After Berkeley Housing Authority (BHA) workers were skewered in a city attorney report for in competencies such as housing dead people in low-income apartments and obstructing investigations, they fought back at Tuesday’s BHA meeting.  

Line workers spoke out, saying they were being scapegoated for longstanding managerial problems and attacked the city manager’s proposal—approved 5-2-2 by the council—to fix the BHA problems by “cleaning house:” eliminating 13 permanent and eight temporary housing authority jobs. (The BHA is made up of the council and two tenants, but voting on the issue was restricted to the City Council.) 

Mayor Tom Bates and Councilmember Kriss Worthington opposed the measure; Councilmembers Max Anderson and Darryl Moore abstained. 

“When I saw the [newspaper] articles, I fell apart,” Tilda Barnes told the BHA. 

“I take this work seriously,” said Barnes who has worked for the BHA for two and one-half years under three different managers. Workers told the council about computer problems, lack of training and heavy caseloads. 

Service Employees International Union 1021 officials said Wednesday they are seeking legal advice regarding the council action, as it may have violated workers’ contracts. City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque argued at the meeting Tuesday that terminating the jobs is legal, underscoring that the city is offering vacant positions in other departments to all permanent employees. 

The BHA was designated by HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development) in 2002 as a “troubled” agency and is implementing a number of changes in an attempt to reverse the designation and keep the agency in Berkeley. One change to be implemented July 1 is that a new board chosen by the mayor and approved Tuesday night by the council will replace the present City Council plus two tenant configuration.  

See the full story in Friday’s Daily Planet 

The Oxford Street parking lot was closed and bulldozed Monday morning, April 2. That night, nearby businesses had little business. The lot is the site of plans to build a residential housing project (called Oxford Plaza) and environmental center named in honor of the late activist David Brower. 

“Everybody has no parking,” said Mike Yu, owner of the 25-year-old Great China restaurant at 2115 Kittredge St. Yu was re-arranging cars in the parking lot which he operates behind his restaurant, trying to fit customer cars in without blocking cars in spaces he had already rented out to other merchants. 

“It’s bad,” said Dale Sophiea at the California Theater next door. “We’ll have to work around it. Definitely, we should hit the city up for some kind of parking accommodation.” 

Shihadeh Kitami, owner of Razan’s Organic Cafe, next door to the dug-up, machine-filled lot, said his sales have fallen 25 percent and, on the other side, standing in a half-filled club on a weekend night, Anna de Leon of Anna’s Jazz Island at 2120 Allston Way, said, “There was a huge difference the day it happened.” 

Business since has gone from bad to slow to OK to bad again. “It feels like one good day and 10 bad days,” Kitami said. 

In a 2005 negative declaration—a sort of unilateral method for the City Council to bypass a fuller environmental impact report—a paragraph was devoted to parking: “There is enough parking available in the downtown to accommodate unmet parking demand from the project.” 

Councilwoman Betty Olds abstained in an 8-0 vote. “She believes there are serious environmental consequences to the project,” said her aide, Susan Wengraf. 

In fact, there’s plenty of nearby parking. People just don’t want to use it. On a recent weekend night, only three of the five floors at the 612-space Allston Way parking garage, which is two blocks away, had any cars on them. The attendant said this wasn’t unusual. 

A person answering the phone at the office of Parking Concepts Inc., which runs the garage, said, “We haven’t been full in quite a while.” When it does fill up, an attendant double-parks the extra cars behind ones already there. 

Robert, a regular customer at Razan’s, said he used to pay $1 to park at the Oxford Street lot for an hour. Now he looks for on-street parking. “I don’t want to pay $5 bucks to park,” he said. 

Customers outside Great China said they were waiting for one of Yu’s other parking operations to open up—the spaces he rents in the evening from the Touchless Car Wash parking lot across the street. 

There’s a sense that upper Kittredge Street, where it runs to its end at Oxford Street, isn’t wholly a part of downtown Berkeley but more like a crossroads hamlet. All the businesses are off-normative. 

Great China is filled with large groups of extended Chinese families. Razan’s is the first and allegedly only all-organic restaurant in Berkeley. Also, it welcomes small children, even 2-year-olds, who sometimes conduct experiments involving organic rice and the laws of gravity. 

The California Theater, built in 1913 as a vaudeville house, is the first to run controversial and off-beat films such as Farenheit 9/11, An Inconvenient Truth, The U.S. vs. John Lennon and The Passion of the Christ. Employees’ dress tends toward a kind of black, anarchist style. Maria, a homeless woman who sometimes sleeps in doorways on the street, sweeps the street clean in front of the businesses everyday. 

The parking lot was eccentric too. 

Demolished with it was an existential footpath, used by scores of people a day. It opened out in front of Razan’s, where I sometimes work. Over time, people peeled back the parking lot fence and tramped down the shrubbery.  

One night, a guy came out of the dim lot with pliers and yanked out a protruding metal rod that was the last obstruction. 

This kind of activity was first noticed by landscape architects. The walkways they drew on paper and cemented into the ground often weren’t used. People favored shortcuts, cutting pathways in the grass down to bare dirt.  

The architects called these “desire paths.” People’s Park is full of them. 

Berkeley High School students once attempted to make a “desire path” across two lanes of moving traffic. 

Billy Keys, a Berkeley graduate and now school safety officer, recalls: “It was four or five years ago, during renovation. The kids would walk across to the park in the middle of the block, dodging traffic. 

“One morning we came out and the kids had painted a yellow crosswalk here,” he said, indicating two dark, faded stripes running across the middle of Allston Way. 

“Cars saw it and stopped.” This backed up traffic at the intersections and “after a couple of days, the city came and painted them over.” 

The Berkeley Housing Authority has paid rent on at least 15 units where tenants are dead—as much as two years of rent on the deceased, failed to inspect units where substandard conditions exist, and allowed ineligible family members to “inherit” a unit ahead of others on the waiting list.  

These are just a few of more than a dozen serious problems cited by City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque in a report to the Berkeley Housing Authority members. The report also recommends the removal of all housing authority staff except new manager Tia Ingram. 

The report will be discussed today (Tuesday) at the 6 p.m. BHA meeting. 

The city will contract for temporary staff until the new board takes over and hires staff or contracts with the city for staff. The current BHA board, made up of the City Council and two tenants, will continue to serve until June 30. At tonight’s meeting BHA will be asked to approve members of the new authority (selected by Mayor Tom Bates) who will take over new responsibilities July 1. 

“The problems are so numerous and pervasive that they reveal BHA’s inability to perform routine functions in conformance with federal regulations,” Albuquerque says in her report. 

HUD (the federal Housing and Urban Development eepartment) has deemed the Berkeley agency “troubled” since 2002; if the authority does not significantly improve, it could ask an agency outside Berkeley to manage the city’s low-income housing efforts. 

Reacting to the removal of 13 permanent and eight temporary staff, Section 8 tenant Patrick Kohoe told the Planet, “This may be what it takes to clean up the ‘troubled’ agency.” There are “some really hard-working employees with tremendous workloads,” Kohoe added, but there are others that no other department wants.  

The housing authority “has long been the Siberia of Berkeley’s ‘no lay-off’ policy,” he said.  

Employees won’t be laid off. “We’re looking at it as a major reshuffling,” City Manager Phil Kamlarz said in an interview Monday. Some employees may go through the city’s “progressive discipline” procedure in other departments, he said.  

Temporary employees will be hired in the interim and the new board will oversee hiring new employees. Former employees will be able to reapply for their jobs, according to a report authored by Kamlarz accompanying the city attorney’s report. 

In her report, the city attorney detailed concerns with staff: files had disappeared then reappeared, employees have “actively obstructed Ms. Ingram’s attempt to piece together missing information….”, obstructed HUD (Housing and Urban Development) oversight, and has given “extremely poor service to clients.” 

