English and American dances, 8 p.m. every Wednesday, $9. 7 p.m. first Sunday, $10. Grace North Church, 2138 Cedar St. 233-5065. www.bacds.org 

Free Feldenkrais ATM Classes for adults 55 and older at 10:30 and 11:45 a.m. at the Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut at Rose. For information call 848-0237.  

THURSDAY, DEC. 18 

Public Meeting on the Santa Fe Right-of-Way Bike and Pedestrian Path which runs from Delaware to University, at 7 p.m. at the West Berkeley Senior Center. For information call Niran at 981-6396 or Michael at 981-2490.  

Environmental Resource Center Open House Come visit your local environmental center for a warm winter get-together. There will be music, food, games, and a free raffle of environmental books and products. From 6 to 8 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave, near Dwight Way. 548-2220, ext. 233. www.ecologycenter.org 

Amphibians After School The wet weather brings out the frogs and salamanders. Let’s learn about them and look for them. For young naturalists, age 8-10, without their parents. From 3 to 4:30 p.m. Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. Cost is $3, registration required. 525-2233.  

Berkeley Liberation Radio 104.1 FM holds public meetings for all interested people first and third Thursdays, 7 p.m. at the Long Haul Info Shop, 3124 Shattuck Ave. 595-0190.  

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Practice public speaking with out-of-this-world subjects, at 6:15 p.m. at 2515 Hillegass Ave. 898-1993. www.MetaphysicallySpeaking.org 

ONGOING 

Holiday Food Drive Help the Alameda County Community Food Bank help people in need. Offer to run a food drive, or donate healthy nonperishable food at Safeway stores, Berkeley Bowl and Bay Street Emeryville. For more information call 834-3663. www.accfb.org 

The Berkeley School Board is now accepting applications for Board Committees and Commissions. Applicants interested in representing a Board Member will find information and applications on the BUSD web site www.berkeleypublicschools.org or by contacting the Public Information Officer at 644-6320. Applications can also be picked up in the Superintendent’s office. 

City of Berkeley Commissioners Sought If you are interested in serving on a commission, applications can be downloaded from www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/general.htm#applications or contact the City Clerk, 981-6900.  

The Online Civilian Conservation Corps Museum is seeking the stories about the CCCs, CCC Enrollees, Staff, or Technical Advisors for publication to this online historical resource. If you would like to participate please send your stories, with name company number and location if known, to CCC Collection, PO Box 5, Woodbury NJ 08096 or email to JFJmuseum@aol.com 

CITY MEETINGS  

Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board meets Mon., Dec. 15,  

at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers, Pam Wyche 644-6128 ext. 113. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/rent 

Design Review Committee meets Mon. Dec. 15, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Anne Burns, 981-7415. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/designreview 

City Council meets Tues., Dec. 16, at 7 p.m., with a special session on the budget at 5 p.m. in City Council Chambers, Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk, 981-6900. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Berkeley Housing Authority meets Tues., Dec. 16, at 6:30 p.m. in City Council Chambers, Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk, 981-6900. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/housingauthority 

Citizens Humane Commission meets Wed., Dec. 17, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Katherine O’Connor, 981-6601. www.ci.ber 

keley.ca.us/commissions/humane 

Civic Arts Commission meets Wed., Dec. 17, at 6:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Mary Ann Merker, 981-7533. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/civicarts 

Commission on Aging meets Wed., Dec. 17, at 1:30 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. Lisa Ploss, 981-5200. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/aging 

Commission on Labor meets Wed., Dec. 17, at 6:30 p.m., at Berkeley Work-Source, 1950 Addison St., Suite 105. Delfina M. Geiken, 644-6085. www.ci.-berkeley.ca.us/commissions/labor 

Energy Commission meets Wed., Dec. 17, at 6:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Neal De Snoo, 981-5434. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/energy 

Human Welfare and Community Action Commission meets Wed., Dec. 17, at 7 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. Marianne Graham, 981-5416. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/welfare 

Mental Health Commission meets Wed., Dec. 17, at 6:30 p.m., at 2640 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. Harvey Turek, 981-5213. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/mentalhealth  

School Board meets Wed. Dec. 3, Dec. 17, at 7:30 p.m., in the City Council Chambers. Queen Graham 644-6147 or Mark Coplan 644-6320. 

Disaster Council meets Wed., Dec. 18, at 7 p.m., at the Emergency Operations Center, 997 Cedar St. Carol Lopes, 981-5514. www.ci.berkeley.ca. us/commissions/disaster 

Fair Campaign Practices Commission meets Thurs., Dec. 18, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Prasanna Rasaih, 981-6950. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/faircampaign 

Transportation Commission meets Thurs., Dec. 18, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Peter Hillier, 981-7000. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/transportation

Nine years after a fire burnt down their first home, Berkeley Montessori School is moving to the flatlands—hoping that at their new address they can breath life into a Berkeley landmark and surrounding neighborhood fighting to improve its image and maintain its character. 

Come February, the school’s 270 students will move from their rented space at the Hillside School building to 1310 University Ave., beside Congregation Netivot Shalom, also under construction at the site of the former Jayvee Liquors. “The whole setting in the hills is beautiful, but it’s pretty isolated,” said Will Travis, a Montessori parent. “I think it will be exciting for the kids to be in the midst of the Berkeley community.” 

Besides wanting a home of their own, parents were eager to leave Hillside School—still owned by the Berkeley Unified School District—which sits directly over the Hayward Fault and was prohibited by state law from remaining a public school. 

Lew Jones, director of facilities and maintenance for the district, said no decision has been made about the fate of the site, which is rented by other groups as well.  

Parents secured a $7.9 million bond to pay the Catellus Corporation for the University Avenue site, home to the historic Berkeley Santa Fe Railroad Depot—up until the 1960s one of Berkeley’s two passenger stations and most recently a restaurant. 

An additional $1.3 million fundraising drive will make the new school an environmental marvel that keeps room temperatures comfortable while actually producing power for the neighbors. 

Local neighborhood groups have found themselves at the center of several land use fights this year, but they said they’re happy about the school’s arrival. The same groups have struggled to hold on to the Berkeley Adult School (which they say helps deter crime), banish the Berkeley Corporation Yard to an industrial site, and oppose development of Panoramic Interests’ new Acton Courtyard apartments, which several called a “five-story monstrosity.” 

The school and synagogue are a step in the right direction, said neighbor Sharleen Hardy. “They kind of fit in and when things fit in no one complains.” 

Parents and school officials insist that students will feel at home along the busy thoroughfare that has a seedy reputation. 

“All of our kids live closer to that part of town, so there’s not much we need to teach them,” said school spokesperson Sharline Chiang.  

The school will have fences and gates to keep children from wandering onto University Avenue. 

Getting to school will be easier for parents and children who’ve been force to rely on cars to reach the previous site. Located on bus lines, the school has also donated a ten-foot swath of land for a planned bike trail to traverse the site linking the Ohlone Greenway to Bay Trail. 

Montessori schools mix environmental stewardship with some unorthodox teaching methods, and the school will cater to both. 

Since younger students do most of their learning on the floor, rooms will be heated through radiant tubes underneath the floors made of Plyboo, a soft, durable surface made of bamboo. 

Architects have outfitted the school with a dimming system that senses the amount of natural light in a classroom and adjusts the electric lighting accordingly. The lights themselves are powered by solar panels connected to the PG&E grid and yield a surplus of electricity for the school and neighbors. 

Outside, the school will plant an organic garden for each class. 

In addition to two new buildings comprising 14,000 square feet of teaching space, the school is doing its best to restore the train depot, built in 1904, as a library. “It won’t be the jewel in the crown,” said Douglas Burnham, a parent and architect, but the school is working with a historian to replace the stucco exterior and repaint the depot to its original color. 

“Now our kids can have a better sense of history by living in it,” Travis said.

Long-struggling advocates of democratic governance for the Pacifica Network and its member stations chalked up one more small victory last Friday with the expiration of the deadline for candidate applications for the upcoming board elections. 

The election, which ends Feb. 5, resulted from a years-long battle over the future of the popular listener-funded Pacifica stations. When the smoke clears, the resulting new governance structure will feature a democratically elected advisory board at the network’s five members station: KPFA here in Berkeley, WBAI in New York City, WPFW in Washington D.C., KPFT in Houston and KPFK in Los Angeles. 

Under the new model, listener members and staff will elect candidates to the 24 slots on each station board. Each of the five boards will then pick four of their own members to sit on the national Pacifica board. 

Pacifica’s 53 affiliate stations will elect an additional two members. 

“It’s democracy not in a passive sense but in an active sense,” said KPFA election supervisor Les Radke during a press conference to announce the elections Monday. Joining Radke at the conference were a handful of the approximately 50 preliminary candidates vying for a spot on KPFA’s board. 

Though the station widely publicized the press conference, this writer was the only non-Pacifica reporter in attendance. 

Radke said the structural changes were enacted to ensure that the station continues to model the type of progressive and democratic organization that has governed the network and its content since its founding back in 1946. 

The latest round of changes were sparked when the old Pacifica board moved to consolidate and centralize power, prompting protesters to fill the streets outside KPFA and other member stations across the nation. 

Listeners were outraged by policies enacted by a Pacifica board which announced its intent to “mainstream” local stations and their content. Specific gripes included the decision by the national board to self-select its membership, ending the long-standing process that allowed local stations to appoint the majority of the national board members. Protesters also complained of financial mismanagement and censorship. 

The new structure, proponents say, ensures democratic oversight of all the network’s most important functions, effectively forestalling the possibility of another power struggle lead by the board. Nonetheless, they say they don’t expect the transition to be hassle free. 

“I’m actually nervous. Democracy doesn’t solve every problem,” said KPFA General Manager Gus Newport, a former Berkeley mayor. “Hopefully [the elections] will open the door to new ideas and energy and accountability. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”  

Organizers say they’ve tried to democratize the election process as much as possible by employing a “Choice Voting” form of proportional representation. 

Choice Voting, they say, allows voters to rank candidates, preventing power grabs by monolithic slates by preserving minority representation. Instead of winning a majority, each candidate only has to receive a set amount of votes and is automatically elected.  

If a voter’s first choice already has enough votes to win, the vote automatically transfers to their second choice, ensuring that the vote counts. If the voter’s first choice doesn’t have enough support to win a seat by the time the voter casts their ballot, the vote will automatically be transferred to the next choice still in the running. 

At KPFA, 18 of the 24 slots will be filled by the 50-plus candidates who turned in candidacy applications. The remaining six will be filled by paid and unpaid staff. Only listener members can vote on the 18 slots and only staff can vote for staff. A 25th slot on KPFA’s board will be filled by someone from member station KFCF in Fresno. Eligible to vote are listeners who have pledged $25 or more in the last year or performed three hours of volunteer service at the station. 

Around 110,000 ballots are scheduled to go out nationwide, of which 30,000 will go to KPFA members. The election is valid if 10 percent of the registered members cast ballots. 

For more information about KPFA’s election contact Les Radke at 848-6767 ext. 626 or by e-mail at elections@kpfa.org.

Some 75 balloon-wielding demonstrators—including a state assemblymember, a mayor, a city councilmember, a county supervisor, and a seven-foot-tall costumed Grinch—staged a candlelight vigil at an entrance to Hilltop Mall in Richmond Wednesday evening, protesting plans by retail giant Wal-Mart to open a store there. 

While the Grinch wandered through the protest waving Plaster of Paris claws and shouting “I love Wal-Mart! Jobs shouldn’t pay!” to a chorus of hearty boos, protesters chanted “Wal-Mart, No! Richmond, Yes!” and “Keep Them Out!” 

The hour-long demonstration was sponsored by the Central Labor Council of Contra Costa County. 

Richmond City Councilmember Charles Belcher told the crowd that he first attended a meeting at Hilltop on the prospective Wal-Mart move some months ago. “I told them I didn’t want Wal-Mart then, I don’t want them now,” Belcher said. “Richmond is a city of pride and purpose. Wal-Mart doesn’t fit here.” 

Contra Costa County Supervisor John Gioia, who led the recent vote on the board of supervisors to ban Wal-Mart from the unincorporated areas of the county, said he was particularly concerned about the retailer’s stand on gun sales. “In New York State, Wal-Mart would not stop the sale of guns to minors, even when they were asked to do so by the local community. We don’t need any more guns in Richmond. We need to demand responsibility from businesses who locate in our city.” 

Richmond Mayor Irma L. Anderson said Wal-Mart officials have already written her office promising not to sell guns in the proposed Richmond store. “We plan to hold them to that.” 

Other short speeches were given by State Assemblymember Loni Hancock and Contra Costa County Central Labor Council Executive Secretary John Dalrymple. 

One demonstrator, a white woman, accused the company of being “slave owners. They pay slave wages to their employees.” 

There is a growing movement in communities throughout the country to discourage Wal-Mart stores from opening in their areas, based on charges that the nation’s largest employer pays low wages, drives out local businesses, shifts the costs of its employee health care to the cities in which it settles, discriminates against women workers, engages in anti-union practices, and exploits overseas sweatshop labor. 

Wal-Mart couldn’t be reached for comment for this article. The company has previously denied such charges in prepared statements, and its website lists such honors as the 2002 Ron Brown Presidential Award (recognizing outstanding achievement in employee relations and community initiatives) and the 2001 and 2002 Billion-Dollar Roundtable Award for spending more than $1 billion with women and minority-owned suppliers. 

The company also says it “require[s] suppliers to ensure that every [overseas] factory conforms to local workplace laws and that there is no illegal child or forced labor.” On the issue of unions, the company says while it “respect[s] the individual rights of our [workers] and encourage them to express their ideas, comments and concerns...we do not believe there is a need for third-party representation.”

A decidedly glum Berkeley City Council took the first tentative steps Tuesday night toward budgeting in the Schwarzenegger era, squirming through a complicated revenue-cutting presentation by Budget Manager Paul Navazio, then putting off any decision until next week’s council meeting. 

At issue is what to do with close to $43 million in already-budgeted but uncontracted unspent funds carried over from fiscal year 2003. The city manager’s office has recommended that some $40 million of that money be spent as Council originally budgeted it, leaving an extra $2.8 million to put towards relieving the deficit. 

At Mayor Tom Bates’ suggestion, council postponed deciding what to cut and what to keep of the 13 pages of carryover budget line items in the city manager’s report—but an emotional protest by Councilmember Dona Spring demonstrated how difficult those choices will eventually be. 

Included in the manager’s proposed cuts was approximately $150,000 for improvements at the Warm Water Pool at Berkeley High. Arguing that the proposed improvements were earmarked for making the pool more accessible to Berkeley’s disabled, Spring said that the pool funds hadn’t been used not because they weren’t needed, but because they were not high on the list of staff priorities. 

Spring’s motion to leave the money in the budget died for lack of a second, while the rest of council looked dejectedly in other directions without saying a word. 

“You’re forcing me to make telephone calls to everyone in the disabled community to come out to the meeting next week to lobby to keep these funds in,” she said. 

“I’m not forcing you to do anything,” Bates answered, more in anguish than in anger. He added that he expected complaints from representatives of any of the city’s constituencies facing cuts. 

Councilmember Gordon Wozniak also called the city manager’s suggested ratio of $2 million cuts from operating funds and $800,000 from capital expenditures unbalanced, and asked staff to come back with suggestions for $2.5 million to $3 million more in capital cuts. 

Council has scheduled budget discussions for its Dec. 16 meeting both at its 5 p.m. working session and at its regular 7 p.m. meeting time. At that time, City Manager Phil Kamlarz is expected to make a presentation on how the city will make up for a $3 million cut in revenue stemming from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s lowering of the state’s Vehicle License Fee (VLF). 

The VLF action automatically lowered legally mandated payments from the state to city and county governments. The governor has said it’s the responsibility of the state legislature to figure out a way to make up the lost money to local governments. 

This week, the state provided less than a third of the monthly approximately $330,000 payment due the City of Berkeley. If state cuts continue, Berkeley will lose $4.6 million in state funds next year. 

Later in the week, Mayor Bates issued a press statement blasting Schwarzenegger. “I am absolutely outraged that the governor would make these unilateral cuts,” Bates said. “Cities throughout the state rely on this funding for police, fire, and other important services.” 

A statement from the mayor’s office said that Schwarzenegger’s action “breaks [his] promise to protect funding to local governments; it also violates the law.” Bates has already asked City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque to investigate Berkeley’s joining other local governments in a lawsuit against the governor’s actions. 

In other action last Tuesday night, Berkeley City Council: 

• Gave the city manager increased authority on his own to purchase supplies up to $50,000 and for construction up to $100,000 (Spring and Worthington voting no). 

• Supported Senator Don Perata’s March 2004 bond referendum to raise local bridge tolls to $3 to support a variety of local transportation projects. (In protest that many of the projects—including the fourth Caldecott Tunnel bore and the extension of BART to Warm Springs—are not supported in Berkeley, Shirek, Spring, Hawley, and Olds all abstained.) 

• Voted down the appeal of neighbors to stop construction at the city’s Corporation Yard. Council also adopted several mitigation requirements authored by Councilmember Margaret Breland, including a ban on Saturday morning construction and requiring street sweeping of the yard three times a week during the construction period. Several councilmembers expressed the desire that the Corporation Yard should eventually be moved out of a residential neighborhood and into an industrial area, but conceded that the present budget difficulties made that impossible at the present time. 

• Approved the formation of the Solano Avenue Business Improvement District (Olds voting no), to join BIDs already established downtown, on Telegraph Avenue, on North Shattuck Avenue, and in West Berkeley. BID fees are mandatory for businesses operating within the districts, collected automatically through the Alameda County treasurer’s assessment bill. Several professional businesses had sought exemptions from the association. Council rejected that appeal, but cut their fees by one-third. 

• Accepted a check for $27,224.98 from the United Pool Council, which the organization gave “in expectation that the city’s pools will remain open.” Members asked that council not freeze out the currently vacant position of Aquatics Pool Coordinator. The United Pool Council also announced formation of the Fred Lupke Pool Fund to raise money for pool access for “disabled and underserved children of Berkeley.” The fund is named for the longtime Berkeley disabled activist who was killed earlier this year when his wheelchair was struck by a car on Ashby Avenue.

Planners Ponder Second Berkeley Bowl 

Berkeley’s Planning Commission took their first look this week at the project that may eventually become a second Berkeley Bowl Supermarket, and their staff told them considerable General Plan and zoning hurdles stand in the way of the proposed West Berkeley store. 

Kava Massih Architects of Berkeley, on behalf of the Berkeley Bowl’s owners, is seeking an amendment to the General Plan that would allow a 55,000-square-foot store at the corner of Ninth Street and Heinz Avenue, some 13,000 square feet larger than the Bowl’s Oregon Street store. 

The Bowl’s owners haven’t indicated any plans to close the original store. 

Currently the West Berkeley Plan and the location’s current Mixed Use-Light Industrial (MU-LI) zoning designation would bar building the second store, which is expected to cater to traffic coming directly off I-80. A proposed 30,000-square-foot warehouse annex to the West Berkeley store would be allowed, however. 

Planning Commissioners expressed some reluctance to amend the General Plan—which covers zoning and development throughout Berkeley—and worried that changing the zoning ordinance to accommodate Berkeley Bowl would leave the project site open for a less desirable supermarket—Safeway was mentioned—should Berkeley Bowl change its mind. 