Kohoe said he has felt the impact of the agency’s problems. When he first received his section 8 voucher, he wanted to stay in the apartment he had been renting and his landlady agreed to accept the voucher. She had so much difficulty in getting a response from BHA, however, that he almost lost the apartment, he said. 

Kamlarz doesn’t place the entire blame on line staff. “Part of the problem is that we’ve had so many different managers,” he said, noting that there have been four different managers over the last four-to-five years. 

“I have concluded that the city simply cannot competently staff BHA operations and that the new board must be able to create its own staffing structure in order to attempt to address the deficiencies of the current operation….” says Kamlarz’ report. 

Another concern noted in the city attorney’s report is the management by Affordable Housing Association of the city’s 75 public housing units. “Eight public housing units have remained vacant under AHA’s management. The dates the units initially became vacant range from May 1, 2004 to Sept. 1, 2006 and they are still currently vacant,” the Albuquerque report says, also alleging that BHA had received complaints of criminal activity at the units “but has failed to take any action in response until Ms. Ingram arrived.” 

But in a phone interview Monday, Susan Friedland, AHA’s executive director, explained the problems this way: when AHA took over management of the public housing three and a half years ago, they were in poor condition and “files on tenant certification were non-existent.”  

Some of the units remained unoccupied while AHA did the rehabilitation work necessary, Friedland said. Further, she said, “We take complaints of crime seriously, responding to the neighbors and working with police.” 

Friedland said that currently there are five units that need to be rehabilitated and two vacant units, which she is unable to rent because BHA’s waiting list is not up to date. 

Friedland said AHA has decided not to renew their contract with BHA to manage the units at the end of June.  

While Housing Director Steve Barton generally authors BHA reports, his name is conspicuously absent from the city manager and city attorney’s May 22 BHA reports. Barton said he was unaware, until recently, of some of the problems, such as the rental of the units to dead people. 

He said he has been aware of poor service on the part of employees, and while he could not be specific, he said employees have been disciplined. 

Barton also faulted the city for cutting staff at the BHA. “It was the wrong thing to do,” he said.  

Further Barton defended AHA’s record, saying the nonprofit has done a good job, stepping in when the city could find no other agency to manage the public housing units. The slow pace of rehab work there was due to the city’s “elaborate” contracting procedures, Barton said, adding that the problem is that “they don’t own and control the [public housing] units.” 

The housing authority will meet at the Maudelle Shirek Building, 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way at 6 p.m. today (Tuesday) after the workshop on the city’s health and before the council meeting.  

Poised to reaffirm its status as a city of refuge for immigrants at tonight’s (Tuesday) City Council meeting, councilmembers are likely to debate the format of the proposal—ordinance or resolution—while supporting the concept of Berkeley as a sanctuary city, a designation made first in 1971 and again in 1986. 

Based on a San Francisco law, the draft ordinance was written by the Peace and Justice Commission, with input from Le Conte Elementary School PTA president Cary Sanders, Berkeley Organizing Congregations for Action (BOCA), and the American Federation of State, County, Municipal Employees (AFSME 3299) at UC Berkeley. 

The ordinance was placed on tonight’s agenda by Councilmembers Dona Spring and Kriss Worthington.  

Written as a resolution, a similar measure has also been placed on the agenda by Mayor Tom Bates. The council could support one, both or none of the measures. 

“An ordinance is here to stay; a resolution is gone tomorrow,” Spring told the Daily Planet last week. “The ordinance has teeth; it becomes part of the laws of the city.”  

The ordinance Spring is presenting to the council tonight, however, will have some teeth missing from the proposal she presented at last week’s Agenda Committee meeting. That draft of the law included the explicit power to sue employees who violated the ordinance.  

If Spring and Worthington get council support for the ordinance, it will go to the city attorney for approval, then go back to the council for a vote on the final draft. If supported by the council, the mayor’s resolution will go into effect immediately. 

Both the Bates and the Spring/Worthington measures speak to the need for cities to take a stand in opposition to the recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in which thousands of people have been arrested and deported in a program they’re calling Operation Return to Sender. 

Bates’ resolution says: “Immigrant parents who are victims of ICE raids are being separated from their young children, or equally abhorrent, children are being incarcerated along with their parents” and a Berkeley family’s deportation “is leading to an increased climate of fear and intimidation among Latino families and students.”  

The Spring/Worthington ordinance says that through the Return to Sender program the federal government has “escalated a program of fear and intimidation against the immigrant/minority communities” and states that the “extreme actions by the federal government against the immigrant communities are violations of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well as several other international treaties ratified by the United States.” 

Both the proposed resolution and ordinance use the same language in concluding: “No department, agency, commission, officer or employee of the city of Berkeley shall use any city funds or resources to assist in the enforcement of federal immigration law or to gather or disseminate information status of individuals in the city of Berkeley unless such assistance is required by federal or state statute, regulation or court decision.”  

In her original draft, Spring proposed that employees who violated the law would be liable for civil action up to $1,000 plus damages and attorneys fees, but after hearing from City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque, Spring backed down.  

“There are likely some labor management meet-and-confer implications of imposing such employee financial or other penalties for violations of city policies,” Albuquerque wrote the councilmember, further saying that a city such as Berkeley, with its city manager form of government, uses resolutions rather than ordinances to create policy.  

“We should not use an ordinance to regulate ourselves,” Albuquerque told the Planet last week. 

Spring did, however, retain some “teeth” in the current draft ordinance, which says that the appropriate city commission “shall review the compliance of he city departments, agencies, commissions and employees with the mandates of this ordinance in particular instances in which there is question of noncompliance….” 

Individuals from both BOCA and AFSCME said they would like the council to pass the ordinance. 

“I support the ordinance. Because of the horrible situation, I don’t want the city to collaborate with ICE,” said BOCA organizer Belen Palido, calling Bates’ resolution “kind of symbolic.” She said BOCA was going to try to meet with the mayor to ask his support for the ordinance. 

And Seth Newton, lead organizer for AFSCME at UC Berkeley said the union supports the ordinance. “As a union, we support the strongest possible measure.” 

Newton added, “We want to be sure the city respects the rights of all the members of the Berkeley community.” 

Cary Sanders said the main point is for the city to make a strong statement of solidarity with the immigrant community. 

“There’s fear in the community,” she said. 

Tonight at 6:30 p.m., before the 7 p.m. council meeting, BOCA is organizing a rally in front of the Maudelle Shirek Building, 2134 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way to speak out supporting “the civil rights of all of its residents and declaring itself an immigrant sanctuary.”  

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger came to Berkeley Friday, declaring that market forces would solve one of the greatest issues in global warming. 

Backing him up was retired General Charles F. Wald, who described global warming as a national security issue, a “non-traditional security threat” in an increasingly complex world where the free flow of Middle Eastern oil to the United States is a military mission. 

“The governor, in a previous career, is known throughout the world as the quintessence of an action hero. Today he is calling for action, not just words, in addressing climate change while maintaining our economic prosperity,” said Steve Chu, the Nobel laureate who heads the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). 

“Thank you very much Dr. Chu for that great introduction,” said Schwarzenegger. “It was just the way I wrote it.” 

The event was the International Law Carbon Fuel Symposium, held at LBNL. 

But one critic who attended the event, a leading European environmental regulator, cast doubt on the program, warning that it lacked safeguards for both the people and the land most likely to be affected by the research now under way at the lab. 

“There are real issues about diversity and protection of the environment,” said Axel Friedrich, who directs the programs on transportation issues and noise reduction for the Umwelt Bundes Amt, Germany’s federal environmental agency. 