Commissioners directed staff to come back next month with several alternative scenarios, including changing MU-LI zoning to allow large retail, rezoning the area of Ninth Street and Heinz Avenue to another designation that would allow the store, or legalizing the store under a zoning variance. 

—J. Douglas Allen-Taylor 

Edley Named Boalt Hall Dean 

Christopher Edley Jr. became the first African American to lead a top-ranked law school Thursday when the University of California, Berkeley named him dean of Boalt Hall. 

Edley, a Harvard Law School professor, served in both the Clinton and Carter administrations and currently sits on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. 

He is the founding co-director of the Civil Rights Project, a multidisciplinary research and policy think tank whose research was cited in the U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of affirmative action at the University of Michigan. 

Under Clinton, Edley served as a special counsel who led the White House’s review of affirmative action. He was also the Office of Management and Budget’s associate director for economics and government. Under Carter he served as the assistant director of the White House domestic policy staff.  

According to a statement released by UC Berkeley, Edley’s research primarily focuses on issues of racial justice and the struggle to define equity, fairness and opportunity in a multi-racial context. 

In addition to his seat on the Commission on Civil Rights he also serves on several panels of the National Research Council, the research section of the National Academy of Sciences. He was a member of the National Commission on Federal Election Reform and is currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. 

Edley is the son of Christopher Edley Sr., a lawyer who headed the United Negro College Fund. His wife, Maria Echaveste, is a well-known lawyer who served as White House deputy chief of staff under Clinton and currently runs a public policy and political strategy consulting firm in Washington D.C. She will be joining Edley at UCB as a researcher and lecturer at Boalt and the Goldman Graduate School of Public Policy. She and Edley are also volunteer policy advisors to Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean. 

—Jakob Schiller 

Woman Attacks Two In Bookshop, Ends Up Bloody in the Street 

A woman inexplicably attacked two shoppers with her bare hands at early Tuesday afternoon at Mr. Mopps Children’s Books, 1405 Martin Luther King Jr. Way. Police said they arrived at the store to find the woman getting into her car parked outside the store. 

Berkeley BPD spokesperson Kevin Schofield said that when police ordered her out of the car, she pulled the car out, striking one officer in the leg. Police at the scene quickly boxed in the car with three patrol cars, then approached her again and demanded she leave her vehicle, Schofield said.  

When she refused and began turning the wheel to the left in the direction of two officers, one smashed open the drivers’ side window and opened the door, Schofield said, enabling two officers to yank her from the car. 

The police spokesman said that when the woman continued to violently resist, several officers pinned her on the pavement and held her there until the could confine her in a velcro binding called The Wrap. 

A witness to the arrest, Julia Klems, who watched from a nearby bus stop bench, said the woman didn’t resist and added that she believed the officers had used “excessive force” in throwing her to the ground. Klems said the “slightly built” woman remained pressed against the pavement for about twenty minutes, bleeding from her forehead and hands.  

“It all seemed really unnecessary,” Klems said. “I thought it was strange that they used so much force. She really wasn’t struggling.” A Daily Planet photographer who witnessed the incident agreed. 

Police arrested Tonita Wiemels, 40, of Albany on two counts of assault with a deadly weapon (her car), two counts of battery and one count of evading a policeman. 

Second Jogger Assaulted While on Bay Trail 

For the second time in a month, a woman was attacked while running alone on the Bay Trail north of University Avenue. At approximately 6:43 a.m. Tuesday, the culprit tackled the woman from behind and shoved her into nearby bushes where he sexually assaulted her, police said. Ultimately the victim managed to escape and run into the street, where she flagged down a passing car and called police from a pay phone at the Seabreeze Market. 

Two people in an SUV also saw the victim and darted out of their car to chase after the assailant but failed to track him down. The attacker is described as an Anglo or Latino male, medium build, late 20s, and between 5’10” and 6’ feet tall. He was last seen wearing a gray sweatshirt and dark pants. 

Police suspect he is the same man who attacked a woman jogger on a similar stretch of West Frontage Road—which runs parallel to the Bay Trail—early in the morning of Nov. 9. In that incident the woman was also tackled from behind, but escaped prior to any sexual assault. Police urge any witnesses to contact the Sex Crimes Detail at 981-5735. 

More Dangerous Than Tom Cruise with a Kendo Stick 

An Monday night altercation at a screening of The Last Samurai at the California Theater spread to the street at approximately 11:30 p.m. According to police, a group of three men behaved boorishly during the action flick, causing a different group of moviegoers to complain to management. The three men zipped up, but after the movie, as the other group left the theater, the three men pulled beside them in a Lexus. One of the trio pointed the gun at a man in the group and threatened to shoot him before the car departed.

We’ve heard a lot lately about how the recording industry is increasingly dominated by a few large conglomerates, producing fewer and fewer choices for listeners and less and less income for artists. 

If you’re looking for alternatives to buying music from the big boys, you can find them in and around Berkeley. Here are four selections from many possibilities which illustrate how you can support independent artists with your buying dollar in a variety of ways. 

The most innovative solution to the problem of excessive consolidation in the recording industry is offered by a new Berkeley Internet company, Magnatune, whose first release was in May of this year. I found their website (magnatunes.com/) when I was trying to figure out how to buy baroque cellist Phoebe Carrai’s recently released CD of Bach’s Cello Suites. Carrai, though based in Boston, appears frequently in Berkeley with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. 

Magnatune’s slogan is “we are not evil.” Founder John Buckman explains the whole concept, at great length, on the company website: “The goal is to find a way to run a record label in the Internet Reality: file trading, Internet Radio, musicians’ rights, the whole nine-yards.” What this means is that individual listeners can download uncompressed CD-quality music, and they are asked to pay “what you think this music is worth,” though there is a suggested price. Musicians retain the copyright in their work, and keep half of the buyer’s payment. That’s half of the gross, not a minute percentage of the (usually non-existent) profits, which musicians get from conventional labels. There are also elaborate schemes for licensing for commercial use. 

The Magnatune website tells you much more than you ever expected to know about the way it all works. Clicking on “statistics” gives detailed sales breakdowns for the 75 artists currently represented by 145 albums on the company’s list. They are unusual offerings in a thoroughly eclectic list of genres. Selecting “Sales by Genre for this week” shows what’s selling in ten diverse categories, from Classical at 40.41 percent of sales, through Electronica (11.75 percent) down to Punk: (0.42 percent). 

Of course, if you’re not Internet-savvy (probably not all baroque music fans are!) you can just go down to The Musical Offering at 2430 Bancroft Way and pick up a CD. It’s produced by Britain’s Avie, a similarly artist-friendly company, in partnership with Magnatune. 

Next, there are still a few somewhat independent big labels out there. Dave Ellis, who would deserve the title “Pride of Berkeley High” if there weren’t so many other fine musicians who could also claim it, has an edgy jazz offering on the Milestone label, produced by the legendary Orrin Keepnews, the founder of the label as a New York independent. Milestone was acquired by Berkeley’s own Fantasy in the 1970s, so it now could be considered a local label, though part of a larger enterprise. Dave’s latest CD release is called State of Mind, and it can be purchased directly from Fantasy’s website without going through a distributor, though it is also available in stores. Details at: www.fantasyjazz.com.  

Berkeley has a remarkable number of venues for what’s most often called “roots music,” and many of the leading performers live here. Suzy Thompson has played for more than thirty years in most of the popular groups, such as Any Old Time, Klezmorim, the California Cajun Orchestra, and the Bluegrass Intentions. She’s recently released her first solo fiddle CD, No Mockingbird, which mixes her own compositions with music from a great variety of American roots sources from the 1920s and 1930s. It can be purchased on-line (nativeandfinerecords.com) or by phone (559-8879) from Albany-based Native and Fine Records. For those who want to walk into a locally-owned music store to make their purchases, El Cerrito’s Down Home Music at 10341 San Pablo Ave. is the place to go. On Saturday, Dec. 13, Suzy will be a guest on West Coast Live (KALW 91.7 FM), which will be broadcasting at 10 a.m. before a live audience from Freight & Salvage Coffee House, 1111 Addison St. You can probably pick up a CD there, too. 

Finally, the simplest route. Many musicians now make their own CDs and sell them at their gigs. Smooth and silky Louisiana-born saxophone player Jules Broussard, who can be heard most Wednesday nights at Berkeley’s Downtown Restaurant, brings along his 1995 CD Love Note, proudly listing his name as copyright holder, which he offers to interested fans for $15 cash on the spot. Just go down to Downtown (2101 Shattuck Ave.), listen to some music, and give Jules your money.

Pivotally located smack between the downtown BART station and the edge of campus, the proposed UC Berkeley hotel/conference center/museums complex could bring important benefits or major headaches—perhaps both. It certainly poses a wide range of difficult, and interrelated, issues. 

The Project’s Basic Features 

The plan would involve redeveloping most of the block bounded by Shattuck, Addison, Oxford, and Center. The university already owns the eastern half of the block—with a parking garage on the Addison side and the old UC Press building (now used by the Printing Services Department) on the Center Street side. UC has a tentative deal to buy the Bank of America property on the block’s southwest quarter, which now houses the bank’s rambling one-story building and sizable open parking lot. The redevelopment’s first phase, likely to occur on the bank land, would include constructing a hotel with roughly 175-225 rooms and some 15,000-20,000 square feet of meeting space, as well as a replacement for the branch bank and considerable enclosed parking. This would entail a long-term ground lease from the university—or possibly resale of the land by UC. The second phase would include constructing, likely on the block’s eastern half or so, new homes for the Berkeley Art Museum, the Pacific Film Archive, and the Hearst Museum of Anthropology.  

The RFQ (Request for Qualifications) sent to potential developers includes a tentative site plan and east-west section drawing showing a “presently preferred” scheme for the block—although this is considered subject to major changes later on, during the project’s detailed planning.  

Less widely known is that the project would also involve redeveloping much of the next block to the north, including the UC open parking along the north side of Addison, the one- or two-story parts of University Hall, and the one-story commercial building at 2154-60 University Ave. that UC is presently acquiring. In their place, the plan currently foresees “a parking structure primarily for university use, ground floor retail, and perhaps office space for university users.” 

Urban Design and Preservation 

The Berkeley General Plan says it’s very important to maintain the special physical character of our historic downtown and ensure that new construction is compatible. 

One aspect of that involves protecting specific historic buildings. Of particular concern here is that the Moderne-styled UC Press building is on the SHRI (State Historic Resources Inventory). Could at least parts of this quite notable building be incorporated into the new complex? Also of direct concern is the 1911-vintage structure at 2154-60 University Ave., which is listed as a “significant building” by the city’s Downtown Berkeley Design Guidelines.  

Furthermore, many historic buildings closely adjoin the project site, and could be seriously affected by what happens on it.  

As for the project’s new buildings, how should they be massed? For what it’s worth, the RFQ’s section drawing shows something 12 stories high at the corner of Shattuck and Center. Would a narrow tower that high be acceptable at this particular corner, partly because of precedent set by the nearby historic Wells Fargo tower? Or should the hotel be much lower and wider? Should the project’s tall elements be elsewhere on the block, even partly over museum space? Should building form be terraced, with a series of roof gardens? All these options need exploring. 

Would the project create huge monolithic structures clashing with downtown’s “grain” of mostly moderate-scaled buildings and storefronts? How could the new construction be massed—and detailed—to avoid undue mismatch? 

Would the museums be designed as a nowadays typically grandstanding, idiosyncratic Big Statement? Or would they—in addition to embodying green building principles—seek excellence and uniqueness by instead graciously fitting into, and reinforcing the character of, a unique historic downtown? 

The RFQ’s site plan shows an “arts courtyard” apparently rather hidden at second-floor level within the southern block’s interior. But what about public open space where it’s most useful, namely, at street level adjoining the sidewalk? According to the site plan Bank of America’s current plaza on Shattuck would disappear, and the block’s only real street-level open space would be a tiny, and likely sunshine-challenged, plaza at the northeast corner.  

Would the new buildings’ ground-floor usage enhance the pedestrian experience? The situation could be bleak along the north side of Center Street, where the RFQ drawings don’t specify any use directly relevant to foot traffic except for the bank at the Shattuck end and a “museum cafe” at the Oxford end. Along the rest of this crucial frontage, would pedestrians find only the Berkeley Art Museum’s doorless sidewall and the face of a sprawling parking garage? Also of special concern is the future pedestrian experience on the project-impacted north side of Addison and south side of University Avenue.  

Parking and Transit 

The RFQ seems to envision a large amount of parking even within the project’s southern block. The section drawing shows beneath the new bank office a presumably dedicated basement garage, served by a driveway evidently descending from Center Street: a driveway arguably inconsistent with the potential (which interests Mayor Tom Bates) for converting that street into pedestrian open space. And east of the driveway, it shows an apparently huge garage that—partly at ground level and then partly below grade—would continue, below the museums, all the way to Oxford. 

Many Berkeleyans will likely object strenuously to having so much parking right beside the downtown BART station, at the heart of a city supposedly committed to minimizing use of the private automobile. They’ll probably argue that, instead, the project should be conceived and designed to actively support use of public transit. 

As just one example, could the hotel/conference center give a transit-friendly strong hint by having its main entrance feed directly to and from a bus stop with ample shelter and seating? As another, could there be a direct underground passageway from inside the project to the BART station’s mezzanine?  

Strawberry Creek 

At a Dec. 2 meeting, several attendees urged that the project should include daylighting Strawberry Creek. Though sympathetic to creek restoration, the Mayor felt that the hotel/conference center/museums project shouldn’t be asked to pay for it. Daylighting advocates responded by suggesting that the project should include extra uses so as to enable such payment.  

Fiscal Concerns 

The hotel/conference center evidently would pay transient occupancy tax to the city. However, UC and apparently the mayor assume that (at least if UC retains fee ownership) it would be exempt from ad valorem property tax and would, instead, be subject to a less burdensome relative called “possessory interest” tax. At the Dec. 2 meeting Mayor Bates said it appears the latter would at least equal the property tax that Bank of America currently pays. But as the bank’s land is now very underbuilt, shouldn’t the comparison be made, instead, with the property tax the bank might pay if it retained the land and fully developed it? Furthermore, it seems that the city attorney’s office has been seriously reviewing the city’s legal situation on the property tax. 

Relevant in any case is Measure N, enacted by Berkeley voters in 1988. That measure declares as city policy that all development by public agencies should pay taxes and fees, comparable to those paid by private citizens and businesses, to support their fair share of city services. It is supplemented by General Plan statements like the Land Use Element’s call to “[s]eek ways and means, and commit additional resources, to ensure that the University of California complies with voter-approved Measure N.”  

This concern extends to even the transportation-services and other “impact fees” called for by the General Plan. For instance, the Housing Element says to “[a]pply [housing mitigation] impact fees to new hotel or conference center uses as well as to office, retail, and industrial uses.”  

Role of the City and Community 

The RFQ says nothing at all about the city’s role in the project planning process. In contrast, it prominently cites—supposedly as an advantage for developers—the university’s “exempt status as a state agency.” Will the city and citizens be relegated to what, in the last analysis, amounts to mere commenting?  

But would the hotel/conference center really be exempt from city regulations? It’s not clear that it would be, and it seems that the city attorney’s office has been studying this question. 

Measure N mandates that all land use plans, development, and expansion by public agencies should follow city laws. This theme is supported by General Plan statements such as “Use all available means to ensure that the university and other public agencies abide by the rules and laws of the city.” 

Whatever the ultimate legal situation, the city has now activated General Plan language calling for a “Planning Commission task force” regarding the project. The council has asked the commission for an initial report, including recommended project criteria, to be submitted by May. 

In a recent letter to the Berkeley Daily Planet, Planning Commission chair Zelda Bronstein emphasized that in order for the project to greatly benefit Berkeley, “the community at large must have ample opportunity to participate in the planning process.”

I was sitting in my desk in my second grade classroom, I think, at Highland Elementary in Oakland—which takes this back a ways, I know—when an earthquake came and split a crack so wide in the school’s administration building that you could stick your fingers in it. That summer, they tore down the administration building and put up a new one. Eight years later, when I had just entered Castlemont, Oakland built a high school for the rich kids up in the hills. 

In the spring of 2002, voters in Oakland passed Measure A, the $303 million bond referendum allowing school construction and facilities improvement in the city. As far as I can determine, between 1963 and 2002—a period of some 40 years—Oakland built no new schools. Quite the contrary. During that period, while a need for school facilities increased with a rising population, popular support for school financing plummeted after the hope generated during the administration of Superintendent Marcus Foster. Following Mr. Foster’s assassination, Oakland wallowed in a long, meandering period that drifted between scandal, corruption, resignation, and despair. 

All of which one needs to keep in mind if one wishes to understand the passage of Measure A and the brief administration of Superintendent Dennis Chaconas—a brief and shining moment of hope in Oakland when we began to believe in ourselves again and our power to transform our circumstances—and how much we lost when those greedy bastards took it all out of our hands. 

I’m probably understating my point. If so, I offer my apologies. But I’m awfully angry about this, and when you’re angry, you tend not to stutter and not express yourself so well. 

For the months leading up to the state takeover of the Oakland schools, we heard a string of accusations—from both politicians and the press—on how the School Board and Mr. Chaconas had screwed up the schools, and education in Oakland could only be saved if responsibility was taken out of their hands. An essential point was missed, here. The antiquated computer and accounting system that hid Oakland’s financial problems preceded Mr. Chaconas and every present sitting member of the school board by several years. So long as Oakland’s various school administrations marked time, took their paychecks, and allowed the city’s public schools to wallow in mediocrity, the problems of the accounting system never saw the light of day. It was only when Mr. Chaconas—under the direction of the School Board and with the support of the Oakland public—began clearing out the dead weight in the administration building, shaking out nonfunctioning or underfunctioning teachers and administrators and—most important—brought teacher salaries in the city up to a competitive standard, that Mr. Chaconas and the school board discovered the house of cards upon which our schools’ finances were constructed. 

Okay. You can make a case, if you want, that they should have figured that out earlier. 

But even for those who take that position—and I don’t happen to be one of them—the prudent next step should have been to rally around our elected school representatives and hired superintendent, go to Sacramento as a united front, and worked our way out of this mess as a united community. 

Instead, Mayor Brown and State Senator Don Perata and Alameda County School Superintendent Sheila Jordan merrily stirred the pot of dissent, conspired with the folks at the Fiscal Crisis And Management Team—if you are to believe Robert Gammon of the Oakland Tribune—and helped pave the way for the State of California to seize the Oakland Unified School District. 

We are told that sometime, somewhere, in the unforeseen future—based upon conditions that are far outside of our control—the state will give us back our schools. There are people in this city who are willing to wait that long. I don’t think we can. Before our eyes, we can see the collapsing of Oakland people’s confidence in the Oakland public schools, as enrollment spirals downwards, and parents seek education solutions elsewhere. Developers have long had their eyes on the downtown administration building. We now hear from the overseer—Dr. Ward—that schools may be forced to close. Think of that, my friends. Three years after Oakland voters approved the first Oakland school construction in a generation, our assets are going to be parceled out like this was a yard sale. Wonder whose got their eyes on those parcels? 

Forty years ago, Oakland would have stormed the legislature with demonstrators, sat down in the halls up in Sacramento and blocked the doors. We would have pulled our children out of the schools en masse and opened up Freedom Schools in synagogues and churches and community centers and garages, and stayed out until we forced the legislature to give us our schools back. But maybe Oakland has grown old, and lost its heart. Or maybe—as the block boys like to say—Oakland’s heart is still there somewhere, but it’s just pumping Kool-Aide.  

Last year and this, we built a new, two story-classroom wing at Highland with the Measure A money, my old elementary, the first capital improvements to the school since I was in the second grade. The new building replaced the dilapidated, wooden portables where I spent my fifth and sixth grades. A new building, put up by Oakland people, with Oakland money, for Oakland children. 

If we don’t do something, and do it soon, that’s the sort of legacy that will be lost, and there will be nothing but scraps left for us after the pigs finish gorging themselves on the meal that is Oakland.

Christmas, 1849: not a joyous time for a party of gold seekers led by a Vermonter named William Lewis Manly. An alleged shortcut from Salt Lake City to California has left them stranded in Death Valley. They’ve slaughtered their draft oxen and dismantled their wagons for firewood. They’re hungry enough to try anything, however unpromising. 

Up a canyon, in niches set in a high cliff, Manly’s group finds what he describes in his journal as “balls of a glistening substance looking something like varigated [sic] candy stuck together” the size of small pumpkins. Concluding it “evidently food of some sort,” they break off pieces and share them around. Manly records the taste as “sweet but sickish.” Those who sample it have a touch of nausea afterward, but no lasting ill effects. 

Manly believed they had discovered an Indian food cache, and was apprehensive about the consequences of raiding it. The pioneers apparently thought the “glistening substance” was some kind of Native American rock candy. But it had been left not by the local Paiutes, but by packrats. 

Although some might consider the packrat my totem animal, I’ve only seen a couple: a trophy brought home by one of my late cats, another treed by a friend’s dog. But they’re common enough in the right places, and it’s easy to find evidence of their presence. They’re more properly called woodrats, although only a few of the 21 species (10 in North America) live in forests; most inhabit the Southwestern deserts. In the Bay Area, the dusky-footed woodrat is widespread in woodland and oak scrub. It’s smaller than a Norway rat, from which it’s also distinguishable by its furry tail. 

Packrats are secretive, but their homes are hard to miss. Called “houses,” their dwelling are massive stick constructions, conical in shape. Biologist Elden Vestal, who studied the dusky-footed woodrat in Strawberry Canyon in the 1930s, measured over 300 houses: They averaged 4 feet in height (maximum 6 feet 7 inches) and 5 feet in diameter (maximum 7.5 feet). Rat houses often harbor smaller creatures: mice, voles, shrews, alligator lizards, tree frogs, three species of salamander. A typical house has sunporches, internal passageways, a nest chamber deep inside, and storage space for food. The exterior may be decorated with objects that catch the rat’s fancy. Vestal found one house adorned with a great horned owl’s skull, another with two golf balls. 

These are short-lived creatures, but their houses may be occupied by generation after generation. A good home is never empty for long. Solitary except during the mating season, neighbors communicate by rattling their tails to signal potential danger. 

Dusky-footed woodrats will take a wide variety of plant matter; field work at UC’s Hastings Reservation in the Carmel Valley tallied 73 species. But a few plants, mainly live oak and California laurel, are staples. The rats eat both acorns, which they stash in impressive quantities (one house contained 20 pounds), and oak leaves. Other mammals, including lab rats, are unable to handle the toxic tannins in oak foliage. Woodrats, though, thrive on it. Peter Atsatt and Trudy Ingram, biologists at UC Irvine, found that captives maintained their weight on a strict oakleaf diet, and theorized that the rats rely on specialized bacteria in their digestive tracts to break down the tannins. 

Anything the rat brings home but doesn’t eat goes into the midden, an accumulating trash heap just outside the house and often downslope. The midden also serves as a latrine. And it’s this behavioral trait, shared by most packrat species, that’s made these rodents a valuable resource for the study of climate change. 

What the Manly party unwittingly ate was dried packrat urine. Climatologists call it “amberat,” which has a nice ring. In our area, with its winter rains, dusky-footed woodrats don’t produce amberat. But their desert relatives do, and the substance is a potent preservative. 

Just how potent was discovered by botanist Philip Wells and zoologist Clive Jorgensen in 1961. Near Frenchman Flat in the Nevada Test Site, the scientists broke off a chunk of packrat midden and found it full of juniper. There was no juniper anywhere in sight. Wells and Jorgensen sampled eight more middens, all containing juniper, one with the skull of a marmot, a resident of alpine tundra. Carbon 14 testing showed the skull was 12,700 years old, and the juniper bits ranged from 7,800 to at least 40,000 years in age, as far back as the dating method was effective. The middens had evidently been used by successive generations of rats, stretching back into the Pleistocene Era, and the juniper and marmot remains dated from a time when southern Nevada was cooler and wetter. 

When they published their findings in Science, Wells and Jorgensen suggested further study of packrat middens as a secondary source of evidence in climate studies, along with pollen analysis. It’s become a lot more than that. Several university labs are now devoted to middenology. Teasing the datable bits out of the viscous rat urine is tedious work. But the result is a detailed, site-specific history—site-specific because the rats are homebodies—of local vegetation, and thus of local climate. And it’s possible to measure how rapidly plant life changed when the great ice sheets melted, or during later cycles of drought, like the one that may have driven the Anasazi from their cities. 

Our local woodrats may not have made a major contribution to science, but desert rats have left a record enabling us to reconstruct ancient climates and project the likely impact of changes to come. Not bad for a rodent. 

And yes, the Manly party made it out alive. Manly and a companion scouted an escape route and came back for the others. When they reached the pass leading out of their encampment, they doffed their hats and shouted “Goodbye, Death Valley!” to the silent desert. And the name stuck.

Father Bill O’Donnell, often described as one of the last activist priests, died suddenly Monday morning while carrying out his duties at St. Joseph the Worker church. He was 74 years old. 

O’Donnell had been pastor and parish vicar at St. Joseph’s since 1973. 

“The paramedics were called by Father Crespin, who found him at his desk” shortly after he celebrated the 8:30 mass, said Berkeley City Councilmember Linda Maio. “Father Crespin said he died as he wanted to, at his desk, doing the work that he loved, in the community that he loved.” 

The cause of death has not yet been determined, but O’Donnell was known to have heart trouble. He had major heart surgery in 1993 and suffered a stroke in 2001.  

O’Donnell, who usually wore faded black jeans and a tattered leather jacket over his Roman collar, was well known in Berkeley and news of death shocked officials, activists and residents. 

As word of his death spread through the community Monday afternoon, parishioners and community members began to show up at the church offices to offer tearful condolences and pay their respects. 

“He was a great man, and I’ll miss him dearly,” said Federico Chavez, a Berkeley resident who came to know the priest through his work with Federico’s uncle, United Farm Workers Union founder Cesar Chavez. 

The late labor leader often stayed at the St. Jospeh Rectory during his visits to Berkeley, where he cherished the camaraderie and spiritual inspiration, said the younger Chavez, who had known the priest since childhood. 

“He had a passion for social justice and was the epitome of the activist priest,” said Father Jayson Landeza, the pastor of St. Columba’s in Oakland. “For Father Bill, the Kingdom of God was the Kingdom of Social Justice.” 

Over the last 30 years, O’Donnell’s passion for social justice resulted in nearly 300 arrests for civil disobedience at peace, labor and anti-nuclear protests. 

Last year, at the age of 73, he served six months at Atwater Penitentiary, a high security federal prison in Merced County for trespassing on the Western Hemisphere Institute of Security in Fort Benning, GA. Formerly known as the School of the Americas, the institute is alleged to train secret police in anti-revolutionary tactics in Central and South American countries. 

Over the years, O’Donnell’s sense of justice had led him to scale the barbed-wire fence at the Indonesian Consulate in San Francisco, march arm-in-arm with Cesar Chavez for farm workers’ rights and regularly protest nuclear weapons development at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. 

O’Donnell was associated with dozens of civil rights and human rights organizations both in Berkeley and nationally.  

He volunteered regularly at Options Recovery Services, a nonprofit organization that works with the most hardcore alcoholics and drug addicts who are often homeless and suffer from mental illness.  

ORS Director Dr. Davida Coady knew O’Donnell for 25 years. “He called me early (Monday) morning around 7:30 a.m. just to chat,” she said. “He was in a good mood and talked about getting more active with Options.”  

Coady was protesting with O’Donnell when he was arrested with 43 others at Fort Benning in November, 2001. “We had been warned that we would do jail time if we crossed the line and I reminded him “Bill their going to put you in jail,’ and he just barreled ahead.” 

O’Donnell was also a mainstay for the Hispanic community in Berkeley. He fought hard to bring Spanish-speaking priests into the county parishes. 

“He was a pillar of strength to us,” said Federico Chavez, who recalled with a breaking voice O’Donnell’s fearless confrontation with screaming anti-union mobs during the Coachella Valley organizing effort of 1973. 

“There he was, standing up to the goons who were ranting and raving, standing right out in front, not afraid of suffering physical violence, inspiring confidence in the workers,” Chavez said. “Father Bill sincerely believed that if Jesus Christ were here today, he would be there with those who were putting their lives on the line. He was a great man.” 

“He was an icon,” said Mayor Tom Bates, who keeps a framed photograph of O’Donnell in his office. “He was like the saint of the labor movement. He inspired hundreds of people to stand up for what they believe in even if it meant getting arrested.” 

Councilmember Kriss Worthington said his presence will be sorely missed in Berkeley. “He dressed and lived like the common person,” he said. “Father Bill never put on airs and made himself available to everybody.” 

Councilmember Maio hailed the priest as “a wise, courageous and loving soul.” 

Father Landeza said that O’Donnell was his inspiration to go into the priesthood. “I had a job working for the parish when I was 12 years old and it was Father Bill’s passion for justice that made me want to become a priest,” he said. 

“He saw the sacred in the downtrodden and never tired of fighting for their rights.” 

Landeza said that O’Donnell was one of the last of the activist priests who were known in the 1930s and 1940s for putting their collars on the line for labor issues in eastern cities and Chicago. He said that O’Donnell often found himself at odds with the Oakland Archdioceses for his activism. “If he thought someone was being treated unfairly, he would stand up to anybody,” he said. 

Coady said O’Donnell was kicked out of four parishes before finally finding a home at St. Joseph’s in 1973. 

O’Donnell’s Irish Catholic parents owned a farm in Livermore, where he was raised. He grew up with three brothers, one his twin, and two sisters. 

“My mother used to drive us to a small Catholic school in Livermore,” O’Donnell said in an interview with the Daily Planet shortly after he was released from prison last May. “I remember the nuns always saying the best thing you could do with your life was to be a priest. The seminary looked very good to me.” 

O’Donnell began studying for the priesthood when he was 13 years old and completed his studies 12 years later. He was first assigned to Corpus Christi in Piedmont but by 1965 his constant political activism got him removed to St. Joaquim’s in Hayward where he met Chavez and became involved with the farm workers movement.  

For more information about services for Father Bill O’Donnell, contact St. Joseph the Worker Church at 843-2244. 

Richard Brenneman also contributed to the story.

TUESDAY, DEC. 9 

Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters meets at 7 p.m. at the Rockridge Library, 5366 College Ave., near Rockridge BART. 835-6303.  

“The Geysers: The Nature, Development and Preservation of a Unique Resource” with W. T. (Tom) Box, Jr., VP, Geothermal Resource Management, Calpine Corporation, at 5:30 p.m. in 105 North Gate Hall, UC Campus. Sponsored by Water Resources Center Archives. 642-2666. 

“Translating the Ineffable” A reading and celebration of Professor Daniel Matt’s new translation of the Zohar at 7:30 p.m. in the GTU Library, 2400 Ridge Rd. Admission free. Sponsored by the GTU’s Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies. 649-2482. 

Daniel Ellsberg, author of “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers,” will offer insights into the parallels between the war in Vietnam and the war in Iraq, at 7:30 p.m. at Easy Going Bookstore, 1385 Shattuck Ave. 843-3533. 

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

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 525-3565. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 10 

Protest Against Wal-Mart from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at the former Macy’s store in Hilltop Mall, Richmond. Sponsored by the Contra Costa Central Labor Council. 925-250-5513.  

Epic Arts Annual Holiday Art Auction, featuring original works and prints, at 7 p.m. at 1923 Ashby. 644-2204. www.epicarts.org 

Fun with Acting class meets at 11 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Free, all are welcome. 985-0373. 

Prose Writers Workshop We're a serious but lively bunch whose focus is on issues of craft. Meets 7 to 9 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut, at Rose. 524-3034. 

Free Marketing Workshops, sponsored by Sisters Headquarters, for women entrepreneurs, every Wed. from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at 643 17th St. Oakland. For information call 238-1100. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Sta- 

tion, corner of Shattuck and Center. Vigil at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

Amnesty International Berkeley Community Group meets the first and third Wednesdays of the month at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 1606 Bonita Ave., at Cedar St. Join fellow human rights activists to help promote social justice one individual at a time. 872-0768. 

Berkeley CopWatch open office hours 7 to 9 p.m. Drop in to file complaints, assistance available. For information call 548-0425. 

Community Dances, traditional English and American dances, at 8 p.m. every Wednesday, $9. 7 p.m. first Sunday, $10. Grace North Church, 2138 Cedar St. 233-5065. www.bacds.org 

Free Feldenkrais ATM Classes for adults 55 and older at 10:30 and 11:45 a.m. at the Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut at Rose. For information call 848-0237. 

THURSDAY, DEC. 11 

Project Gutenberg, a presentation on the effort to digitize, archive, and distribute cultural works, at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge Street, 3rd Floor, Meeting Room. Sponsored by the Berkeley Public Library, Internet Archive and ibiblio. 981-6195. 

Examining Humanity’s Alienation from Nature, Animals and Each Other, an evening with grassroots animal liberationists, Kelah Bott and David Hayden, at 7 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave, near Dwight Way. 548-2220, ext. 233. www.ecologycenter.org 

Boston Tea Party in Berkeley? Join the US Face to Face Voter Project, the national movement of citizens educating citizens about the current administration in time for the 2004 election. From 7 to 9 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists at Cedar and Bonita. 848-8848. join@usfacetoface.org 

Nonviolent Peaceforce Party featuring Mel Duncan, Co-Founder of Nonviolent Peaceforce, at 7 p.m. at the University of Creation Sprirituality/ 

Naropa Univ., 2141 Broadway, Oakland, two blocks from 19th St. BART. 415-751-0302.  

Berkeley Alliance of Neighborhood Associations Holiday Social from 7 to 9 p.m. in the Fireside Room at St. John’s Presbyterian, 2727 College Ave. Bring appetizers, desserts or drinks to share.  

East Bay Mac User Group meets on the second Thursday of the month from 6 to 9 p.m. in the 3rd floor Community Room, Berkeley Central Library, 2090 Kittredge St. http://ebmug.org 

FRIDAY, DEC. 12 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Luanne Linnar-Palmer, RN, PhD, “Who Has the Final Say on Children’s Health?” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $11.50 - $12.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For reservations call 526-2925.  

“So How’d You Become an Activist?” with Joe MacDonald, veterans advocate, singer and composer and Terri Compost, Food Not Bombs volunteer, at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar St., at Bonita. Suggested donation $5. For more information call 528-5403. 

“Literacy and Beyond” hosts a scholastic book fair from 6 to 9 p.m. at the Downtown Berkeley YMCA., 2001 Allston Way. 665-3271. 

Literary Friends meets at the Berkeley Senior Center at 1:15 p.m. 232-1351. 

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

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

Berkeley Critical Mass Bike Ride meets at the Berkeley BART at 5:30 p.m. 

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

SATURDAY, DEC. 13 

East Bay Sanctuary Covenant’s Holiday Crafts Fair, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the First Congregational Church, Channing and Dana. Items are fair trade and most are from indigenous women’s cooperatives in Central America, Asia, Haiti and Africa. Free admission. All proceeds benefit local work with refugees. 524-7989. 

Benefit Holiday Crafts Sale Handicrafts from reused and recycled materials, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 1720 Rose St. Backpacks, purses, jewelry, slippers, carved coconut shell containers, and more, made in cooperatives in India and the Philippines. Affordable prices. All proceeds will be distributed by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, www.no-burn.org to communities working to stop waste around the world. 

Artists with Heart, art show benefit from noon to 6 p.m. at 2033 and 2041 Center St. More than 50 artists and community members are donating their work to benefit the individuals and families served by BOSS (Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency). 649-1930.  

Telegraph Avenue Holiday Street Fair between Bancroft and Dwight, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. 649-9500. www.telegraphberkeley.org  

Holidays on Solano Ave. with photos with Santa from 1 to 3 p.m. at Peralta Park, 1561 Solano. 

Berkeley Farmers’ Market Holiday Crafts Fair from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., with handcrafted gifts and music at Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park. 548-333. www.ecologycenter.org  

Amsterdam Art Studios Holiday Sale, with a dozen artists’ paintings and crafts, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at 1007 University Ave., between 9th and 10th Sts. 

Studio 1509's Winter Open Studios from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 1509 San Pablo Ave. 

Berkeley Artisans Open Studios every weekend through Dec. 21. 100 professional artists and craftspeople at studio buildings in Berkeley open their doors to the public. Crafts include blown glass, functional and decorative ceramics, ornaments, Menorahs, clocks, lamps and lighting, painted and custom furniture, garden art, bird houses, egg dioramas, floor cloths, clothing, textiles, jewelry, sculpture, photography, paintings, original prints, and other works on paper. All work is handcrafted, many pieces are one-of-a-kind. A self-guided tour presents opportunities to meet the artists and see working craft studios. For a map of participating studios call 845-2612. www.berkeleyartisans.com 

33rd Annual KPFA Community Crafts Fair from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at The Concourse, 8th and Brannan, San Francisco.  

High Tea at the Berkeley City Club with holiday decorations, sweets and savories from noon to 2:30 p.m. Cost is $24.95 adults, $14.95 children under 12. Call for reservations, 848-7800. 

East Bay Wetlands Restoration from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Join us for our regular drop-in volunteer days at Arrowhead Marsh, for a fun chance to learn about the ecology of the Bay and see some of the last remaining wetland habitat in the East Bay. We will be planting for the native plant project. Gloves, tools and snacks are provided. Please dress in layers and bring sunscreen and water. All ages and physical abilities are welcome. Please RSVP groups with 10 or more. Martin Luther King, Jr. Regional Shoreline, Oakland. 452-9261. mlatta@savesfbay.org  

Greens at Work will be volunteering for the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. We will be clearing ivy and other invasive plants from the Tamalpais Path. Meet at the intersection of Euclid at Eunice. Bring gloves, study shoes, and water.  

Winter Tonics and Herbal Remedies from the Kitchen and Yard Stay healthy this Winter with the aid of common plant allies from your kitchen and yard. Learn how to boost your system with herbs, spices, foods and weeds. Leave the class with a homemade remedy. The class is taught by Terri Compost, a naturalist specializing in the living world immediately around us. From 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave, near Dwight Way. Cost is $10 EC members, $15 general, no one turned away for lack of funds. 548-2220, ext. 233.  

Conifers, with Garth Jacober at 10 a.m. at Magic Gardens, 729 Heinz Ave. 644-2351. www.magicgardens.com 

Small Press Distribution Open House and Book Sale from noon to 4 p.m. at 1341 7th St. at Gilman. 524-1668. www.spdbooks.org 

Kol Hadash Brown Bag Family Shabbat with Rabbi Kai Eckstein, on “King Solomon,” from noon to 1:30 p.m. at the Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin Ave. Come and find out why King Solomon was special. Please bring lunch for your family, and (finger) dessert to share; juice provided. We also collect non-perishable food for the needy. 428-1492. kolhadash@aol.com 

Shamanic Journeying Meditation, starts at noon. Free. For information and directions call 525-1272. 