Gen. Wald, who retired last July at the four-star rank after serving as deputy commander of the U.S. European Command, responsible for military affairs in 91 nations, is now a private-sector consultant who serves on the Energy Security Leadership Council of the advocacy group Securing America’s Energy Future and advises the CNA Corporation, a Pentagon-linked think tank. 

With “our national security dramatically influenced by the demand for oil,” Wald said, the best solution is development of alternative fuels. 

That mission dovetails perfectly with LBNL’s current push for a $125 million Department of Energy biofuel grant and with the lab’s central role in a controversial $500 million grant from BP (the erstwhile British Petroleum) to UC Berkeley, which relies heavily on the lab and its resources. 

As if to emphasize the point, UCB Chancellor Robert Birgeneau walked into the meeting room with the governor and Chu and left when they did, none of them staying for the full program. 

The governor, who announced an executive order in January mandating that the state reduce the carbon intensity of transportation fuels sold in the state by 10 percent by 2020, said the solutions would be found “by unleashing the power of market forces.” 

Indeed, the new standard “is our best weapon against rising oil prices and gas prices because a vibrant market in alternative fuels and alternative vehicles, alternative engines, gives customers a great choice, gives different choices, and that empowers the customers, of course, to say no to those high fuel prices, to say hasta la vista, baby.” 

And UC Berkeley’s efforts, the governor said, are “showing us what the world could look like in 2020 and way beyond, and they’re showing us what steps we actually need to take to create this low-carbon environment that everyone wants.” 

Wald and other speakers reiterated the governor’s position, and many of the presentations featured projections that relied on significant increases in productions of cellulose-derived biofuels to reach his targets. 

Behind Schwarzenegger as he spoke, a video display featured as its largest single element a stand of miscanthus, the energy crop which is the basic element in the proposal UC Berkeley used to win the BP grant. 

That proposal called for development of genetically modified strains of the crop to grow in normally inhospitable environments, to be transformed into fuels after harvesting by genetically modified microbes derived from those that inhabit the guts of termites, where they digest cellulose to feed their six-legged host. 

Friedrich’s concerns 

Only one critic, Axel *Friedrich, rose to speak during the question period following the morning session. 

Friedrich, who holds a doctorate in engineering, said he was alarmed at the rush into alternative fuel production without serious consideration on long-term impacts. 

Afterwards he explained his concerns in greater detail.  

“Clearly, they understand the problem, but you need to look at the effects 50 and 60 years down the line,” he said, noting that a British participant had said that efforts there would be evaluated only five years down the line. 

“You have to address the whole transportation system as well, and you have to address what the impacts on land use will be” for people in the areas where crops are grown. “You have to look at the environmental impacts. And you have to look at other pollutants that may arise and at quality of life.” 

One of the greatest concerns, he said, is that the likely sites of biofuel production are in lesser developed countries in areas with the greatest and most-threatened biodiversity. 

“You have to look at all these things before you start, not afterwards,” he said. 

He also noted that despite the claims of the governor and others at the conference, Germany has a much higher target for carbon reduction, 40 percent by 2020. 

“Maybe that’s why they didn’t let me speak on one of the panels,” Friedrich said. 

Friedrich also said Germany had an even more stringent goal than California, a 40 percent reduction by 2020, “and we are the only country in the world that is reducing our total fuel consumption, and that’s not just for transportation.” 

Photograph by Richard Brenneman. 

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger opened a day-long conference on low-carbon fuels at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Friday as lab director Steve Chu and retired four-star general Charles F. Wald looked on. The retired officer declared climate change a national security issue, best solved by alternative fuel development.

By Judith Scherr 

The mayor’s kick-off event aimed at cutting local greenhouse gas emissions brought almost 150 people—most of them already active in the fight against global warming—to the South Berkeley Senior Center Saturday morning to network and hear speakers talk about walking lighter on the planet.  

Berkeley resident, comedian and environmentalist Josh Kornbluth served as MC. 

Introduced by her husband, Mayor Tom Bates, Assemblymember Loni Hancock lauded AB 32, which requires a statewide reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. “Now our task is to implement the bill,” Hancock told the crowd. 

Timothy Burroughs, recently hired by the city to plan the local emission reduction effort, pointed out that half of the city’s emissions come from vehicles. (The statistics exclude freeway emissions, he said.) Residents contribute about 26 percent of the city’s greenhouse gases and businesses emit 27 percent, he noted.  

Tom Kelly, director of Kyoto USA, a grassroots effort to encourage U.S. cities to actively address global warming, spoke to the Planet after briefly addressing the gathering.  

Kelly said that while the room was mostly filled with committed environmentalists talking to each other, the mutual support would sustain future efforts to “reach out more deeply” to yet uncommitted people in the community.  

The next step is to take the question of greenhouse gas reduction to various commissions to get input into the effort, he said. The Community Environmental Advisory Commission is tentatively scheduled to discuss the question at its June 6 meeting at 7 p.m., 2118 Milvia St. 

While some ideas cost relatively little, such as the effort to get people to use compact fluorescent light bulbs, large-scale ideas are expensive. “We might have to tax ourselves,” Kelly said. 

For example, one costly suggestion Kelly raised would be to put solar panels on every building in the city. 

The city plan, which the council is expected to adopt at the end of the year, will likely designate choices among possible projects. 

Councilmember Kriss Worthington briefly addressed the gathering, supporting the concept of creating a free bus pass for workers on Telegraph Avenue, similar to the eco-pass that has reduced city worker dependence on the automobile. 

Worthington also talked about developing a “zero waste” facility, where all items “dumped” at the transfer station would be reused. 

Another effort the city might decide to fund is Community Choice Aggregation, which was put forward at the Saturday event by a nonprofit called “Bay Localize.” CCA would be a partnership among Berkeley, Oakland and Emeryville to sell electricity to residents of the three cities. A plan for CCA is moving toward implementation in San Francisco and is being discussed by the Energy Commission, which will present CCA options to the City Council in the fall.  

Photograph by Judith Scherr 

Josh Kornbluth, comedian, environmentalist and Berkeley resident was the MC for Saturday’s community meeting on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

It was good news/bad news in the Bay Area media world last week. 

The good news came in the announcement that a local chain newspaper was going independent; the bad news was the proclamation of the wholesale downsizing of the area’s largest news staff. 

Village Voice Media, owner of both the East Bay Express and the SF Weekly, revealed an agreement to sell the Express to a group of buyers including local editor Stephen Buel. 

The bleak news came Thursday, when San Francisco Chronicle Publisher Frank Vega tersely announced that the paper would slash its newsroom staff by 25 percent—for a total of 100 jobs, or 80 reporters and 20 editorial managers. 

Blogger and media maven Allen Mutter (part-owner of the Berkeley Daily Planet in its previous incarnation) reported that when combined with an additional 60 jobs lost in the last two years, the cutbacks will amount to 35 percent in newsroom strength. 

Mutter wrote that the paper had lost more than $330 million since Hearst bought in seven years ago. 

“When Hearst bought the paper, they committed to keeping all the reporters at both the Chronicle and from the Examiner. So at a time when other newspapers were cutting jobs, the Chronicle was contractually obliged to keep those it had,” Buel said.  

The news nonetheless came as a shock to some Chronicle reporters, prompting one to quip to a Daily Planet reporter, “The way things are going, we’ll be the same size as you guys before long.” 

Ben Bagdikian, former dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and a revered figure in the world of working journalists, said the move poses serious risk for the Chronicle. 

“By substantially cutting back on the paper’s ability to produce detailed stories about local events, they could greatly reduce the Chronicle’s appeal to its readers,” Bagdikian said. “If they go for brevity or less detail, they make themselves less competitive with broadcast media and with other newspapers.” 