Yoga for Seniors at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St., on Saturdays from 10 to 11 a.m. Open to non-members of the club for $8 per class. For further information and to register, call Karen Ray at 848-7800. 

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

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, held every Sat. from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552. 

SUNDAY, DEC. 14 

Bamboo Building Strong as steel in tension, timber bamboo can grow three feet in a day, be sustainably harvested every year and uses a small fraction of the land required by trees. We will cover proper tool usage and joinery as well as design ideas that avoid the more difficult, time-consuming joints. From 7 to 10 p.m. at the Building Education Center, 812 Page St. Cost is $35. 525-7610.  

East Bay Sanctuary Covenant’s Holiday Crafts Fair, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the First Congregational Church, Channing and Dana. Items are fair trade and most are from indigenous women’s cooperatives in Central America, Asia, Haiti and Africa. Free admission. All proceeds benefit local work with refugees. 524-7989. 

Telegraph Avenue Holiday Street Fair between Bancroft and Dwight, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. 649-9500. www.telegraphberkeley.org  

Studio 1509's Winter Open Studios from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 1509 San Pablo Ave. 

Amsterdam Art Studios Holiday Sale, with a dozen artists’ paintings and crafts, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at 1007 University Ave., between 9th and 10th Sts. 

Holidays on Solano Ave. with photos with Santa from 1 to 3 p.m. at Sweet Potatoes, 1224 Solano. 

Teach-in on Militarism from 4 to 6 p.m., followed by spoken word, speakout on militarism, art dancing and music. Admission is $5-$15 sliding scale or free with a donation for homeless veterans shelter (blankets, gloves, hats, warm clothes, socks, shoes, etc.) No one turned away for lack of funds. Humanist Hall, 390 27th St. Oakland. 547-7486. 

Anti-Militarist Festival of Resistance, with poetry and music by Lynx, International Maggot Theatre, Six Pack Four, Live Ammo, and Tragedians of the City, at 6 p.m. at The Fellowship of Humanity, 390 27th St., Oakland, between Telegraph and Broadway. 547-7486.  

Free Sailboat Rides from 1 to 4 p.m. Bring warm, waterproof clothes - it can be wet! At the Cal Sailing Club at the Berkeley Marina 287-5905. www.cal-sailing.org  

Chanukah Celebration for the entire community. Activities, music, storytelling and, of course, latkes, from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237, ext. 112. www.brjcc.org 

MONDAY, DEC. 15 

Tea at Four Enjoy some of the best teas from the other side of the Pacific Rim and learn their cultural and natural history. Then take a walk to see wintering birds and dormant ladybeetles, from 4 to 5:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, in Tilden Park. Registration required. Cost is $5 for residents, $7 for non-residents. Wheelchair accessible. 525-2233. 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 6 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

ONGOING 

Holiday Food Drive Help the Alameda County Community Food Bank help people in need. Offer to run a food drive, or donate healthy nonperishable food at Safeway stores, Berkeley Bowl and Bay Street Emeryville. For more information call 834-3663. www.accfb.org 

City of Berkeley Commissioners Sought If you are interested in serving on a commission, applications can be downloaded from www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

commissions/general.htm#applications or contact the City Clerk, 981-6900.  

The Online Civilian Conservation Corps Museum is seeking the stories about the CCCs, CCC Enrollees, Staff, or Technical Advisors for publication to this online historical resource. If you would like to participate please send your stories, with name company number and location if known, to CCC Collection, PO Box 5, Woodbury NJ 08096 or email to JFJmuseum@aol.com 

Free Smoke Detectors for City residents and UC Berkeley students who live off-campus. Applications are available from the Environment, Health & Safety office of UC Berkeley, at any Berkeley Fire Station, or at the Fire Admin. Office located at 2100 MLK, Jr. Way. 981-5585.  

Free Energy Bill Payment Assistance The City of Berkeley has money to help low-income households pay their gas and electric bills. For applications contact the Energy Office at 644-8544. TDD: 981-6903. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/energy 

CITY MEETINGS  

City Council meets Tues., Dec. 9, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers, Sherry M. Kelly, city clerk, 981-6900. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Commission on Disability meets Wed., Dec. 10, at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Paul Church, 981-6342. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/disability 

Homeless Commission meets Wed., Dec. 10, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Jane Micallef, 981-5426. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/homeless 

Planning Commission meets Wed., Dec. 10, at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Ruth Grimes, 981-7481. www.ci.ber 

keley. ca.us/commissions/planning 

Police Review Commission meets Wed., Dec. 10, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Barbara Attard, 981-4950. www.ci.berkeley.ca. 

us/commissions/policereview 

Waterfront Commission meets Wed., Dec. 10, at 7 p.m., at 201 University Ave. Cliff Marchetti. 644-6376 ext. 224. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/waterfront 

Commission on Early Childhood Education meets Thurs., Dec. 11, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Marianne Graham, 981-5416. www.ci.berkeley. ca.us/commissions/earlychildhoodeducation  

Community Health Commission meets Thurs, Dec. 11, at 6:45 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. William Rogers, 981-5344. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/health 

Zoning Adjustments Board Thurs., Dec. 11, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/zoning 

Design Review Committee meets Mon. Dec. 15, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Anne Burns, 981-7415. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/designreview

In early October, I meandered the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland with easy-laughing Mahmoud. We were bleary-eyed from international travel, and from many hours of animated discussions at our conference.  

Scholars, lawyers and activists had converged to explore ways to implement the rights of Palestinians to return to and regain their homes, seized by Israel in 1948. This fate had befallen Villa Harun ar-Rashid, the Jerusalem home of my late grandfather, Hanna Ibrahim Bisharat. We had been inspired by accounts of successful campaigns for housing restitution for refugees and other dispossessed peoples in Bosnia, South Africa and Rwanda. 

The sky was leaden, the wind off the slate lake bracing. But the fountain at the end of the lake lofted exuberant white plumes of water toward the heavens, and seemed to elevate with them our hopes and dreams for a more just and peaceful future. 

Little did we suspect that in other conference rooms across the same city, Israelis and Palestinians had been conducting covert, informal negotiations for two years toward what are now touted as the “Geneva Accord.” The agreement, while envisioning a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, studiously avoids mention of the very rights Mahmoud and I, and many others, are fighting to protect. The negotiators, prominent private citizens, include former Israeli Justice Minister Yossi Beilin and former Palestinian Information and Culture Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo. 

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has vehemently attacked the unofficial pact, and the negotiators have been condemned as irresponsible meddlers. The accord has no chance of adoption in the immediate future. 

Its principal objective may have only been didactic: to teach Israelis there is an alternative to the militaristic policies of Sharon. 

The pointed silence regarding the Palestinian right of return, however, means that an important opportunity has been missed to apprise Israelis, and the world, of a critical reality. No real or lasting peace will be achieved in the area until Israel finally admits the long-denied truth, accepts moral responsibility and apologizes for its forcible exile of Palestinian refugees 55 years ago. 

In 1948, three quarters of a million Palestinians were driven from what became Israel, their homes, land and possessions taken over by the new Jewish state. Most were victims of direct military attacks, forcible expulsion orders or a deliberate campaign of terror and intimidation, fueled by actual massacres. A post-war internal report from the Haganah (a quasi-official Jewish militia) stated that of 391,000 Palestinians who had fled by June, 1948, some 73 percent had done so in response to Jewish military operations. 

Palestinian villagers were often attacked at night, from two or three sides, while a road to the closest Arab country was left open. Their flight was hastened by news of massacres committed by Zionist forces, the most infamous of which occurred on April 9, 1948 in Deir Yassin. Up to 254 mostly unarmed Palestinians were slaughtered. Some were paraded in Jerusalem on trucks before being executed. 

Describing the July 10, 1948 attack on Kweikat, near Haifa, a villager attested: “We were awakened by the loudest noise we had ever heard, shells exploding and artillery fire...the whole village was in panic...Most of the villagers began to flee with their pajamas on. The wife of Qasim Ahmad Said fled [mistakenly] carrying a pillow in her arms instead of her child.” 

Exile involved more than material deprivation. Palestinians lost their homes, belongings, fields, orchards, workshops, possessions, professions -- but more than that they lost their human dignity. Any people that has suffered massive wrongs—African-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Jews—understand the special wound of victimization for who you are, not what you have done. 

Like slavery for African-Americans, internment for Japanese-Americans and the Nazi holocaust for Jews, the “Nakba” (“Catastrophe”) was a seminal event in the consciousness of the Palestinian people. No act of the Palestinians justified their expulsion. Their only “crime” was that they were born Christians and Muslims in a place coveted by the Zionist movement for an exclusive Jewish state, and refused to slink off into history as a vanquished people. 

As Israel's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, once candidly admitted to a colleague: “If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but 2,000 years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country.” (The comment was made to Nahum Goldmann, as reported in the latter’s book, “The Jewish Paradox.”) 

The U.N. quickly affirmed the right of the Palestinians to choose to return to their homes, or to receive compensation and support for resettlement. Israel stone-walled the entire international community, rejecting virtually any return by the refugees of 1948, a position the U.S. delegate to the U.N. Conciliation Committee on Palestine denounced as “morally reprehensible.” 

An official Israeli Transfer Committee under Yosef Weitz mobilized to block the return of Palestinian refugees, orchestrating the obliteration of entire Palestinian villages, or their resettlement with Jewish immigrants. 

The Transfer Committee also devised a propaganda plan to justify Israel’s rejection of the right of return. Israel soon claimed that Palestinians left their homes after radio broadcasts by Arab leaders bidding them to evacuate. Later review of broadcast transcripts proved this claim to be a fabrication. Israel argued that Jewish emigration from Arab countries, some of which flowed to Israel, constituted a “population exchange” that compensated for its expulsion of the Palestinians—as if two wrongs made a right. 

Israel also blamed Arab states for “failing to resettle Palestinian refugees”—something the Palestinians themselves actively resisted. Five and a half decades later, Palestinian refugees and their offspring number 5.5 million people. 

Israel’s denial of responsibility for the refugees, and rejection of their repatriation—unchallenged by the new “Geneva Accord”—is, at this stage, as galling and hurtful as the original expulsion itself. The pain of denial should be intuitively understood by victims of the Nazi holocaust—indeed, by all of us who are repelled by denial of that terrible episode in history. 

Thus the chances for long-term peace and reconciliation would be greatly advanced if the Israeli government were to stop hiding the truth. As remote as peace seems today, halting the 55-year cover-up and apologizing would place peace negotiations between the two peoples on an entirely different ground. At this stage, the dream of return to Palestine is for many Palestinians a shield against despair, and recognition of the right to return a matter of great principle. A sincere Israeli apology would be a milestone toward reconciliation that no Palestinian could ignore. 

Formidable obstacles lie in the path to apology. Many Israelis doubt that Israel deliberately expelled the Palestinians. But many others—elders who remember the events of 1948, or others who have read histories of the period based on recently declassified documents—know the truth. 

More difficult are Israeli fears about the consequences of such an admission, especially the possible return of large numbers of Palestinians to Israel, and the attendant threat to the Jewish character of their state. Yet establishing an ethnically exclusive state in someone else’s country may not be a “right” that merits protection. Accepting back refugees, who would form a larger Palestinian minority in Israel than has been deemed ideal for Jews, may be the price Israel must 

pay for establishing a Jewish state in Arab Palestine. 

Nor would an apology inevitably cause the return of millions of Palestinian refugees. It is entirely possible that, with the dignity of Palestinian refugees ameliorated by an apology, Palestinians’ decisions regarding actual return would be based on more purely pragmatic grounds. 

Of course, part of Israel’s political elite may still seek exclusive Jewish control over all of former Palestine, including the West Bank and Gaza Strip. If so—and there is much in current Israeli policy that supports such an inference—apology is the furthest thing from their minds, and the regional forecast is for blood. One must place hope in the small but growing number of Israelis who see through the curtain of fear behind which their leaders hide their expansionist policies, and in the desires of many other Israelis to live a simple life of peace. 

I can add personal testimony to the power of apology. Last May, I wrote about going to visit my grandparents’ home in Jerusalem, and my exchanges with its Jewish residents, and their attempts to deny my family’s connection to our home. After my story was published, I heard from three other Israelis who had lived there after its expropriation in 1948. Two of the three discussed the home only casually, without acknowledging my family’s dispossession. 

But the third person was different. His message to me began: “I read your article with special interest, and with an odd, but distorted sense of connection to you.” He explained that he was a native-born Israeli, and while a member of the Haganah during the 1948 war, was stationed in Villa Harun ar-Rashid for a period of three months. He ended by saying that he would like to meet me, and apologize for the taking of my family’s home. 

Fortunately, the gentleman lived nearby and, indeed, we met. After an hour of friendly conversation, this dear man reached across the table, extending his hand, and said: “I am sorry. I was blind. What we did was wrong, but I participated in it and I cannot deny it.” He added: “ I owe your family three months rent,” and we both broke into laughter. 

It is hard to fully describe what I experienced. But vindication was secondary to the tremendous surge of admiration I felt for this man’s moral courage. I was inspired, truly, to match his humanity. Just that response, writ large, is what awaits Israel if it could bring itself to apologize to the Palestinians. There is an untapped reservoir of Palestinian magnanimity and good will that could transform the relations between the two peoples, and make things possible that are not possible today. 

George Bisharat is a law professor at the University of California’s Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. This article previously appeared in the Sacramento Bee and the Electronic Intifada website.  

When Philip Barry told his son that Shambhala Booksellers had to close, his nine-year-old protested, “But Dad! I want to work there when I grow up!” The boy immediately made some bookmarks to sell to help the store make more money. 

In spite of the dedication of the staff and appreciation of the community, Shambhala did indeed have a closing ceremony Nov. 26. 

The founders, Sam Bercholz and Michael Fagan, both idealistic 20-year-olds when they started the business in a tiny side room of Moe’s Bookstore, were joined by current owner Philip Barry in saying farewell to this precious member of Berkeley’s bookselling community. 

When they began, their vision was to “create a space to propagate the Wisdom Traditions of the World.” So-called “new age” books were few, but the classics of spiritual and esoteric literature were carefully gathered and presented. As new spiritual leaders became published (many thanks to Shambhala Publishing, which came later and still continues), the stock outgrew the tiny space and moved into the larger space next door, becoming its own bookshop. The owners chose to call it booksellers rather than bookshop, to emphasize that it is people-based rather than product-based. 

I could not resist asking, “How did a spiritually based bookstore deal with shoplifters?” 

Philip folded his hands, “It depends. One man we still see on the street sometimes used to come in and lie on the floor, then get up and buy his favorite book. Every time he came in, he would buy the same book. As I was working the counter one day, he came in and kneeled at the center table. I thought, “Uh-oh,” and as soon as I had a moment, I walked over to him. He was trying to shove his favorite book—which is a large volume—into his unzipped pants. 

I shouted at him ‘Now you’ve made it bad for everybody! You can’t come in here anymore!’ So that’s what we do with shoplifters; we eighty-six them.” 

What was the book? Tools for Tantra. 

For 34 years, the store survived riots, the recession of l989 and the high-crime 1990s. I asked Philip for his favorite memory. “I was just leaving a shrine room where I’d been meditating, and found an urgent message: ‘Come to the store!’ I thought, ‘Oh, no—another riot.’ But in fact, Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche had arrived in Berkeley, and had come to the store. 

The clerk had found a bottle of good champagne I was saving for another event and opened it. Rimpoche stood at the door, quaffing champagne and grinning and introducing himself to everyone who wandered in. He was so pleased with the sign over the stairs—YOU ARE ENTERING THE KINGDOM OF SHAMBALA—that he autographed it, and suggested adding a second “h” after the “b” to help Americans correctly pronounce it. The spelling was immediately changed on our sign to “Shambhala,” as he suggested. 

Recently, customers frantic to save the store suggested fundraising events. In an open letter, Philip responded, “We are a business…(we are) not asking for donations. The only way real change can come is if people realize what is at stake and support local businesses with ongoing patronage… Still, 35 years is a pretty good run for a little bookshop.” 

As irreplaceable stores close, such as Shambhala Booksellers and Juicy News on College Avenue, which carried 4,207 magazines, our access to information may continue on the Internet, but the serendipitous encounters that book lovers cherish are irretrievably lost. 

California poet Justice Putnam was upset to hear about Shambhala. “That’s so sad. Man, I guess I wasn’t even aware of that! Was it because of rents?” 

Indeed, expenses increased, but the loss of customers to chain stores and the Internet is what wipes out independent booksellers. The neighboring bookstores on Telegraph Avenue—Cody’s, Shakespeare & Company and Moe’s—all respected Shambhala’s focus and agreed not to carry their best-selling books so that the smaller specialty store would thrive. The large chains have no such concern for the independents. 

I encountered the chain store attitude when I ran Shameless Hussy Press. If it had not been for the independents, 42 of our 44 books would never have seen shelf space in a store. Of the two that that were carried by chains, their shelf life was a maximum of three weeks. Any copies that did not sell within that time frame were returned to us. My basement filled up with returned copies until I gave up and had a truck haul these irreplaceable but unsold books to the recycling center. 

Berkeley still has more bookstores per capita than any city in the world—49 stores for a population of 127,000. But even in this environment, Shambhala was special; whenever I entered that space, I came away feeling nourished. It was part of the gourmet section of international literature. Their loss means less arugula and more canned corn. Edmund Burke puts it more eloquently: “The bonds of community are broken at great peril for they are not easily replaced.” 

Four blocks away on Bancroft near Telegraph is a surviving independent bookstore, University Press Books, which just celebrated their twenty-ninth anniversary. In a beautifully designed space next to the only exclusively classical music shop in the world, they feature books published by university presses, most of which would never last past the allotted three weeks in a chain store. 

University Press Books’ anniversary party featured memorable l950s tasty food like bologna on sliced white bread with no lettuce. “Some party,” grumbled an employee, “when the friggin author doesn’t show up!” He did show up three hours later but was told it was all over. It was not. I was still happily chowing down bologna sandwiches and waiting for him to autograph my copy of his book on humor. Unfortunately he believed the clerk in front, and just walked out of the store before ever joining the historians in the back room busily arguing about who best embodied the 1950s: the Kingston Trio or Rosemary Clooney. 

Founders Karen and Bill McClung started University Press Books in the arcade off Dana Street before moving into this building redesigned by architect Thadeus Kusmierski. Now on Bancroft, they have their main customer base directly across the street, which helps explain their survival, when three other stores with the same focus have closed in London, New York and Boulder.  

As well as books by university presses, they now carry some trade academic presses and a few titles by Berkeley-based Heyday Books. 

Collected Thoughts, another independent shop owned by Lorraine Zimmerman, has been saved from closing by moving in to University Press Books and bringing their children’s books and cards.  

There are weekly book signings for the foreseeable future, and there are so many beautifully designed books on these tables that one customer claimed she considers it the most dangerous store to enter when she’s trying to stay within her budget. The staff is friendly, helpful and knowledgeable. Enjoy the ambiance and take your glorious new purchase next door for a quiet cup, where classical music thrives as well.