He said the downsizing is especially shortsighted in light of the paper’s essential monopoly on news on its side of the bay, and in light of the “short-sighted” agreement Hearst had concluded with the firm that dominates daily news coverage of the rest of the Bay Area. 

The MediaNews Group owns 12 Bay Area newspapers, including the Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times, San Jose Mercury News and the Marin Independent Journal. 

Under an agreement between Hearst Corp. and MediaNews, the two papers contemplated cooperating on advertising sales and distribution of their papers. But a lawsuit filed by San Francisco entrepreneur Clint Reilly apparently scuttled the proposal, at least for the moment—though details of the settlement are sealed and accounts of its contents differ. 

Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, said the Chronicle’s cutbacks weren’t unexpected, “especially because they hadn’t done so in the past couple of years even though they’re losing tons of money.” 

Blogger Tim O’Reilly, whose O’Reilly Radar blog covers tech issues, had predicted the layoffs back in March, when he reported on a newsroom meeting called by Editor Phil Bronstein, who, he wrote, had lamented that the news business “is broken, and no one knows how to fix it...And if any other paper says they do, they’re lying.” 

Tim Redmond, executive editor of the Bay Guardian, called the cutbacks “tragic, all those reporters, 80 of them, looking for jobs, and there aren’t any. These are people with mortgages, with children in college, with rent to pay.” 

On the other hand, he said, “it’s ridiculous that the virtual monopoly newspaper in this city can’t make money.” 

Redmond said the Chronicle made its biggest mistake when it decided to become a regional newspaper rather than concentrating on San Francisco. As a result, he said, “their market penetration in San Francisco is abysmal. They fought a competitive war they couldn’t win.” 

Chronicle editorial and managment representatives either didn’t return calls for this story or declined to comment on the record. 

While downsizing has become the norm in newsrooms across the nation, most of the recently announced reductions are smaller in scale than Hearst’s. A random sample of recent downsizing in other newsrooms includes: 

• 50 of 383 newsroom workers at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune, announced on May 8. 

• 71 journalists at the Philadelphia Inquirer, 17 percent of that paper’s editorial department. 

• 36 reporters and four editors at the Akron, Ohio, Beacon-Journal, with the cutbacks, announced in August, matching the Chronicle’s one-journalist-in-four level of severity. 

• 80 newsroom workers at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, announced as part of a wide-ranging restructuring on Feb. 15. 

Other papers have been gradually cutting back their newsrooms, including the Los Angeles Times, which cut 62 newsroom jobs three years ago and offered buyouts to more last month.  

And if cutbacks aren’t enough, some newspapers are shutting down, including the King County Journal in Kent, Wash., which folded in January, with 40 workers losing their jobs after a buyout and consolidation. 

The decline of print has also hit the magazine sector, with Time Inc. announcing in January plans to eliminate 300 magazine jobs, after axing more than 600 workers last year. 

The week also witnessed the Oakland Tribune’s abandonment of the building it had called home for most of the last century and a move to more industrial quarters near the Building Formerly Known as the Oakland Coliseum. 

While dour is the mood of the day in the Chronicle’s newsroom, Buel and his staffers are smiling at the East Bay Express in Emeryville, following last week’s announcement that Village Voice Media (VVM) had agreed to sell the paper to Buel and a consortium of investors. 

Hal Brody, a former alternative weekly publisher and record industry figure, heads a group of three investors who have a 50 percent stake in the paper, while Buel heads a group of another five which controls the other 50 percent, including Kelly Vance, the paper’s veteran calendar editor and co-founder of the Express. Brody is president of the independent Express, and Buel remains as editor.  

While Buel wouldn’t confirm reports which had the Express alone losing $500,000 every year, but he did say that the previous owner, New Times—which owned the paper outright between 2001 and late 2005 before merging with VVM—“doesn’t do well in places with competition.” There has been no announcement about the fate of the SF Weekly, Village Voice Media’s other Bay Area newspaper, which is rumored to be losing $1 million a year or more. SF Weekly’s main competitor in the San Francisco alternative market is the Bay Guardian. 

“It will be wonderful to be independent again,” said Buel, although the paper will continue to maintain a cooperative advertising sales program with SF Weekly, he said. 

He added, “If you look at the paper in the past year or so, you will see that it has gotten a lot thinner.” The chain does well in places like Denver, Phoenix and Miami, he said, “which are basically suburban markets, which are not competitive. But they didn’t do well here.” 

Now, “out from under the ax of New Times, we will be able to make a much better paper,” Buel said. 

The paper remains the target of a lawsuit about Village Voice Media’s advertising sales practices filed by the Bay Guardian, charging that the chain owners engage in predatory advertising pricing designed to corner the market and drive competitors out of business. 

Buel said the Express will still be a defendant in the suit, but that VVM has assumed all responsibilities for the litigation as part of the sale. 

How much did the new owners pay? Buel isn’t saying, but he did say he’d refinanced his home to help pay the tab. 

What lies ahead? 

“You won’t see a lot of changes right away if you look at the paper,” he said. 

One major change to happen soon will be a return of events listings, currently offered only on the website, to the print paper.  

Buel said the paper will also reorient itself to its previous home turf of Oakland, Berkeley, Albany, Emeryville, Piedmont and environs. New Times/VVM had expanded distribution to all of Alameda and Contra Costa counties.

The Berkeley Board of Education will vote Wednesday on whether to approve $750,000 in funds from the Office of Public School Construction (OPSC) and $305,000 in PG&E funds to complete a solar project for Washington Elementary School. 

The board first discussed this proposed pilot solar project at the April 11 school board meeting but refrained from giving it the go-ahead. Board members asked staff to come back with a more comprehensive report. 

The Berkeley Unified School District estimates the cost of the project to be $1.25 million, which takes into account the cost of putting in photovoltaic panels as well as replacing the current roof at Washington. 

KyotoUSA, a volunteer group which encourages cities to work with their governments to reduce greenhouse emissions, estimated the initial cost to purchase and install a solar system to be $800,000. The district, with KyotoUSA’s help, submitted a request to PG&E on March 21 for partial funding valued at $305,000. The school bond Measure AA would contribute $195,000 toward the cost. 

Dubbed as the HELiOS Project (Helios Energy Lights Our Schools), the proposed system would cover 100 percent of the main building’s electricity needs. It also comes with a 25-year warranty. Washington consumed approximately 170,560 KwH in energy and paid around $25,505 in electricity costs in 2006.  

School board vice president John Selawsky and superintendent Michele Lawrence both spoke in favor of the project at the last school board meeting. 

“If we don’t do this in the next six months, the $305,000 in funds is going to become $225,000,” because the PG&E grant will be reduced, Selawsky told board members at the April 11 meeting. “We are not inventing the project. It has been done before.” School districts in San Jose and San Diego and some individual schools in Marin have installed solar in their schools in the past. 

Benefits of the HELiOS project to the district and the community claimed by proponents include: 

• Significant cost savings to the district over the life of the system 

• Environmental benefits including reduction in fossil fuel use, cleaner air and reduced GHGs 

• Educational benefits that will flow from the presence of a photovoltaic system. 

• Bringing in new donors and volunteers to assist in expanding the project beyond Washington School and the City of Berkeley 

• Giving students tangible evidence that adults were taking climate change seriously and are doing something about it 

Measure A funds for Visual and Performing Arts 

The board will vote whether to approve expenditures for visual and performing arts from Measure A. Measure A money will be spent for the first time to support both visual and performing arts programs in the school district next year, including dance, theater, music, drawing and painting. 

The board will also take into account recommendations made by the BSEP Planning and Oversite Committee. 

Child Development Services 

The board will vote whether to approve contracts with the Berkeley-Albany YMCA and the UC Berkeley Early Childhood Education Program to subcontract child development services. The California Department of Education (CDE) recently informed district staff that state funding for the district’s child development program could be reduced next year. 