TUESDAY, DEC. 9 

THEATER 

Shotgun Theatre Lab, “Heavy Days,” a collaborative ensemble piece about four women who resist and succumb to the allure of madness, at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid, at Hearst. Cost is $10. 704-8210. www.shotgunplayers.org 

FILM 

Yasujiro Ozu: “The Lady and the Beard” at 7:30 p.m. and “Tokyo Chorus” at 8:35 p.m.at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Courtableu at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson with Patti Whitehurst at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Hanson Brothers, The Rotters at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Jazzschool Student Recitals from 5 to 9 p.m. at the Jazz- 

school. Free. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Dayna Stephens House Jam at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Donation $5. 649-8744.  

www.thejazzhouse.com 

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

Jeffrey Foucault, original acoustic songwriter, at the 1923 Teahouse at 8 p.m. Suggested donation of $7-$15. 644-2204. www.epicarts.org 

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 10 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

The Garden, an exhibit on the theme of Mahayan Buddhism with objects dating from 200 B.C.E. to 2002. Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 643-6494. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu  

THEATER 

A Little Puppet Show, with Music, puppetry by Wise Fool and Il Teatro Calamari, music by Mark Growden. Doors at 7 p.m., show at 8 p.m. at the Oakland Noodle Factory, 1255 26th St., corner of Union, West Oakland. Tickets are $5-$10 sliding scale, children $3. 415-905-5958.  

FILM 

Cuban Film: “Paradise Under the Stars” at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $8-15, benefit for Pastors for Peace. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Standby: No Technical Difficulties: Program 5 at 7:30 p.m. Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Café Poetry and open mic, hosted by Kira Allen at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

“Images of Mary in Art: Our Lady of Guadalupe” with Katie Osanga, doctoral candidate at the GTU, at 7:30 p.m. at All Souls Episcopal Church, 2220 Cedar St. 848-1755. 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7,  

$5 with student i.d. 841-2082.  

www.starryploughpub.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Tallis Scholars, Renaissance sacred vocal music, at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $42. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Ragas and Talas, classical Indian music open jam at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Donation $5. 649-8744. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Jazzschool Student Recitals from 5 to 9 p.m. at the Jazz-school. Free. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

NC Blues Connection at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. West Coast swing lesson with Nick & Shanna at 8:00 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Nicole and the Soul Sisters at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

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

Brian Wallace at 9 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

THURSDAY, DEC. 11 

EXHIBITION OPENINGS 

Kala Art Institute, Artists’ Annual Exhibition opening reception from 6 to 9 p.m. at 1060 Heinz Ave. 549-2977. www.kala.org 

THEATER 

Shotgun Players, “Death of Meyerhold,” opens at 8 p.m. at the Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. at Berryman, and runs though Dec. 28, Thurs. - Sat. at 8 p.m. and Sun. at 7 p.m. Tickets are $12-$18. 704-8210. www.shotgunplayers.org 

FILM 

Yasujiro Ozu: “Woman of Tokyo” at 7:30 p.m. and “A Mother Should be Loved” at 8:40 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Antero Alli: “Hysteria,” with the filmmaker in person, at 8 p.m. at 21 Grand, 449-B 23rd St., near Telegraph. Cost is $5-$10.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“America 24/7: 24 Hours. 7 Days. Extraordinary Images of One American Week” a photo documentary book produced by David Elliot Cohen, at 7:30 p.m. at Easy Going Bookstore, 1385 Shattuck Ave at Rose, 843-3533. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

World Beat Celebration with Neal Cronin, guitar, vocals and Joyce Wermont, percussion, vocals at 7 p.m. at Pomegranate Mediterranean Restaurant, 1585 University Ave. 654-1904. 

Jazzschool Student Recitals from 5 to 9 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Free. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Inka Star and Rachel Efron at the 1923 Teahouse at 8 p.m. Donation of $7-$15. 644-2204. www.epicarts.org 

Bill Kirchen & Too Much Fun, rockabilly, dieselbilly and truck-stop rock at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Shabaz performs a blend of Indian, Pakistani Qawwali, and other strains from the East and West, at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

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

Ebb and Flow, Anton Barbeau at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

www.starryploughpub.com 

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

Aaron Novik’s Gubbish, the Toids, and Patrick Cress’ Telepathy perform modern jazz at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Donation $7-$15. 649-8744. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Bizar Bazaar at 9 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

FRIDAY, DEC. 12  

FILM 

Yasujiro Ozu: “There Was a Father” at 7:30 p.m. and “The Record of a Tenement Gentleman” at 9:20 p.m. at Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

THEATER 

Berkeley High School, “You Can’t Take it With You,” by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, directed by Rachel Rudy, at 8 p.m. at the Florence Schwimley Little Theater. Tickets are $10, $5 with student i.d. 

Oakland Opera Theater, “Four Saints in Three Acts,” an opera by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein, at 8 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway, at 2nd St. Tickets are $15-$25 and are available from www.oaklandopera.org 

“The Christmas Revels” at the Scottish Rite Theatre, 1547 Lakeside Drive, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $17-$35 and are available from www.calrevels.org or by calling Frantix at 415-621-1216.  

“A Night of Drama and Music” presented by Arrowsmith High School at 7:30 p.m. at the Parish Hall, 2300 Bancroft Ave. Tickets are $5 for adults, free for students and children. 540-0440. 

California Shakespeare Student Company, “A Comedy of Errors” at 7 p.m. at Cal Shakes Rehearsal Hall, 701 Heinz Ave. Tickets are $5. 548-3422, ext. 130. www.calshakes.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Jean Shinoda Bolen reads from “Crones Don’t Whine: Concentrated Wisdom for Juicy Women,” at 7:30 p.m. at Boadecia’s Books, 398 Colusa Ave., Kensington. 559-9184. www.bookpride.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Mark Morris Dance Group, The Hard Nut at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$56. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Berkeley Ballet Theater, “The Nutcracker,” at 7 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Tickets are $18 and are available from 843-4689. www.berkeleyballet.org 

Making Waves and Samsara, a cappella trios, with Storm Florez, Inka, and True Margrit at 7:30 p.m. at Rose Street House of Music. For location call 594-4000 ext. 687. www.rosestreetmusic.com 

“Shining Star” a hip-hop dance concert and fundraising event, featuring performances by the New Style Motherlode Dance Company and Diamond Dance Company, at 8 p.m. at The Regent’s Theatre, Holy Names College, 3500 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. Tickets are $25 available from 597-1056. www.newstylemotherlode.com 

Molly Holm, jazz tunes with trombonist Wayne Wallace, pianist Bill Bell, and drummer, Deszon Claiborne, at 8 p.m., at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $13 in advance, $15 at the door. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Jazzschool Student Recitals from 5 to 9 p.m. at the Jazz- 

school. Free. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Melanie O’Reilly and Sean O Nuallain, Celtic music and jazz night at the 1923 Teahouse at 8 p.m. Suggested donation of $7-$15. 644-2204. www.epicarts.org 

Pick Pocket Ensemble, Married Couple, Odd Shaped Case Ensemble perform modern jazz at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Sliding scale donation $10-$15. 649-8744. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Stephen Kent and Trance Mission at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Hot for Teacher, Damage, Inc. at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $7. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Kevin Cadogan, Jesse DeNatale, Noelle Hampton at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

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

Danny Caron at 8:30 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Due West, contemporary bluegrass, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Stolen Bibles at 9 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Toys That Kill, Frisk, Scattered Fall, Scissorhands, Love Songs at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

SATURDAY, DEC. 13 

CHILDREN  

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with Bonnie Lockhart at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $4 for adults, $3 for children. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Meet Ms. Frizzle at 1 p.m. at Lawrence Hall of Science, Centennial Drive. Cost is $4.50 to $8.50. 642-5132. 

THEATER 

Berkeley High School, “You Can’t Take it With You,” by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, directed by Rachel Rudy, at 8 p.m. at the Florence Schwimley Little Theater. Tickets are $10, $5 with student i.d. 

Destiny Arts Center Youth on the Move “Love in Action,” with dance, martial arts and spoken word at 7 p.m. at McClymonds High School, 2607 Myrtle St., at 26th near Market. This celebration marks the 15th anniversary of Destiny Arts arts education and violence prevention programs. 597-1619. www.destinyarts.org 

“The Christmas Revels” at the Scottish Rite Theatre, 1547 Lakeside Drive, at 1 and 5 p.m. Tickets are $17-$35 and are available from www.calrevels.org or by calling Frantix at 415-621-1216.  

California Shakespeare Student Company, “A Comedy of Errors” at 2 and 7 p.m. at Cal Shakes Rehearsal Hall, 701 Heinz Ave. Tickets are $5. 548-3422, ext. 130. www.calshakes.org 

“The Wakefield Cycle,” a selection of medieval religious miracle plays at 6 p.m. at All Souls Episcopal Church, 2220 Cedar St. A medieval-themed banquet will preceed the performance. Childcare provided. 848-1755. 

Oakland Opera Theater, “Four Saints in Three Acts,” an opera by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein, at 8 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway, at 2nd St. Tickets are $15-$25 available from www.oaklandopera.org 

FILM 

Yasujiro Ozu: “Early Summer” at 4 and 8:45 p.m. and “A Hen in the Wind” at 7 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Rhythm & Muse holds its yearly all-open mic, sign-up 6:30 p.m., reading and performance at 7 p.m. Free. Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. 527-9753. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Ballet Theater, “The Nutcracker,” at 2 and 7 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Tickets are $18 and are available from 843-4689. www.berkeleyballet.org 

Berkeley Youth Orchestra’s Winter Concert, Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” narrated by John Grappone, and Holst’s “Jupiter” at 11 a.m. at the Laney College Theater, 900 Fallon St. in Oakland. Tickets are $5 at the door. 663-3296. www.byoweb.org 

San Francisco Early Music Society, The Concord Ensemble, performs ancient English carols, plainsong, Renaissance polyphony, and poetry at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing. Tickets are $22 for SFEMS members and seniors, $25 for non-members, $10 for students. 528-1725. www.sfems.org 

Voci, “Voices in Peace III: The Promise of Peace” women’s vocal ensemble presents six centuries of Magnificat settings and other selections celebrating the promise of peace at 3 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way at Dana. Tickets are $15-$20, children under 12 free, and are available at the door or online at www.angelfire.com/la/VOCI 

Slavyanka - San Francisco Men’s Russian Chorus performs “Echoes of the Soul: Songs of Russian Spirit, Season and People” at 8 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way at Dana. Tickets are $15-$18, available from 866-468-3399. www.ticketweb.com 

Kensington Symphony Orchestra Holiday Concert, conducted by Tomothy Smith, performs Strauss, Corelli and Mendelssohn at 8 p.m. at Northminster Presbyterian Church, 545 Ashbury Ave. El Cerrito. Suggested donation is $10; seniors $8. Children admitted free. 534-4335.  

Oakland East Bay Gay Men’s Chorus, “I Got Yule, Babe,” at 8 p.m. at Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church, 3534 Lakeshore Ave. Tickets are $12 in advance; $15 at the door. 800-706-2389. www.oebgmc.org 

Diana Stork, Holiday Harp Performance at 1 p.m. at Bansuri’s Spring Gallery, 3929 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. 415-259-8629. 

Rose Street House of Music with Emily Shore, Irina Rivkin, Maria Quiles, Lily Wilson, Kiki Ebsen, Rebecca Crump at 7:30 p.m. For directions call 594-4000 ext. 687. www.rosestreetmusic.com 

Singing Out Against War and Empire with Robert Temple and Soulfolk Ensemble, Errotator and Paradise Freejahlove at 8 p.m. at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St. at Telegraph. Cost is $10, no one turned away. wwwroberttemplemusic.com 

Bolshevik Cafe, a cabaret variety show featuring Bay Area music and comedy acts with and anti-capitalist slant, at 8 p.m. at Finnish Hall, 1819 Tenth St. Dinner available at 6:30 p.m. Come early as the dinner and show always sell out. 

Talent Show featuring Sapo Loco from the Funky Aztecs at the 1923 Teahouse at 9 p.m. All ages welcome. Suggested donation of $7-$10, no one turned away for lack of funds. 644-2204. www.epicarts.org 

“Shining Star” a hip-hop dance concert and fundraising event with a holiday theme, featuring performances by the New Style Motherlode Dance Company and Diamond Dance Company, at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. at The Regent’s Theatre, Holy Names College, 3500 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. Tickets are $25 available from 597-1056. www.newstylemotherlode.com 

Married Couple at 9 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Jazzschool Student Recitals from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Free. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com  

Dmitri Matheny Winterfest at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com  

Suzy Thompson celebrates the release of her solo album, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50 in advance, $16.50 at the door. 548-1761.  

www.freightandsalvage.org 

Tom Rigney and Flambeau at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson with Diana Castillo at 8:30 p.m. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Maria Marquez, CD release party, at 8 p.m. at La Peña. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Rogue Wave, Six Eye Columbia, The Red Thread at 9:30 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $6. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Robin Gregory, jazz vocalist at 8 p.m. at The Jazz House. Sliding scale donation $8-$15. 649-8744. www.thejazzhouse.com 

Nicole McRory at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Pinback, Aspects of Physics at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Denise Perrier at 8:30 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

The Phantom Limbs, Nigel Peppercock, Funeral Shock, Annihilation Time, Case of Emergency at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926.

A town/gown disaster preparedness summit at the Berkeley City Club Friday brought out approximately 100 city, public utility and university top brass—including Mayor Tom Bates and Chancellor Robert Berdahl—but some community members complained about a glaring omission from the list of invitees: John Q. Public. 

“If the City of Berkeley is going to co-sponsor this event and put money and staff time into it, then the general public should know about it,” said Councilmember Kriss Worthington, adding that residents would have questioned university and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) officials about the wisdom of planning major new developments in the heart of an earthquake zone. 

“It’s a serious flaw when you get 100 top professionals together but you don’t address the single biggest issue about disaster preparedness,” he said. 

“That wasn’t factored into our thinking,” said Berkeley Assistant City Manager Arrietta Chakos, who worked with university officials to organize the summit. “There will be tons of time for more community discussion and review.” 

City and university officials convened the summit at a shared cost of about $5,000 to begin work towards a Community Mitigation Plan that could net both entities new streams of federal disaster funding. The city’s share was covered by a state grant, Chakos said. 

For a meeting on disasters, the tone was upbeat.  

In the years since the 1991 Berkeley Hills fire, the city has received roughly $30 million from the Federal Emergency Management Association (FEMA). 

Representatives from the city, school district and university boasted of their accomplishments during the past decade. Thanks to taxpayer largess and city incentive programs, all of the district’s K-12 schools, all local fire stations, and nearly 60 percent of single family homes have been retrofitted or seismically upgraded since 1991. 

The university has already retrofitted 31 of its 81 buildings as part of its roughly $800 million SAFER program, with 13 more buildings scheduled for completion within the next five years. 

Still, a magnitude 6.9 earthquake along the Hayward Fault which runs underneath Memorial Stadium—a 62 percent probability before 2032—could have devastating consequences, said Richard Eisner of the California Office of Emergency Services. 

Such a quake would kill an estimated 100 residents, ignite five major fires, damage 21,000 buildings, displace 3,000 - 12,000 residents and cause an estimated $1.5 billion in damages, he said. 

Homes most susceptible to collapse are the roughly 400 “soft story buildings” built around the campus during the ‘60s and early ‘70s that house about 5,000 residents. Similar buildings—which perch apartments above ground-level garages—suffered high rates of destruction in the 1993 Northridge earthquake, Housing Director Stephen Barton said.  

Friday’s meeting focused on coordinating disaster response efforts among the city, the university, public utilities and BART. 

Representatives from the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) and Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) claimed their disaster preparedness programs—funded with billions of taxpayer dollars—would likely restore water and electricity within two weeks of a major temblor. However, BART General Manager Thomas Margro said that without funding for its proposed $1.5 billion retrofit program—rejected by voters in 2002—a major earthquake could shut down the Transbay Tube for two years. 

Coordinating transportation in the aftermath of an earthquake emerged as a primary concern. “The ability to move people in and out of places and get access will be significant,” said UC Berkeley Director of Parking and Transportation Nad Permaul. “If East Bay MUD has to bring water by truck, we need to decide what street do we have to have.” 

Berkeley Fire Chief Reg Garcia said the city has prioritized city response and evacuation routes, but that a decision on which street to open first will be based on “the nature and location of the emergency.” He said that since top city emergency personnel all lived within walking distance of the city’s new Emergency Operations Center in the Public Safety Building, the city would not be shorthanded during an emergency.  

Some members of the public were invited to the meeting. Members of commissions on housing, transportation, disabilities and zoning were present, but members of the Community Environmental Advisory Commission (CEAC) and the Community Health Commission—two of the biggest advocates for disaster preparedness—were excluded. 

“This was an absolute outrage,” said Pam Sihvola of the Committee to Minimize Toxic Waste. “Why were the most informed neighborhood and environmental groups excluded from the meeting?” 

Particularly galling, she said, was that attendees of an afternoon roundtable meeting on environmental health co-chaired by LBNL Radiation Safety Officer Gary Zeman never discussed ramifications of the Molecular Foundry, which is to be built within the Alquist-Priolo earthquake zone and a landslide zone. 

“We believe the best way to shield yourself from huge disasters is not to build at the most hazardous site in the city,” she said. “But any community individual who would have brought that up was excluded.” 

UC Berkeley Director of Community Relations Irene Hegarty said residents will get ample opportunity to weigh in on future UC development as the university continues to fine-tune its Long Range Development Plan. 

Chakos said space limitations at the City Club—a neutral venue—limited the number of participants, but promised that residents and commissioners would get plenty of opportunities to have their say. 

“This is a small first step in a larger community conversation that will be going on for a while.” 

She estimated the mitigation plan would go before commissions by January and be ready for Council approval by late spring. Implementation would not only qualify Berkeley for more mitigation funding, but—depending on the fate a proposed law now before Congress—could qualify Berkeley for more relief in the aftermath of a disaster.

RUBBER STAMP 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

There have been repeated requests from BUSD for volunteers to serve on BUSD committees, namely the Facilities Safety and Maintenance Committee, which was formerly the Maintenance Advisory Committee (MAC).  

This committee was created by our Bond Measure BB which provides BUSD with over $4 million a year of funding, to provide oversight, and strategic planning. Since Michele Lawrence’s ascension, she has abrogated the MAC committee’s strategic plan, violated the statutory requirements of the bond, failed to carry out the required audits, and not accounted for the funds spent.  

Now she wants citizens to rubber stamp these violations. No wonder there are no volunteers beating down the doors.  

Yolanda Huang  

former MAC chair 2000-2002  

• 

OPEN FOR BUSINESS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

With regard to the stalled University Avenue Plan, not only are there already too many vacancies on University Avenue, but a valuable four-year-old business there is under threat. 

The city has given a permit for the contractor of the Darling Flower Shop project to place a cargo container on University Avenue in front of Cafe Tibet and the existing Darling Flower Shop. This large container blocks the cafe from view for anyone driving east on University Avenue. A sign has been placed on top of the container, but that does not lessen the terribly deleterious impact of hiding the business from people driving up University Avenue. 

Cafe Tibet has already suffered the loss of foot traffic that resulted from the sad demise of the UC Theatre. I think it would be a great loss to the city, to Samten’s customers, and to Tibetans in exile all over the Bay Area if a decline in customers endangers her business. As things now stand, she has to try to keep her restaurant alive when it is obscured from the street for a whole year (until August 2004). 

Surely a better place for the container can be found at the back of the work site. If the city wishes to improve the business climate on University Avenue, it must support rather than endanger existing businesses there. 