District staff has requested the CDE to carry on the present contracted amount for next year by outlining the district’s plan to: 

• Rebuild the pre-school sites with additional classrooms 

• Develop partnerships with two programs in the area, the UC Berkeley Child Development program and Berkeley-Albany YMCA (Head Start), for the 2007-08 academic year.  

Under the contract, agreements have been set up with both agencies to provide services for pre-school students at an amount not to exceed $200,000 each. 

This step will allow the district to expand enrollment in the pre-schools once the pre-school facilities have been completed. 

Mayor Tom Bates has added to and clarified some elements in his Public Commons for Everyone Initiative proposal, which the City Council will be asked to address tonight (Tuesday).  

The meeting will be preceded by a workshop on the status of the city’s health, information on which will not be released until the 5 p.m. workshop. Earlier, such reports showed a dramatic discrepancy between health and longevity of Caucasians living in the Berkeley hills and African Americans living in the flatlands. The Berkeley Housing Authority meeting is at 6 p.m. The City Council meets at 7 p.m. 

The mayor’s proposal, which may be off its original fast track, is aimed at removing people with inappropriate behavior from shopping areas. 

In his new proposal, the mayor has accepted a recommendation from the Homeless Commission to organize a joint meeting among the Mental Health, Homeless and Human Welfare commissions. Many of these commissioners have said the measure criminalizes homelessness. 

The mayor and Councilmember Gordon Wozniak have been asking the community for its support; a number of positive responses were received. 

“I had some young students visiting from Germany recently,” Marna Owen wrote the mayor in support of the measure. “They were afraid to cross the street at University and Shattuck due to the number of loitering homeless people. Please, it’s time to make our city more livable and friendly.”  

To formulate new laws on “sidewalk obstruction,” develop diversion programs, look at community policing and “significant public discussion” on the question, the mayor is asking the city to hire a new six-month staff person. 

Because the mayor is asking for existing laws to be more strictly enforced, for the addition of new laws such as no smoking in commercial areas, and for community policing, Bates is asking for new policy development by the Police Review Commission. 

To pay for additional police and services, he has proposed funding the initiative by increasing parking meter rates and installing new meters.  

In addition to making Berkeley a City of Refuge (see related story), the council will hold a public hearing on the budget and discuss: 

• The Telegraph Avenue and North Shattuck Avenue business improvement districts’ annual reports. 

• A Sweatshop-Free Ordinance, that would prohibit the city from buying goods made under sweatshop conditions. 

• Setting a public hearing for an appeal of the new Trader Joe’s/housing development at 1885 University Ave. The council also will look at approving “fair labor practices” at the new Trader Joe’s on University Avenue. 

• The sunshine ordinance process. 

• Requests to refer the following items to the budget process: $3,000 for a Berkeley Boosters intern, $8,000 for the Dorothy Day breakfast program, $10,000 for the Malcolm X Arts Collaborative, $15,000 for Services for West Berkeley disabled children and $1 million for police. 

Berkeley High School named Cheryl Draper as its new girls’ basketball coach Monday. Draper replaced Gene Nakamura two weeks ago and her team will play their first basketball game in November. 

Coach “Nak” Nakamura, who had coached the girls’ basketball team for 25 years, retired on Feb. 16 after leading his team to win the Division I State Champions twice and Division I Northern California Champions seven times. 

Draper is a graduate of Division I Bradley University and has held the all-time assists record for the Indiana Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (IAIAW). 

She has taught physical education at Longfellow Middle School and has served as junior varsity coach with the Berkeley High Lady Jackets since 2000. 

From 1998 to 1999, Draper was head coach at Piedmont High School. She was also co-head coach at Kennedy High School in Richmond. 

“It feels fantastic,” she told the Planet in a telephone interview Monday. “It’s a great great honor. I hope I can keep up with the expectations.” 

Coach Draper’s advice to her team is to be consistent with their fundamental development and keep up the competitive spirit. 

The Berkeley Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) will once again hear the appeal of an administrative use permit on Thursday that would allow construction at a single-family residential building at 2008 Virginia St. 

Applicant Lorin Hill of Oakland had requested the permit to construct a 1,434-square-foot addition, raising the existing structure approximately six feet to create habitable space on the ground level, and expanding the footprint of the building to create a two-story west wing. 

A group of neighbors have appealed the permit, saying they are concerned that the additional height will block air and light. On Jan. 25, ZAB members had asked the applicant to put up story poles at the site of the building so that ZAB and neighbors could get a better visual representation of the project. 

Staff reported that during this process the applicant had modified the proposed project in a way that could satisfy the neighbors’ concerns. 

Staff recommends denying the appeal and upholding the zoning officer’s decision to approve the project with minor modifications. 

Other items 

• ZAB will once again hear the appeal of an application for an administrative use permit for 933 Keeler Ave. Applicant Ken Winfield of Berkeley was denied a permit for construction of a second story atop an existing one-story detached garage, set back five feet from the property line abutting the street and two feet from the property line to the north, with an average height of 24 feet and a maximum height of 26 feet. 

At the April 17 ZAB meeting, board members set the item for public hearing. The site, at the corner of Keeler Avenue and Forest Lane, one block west of Grizzly Peak and one block south of Marin, is in a neighborhood of mostly single-family homes ranging from one to three stories. 

The zoning officer denied the permit on the grounds of the project’s inconsistency with the neighborhood and the height of the proposed building. Winfield has appealed, but staff recommends denying the appeal and upholding the decision to deny the project. 

• Aran Kaufer of San Francisco will request a use permit modification to allow modification to the ground floor plan and to modify the inclusionary housing for the project at 2700 San Pablo Ave. Staff recommends approval. 

•Sunny Grewal of Studio G+S Architects will request a use permit to remove an existing, detached garage, construct an attached garage and expand the floor area of an existing four-unit building at 1300 Monterey Ave. Staff recommends approval. 

Nationally known African-American talk show host Tavis Smiley brought his Road to Health Wellness Expo to the Oakland Convention Center recently, with hundreds of residents turning out to the downtown facility on May 11 and 12 to hear presentations on various aspects of healthy living, sample food and products, and get free medical testing by representatives of local health clinics and medical facilities. 

Oakland was the last stop in a four-city spring tour for the Smiley Wellness Expo, with earlier stops in Baltimore, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. The Oakland event was primarily sponsored by Kaiser Permanente and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. 

Smiley said that the expo offered “one of the few places these days where you can come and get things for free.” He said that in four years of the expo’s operation, “we have not had one time where at least one person’s life had not been saved by the testing.” 

Twice after being tested at previous expos, he said, people discovered that their health was in such bad shape “they had to go directly from the floor to a hospital.” 

But other press conference participants gave out a bleak assessment of the current state of health and health care. 

Dr. Dwayne Proctor, senior program officer of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, one of the sponsors of the Oakland expo, said that the current generation “could be the first American generation to live sicker and die earlier than the previous generation.” 

Roy Combs, Oakland Unified School District general counsel, gave out a set of sobering health statistics on the district, saying that some 16,000 of its 45,000 K-12 student population is overweight, with 7,000 suffering from asthma and 7,000 with no health care at all. 

Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums called the health problems in the country and the world “an incredible challenge. We need to fashion a solution not to the size of the available funding, but to the size of the problem.” Dellums said that for their own sake, Americans can no longer afford to ignore health problems either in poor communities within the country or in other countries. “This is an increasingly tiny world, interrelated and interdependent,” the mayor said. “There is a universal health vulnerability. Someone can cough in one country today and a couple of days later, someone in another country can die as a result of that cough.”  