Charlene Woodcock 

• 

UNIVERSITY AVENUE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It’s heartening to see so much discussion recently in the pages of the Daily Planet about the state of development along University Avenue. I agree wholeheartedly with the recent letter submitted jointly by Mayor Bates and Councilmember Maio calling for implementation of the long-neglected University Avenue Plan. We need to take a hard, critical look at the recent trend allowing oversized buildings with undersized parking allotments. 

The areas north and south of University Avenue still maintain a tenuous neighborhood charm and a livable pace and scale of living, but if the city allows construction of more Acton Courts on the avenue (that hulking behemoth west of Andronico’s), that fragile balance will be knocked permanently out of whack, with too much traffic, too much density, back yards without a shred of privacy, and a true degradation of the standard of living in our beloved Berkeley flats. 

I look forward to more thoughtful discussions in your pages about the future of University Avenue. 

Steven Saylor 

• 

A CASE FOR REALTORS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

An article in the Daily Planet (“Council Race Underway as Hawley Drops Out,” Dec. 5-8) refers to “a Realtor and former high school teacher” in town. If I hadn’t regularly encountered “Realtor” in the real estate pages of the local press, I would have assumed that the capital R was a typo.  

The Planet, an avowedly democratic publication, has to choose: Either elevate high school teachers and the rest of us to the orthographic heights claimed by Realtors, or bring Realtors down to the common level.  

Though I’m generally in favor of raising democratic standards, and indeed rather fancy the look of Citizen Activist and Writer (my own current designations), I think a cap on big tall letters is the best policy. But perhaps I’m confusing spelling with land use.  

Zelda Bronstein, Chair  

Berkeley Planning Commission  

• 

POSITIVE REVIEW 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I hope you will have more excellent art reviews by Peter Selz. It was so intelligent and reader-friendly, a real addition to your excellent newspaper. 

Estelle Jelinek 

• 

CLARIFICATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I’m writing to clarify a point about the use of a statement of overriding considerations when a proposed project’s environmental effects are significant and unavoidable, as the Environmental Impact Report shows for the Blood House at 2526 Durant Ave.  

The role of the Zoning Adjustments Board is not to ensure a profit for the developer as the Daily Planet suggested (“Not So Fast, ZAB Tells Blood House Developers,” Dec. 5-8). The role of ZAB is to implement the Berkeley General Plan and Zoning Ordinance, which calls for both increasing affordable housing and preserving Berkeley’s historic buildings. A statement of overriding considerations under the California Environmental Quality Act in this case weighs these two objectives to find if the social benefits outweigh the environmental costs. Even before we consider that question, it is important under CEQA to fully consider every feasible alternative, which is what the board decided to do last Thursday when calling for further study of the feasibility of an alternative that would preserve the house but allow for additional housing construction.  

Andy Katz 

Member, Zoning Adjustments Board 

• 

TAX ASSESSMENTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Your recent Commentary piece by Ms. Gale Garcia (“City Staff Serves Developers As Kennedy’s Projects Prove,” Daily Planet, Dec. 5-8) questioned why the GAIA Building is assessed at a different rate from that of an apparently similarly sized Corder Building at 2322 Shattuck Ave. Ms. Garcia is not comparing apples to apples, for the GAIA Building has important differences with respect to the Corder Building that give rise to different evaluations. As far as I understand the city tax code and it application, there are at least three reasons: 

1) The city taxes commercial area at a higher rate than residential area. The Corder Building has much larger percentage of commercial space than the GAIA Building—an entire city block of commercial frontage (260 feet) versus 68 feet at the GAIA Building. 

2) The city does not tax garage areas, even though the square footage does in fact appear on assessors records. Roughly two thirds of the ground floor of the GAIA Building is dedicated to the parking of 42 cars; none of the ground floor of the Corder Building is. I believe that this alone accounts for a difference in the taxable area in the building of at least 25 percent. 

3) The city does not begin tax assessments on unfinished space that does not have an permanent or temporary occupancy permits, or which is not ready for permitted tenant improvements. The entire ground floor of the Corder Building has long been in use and is fully assessed. The ground floor of GAIA is still unfinished, uninhabitable, and awaits such permits—and assessments. 

I hope this sheds some light on Ms. Garcia’s inquiry. 

Patrick Kennedy 

• 

VISA HASSLES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I just wanted to thank you for the excellent article on the serious troubles that international graduate students on the Berkeley campus are facing because of the excessive and unclear process of visa issuance that is taking place today (“Students Face Visa Hassles,” Daily Planet, Dec. 5-8). 

I am an international student myself and have been trying to work on this issue within the graduate student government. Although we have managed to meet with university administrators over the issue, little information has been available, as officials have been reluctant to release any particulars about visa delays and denials. The Berkeley Daily Planet just filled in that void! Thank you for providing crucial information from which we can begin to work on this issue. 

I hope that you will recognize how deeply this affects students—even those who have not experienced troubles so far are constrained from traveling abroad, whether to conferences or to see their families—simply for the fear of encountering troubles on their way back. The lingering fear is affecting the academic endeavor and the quality of life of all students who come to study in the United States. 

Thank you again, and keep up the good work of uncovering problems that are suffered by people who otherwise lack voices. 

Takeshi Akiba 

UC Berkeley graduate student 

• 

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Editors, Daily Planet: 

I wish to comment on the state of affairs of the Telegraph Avenue Street Artists, a group of licensed street art and craft vendors to whom the City of Berkeley owes much of its character. 

We are a poor but proud lot, all makers and vendors of handcrafted items ranging from jewelry and leather goods to art, clothing, hats, incense, soaps, candles, pens and much more. The operant word here is “handcrafted.” We spend our lives making these gifts, then enduring all kinds of weather to sell them on the street, the only roof over our heads (and the heads of our customers) is that which we bring with us. Some of us don’t make enough money at our art or craft to make a decent living, eat well, or provide ourselves with good living and working quarters; some of us are more fortunate because we have other sources of income, such as a husband or wife with a steady job, or we have wholesale and website customers. 

Nevertheless, we are real businesses selling products you won’t find anywhere else. Many of our items are one of a kind, many are made in quantity, but all are handmade from raw materials, the old-fashioned way. We have no factories making our wares, no underpaid sweat shop workers laboring to make cheap goods to the masses. We have no marketing department, no advertising budget, no professional association to support our endeavors. We just survive or thrive, depending on the mood of the crowd that day, or that week, or that month. And if sales are good, we eat and pay our rent; if not, we suffer. 

So why write about it? Simple: to get the local media to devote as much attention to us as we can get. To draw crowds of people to our booths, our street stores which we put up and take down every day and night. To support the local economy, the Berkeley economy. To get you people out of the malls, away from the cheap junk that’s sold for fashion, art or beauty, and to get you to stroll by our booths and spend your money on the beautiful crafts we make. You’ll find gifts 

for your family and friends that you’ll not find anywhere in the world. You’ll not be disappointed and, believe me, neither will we. 

Ed Livingston 

• 

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Editors, Daily Planet: 

Steve Geller writes (Letters, Daily Planet, Dec. 5-8) praising public transportation in Berkeley. I would be delighted if that were so, but just look at the schedules. My wife and I just spent a day in San Francisco using public transportation. The bus we rode came every four minutes in mid-day and was crowded. Too many buses in the East Bay seem to come about every 30 minutes in mid-day. San Francisco Muni transfers are free and are good in any direction for a generous period of time. AC Transit charges for transfers. BART, however, is fast, frequent, and comfortable, but then there is a charge to transfer to AC Transit from 

BART. The infrequent schedules of East Bay buses is discouraging; and when schedules have been revised to be even less frequent, there is even less reason to patronize AC Transit. 

Alan R. Meisel 

• 

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Editors, Daily Planet: 

Dear Council Member Hawley, 

Thank you for announcing your choice of a successor in District 5. Now I definitely know for whom not to vote. 

Your candidate’s willingness to be in consensus with other councilmembers appears to be of great importance in your estimation. I’m so glad he wants to be liked so that his dance card will be full! 

How about a candidate being of good moral character, committed to specific principles, with innovative notions about how a city in a financial crisis should move forward? 

When you ran, you specifically touted your financial expertise. However, now the only solution you have put forward to solve the financial crisis is to burden homeowners with an additional property tax. 

May I suggest that it would be an honorable thing for you to do is to recognize that you no longer represent the views of the majority of voters in District 5. This was demonstrated at the last NEBA meeting. 

You should graciously acknowledge this situation, resign, and let the person who polled the next highest vote assume the remainder of your term of office. This would save the city the cost a possible recall and another election. 

Viki Tamaradze 

• 

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Editors, Daily Planet: 

When Gov. Schwarzenegger asked Californian Indians to pay their fair share of taxes, he never once asked the same fairness of wealthy Californians. It seems to me that Mr. Schwarzenegger doesn’t wan to offend his wealthy friends who donated millions of dollar to his campaign. I call it hypocrisy at its worst. 

Mr. Schwarzenegger only learned one half of the United States when he was still in his home country of Austria. He wasn’t taught about the other half of the United States which had to do with American Indian sovereignty. While there might be legitimate concern over Indian casinos, Gov. Schwarzenegger’s argument about fairness of taxes in California is one-sided. 

Billy Trice, Jr. 

Oakland  

• 

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Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thanks for the yummy info from Marty Schiffenbauer (“Decadent Delights Await the Chocoholic’s Palate,” Daily Planet, Nov. 28-Dec. 1). Here’s my two cents: You can be “chewing good while doing good” by buying free-trade organic chocolate at Global Exchange. They carry three brands from Germany and Switzerland, large and small bars, dark, milk, and bittersweet, powdered cocoa too. Global Exchange is in San Francisco at 24th and Noe and here in Berkeley at 2840 College Ave. Also, Global Exchange is one of the few places you can find organic free-trade coffee; they have a great assortment of handsome items to wear and for the home, most from small village collectives all over the globe. 

Rhoda Slanger 

• 

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Editors, Daily Planet: 

UC’s proposal for a conference center and museums does not only include underground parking on the site. It also includes a new parking structure north of Addison Street.  

This parking structure is not really part of the conference center/museum project, and it should be studied separately. I would like to see the main project built as soon as possible, but not the new UC parking structure.  

This parking structure would be used by UC employees and not by the general public. It seems to be part of UC’s long range development plan, which calls for parking to expand more rapidly than the number of people on campus expands—actually promoting a mode shift from other forms of transportation to the automobile.  

On the more general question of whether downtown needs more parking to stimulate business, I think UC’s conference center/museum project shows that we can attract more customers without attracting more cars.  

Almost all of the people coming to conferences will arrive by air, and when they get to Berkeley, they will not need cars. The hotel will actually reduce demand for parking: Many people visiting UC now stay in hotels in Emeryville and drive to Berkeley, because there is not enough hotel space here.  

The museums will draw people whether or not they provide parking, particularly the museum of anthropology, which will be one of the largest museums of its kind in the country.  

Automobile use expands to fill the amount of parking that is available. If UC builds its parking structure north of Addison, more UC employees will commute by car. If the conference/museum center includes more parking than is necessary, more visitors will come by car. All this parking will not bring more people downtown, but it will cause more traffic congestion and leave us with a less livable city.  

In the long run, more parking will make downtown less attractive and less successful. Berkeley’s downtown will never compete successfully with freeway-oriented shopping centers by providing more parking than they do. Downtown will compete successfully by providing the liveliest, most interesting shopping area in the East Bay—and that requires an intensity of use that you can only get with transit-oriented development.  

Charles Siegel  

When I was a boy in the 50s, I had a large wall map of the world. Much of it was still pink, the pink of the British Empire: Canada and much of the Caribbean, large swaths of East and West Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and the Indian subcontinent. At that age, I found something reassuring about the uniformity of color. It made the vast world look orderly and safe.  

Even then the map was outdated, of course, and in the 60s it became much more so, as colony after colony gained independence. But since that time, something remarkable has happened. A splendid body of literature has appeared, produced by writers who hail from these former colonies, although many of them live not in Calcutta or Bombay but in London or Toronto or New York.  

I am thinking of writers as different as Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Chinua Achebe, Caryl Phillips, Jamaica Kincaid, Amit Chaudhuri, Rohinton Mistry, Bharati Mukherjee, Michael Ondaatje, Akhil Sharma, Anita Rau Badami, Vikram Chandra, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Whatever their differences, these writers have one thing in common: They all write in English. The Empire and the Raj are long gone, but one map of the world—the literary map—is still pink. 

Other languages have dominated a region or continent.  

Greek was the common language in the Hellenistic period even after Athens lost its power. Latin was preeminent in Europe long after the fall of Rome. But no language has been adopted by so many major writers from the four corners of the earth. English is the first world literary language. 

Writers born in India make up the largest group in this new literature. Among them, Salman Rushdie is a special case. His sheer linguistic and narrative virtuosity, sometimes delightful, sometimes difficult or just tiresome, puts him in the great modernist line that extends back through Joyce to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.  

One can divide the other Indian writers, all more old-fashioned than Rushdie in terms of narrative technique, into two groups. The first includes Amit Chaudhuri, Rohinton Mistry, and Vikram Chandra. Their lives exemplify the Indian diaspora (Chaudhuri lives in England, Chandra in Washington, and Mistry in Toronto), but their fiction is set primarily in India.  

There the resemblance ends, however. Chaudhuri’s Freedom Song, three unrelated short novels published in a single volume, gives us dreamy miniatures, short on plot but rich with the sights, sounds, and smells of middle-class family life in Calcutta. The first, A Strange and Sublime Address, explores the perspective of a 10-year-old boy with particular delicacy and precision. Time stops as Sandeep registers the specifics of baths, prayers, meals, and naps and the small, meaningful shifts of inflection in the adult voices that surround him.  

The muscular stories in Chandra’s Love and Longing in Bombay are just the opposite, crammed with sex, intense feeling, and even a ghost. The powerful centerpiece, “Kama,” is a brooding, noirish account of a world-weary policeman, Sartaj Singh, who investigates a violent crime and simultaneously confronts his disintegrating marriage.  

Next to these short works, the two recent novels of Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance and Family Matters, seem titanic. Mistry combines Chaudhuri’s eye and ear for detail with effortless narrative flow and grand social sweep. A Fine Balance is set during the so-called Emergency, under the tyranny of Indira Gandhi. Mistry brings together a pair of poor tailors from a remote village, a student from a comfortable Kashmiri family, and a struggling single woman in a vast but unidentified “city by the sea.” For a while, they become an unlikely but genuine family, until their lives are shattered by an episode of grotesque caste violence.  

In Jumpha Lahiri’s novel The Namesake, the hero’s grandfather, a retired professor of European literature at Calcutta University, tells his son, “Read all the Russians, and then reread them. They will never fail you.” Mistry seems to have taken this lesson to heart. His tenderness for his characters and his attention to the nuances of attachment are no less remarkable than his broad social panorama. A Fine Balance, like its successor Family Matters, offers a reader the kind of pleasure it is difficult to find outside of Tolstoy or Chekhov. 

I would place Lahiri herself and Bharati Mukherjee in the second group of writers. These not only exemplify the Indian diaspora in their own ives—Mukherjee here in Berkeley as a Professor of English—but take it as their principal subject. Their works are about dislocation and its psychological consequences, in particular the subversion of identity. They raise, over and over, the unanswerable question that arises early in Mukherjee’s most recent novel, Desirable Daughters, in a conversation between the heroine and a mysterious stranger who claims to be her relative. 

“‘Who are you?’ I repeated. The strange young man smiled at me. ‘That’s what I’d like to know myself.’” 

Mukherjee begins in 19th century rural Bengal with the story of the “tree bride,” whose father forces her to marry a tree after her wedding to a more conventional bridegroom is disrupted. The tree bride’s fate suggests indissoluble connection with the land as well as the subservience and vulnerability of Bengali women in village society.  

These are the fates which Mukherjee’s trio of desirable daughters resists, with mixed success. Parvati escapes to a conventional wealthy husband in Bombay, Padma to New Jersey, where she becomes a star of Bengali-oriented television. The main character, Tara, escapes to California, first through marriage to a Silicon Valley millionaire, the richest Bengali in America, and then to single life in a Hayes Valley house. She shares the house with her son and her lover, an ex-biker turned retrofitter who professes to be (what else?) a Zen Buddhist. Eventually, her uneasy idyll of assimilation comes to an end, and a piece of sensational violence, never fully explained, propels her back toward her origins.  

Mukherjee attempts an overview of Bengalis in America, from San Francisco to New Jersey to Queens, but her prose lacks the grace of Mistry’s. Her perspective, filtered through her narrator Tara, tends toward satire but often has the flavor of pop sociology, at once abstract and over-explicit. Tara muses that “as sisters we were close, but we didn’t have a language for divorce and depression, which meant we couldn’t fit in concepts like powerlessness and disappointment.” Her son Rabi, she tells us, is “living with his mother in a nice condo in San Francisco, going to a freewheeling private school that seemed more like an extended playgroup than a learning environment.”  

There is far too much telling of this sort, and not enough showing, the showing that provides a principle pleasure of fiction. Moreover, the characterization is weak. Tara’s voice is believable and cranky, but the lesser figures, including the other two sisters, Tara’s artistic gay son, and her lover, are little more than cartoons or clichés.  

Jhumpa Lahiri succeeds where Mukherjee does not.  

Lahiri’s debut collection of stories, The Interpreter of Maladies, won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize in 2000. Her new novel The Namesake is even better: a sustained and deeply moving meditation on the themes of assimilation and identity.  

Lahiri’s protagonist, born in Boston to Bengali parents, is at home in America in a way that his parents cannot be. His ease is undermined only by the nickname his parents chose: Gogol, after the Russian novelist whose work has a special meaning for his father. This name, neither American nor Bengali, sticks to him in spite of various efforts to change it, and marks his separateness from both cultures.  

Lahiri gives us the subtleties routinely overlooked in our interminable wrangles about what was called, in the recent debate by the candidates for governor of California, the “color-blind society.” Gogol is invited to dinner at the luxurious home of Gerald and Lydia, the parents of his Anglo girlfriend Maxine. Gerald and Lydia are old-money Manhattan sophisticates who can discuss with equal fluency the latest French movie, Indian carpets, or the rise of Hindu fundamentalism. They welcome Gogol, but a casual observation, intended as a compliment, defines the gulf between him and his hosts.  

“‘You could be Italian,’” Lydia says during the meal, as she looks at him. 

The unobtrusive irony is at Lydia’s expense but at Gogol’s too. For the Lydias of this world, Bengali and Italian are interchangeable. Gogol’s distinctive heritage disappears into a larger, non-specific otherness. This is the price of his apparently effortless ability to sit with Lydia and Gerald as their equal. The remark also suggests Gogol’s collusion in the process, his wish to blend in by burying anything, including his name, that might set him apart.  

For Gogol, Lahiri suggests, there are no easy solutions. After breaking off his affair with Maxine, he marries Moushumi, who belongs to his parents’ extended circle of Boston Bengali friends. The marriage is soon threatened by Moushumi’s own conflicts about identity and allegiance.  

Lahiri has a sharp eye for the flaws and errors of her characters, always balanced by a generous sympathy. Her style in The Namesake is graceful and self-effacing. There are no pyrotechnics to distract from the clear-eyed, elegiac tone, which becomes almost unbearably poignant as the novel draws to a close and Gogol comes at last to accept his name and what it signifies.  

Gogol’s struggle to find a home and accept an identity is the struggle not just of Bengali-Americans, but of African-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Native Americans—of all Americans, really, and many others as well (think of Jamaicans in London or Tunisians in France or Jews in South Africa). We need writers like Lahiri who can tell us about this struggle. We need her wisdom and compassion. We need her to remind us, as she does eloquently in the final pages of The Namesake, that books can provide a more enduring home than any city, that our connection to stories can be a way back to others and to our truest selves.

Berkeley schools—already reeling from several rounds of spending cuts—must slash another $2.2 million to balance this year’s budget, according to a First Interim Report presented to the school board last week. 

Board members didn’t discuss strategies to eliminate the deficit, which is down from the $6 million carried over from last year. 

State funding cuts, escalating health benefit costs and years of financial mismanagement have all contributed to the deficit. 

Declining enrollment cost the district $1.9 million in state funding this year and will cost an estimated $1.5 million next year, while employee benefits costs have skyrocketed over 20 percent the past two years, said Director of Fiscal Services Song Chin-Bendib. 

To get their financial house in order the district initiated a spending freeze, cut programs, laid-off administrative staff and eliminated approximately 55 teaching positions. The moves have ballooned average class sizes to 32 for fourth and fifth graders and over thirty for ninth graders after the district had to drop out of a federal program to reduce ninth grade class size because it couldn’t afford to pay its share. 

The $2.2 million deficit doesn’t take into account an expected bailout of the district’s cafeteria fund—which is nearly $600,000 in the red—or projected savings from employee health enrollment and worker’s compensation insurance reforms. 

Despite the wide-ranging cuts, Smith forecast future funding imbalances with projected deficits ballooning to $15 million by 2006/2007 if deficits were allowed to compound. 

Those projections included assumptions that teachers and administrators will forego pay raises for the next three years—a measure that boardmember Terry Doran thought required more public input. 

“That’s an important message that we need to convey as widely as possible, not at 12:30 a.m. at a board meeting,” he said. 

The teachers’ contract expired in June. Union head Barry Fike acknowledged that the district’s coffers were bare, but added that “it wasn’t a given that for the next three years no one’s going to get raises.” 

On the good news side, Smith reported that unexpected state funding had bailed out the district’s Child Development Fund previously $235,000 in the red. 

Smith said that accounting and data management systems are getting “tighter” after years of mismanagement landed the district under the auspices of the Alameda County Office of Education. He said the district could now account for all teacher salaries at each school, but that it didn’t yet have a handle on accounting for hourly employees like substitute teachers. 

Smith added the district would soon introduce a plan to decrease cafeteria operation costs, which could receive an additional financial shot in the arm or a devastating blow, depending on the success of the return of a cafeteria at the high school in January.

As a photographer with modest skills—I’ve shot for several newspapers, a magazine or two, and one book—I’m always awed by the truly gifted artists who capture so deftly the images that elude all my skills and hardware. 

Watching an inspired shooter in a darkroom is an awe-inspiring experience, as I discovered when watching the incomparable Bill Beebe, who shot for the L.A. Mirror, Life, a host of nature mags, and the late, lamented Santa Monica Evening Outlook. 

As a reporter—a writer—I’m acutely aware that words can never convey all the subtleties, hues, and shadows that bounce off my retinas. 

I’ve always had a weakness for black and white. Though color photography is glitzier, the infinite palette of grays between the absolute presence and the total absence of light can convey something of the essential nature of things far more clearly that the peacock hues of Agfa, Fuji or Kodak. 

Trees have always been a favorite subject for the lens of the succession of Mamiyas, Rolleis, Nikons, and Minoltas I’ve shot over the years because there’s something remarkable and mysterious in the way they seek the sun, bending and twisting into myriad labyrinthine forms to spread their green thieves of light. 

Once, many years ago, when I ran a photo of a eucalyptus in the late Oceanside Blade-Tribune, a reporter insisted I pull the photo because the picture struck her as obscene. It wasn’t, of course, but it was sensual. 

In Two-Hearted Oak, Heyday Books, a Berkeley publisher devoted to quality works of Californiana, has given us a work that would, undoubtedly, have provoked the Mrs. Grundy in my former colleague. 

The core of the book is a stunning collection of black-and-white landscape shots captured by Roman Loranc, a Polish emigre who settled in California’s Central Valley. 

The book isn’t all trees by any means. There’re vast plowed fields, marshes, rivers, grasslands. Humans are present only through their works: in the neatly planted ranks of vineyards and almond orchards, in achingly lonely windmills, in weathered barns, in a lamplight fog-shrouded path, and in a partially submerged abandoned shopping cart. 

The photographs in this coffee table volume are reproduced in exquisite detail—sometimes in sepia—on heavy coated stock, and the accompanying text and poetry by Lilian Vallee, Loranc’s spouse, plays off and illuminates the imagery. 

Evoking a sense of haunting alone-ness, Loranc’s images offer up a visual koan, contrasting the irresistible human impulse to dominate the landscape with life’s own uncompromising and passionate thirst for light, for water, and for air. 

And of all Loranc’s depictions, it’s the trees I find most moving. 

The Druids worshiped trees, and the Hindu likened consciousness to a tree. Trees capture light, building living explosions of wood to deploy their light- and carbon-dioxide-capturing green, and arraying an equal exuberant network of underground branches—roots—to inhale liquid and mineral nutrient. Mirror images, one visible, the other invisible. As above/so below. As within/as without. 

Even to the skeptic—a group to which this reviewer professes allegiance—at the very least, a tree is a living metaphor. In the intricate array of branches and roots are reflected the countless twists and turns of our lives in pursuit of desire and necessity. 

The presence of the hand of Homo sapiens, evident in Loranc’s canals, fences, buildings, and other artifacts, reminds the reader/viewer of the increasingly miserable way we’re treating the world around us, categorizing life and the earth itself as ‘resources,’ provided for our exploitation. 

Valle’s afterword informed me that my response was exactly what they’d intended: “This book is not meant just to register the heartrending beauty and mystery of what is still here in the Central Valley; it is also to honor the people who will not let it die, who will not leave, who are putting it back—grass plug by grass plug. May these images and words rouse the imagination of Central Valley residents to a greater appreciation of the Central Valley and to impassioned advocacy on its behalf.” 

California is a marvelous state, my home for the last 35 years, and my heart aches to see what we’ve done to our wild places. Books like Two-Hearted Oak remind me of what we’ve lost and what’s left. As a father and grandfather, I hope we leave something of what’s left to those who come after, a sobering but necessary thought.  

Two-Hearted Oak, The Photography of Roman Loranc, Great Valley Books/Heyday Books, Berkeley, 94 pages, $39.95. 

Where Loranc’s photos provoke, those in another Heyday offering—Hidden Treasures of San Francisco Bay—entertain. Dennis E. Anderson, a Marin County photographer, shoots in richly saturated color. From aerial shots of the colorful fractal landscapes that are salt evaporation ponds of the South Bay to a rare vermillion sunset, Anderson gives us scenes that reminder us that part of the Bay Area scene hasn’t been paved over, concreted, I-beamed, and bricked-up. 

The images are thematically organized, bridged with brief essays from biologist and nature writer Jerry George. While George spends part of the year aboard a boat in the Bay, Anderson lives year-round on a refurbished 76-year-old fishing boat moored in the same waters. 

Anderson’s images are journalistic, specific—they feature this delightfully painted wreck on the Albany Bulb, those Grizzly Island Tule Elk, the North Tower of the Golden Gate, that delighted, gray-haired woman grinning, resting the paddle of her kayak, her dog sitting before her, eager and alert. 

The photographs are all well exposed and neatly composed, and a celebration of what is, rather than a haunting reminder of what was or might yet be. 

Anderson’s underwater sea life shots provide some of the more provocative images, colorful proof that there’s another strikingly hued world, both close at hand and unimaginably remote. 

Available either in hardcover or as an oversize trade paperback, Hidden Treasures is an excellent gift to remind friends and family that there’s more to the Bay than bridges and the TransAmerica tower. It’s also a pleasant book to keep around the house, reminding us there’s more out there than we encounter on our daily rounds and commutes. 

Hidden Treasures of San Francisco Bay, photography by Dennis E. Anderson, text by Jerry George, jointly published by Blue Water Pictures, San Rafael, and Heyday Books, Berkeley, 176 pages, hardbound $49.95, trade paper $29.95.  

Berkeley’s Options Recovery Services held a graduation ceremony on Friday for 38 clients who successfully completed a drug and alcohol treatment program designed for hardcore substance abusers who have no resources and nowhere else to go. 

About 300 friends, family members and city officials gathered in the cavernous Veterans Memorial Building theater to enjoy a tasty lunch and observe the ceremony that one council member called “a very moving experience.” 

The graduates, many who struggle with mental illness, homelessness and legal trouble, are often referred to the program by the Alameda County court system. By the time they arrive at Options Recovery Service, they are likely to have lost hope and been forsaken by social services, friends and family. 

“We want to help the people who have no other resources and have not been able to make it anywhere else,” said Dr. Davida Coady who founded ORS in 1996. 

Nearly all of Friday’s graduates described a sense of rebirth and all said they were grateful to ORS for taking a chance on them. 

“The program brought me out of the grave,” said Oakland resident David Stamper, an ex-convict who was homeless and struggling with a longtime addiction to drugs. “I was a walking dead man waiting to go back to prison or die.” Von Segerberg, who abused crack cocaine for 13 years, said her life has been renewed. “When I was using drugs, I was a loner. I was isolated probably because of shame,” Segerberg said. “Now I can really trust people again. I have friends, and I can work with others.”  

Coady has designed a comprehensive 12-step program that works closely with clients to fulfill a variety of their needs such as detoxification, healthcare, treatment for mental illness, court obligations, housing and literacy. Once those issues have been addressed, ORS clients can focus on their recovery. 

“We make every effort to start working with the clients right away,” Coady said. “Some only show up once and don’t come back, but of the ones who come a second day about 80 percent make it.” 

ORS takes in more than 1,000 clients annually and has had a high success rate with those who commit to the program. The program has an operating budget of nearly $1 million a year and relies mostly on contributions and government and foundation grants. 

The high success rate has earned the program widespread support from elected officials, churches, businesses and county health agencies. Among the local dignitaries attending the graduation were councilmembers Linda Maio and Betty Olds. The ceremony was also one of the last events attended by the late Father Bill O’Donnell of St. Joseph the Worker Church. 

“It’s amazing that they have such a high success rate with some of the hardest cases,” Olds said. “It’s always moving to come to these graduations.” 

ORS also enjoys a close relationship with the Berkeley Police Department. Chief Roy Meisner attended the graduation along with Capt. Bobby Miller, who is on ORS’s board of directors, volunteers as a drug counselor and conducts men’s group meetings. And Officer Tom Jeremiason, affectionately referred to as “Officer Tom” by ORS clients, made a special diploma presentation to Stamper. Just about a year ago, Jeremiason found Stamper in very bad shape and sleeping on the Veteran Memorial Building’s front stairs. He helped Stamper take the few remaining steps into the building where he joined the ORS program. Since then the two men have shared a special bond.  

“I’ve been a police officer for 24 years and police get used to seeing people at rock bottom and you can begin to forget they are human beings,” Jeremiason said during his introduction of Stamper. “Well I’m here to tell you that my name is Officer Tom and I’m a recovering cop.” 

Dr. Coady, who one client called the “mastermind of recovery,” said she sees the results of the ORS program whenever she goes shopping. “We have Options people working at stores all over Alameda County,” she said. “Every time I’m at Office Depot, Orchard Supply or Home Depot, I see someone who has graduated the program. Sometimes they come up and give me a hug.” 

For more information about Options Recovery Services and opportunities for contributing to the program, call 666-9552 ext. 21.

When I told Pat Cody I wanted to write about her role in starting up social action projects, her first words were typical. “Only if you don’t imply that I did it alone. No one person can do anything alone!”  

First, a skeletal early bio: She was born Pat Herbert in 1923, in New London, Conn., earned her B.A. at Eastern Connecticut State University in 1943, then went to Columbia University, where she met Fred Cody. They married in 1946. After finishing her M.A. in economics in 1948, she and Fred lived in Mexico and in England where she helped put Fred through graduate school by writing economic reports for the business research division of The Economist. 

Pat and Fred settled in Berkeley in 1956, the year the first of their four children was born. It was also the year they founded Cody’s Books, which is one of six major, ongoing successful projects (not counting their children, all of whom, Pat says proudly, grew up to work in public interest jobs) in which Pat played a starting, then a sustaining role. 

“The ‘50s was the start of the paperback revolution,” Pat says. “Most people can’t remember or even imagine the days when bookstores carried only costly hardbound books, and drugstore racks sold pulpy mass paperbacks. People like Roy Kepler (one of the pacifist founders of KPFA, as well as of Kepler’s Books) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Fred were realizing the possibilities of bookstores specializing in the new ‘quality’ paperbacks.”  

Cody’s Books began (on a borrowed $5,000) in a tiny shop on Euclid. In 1960, they moved to an abandoned grocery store Pat found on Telegraph (now the rebuilt site of Moe’s Books.) In 1964, with the help of one of their employees (“We didn’t realize his father was a millionaire!”) they hired a building designer to create the gleaming glass-walled store on Telegraph and Haste. Pat and Fred got a 20-year lease on it. 

“Fred and I made a good partnership, Fred out on the floor, dealing with book reps and customers, me in the back office doing the accounts.” 

When pressed, Pat admits that during those politically tumultuous years, while she and Fred struggled to play a responsible mediating role in the conflicted community, her writing of economic reports kept the store afloat. 

Some have called Pat’s second great project the birth of the peace movement on the West Coast. In 1961, concerned mothers like Pat, Frances Herring, Madeline Duckles, June Brumer and others decided to stage a Women’s Strike for Peace, organizing visits to local government offices to protest nuclear testing and our early involvement in Vietnam. 

What was to be a one-day demonstration became Women For Peace (still going on Ellsworth Street). One of the early WFP projects was an ongoing Sunday afternoon vigil at city hall and on the university campus. They carried signs like BRING THE 20,000 ADVISORS BACK FROM VIETNAM. “People would look at our signs and ask, ‘Vietnam? Where’s that?’” 

When the 1964 Free Speech Sit-ins hit the media, floods of disaffected young people began pouring into Berkeley. 

“To some people they looked adventuresome, romantic, but the truth is they got sick, they got raped, they overdosed. They really needed help, and often they were too broke and too confused or scared to get it,” she explains. 

Pat says that a coalition of graduate students and activists started going out on the street, offering health services, collecting coins in cups to finance a Berkeley Free Clinic that was soon deluged with every kind of medical need and emergency. 

“Fred said to me, look, if this is going to survive, you’d better handle the money.” Pat sighs, “Every single Sunday night for five years, we had staff meetings,” with Pat as treasurer. The Berkeley Free Clinic continues, serving an ever more needy clientele. 

In the mid-1970s, the Berkeley Women’s Health Collective was formed to offer information, services, and advocacy for young women—focusing on abortion, venereal disease, contraception, but not menopause and other health questions of older women. 

In 1976 Pat helped gather an older women’s support group meeting at the Health Collective. “We met only a few times, talked over immediate issues, shared information.” Pat shrugs. “That one never really went anywhere.” In this case Pat was ahead of the times, planting seeds that, as baby boomers matured, later grew into health advocacy for mothers and older women. In addition, she was unknowingly training herself for her major health advocacy project. 

In 1971 Pat learned about the dangers of DES, a supposedly anti-miscarriage prescription drug she had taken during her first pregnancy. In 1974, her worst fears were confirmed when daughter Martha was examined and found to have abnormal, possibly pre-cancerous reproductive tissue. 

Pat called a dozen or so health advocates and professionals (all those good folks she had met during earlier projects) to a meeting at (where else?) Cody’s Books. 

Pat named their effort DES ACTION, and during the next decade it grew to become a national organization, absorbing more and more of Pat’s interest and time, especially after she and Fred sold Cody’s Books to Andy Ross in 1977. 

Then, in 1983, personal tragedy threatened to stop Pat dead in her tracks. Fred died. “I was devastated, paralyzed. I couldn’t stop crying and crying.” 

Pat looked for a support group and, incredibly, there were none. “I said, I can’t believe this. Berkeley has a support group for everything, but not for grief?” 

So, together with two therapists, Ahna Stern and Marcia Perlstein, she began one. They agreed on two firm criteria: “It had to be free, and it had to be egalitarian, no authority passing down the official word on how we were supposed to feel. It would meet in a neutral location—a schoolroom or church—and would be led by two facilitators, one a grieving person, the other a trained, (volunteer) group leader.” 

For the next five years, Pat helped start and run groups until many agencies and organizations began to offer them. “It was essential for me, because giving back to the community is part of healing.” 

Another part of healing was Pat’s continued work for DES ACTION, soon an international association, helping thousands of women who were injured by a useless and harmful drug prescribed by doctors for more than twenty years. For thirty years, DES ACTION has continued to grow in services and influence. 

Among many activities, DES ACTION offers education for possibly affected mothers and their children; makes referrals to doctors and lawyers; monitors research, pointing scientists in directions suggested by anecdotal evidence; publishes the DES Newsletter, still edited by Pat; lobbies for legislation, winning victories like a recent Congressional appropriation of $5 million for DES research and treatment. 

Another recent triumph: the Center for Disease Control put out a handsomely printed, free DES UPDATE, which recently won an award from the Public Relations Society of America. “We are thrilled to see the hard work of the CDC group recognized.” Ever the advocate reaching out, Pat insists that this article include the DES ACTION Web site www.desaction.org. 

Recently the subject of a San Francisco Chronicle series titled “Unsung Heroes,” Pat commented, “Unsung? Well, if you’re busy blowing your own horn, there’s no time to do anything.” 

But Pat, who just celebrated her 80th birthday, is facing defeat in her struggle to blend into the background. On Jan. 31, 2004, at the Berkeley Public Library Foundation Authors’ Dinner, Pat will be honored as the first recipient of what is to be an annual award “to a Berkeleyan with a distinguished career related to books, literacy, and literature—The Fred and Pat Cody Award.” 

For information about celebrating Pat at this fundraiser, call 981-6115.

Berkeley citizens get their first look tonight (Tuesday, Dec. 9) at just how lean and mean City Council is willing to become when Council holds its first meeting in the belt-tightening, post-parcel tax era. 

Council must decide on what to do with close to $43 million in what is called “unencumbered carryover” funds: money which was allocated in last year’s budget, is not tied up in a contract, and was not spent by the end of the year.  

According to the city manager’s report, such funds are normally stay with the original budgeted item until the project is completed or the budgeted money runs out. But these aren’t normal times. 

City Manager Phil Kamlarz and Budget Director Paul Navazio have recommended that Council hold back nearly $3 million in carryover funds and transfer them to the Reserve Fund to “provide the City Council with increased flexibility in addressing projected budget deficits.” 

Among the larger items recommended for the budgetary ax are $395,000 in window replacement at the Civic Center Tower, $457,000 work on the Public Safety Building Communications Tower, and $264,000 in Clean Storm Water funds. 

At its discretion, of course, Council can hold back more of the unexpended funds than the city manager’s office recommends. Or it can keep all of the rolled-over money in the budget. 

In other fiscal matters to be taken up tonight, Council is scheduled to consider, on first reading, an ordinance increasing the amount the city manager can expend for capital improvements, supplies, and equipment without Council approval. The city manager’s office uses the money primarily in what it calls emergency situations. The item was held over from the Nov. 4 Council meeting at the request of Councilmember Kriss Worthington. 