Repeating the old environmentalist slogan, Dellums said that “while we have to think globally and act locally, our health security ultimately stands outside of our local communities. To preserve our own health, we need to solve the health problems everywhere. We need to address the issues of environmental degradation, hunger, and poverty that are driving the health crisis.”  

Bernard Tyson, executive vice president with Kaiser Permanente, another major expo sponsor, thanked Mayor Dellums for the city’s cooperation in the event, saying, “most mayors just show up for the press briefing for these events, and that’s it. But Mayor Dellums has been a full participant.” 

Smiley called Oakland “a great place to wrap up the tour; we’re glad to be in a city where we are welcomed.”  

While the theme for each day of the two-day event was identical—with an emphasis on how minority citizens, particularly Latino and African-American, can make affordable personal lifestyle choices to improve their health—the energy level in each of the two days was distinctly different. 

Friday was youth day, with the AC Transit District and the Oakland Unified School District cooperating to bring in busloads of local middle school students. Scores of students in powder blue “Tavis Smiley Presents Health & Wellness Expo” T-shirts roamed the floor of the convention center, doing double-dutch rope-jumping at the Oakland Office of Parks & Recreation pavilion, lining up to go up the artificial rock-climbing wall, or crowding around a platform where one local cook was preparing a dish of chicken, greens, and mandarin oranges, a helper giving out samples in small cups that were greedily consumed. 

“Do you like fast food?” the cook asked as she stirred more food in the pan. When a large show of hands from the young crowd went up, she asked, “Why?” and after some students replied, “It’s good,” or “My parents take me,” the cook asked, “How many of you saw the movie Supersize Me? If you saw the movie, why are you still eating fast food?” 

Friday’s focus was childhood obesity, which Smiley said was “not a sexy topic. It’s not a topic that you can get a lot of traction on.” 

While the adults sat in on a symposium panel that included several experts in the field of childhood health or fitness, students were down the hall participating in workshops run by students themselves. 

In the workshop operated by West Oakland’s Asa Academy, middle school student workshop leaders hammered their peers on the target-of-the-day: fast food. 

Yaminah Abdur-Rahim explained that “kids who eat fast food regularly” gain weight, suffer from headaches, and are at increased risk for diseases like Type 2 diabetes. She explained how fast foods are addictive, with such extra elements as high levels of salt and sugar. “You wouldn’t think there is sugar in burgers because they’re not sweet,” she said, “but it’s there.” 

Other presenters took surveys on how many students liked fast food staples like MacDonald’s Big Macs or burritos from El Pollo Loco or Taco Bell, and then cited statistics on the calorie counts and ways students could reduce the fat intake by such tactics as “keeping your portions small (don’t supersize it!),” or “getting a healthier side dish; go for the greens; drink water instead of a soda.” 

It was not certain how much of this the student listeners took in, but as Kaiser Vice President Bernard Tyson later said, “I came into [the health business at Kaiser] because I wanted to save the world. I’ve been around enough to know that we’re not going to save the world. But if we’ve changed the lifestyle of just one child this weekend, we’ve done a great thing.”  

At the Friday press conference, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation announced a $100,000 grant to Oakland’s San Antonio Neighbors for Active Living organization for its work on child obesity. 

On Saturday, the focus shifted to adults, with workshops on such topics as disease management, sexual health, promoting healthy lifestyles, and finding affordable healthcare. Local health organizations, including Kaiser Permanente and Sutter Medical Center, provided free health screenings from dental to blood pressure to prostate exams to HIV testings.  

Other pavilions on the convention floor were set up specifically for 20- minute presentations on topics of women’s or senior health. In place of the high school hip hop dancers on the main stage on Friday, Saturday’s dancers featured a chorus line of middle-age women in T-shirts and jeans doing a (slightly) less exaggerated version of some of the same moves. 

Two years ago, Derby Street resident Martha Jones had a sofa sitting on the sidewalk of her block for an entire week. 

When Jones called Council-member Gordon Wozniak—her district’s representative—to complain, the grimy old sofa magically vanished, she said. 

“It started with the UC students who moved out of their apartments at the end of the semester and had no place to store their stuff,” she said. “At first it was just one sofa on the sidewalk, and then there was a whole family of them. If Gordon hadn’t stepped in to help, we would have turned into a furniture store.” 

As students gear up to take their last final at 3:30 p.m. today (Friday), the streets of Berkeley will likely once again be dotted with old sofas, desks, mattresses and other unwanted objects from cleared-out dorm rooms and student apartments. 

This year however, Jones has the option to call up a hotline (643-5309), which is part of an initiative the university has started with the city to tackle the trash students leave behind before they head home for summer. 

“On Thursday morning debris boxes—12 to 20 feet long—will be put out for students to use in areas near campus.” said Irene Hegarty, director of community relations for UC Berkeley. “Students often don’t have cars, since the university advises them not to bring vehicles to school because of parking problems. So they don’t have a way to get rid of the stuff they won’t be using anymore. As a result, the curbside becomes a dumping ground.” 

Although there have been efforts in the past by both UC Berkeley and the city to clean up the campus after students leave for break, none has been effective. 

With the university donating $20,000 and the city $10,000, Hegarty thinks the funds are enough to cover the expenses for the clean-up this year. 

“Door hangers were also hung up on the north side and the south side which alerted students about ways to recycle their trash,” she said. “This weekend and the next, a drop-off recycling center will be set-up on the Clark Kerr campus. Non-profits such as the Alameda County Food Bank and the American Cancer Society will be there to pick up stuff. Computer parts and anything with a plug will be picked up by computer resource centers.” 

Last June, a trip to Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Co., by the Chancellor’s Task Force on Student/Neighbor Relations—which in-cluded Hegarty and Assistant City Manager Jim Hynes—introduced them to the “Great Sofa Round-Up.” 

“Colorado State students take a parking lot and drop sofas and chairs off before they leave their dorms,” she said. “It’s difficult to do that here because there’s no one single weekend when students graduate or take their last finals.” 

While some students are happy with UC Berkeley’s efforts this year, others are not too sure they will make a difference. 

“Sure, it’s a small step in the right direction,” said mechanical engineering/political science student Igor Tregub. “Unfortunately, attempts to publicize this effort have probably begun too late for students to have any knowledge about this opportunity this year.” 

Tregub, who will be in Utah for summer, plans to drop off some furniture before he takes off. As of Thursday, he had no idea where the dumpsters were being put up. 

“I wish we had received some kind of map of where to go,” he said. “I guess I am just going to look for the dumpsters close to my apartment at Parker and Dwight.” 

The university posted a No Dumping poster displaying a beat-up sofa with the message: “A sofa on the sidewalk is not lawn furniture” on the 2400 block of Warring street Thursday morning. Hegarty said that more dumpsters would be put out today (Friday) and Saturday.  

According to Hegarty, the most trashed areas were near the fraternities located east of College Avenue, and the one and a half miles around campus. 

Emma Till, a freshman who lives on the Clark Kerr campus, said that she had not heard about the dumpsters, the door hangers or the recycling. 

“I am completely clueless about it,” she said, walking down Channing Way Thursday. 

Others such as Beta Theta Pi fraternity brothers Chris Wenner and Neill Barrett said they were happy to see the dumpsters in front of their frathouse. 

“In the past people have been upset with students for leaving things on the sidewalk,” said UC Berkeley student Jason Overman, who ran against Gordon Wozniak for City Council last year. “We haven’t had accessible dumpsters in the past. Now we do, and I think it’s an important step in helping to show the community that students care about their neighborhoods and are interested in keeping them clean.” 

Alan Lightfeldt, a Spring 2007 graduate, said that the university has a duty to make sure that students are responsible neighbors and to give them the proper resources to achieve that. 

“Since I will be moving away to D.C., most of my furniture will be going to friends and the remaining stuff will be sold on craigslist.com,” he said. “One man’s trash is often another man’s treasure. It pays to post.” 

Move-Out Campaign Dumpster Locations 

Locations for debris bins (asterisk  

indicates priority—put out on Friday  

if possible at or near the following locations): 

1. Corner of Channing/Fulton  

(2400 block of Fulton) 

2. *Dwight Way: 2200 block  

3. Dana/Dwight Way 

4. Dana: 2500 block (between 2522 and 2600) 

5. *Ellsworth/Blake (2500 block of Ellsworth) 

6. *Fulton/Parker (2600 block of Fulton) 

7. Ellsworth: 2600 block 

8. Corner of Parker/Regent (on Regent) 

9. *Derby between College/Benvenue 

10. *Benvenue: 2500 block, mid-block (large debris bin) 

11. *Hillegass: 2500 block (northern end) 

12. Regent: 2500 block (southern end) 

13. Haste Street: 2700 block 

14. *Warring: first block south of Dwight Way, west side of street 

15. *Prospect: 2500 block, mid-block 

16. *Warring: 2400 block, mid-block yellow loading zone (west side of street) 

17. *Durant, between College and Piedmont (red zone) 

18. *Channing: 2700 block (red zone) 

19. *College: 2500 block (at top of  

Parker) 

20. *College: Between Garber and Stuart 

21. *North of campus: Ridge/Euclid, red zone 

22. Ridge/LeRoy

More than 50 complaints lodged with the Police Review Commission against various Berkeley police officers sit awaiting action at the city’s Police Review Commission offices. 

The commission’s complaint hearings were suspended in September, following the California Supreme Court decision Copley Press v. San Diego. 

Hoping to restart the hearings, the City Council voted 7-0-2 Monday in closed session, with Councilmember Gordon Wozniak abstaining and Council-member Darryl Moore absent, to go back to court and appeal a related local case, Berkeley v. Berkeley Police Association (BPA). 

The court ruling in favor of the BPA is similar to the Supreme Court decision: both say a police officer’s record, including complaints against the officer, are personnel matters that cannot be made public.  

The grounds on which City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque intends to appeal the Berkeley v. BPA ruling have not been made public. In arguments with which the court disagreed, Albuquerque contended that since the PRC does not determine whether or how officers are to be disciplined, which is the city manager’s responsibility, personnel confidentiality is not violated under Berkeley’s complaint system and the Copley case does not apply to the city. 

Given the growing number of unheard complaints against the Berkeley police, the Police Review Commission voted to hold their boards of inquiry behind closed doors until such time as they could again hold them in public.  

This is what Oakland is doing, according to PRC Officer Victoria Urbi, who, with the city attorney, wrote draft regulations for closed hearings patterned on Oakland’s closed hearing regulations. (Oakland and all the other California jurisdictions with police complaint processes suspended open hearings around the same time that Berkeley did.) 

Urbi said that Oakland’s police union sat down with that city’s police commission and agreed on rules to hold complaint hearings behind closed doors. 

In Berkeley, however, “the Association has not weighed in on the [proposed] regulations,” City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque told the Daily Planet, saying that the BPA attorneys said they were going to put a proposal in writing, but never did. 

“They never sent us anything,” Albuquerque said. “I consider them to be obstructionist.” 

“They’ve been using stalling tactics to hold off our hearings,” Urbi said. 

Attorney Jim Chanin, a former PRC commissioner who helped found the commission 30 years ago, agreed: “They don’t want closed hearings,” he said. “They don’t want civilian review.” 

However, BPA President Officer Henry Wellington said they have offered to meet: “We have diligently tried at every turn to see how we can move forward,” he told the Planet, arguing that simply posting a draft on the city’s website or putting in a PRC agenda packet with only a few days notice is inadequate. “No one has asked us to sit down,” he said. 

In an April 24 letter BPA attorney Allison Berry-Wilkinson wrote to Albuquerque saying that if new regulations are proposed, they must be submitted to the BPA under a formal “meet and confer” process that is generally part of contract negotiations. 

PRC Commission Chair Sharon Kidd and Commissioner Michael Sherman both told the Planet they surmised, after the closed-door meeting in which the PRC sat with the City Council, that if the city attempted to hold closed door police complaint hearings, the union would take the city to court. 

Berry-Wilkenson’s letter seems to indicate that: “Please be advised that the Berkeley Police Association intends to exercise its right to meet and confer prior to any proposed regulation changes and will enforce that right, if necessary, through further legal proceedings.”

In an effort to bring more transparency to library governance, the Board of Library Trustees held its first public hearing last week on the budget, giving the public a chance to comment on how the institution spends the $13 million it receives through the city’s library tax.  

“It went well,” said Trustee Laura Anderson, reached by phone Thursday. A Power Point presentation by Budget Manager Beverli Marshall made the budget “clear to the public—and questions were entertained on how the money is spent.” Anderson said, adding that she thinks the information provided was adequate for her to make decisions to approve the budget in June. 

Library Director Donna Corbeil, also interviewed Thursday, agreed, but took note of the small number of participants from the public. “It would have been great if more people had been there,” she said. 

But Peter Warfield of the Library Users’ Association said the budget hearing ignored a critical question: what are ongoing costs of the library’s three-year-old Radio Frequency Identification system? Without understanding the costs, Warfield told the Daily Planet, this system of checking out books to the earlier barcode system can not be compared.  

“I think RFID is a money suck,” Warfield said. (The RFID system has also raised questions of personal privacy.) 

With the help of documents and other information provided by Corbeil, the Daily Planet was able to uncover some of the costs, which include loan repayment, materials and a maintenance contract. 

The price for the RFID system, purchased from New Jersey-based Checkpoint Systems, was $643,000, of which the library initially paid $143,000 in 2004 and funded the rest through a loan at about $111,400 per year, according to an October 18 2005 staff report by Budget Manager Beverli Marshall.  

The cost of the loan was noted in the library’s Fiscal Year 2007 adjusted budget at $127,280. According to Corbeil, the exact payment per year varies and the total payment of the loan by 2008 will not exceed $556,957. 

Another ongoing RFID expense is the annual $35,000 maintenance contract with Checkpoint Systems.  

A larger ongoing expense is the RFID tags, inserted in library materials so that the user can check them out. 

“Regular tags cost 77 cents each and media or donut tags [used on CDs and DVDs] cost $2.12 each. We estimate that in FY06/07 we added 31,000 items to the collection,” Corbeil said in an e-mail on Wednesday, responding to Daily Planet questions. 

One can compare these costs to a Sept. 14, 2005 report to the library board from Trarie Kottkamp, technical services manager, in which the regular tags were listed at 60 cents each and the donut tags were at $1.15. It is also of note that at the time the Board of Trustees voted to approve the system it was expected that these prices would fall. 

“There is general agreement that in the near future the costs of the RFID security tags should drop below their current 60 cents apiece,” Kottkamp wrote at the time. 

Warfield commented that the predicted decrease in the price of tags was one of its selling points. “It was a kind of fraud,” he alleged.  

Corbeil said the library does not keep specific records on the amount of time workers spend inserting the tags into the various media.  

Speaking for the library workers union, Andrea Segall, SEIU 535 vice president, said the concern of the workers is that there be enough money in the system so that an adequate number of library workers staff the libraries at all times and that they are able to “provide good service and worker safety.” 

Segall said that staff is working with Corbeil to analyze the effectiveness of the RFID system. “With a limited budget, we don’t want money going to things that are not working well,” she said. 

One of the goals of the group working with Corbeil is to determine whether the RFID system is operating as it is supposed to. 

Corbeil pointed out that if the Checkpoint System were found lacking, there would be new equipment expenses if the library board decided to go back to the old bar code system.

A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) plan to build a 25,000-square-foot, 60-bedroom, four-story guest house at the lab poses no significant negative environmental impacts, lab officials contend. 