Council has also scheduled two neighborhood-interest items held over from previous meetings. A public hearing on the Solano Avenue Business Improvement District was postponed from Nov. 18 to attempt a compromise with Solano Avenue businesses who felt that the district would not serve their particular needs. Held over from the same meeting is an appeal by neighbors of the city’s Corporation Yard, who have complained that the proposed demolition of buildings at the yard will disrupt the peace of their neighborhood. 

Tonight’s meeting will feature dueling bridge toll increase recommendations, with Councilmember Worthington favoring State Sen. Don Perata’s bill to raise area bridge tolls from $2 to $3 and Councilmember Miriam Hawley asking that Council take no position. The money raised would be set aside for Bay Area transportation projects. 

Hawley has complained that not enough of Perata’s proposed toll increase money would go to what she calls “transit-friendly” projects, while too much will be set aside for what she calls “less cost-effective” projects such as highway improvements, construction of parking lots, digging a fourth bore to the Caldecott Tunnel, and extending BART to Warm Springs. Worthington argues that the transportation infrastructure improvements are needed. 

Finally, Council will be asked to authorize a staff review of the Council Agenda Committee, including soliciting comments from the public, with a report to come back to Council in March.  

The Agenda Committee, made up of Mayor Tom Bates and councilmembers Linda Maio and Miriam Hawley, currently organizes the placement of items on Council’s agenda. A recent suggested amendment to the Agenda Committee rules, allowing them to keep city commission reports off of the agenda for one week for what committee members have called management purposes, has caused some concern among some of the city’s commission members.

A Wednesday night candlelight Holiday Vigil scheduled for the Hilltop Mall in Richmond isn’t designed so much to bring peace on earth to the Contra Costa County city as it is to keep a big-box retailer out. 

Several local politicians—including State Assemblymember Loni Hancock, Contra Costa County Supervisor John Gioia, Richmond Mayor Irma Anderson, and Richmond City Councilmember Rev. Charles Belcher—are expected to join the Contra Costa County Central Labor Council in a “Bringing Hope To Richmond” demonstration against the proposed Wal-Mart store at Hilltop. The vigil is scheduled to last from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Organizers are expecting up to a hundred participants. 

While Wal-Mart has announced plans to locate a retail store at Hilltop, it has denied that the location will be turned into a supercenter. Supercenters, or big-box stores, are retail stores the size of several football fields that sell groceries as well as traditional retail goods at discounted prices. They have created controversy in cities throughout the country, with charges that they have driven out smaller, locally based businesses. 

Hancock said she would attend the demonstration because “I share the concern of many people in the community about the spread of Wal-Marts. They adversely compete with local retail, they often do not pay a living wage, they do not provide health insurance. In the past, they have suggested that their employees join Healthy Families, which meant basically passing the cost of a decent standard of living for their employees to the State of California.” 

In California, the Healthy Families program is a joint federal and state project that provides low cost health care to children of low-income families who do not qualify for Medi-Cal. 

Earlier this year, Contra Costa County supervisors voted to ban supercenter stores from unincorporated areas of that county. The ban wouldn’t affect the Hilltop Mall store, and Wal-Mart has gathered enough signatures to put a referendum on the March ballot to overturn the ban. 

A Wal-Mart spokesperson told the Tri-Valley Herald that her company “believe[s] the voters will vote to repeal this ordinance, and I think that will send a message to other communities in Contra Costa that people don’t support ordinances like these. I think that our customers really appreciate the one-stop shopping where they can purchase a myriad of items right under one roof.”

A group of Berkeley citizens have filed ballot arguments against the March charter amendment referendum that would change requirements for running for office in the city. 

City Council authorized the ballot measure last month that would, among other things, require prospective candidates for mayor, City Council, school board, and other city offices to turn in any combination of 150 dollars and signatures to earn a spot on the ballot. 

Berkeley Peace and Justice Commissioner Elliot Cohen, who authored the argument against the proposed electoral changes, called the charter amendment “self-serving, undemocratic, and...an abuse of power.” 

The argument against the measure was co-signed by vice-chair of both the Commission on Aging and Commission on Disability Charlie Betcher, former City Council candidate Budd Dickinson, Berkeley Association of Neighborhood Associations President Marie Bowman, and local musician and teacher Hali Hammer. 

The citizens contend that while “winning against an incumbent is extremely rare, ... the ability to campaign against sitting incumbents allows a candidate to call attention to issues. ... This Charter Amendment will prevent potential candidates from participating in the debate and endorsement process. All of Berkeley [will be] worse off...” 

—J. Douglas Allen-Taylor 

Berkeley’s youngest artists will be showing their works Thursday evening when Habitot Children’s Museum, 2065 Kittredge St., unveils its 5th Annual Preschool Art Show from 5 to 7 p.m. 

The exhibition features the creations of children between the ages of 2 and 7. There is no admission charge, and refreshments will be provided. Call 667-1111 for information.

Recently, I met Kim Severson at Andronico’s on Telegraph Avenue. We weren’t there to shop. We were looking for hidden trans fats. 

These are the man-made fats that food manufacturers love to add to their products. Unfortunately trans fats can raise cholesterol levels, clog arteries and lead to heart attacks, strokes, obesity, diabetes and possibly cancer, but it won’t be until 2006 that the FDA will require trans fats to be listed on food labels .  

Kim, who lives in Oakland, has written The Trans Fats Solution, Cooking and Shopping to Eliminate the Deadliest Fat from Your Diet. Published by Berkeley’s Ten Speed Press, it is available in book stores now, in time for the holiday eating frenzy.  

Together Kim and I cruised up and down Andronico’s narrow aisles. Kim pointed out what products to avoid, while I grew hungrier by the minute. 

“Think of trans fats as sprinkles of sand inside your watch,” Kim suggested. “It won’t screw it up immediately, but eventually your watch won’t work. That’s what trans fats do to your body. It messes with the cell structure.” 

Kim pulled a jar of peanut butter off the shelf. “You know how nice and smooth this stuff is? Creamy and spreadable? That’s the trans fats doing their job. Food manufacturers love this stuff because it makes their products taste fresh.” She reads the list of ingredients on the label. “Look for this,” she said, pointing to the words hydrogenated oil. “That’s peanut-flavored trans fat.”  

Kim returned the jar to the shelf and motioned me to follow her. “See these?” she asked, picking out a package of Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies. “My beloved Milanos,” she sighed. “I let myself eat just one occasionally.” She hesitated before she put the bag back on the shelf, then pointed to the Alice Stick cookies. “These are expensive but they’re made with real butter, not hydrogenated oil. Most bakeries love to use Crisco. It’s a killer.”  

Further down the aisle we came to the crackers and snack foods. “You can eat some pretzels and old-fashion popcorn that you pop in a pan, but not the microwavable kind. That stuff is trans fat city.” I pointed to my favorite crackers, Stoned Wheat Thins. “Sorry,” said Kim. “You should buy the Ak Mak crackers instead.” 

We had wandered into the aisle that had pastas and noodles on one side and frozen foods on the other. “Marie Callender’s pot pies will just kill you,” said Kim. “That’s probably why they taste so good.” I pointed to the frozen fish sticks and Kim shook her head. I looked at the frozen quiche and Kim muttered, “Trans fatty crust.” On the other side of the aisle she gazed at the inexpensive packages of Top Ramen. “They fry that stuff in hydrogenated oil to get it dry. It’s dangerous.” 

“Kim,” I asked, “what are you having for dinner tonight?”  

“Probably something from the book. Maybe Spicy Buttermilk Fried Chicken with a salad tossed in vinegar and olive oil. What about you? Now that we’ve had this little tour, what will you have?”  

I thought about the measly contents of my refrigerator and kitchen shelves. There probably wasn’t a thing available that wouldn’t hurt me in some way. “Water,” I said. “I think I’ll just have water.” 

“No,” said Kim. “Don’t go extreme on me. Use common sense. Remember back when your grandmother cooked from scratch and used real butter and fresh ingredients?” I thought about my Grandmom Daniels, who always held a spatula with her left hand while holding a martini and a cigarette in her right. “Kind of,” I said  

“Eat sensibly,” said Kim.  

I went home and found in my mailbox another book from Ten Speed Press, the new recipe tome just out from Cesar, the oh-so-cool tapas bar on Shattuck Avenue in North Berkeley. It’s a beautifully rendered, sumptuous recipe book that is jam packed with color photographs of extravagant drinks and elegant platters. In it I found directions on how to make Gin Rickeys, Chocolate Martinis, Cosmopolitans, Old Fashions, Mojitos, Margaritas, and Sidecars, to name just a few of the dozens of cocktail concoctions gathered together on its lavish pages.  

I lay my copy of The Trans Fat Solution beside Cesar, Recipes From a Tapas Bar. What would Grandmom Daniels do? The answer was obvious. I followed the recipe for a traditional Manhattan:  

11/2 ounces whiskey, 1/2 ounce sweet vermouth, 2 dashes of angostura bitters and a maraschino cherry. Not a trans fat in sight. I simply substituted one bad thing for another, but hey, it’s the holidays and Grandmom Daniels would definitely approve.  

The Trans Fat Solution, Cooking and Shopping to Eliminate the Deadliest Fat From Your Diet, by Kim Severson with Recipes by Cindy Burke, Ten Speed Press, $12.95 

Recipes From A Tapas Bar, by Olivier Said and James Mellgren with Maggie Pond, Ten Speed Press, $29.95.

Attempted Rape 

A UC Berkeley student fought off a would-be rapist who entered her bedroom just after 2 a.m. Saturday morning. According to police, the woman awoke at her co-op in the 2400 block of Ridge Road to find a man walking into her bedroom. 

When the intruder leaped on top her and made sexual comments, she managed to get out from underneath him and race out of the room. Police were summoned and arrested Kandarp Patel, 26, of Mountain View on suspicion of burglary and attempted rape. 

Police Stop Car, Find Gun 

A police officer stopped a driver at Ashby Avenue and King Street late Monday after noticing the car lacked a front license plate. Standing outside the car, he spotted a handgun sticking out from beneath the seat, and promptly arrested Saga Llewellyn, 29, of Oakland for possession of a concealed and loaded firearm. 

Armed Robbery 

A gunman welcomed the new Longs Drugs to the 1900 block of San Pablo Avenue with an old-fashioned stick-up Thursday evening. Police said the robber entered the store, waited in line and then demanded money from the clerk—then raced out the door with an undisclosed amount of cash. 

Robbery Via Threat of Gun 

A man walking through south Aquatic Park Friday night was robbed by an acquaintance. According to police, the victim was “looking to meet somebody” when he was approached and later robbed by a man who claimed to have a gun. Nearly three hours later officers found a man hiding in the bushes who the victim later identified as the robber. Terry Johnson, 38, of Oakland was busted for robbery and violating parole.

Attempted Rape 

A UC Berkeley student fought off a would-be rapist who entered her bedroom just after 2 a.m. Saturday morning. According to police, the woman awoke at her co-op in the 2400 block of Ridge Road to find a man walking into her bedroom. 

When the intruder leaped on top her and made sexual comments, she managed to get out from underneath him and race out of the room. Police were summoned and arrested Kandarp Patel, 26, of Mountain View on suspicion of burglary and attempted rape. 

Police Stop Car, Find Gun 

A police officer stopped a driver at Ashby Avenue and King Street late Monday after noticing the car lacked a front license plate. Standing outside the car, he spotted a handgun sticking out from beneath the seat, and promptly arrested Saga Llewellyn, 29, of Oakland for possession of a concealed and loaded firearm. 

Armed Robbery 

A gunman welcomed the new Longs Drugs to the 1900 block of San Pablo Avenue with an old-fashioned stick-up Thursday evening. Police said the robber entered the store, waited in line and then demanded money from the clerk—then raced out the door with an undisclosed amount of cash. 

Robbery Via Threat of Gun 

A man walking through south Aquatic Park Friday night was robbed by an acquaintance. According to police, the victim was “looking to meet somebody” when he was approached and later robbed by a man who claimed to have a gun. Nearly three hours later officers found a man hiding in the bushes who the victim later identified as the robber. Terry Johnson, 38, of Oakland was busted for robbery and violating parole.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one in a continuing series by UC Berkeley students on the paths of Berkeley. 

Cathy Powers opens up her balcony doors, points toward San Francisco Bay, and smiles. “On a clear morning or a sunset,” she says, “there’s nothing better.” Powers, a 30-year resident, lives in a story book home. It graces the cover of Susan Cerny’s book Berkeley Landscapes, and is deemed a cultural asset by the author. Powers doesn’t really care. 

“The cover is nice and everything, but the ambiance of the place is what is important to me.”  

What makes this house and others nearby so unusual is what begins outside their front door: Rose Walk, between Euclid and Le Roy avenues, one of the most celebrated paths in the North Berkeley Hills.  

Powers uses the path every day and passes through the Euclid entrance, high-walled and dipping in the middle like two petals, and molded in rose and cream concrete. She smells the roses and walks the sweeping set of stairs that flank the entrance. 

When her walks take her to the Le Roy entrance, she sees benches nestled in corners, boulevard lamps, gnarled as well as newly planted lemon trees, and abundant flowers. All are tucked between the path designed by Bernard Maybeck in 1913, and homes built 10 years later by architect Henry Gutterson to be an integral part of Rose Walk. 

“From time to time as a child, my grandmother would take me [to Rose Walk], and we would play on the steps. It sure was fun,” says John Underhill, tour guide and Rose Walk historian. On his tours, organized by the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association, he tells about his grandfather’s involvement in the walk’s creation.  

About 1910, Underhill and his neighbors raised money to build the path to allow residents to circumvent long, winding roads to reach the City Street Car line, which had been extended from Hillgard to Berryman Reservoir. By the time the street cars were replaced by city buses in 1948, Rose Walk had become a Berk-eley institution.  

“The irony of this story,” says John Underhill, “is although my grandfather was so helpful in getting it built, he never got to see it finished.” At a party seven months before completion, Underhill died of a heart attack. 

Today, Cathy Powers revels in her view and her ambiance, and kids still have fun on the steps. John Underhill looks forward to the 2013 centennial of Rose Steps. “I’d like to do something special for that,” he says, “If I’m still around.” 

I was in St. Joseph the Worker church most recently on Sunday evening, the night before Father Bill O’Donnell died. It was that most Berkeley of events, the Berkeley Community Chorus and Orchestra’s holiday special: Handel’s Messiah, sung by an enormous assemblage of unauditioned but well-rehearsed community members who rattled the stained glass windows with glorious sound. The orchestra was splendid. The soloists were thrilling. The audience enthusiastically stood up to join in singing the Hallelujah Chorus. BCCO performances bring out all kinds of Berkeleyans, people who probably couldn’t sit down at the same dinner table for conversation (or even agree on the choice of a restaurant), but who manage to get together harmoniously a few times every year. 

My favorite part of Messiah is the triumphant trumpet solo, accompanying this text: 

Behold, I tell you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised, the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. 

I thought of it when we got the news at the Daily Planet that Father Bill had died with his boots on, at his desk after saying the eight o’clock mass. I also thought of another scriptural text: In the midst of life, we are in death. It’s all too easy, these days, to be dead to what’s going on in the world around you. People like Bill O’Donnell are the trumpeters, letting us know that we need to wake up and do the right thing.  

A few years ago, some Berkeley politicians came up with the precursor of Gavin Newsom’s Care Not Cash initiative. They put together a meeting for religious leaders, hoping to get their endorsement for a ballot measure. Father Bill showed up, and with a few well-chosen remarks put the proposal in context, and most decided not to go along with the plan. This is a role he played many times, jolting people who were tempted to close their eyes to moral decisions out of their complacency. He didn’t always win the battles he engaged in (his side lost the election on that one, though they won in court), but he raised many of us from sleeping and changed many of our hearts and minds. 

Hundreds of people in Berkeley have their favorite stories about The O’Donnell. We’ve got a few of them on these pages, and there will be more to come. 

Becky O’Malley is executive editor of the Daily Planet.

As the holidays approach, volunteer opportunities abound—part of a seasonal tradition. Unfortunately, after New Year’s rolls around, this burst of good will seems to get packed away with the decorations. 

But one gift just might ensure that the giving goes on. 

Arthur I. Blaustein’s revised and updated Make A Difference: America’s Guide to Volunteering and Community Service makes the perfect present for anyone interested in year-round volunteer opportunities, providing a comprehensive guide to well over a hundred organizations within a wide variety of interest areas. With a brief description of each organization and their volunteer opportunities and contact information, the book is a must-have for anyone whose commitment stretches beyond December. 

Blaustein, who teaches community development, social history and urban policy at UC Berkeley, knows his subject matter first-hand as a volunteer, program administrator and advocate for civil and community service programs. His many accomplishments include chairing President Jimmy Carter’s National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity, a John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service, his current appointment to the National Endowment for the Humanities, and his position as faculty advisor to the AmeriCorps program at Cal. 

His book is more just a list. In the introduction, Blaustein provides an analytical discussion of the values of volunteerism. For those of us who are drawn to volunteer, this section is especially important—offering both a clear explanation of why people want to help and a compelling argument about why it is more important than ever to re-establish our civil authority as citizens of a democracy through action such as volunteerism. 

“From Plato to the present, civic virtue has been the core of civilized behavior,” he writes. Civic participation, like volunteerism, helps us “enhance human dignity,” and “nourishes the moral intellect required for critical judgment and mature behavior.” 

In a society that is already based on quantitative values such as competition and privatism, he writes, civic participation offers the most direct way to re-establish those values that nourish a healthy society. 

I recognize this moral drought and am drawn to activism and volunteerism. Yet I couldn’t articulate why until I read Blaustein’s book. Like any theoretical work, Blaustein forced me to think about my reasons and interests, a good exercise for anyone interested in pursuing volunteerism seriously. 

As a further enticement to volunteerism, he includes a section called “Now More Than Ever,” analyzing why volunteerism and exercising one’s civil authority has become more important under the Bush administration. 

He argues that Bush and his administration have eroded our already narrow opportunities for civil participation—mouthing a supposed commitment to society while enacting policies that contradict their message, policies that are making it increasingly difficult for people to survive and drastically reducing their time to think about their moral and civil power. 

“A vital and healthy federal government is indispensable to the well-being and sovereignty of a self-governing people. That is, after all, what democracy is all about. Without this protection, whole segments of our society—especially those who can least afford it—will give up hope, will become more frustrated and alienated, and this can serve only to undermine the very social fabric of all our communities even more.” 

Nowhere in this chapter does Blaustein suggest that volunteerism is the cure for all our current social ills, but his argument is intriguing and motivating, especially for anyone worried about the current state of affairs under President Bush. 

For someone who initially looked at the book as a cheat sheet for volunteering, I was pleasantly surprised by Blaustein’s balance between theory and information. At a time when many of us, especially here in Berkeley, are actively pursuing exactly what Blaustein is giving us the tools to do, the book is an excellent addition to anyone’s collection.  

There’s also an added perk at the end. The last chapter, “Recommended Readings: A Novel Approach,” lists works of fiction he thinks will help readers understand society and provide insights for effecting change. As he explains, “[Novels] inform us, as no other medium does, about the state of our national soul and character—of the difference between what we say we are and how we actually behave.”  

The updated version of Make A Difference: America’s Guide to Volunteering and Community Service is published by Jossey-Bass and is 149 pages. It sells for $12.95 in paperback.