Berkeley city Planning Direc-tor Dan Marks says he’s inclined to agree, especially when the relatively small lodging facility is compared with the lab’s plans for major construction projects outlined in their draft Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) covering the years through 2025. 

And the president of the Downtown Berkeley Association (DBA), which has argued consistently for the university to develop a more symbiotic relationship with downtown businesses—including restaurants and hotels— says the organization has no objections to the plan. 

The lab’s LRDP for the years through 2025 calls for 980,000 square feet of new construction, an additional 1,000 new employees and 375 to 500 new parking spaces, but the plan’s new guest quarters isn’t among them. 

LBNL officials have included the project under the previously approved development levels included in their last LRDP, completed in 1987. 

Details of the guest house project are outlined in a draft Negative Declaration filed on the lab’s website, and the lab is taking comments through the end of the month for consideration in the document’s final draft. 

According to draft, “The Guest House would address a lack of convenient, affordable, and short-term accommodations on the LBNL campus for faculty, postdoctoral associations, students, and other visitors to affiliated UC Berkeley science facilities.” 

The building “would support the research mission of the University of California by providing convenient and affordable aaccommodations in close proximity to scientific, engineering and technological research facilities on the LBNL campus.” 

The declaration estimates that half of the occupants would be spending their time at the lab’s Advanced Light Source, the massive accelerator scientists use to create ultra-fine x-rays and super-bright ultraviolet rays. 

“The thinking is that scientists need to be near the experiments,” Marks said. 

The three-story structure would house 44 “standard” bedrooms, 12 larger rooms and four “studio suites.” 

And while the structure’s overall height is listed as four stories, plans reveal that most of the structure is only three floors, with a small raised section in the middle of the building. 

At peak occupancy, the building would house 73 residents, served by a permanent staff of eight. No dining facilities are indicated in the statement, which notes that the building is located across a roadway from the lab’s cafeteria building. 

Plans for the facility also include an office, a laundry and a fitness center. 

Construction would require the elimination of one existing structure, a trailer that now occupies the site, according to the documents prepared in compliance with state and federal environmental laws. 

“It’s not a bad design,” said Marks, “and the impacts are relatively small. There won’t be much traffic, and there might be even less than there is now, since the scientists won’t need to commute from lodgings that are more distant from the lab.” 

Although the lab is currently preparing a new LRDP, it has incorporated the new facility under its previous LRDP, issued in 1987. 

Marks, who is challenging the lab’s proposed new LRDP, said he doesn’t have any problems with including the guest house under the old document. 

“They are considerably under the amount of square footage and the number of employees that were approved in the existing LRDP,” Marks said. “There is plenty of room in it for this kind of use. We are much more concerned about some of the projects in the new LRDP.” 

Mark McLeod, president of the DBA, which represents downtown businesses, said that while he continues to believe the relationship between town and gown should be symbiotic, “I do not think that this particular project violates that wish for [a] symbiotic relationship. Rather, it sounds like LBNL is providing accommodations which offer very little, if any, competition to city-based hotels,” while providing a needed service for the lab’s research goals. 

Similar guest houses are available at other labs, McLeod said.  

Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois maintains a 157-room guest house, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wa., boasts an 81-room guest house, while Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., not only operates a 13-room guest house, but also maintains 409 other rental housing units, ranging from dormitories to detached cottages. 

Barbara Hillman, president of the Berkeley Convention & Visitors Bureau, said she agreed with McLeod that the guest house “is not intended to displace business at local hotels.” 

Hillman said she was confident visitors to the lab’s lodgings would patronize the city’s restaurants and attractions “when their schedules permit.” 

The one definitive loss to the city would be room tax revenues that would be paid if lab guests were to stay in city hotels. A call on the subject to City Manager Phil Kamlarz had not been returned by deadline Thursday. 

The full set of documents is posted on the lab’s website at www.lbl.gov/  

Community/env-rev-docs.html.

When Augustin Aguayo joined the military the young man thought it would open doors for him, but soon realized that he had been mistaken. 

Recently released from military prison in Germany, Aguayo addressed a gathering Tuesday morning outside City Hall sponsored by the city’s Peace and Justice Commission, Courage to Resist and the Ehren Watata support committee. 

The event was to celebrate the city’s first Conscientious Objectors and War Resisters Day, an event to be observed annually every May 15. 

While his application for conscientious objector status was being processed, Aguayo was deployed to Iraq as a medic. “I realized how wrong war was,” Aguayo said. There he refused to load his weapon, even when he was standing guard duty.  

Aguayo’s conscientious objector application was denied while he was back from Iraq and on base in Germany. Instead of accepting deployment to Iraq a second time Aguayo went AWOL in September of 2006 and consequently spent about six months in prison. 

“Some think it’s a cowardice act,” Aguayo said, adding that he had to do what his conscience dictated.  

Tonight (Friday) Courage to Resist is sponsoring a talk by Camilo Mejia at 7 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Former Staff Sgt. Mejia spent a year in prison for refusing to return to duty in Iraq after his request for conscientious objector status was denied. 

Photograph by Judith Scherr. 

Augustin Aguayo at Tuesday’s Conscientious Objectors and War Resisters Day rally.

With some predictions that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s new budget proposals could have severe effects on the East Bay’s public transit system, East Bay transit officials and its powerful trio of state legislators are indicating that a fight is in the works. 

Because of a projected $2.2 billion shortfall in state income, the governor is proposing siphoning off some $200 million more in public transportation funds from the state’s General Fund, on top of some $630 million Schwarzenegger proposed to move from public transportation to the General Fund in his original January budget. The budget update is part of what is commonly known as the “May Revise,” when California governors recalculate their originally-submitted budget after more information on real revenue and expenditures is gathered. 

In an explanation of the new budget figures on the governor’s website, the administration calls it a “fiscally responsible” May Revise, saying that the revisions “maintain (the governor’s) commitment to aggressively pay down debt, restrain spending and build the state’s reserve while fully funding education and maintaining California’s public safety, environmental and health care priorities. The May Revision achieves these goals without raising taxes, and maintains some of the nation’s highest funding to support vulnerable populations.” 

The administration report also noted that “California is investing more in its transportation system than ever before under the Governor’s leadership,” citing, among other things, voter passage last November of a bond measure “to relieve traffic congestion on California's overcrowded roads, expand the state's mass transit and rail systems and improve air quality near California’s ports.” 

But the independent Legislative Analyst’s Office immediately concluded that it did “not believe that the administration’s transportation proposal is workable,” the LAO adding that “it would not provide the assumed $830 million in savings.” 

And in a letter to local transit agencies sent out immediately following the release of the May Revise, the Bay Area Transportation and Land Use Coalition (TALC) said that, taken with other cutbacks, “the Governor’s budget would give the Bay Area only 30% of the public transit funds that they are legally entitled to.” TALC estimated that the cuts would cost BART “over $21 million in funds they were relying on,” adding that the governor’s new budget “would result in a $10 million gash in AC Transit’s operating budget.” The TALC letter said that the state fund shortfall could cause AC Transit to either raise fares or cut service, or both. 

Calling the governor’s proposal “bad for BART,” the Bay Area Rapid Transit District said that the $21 million funding loss could halt plans for additional customer service expenditures by the district, including the hiring of more police officers, adding more trains on nights and weekends, and adding more connector buses to BART stations. In addition, BART says that the governor’s new budget could result in delaying $38 million in state money the district had earmarked for earthquake retrofitting of the tube under the bay. 

Referring to the recent truck accident that led to the collapse of a portion of the MacArthur Maze freeway, BART Board President Lynette Sweet said in a prepared statement that "two weeks ago today the Governor saw just how important BART and other public transit is to the Bay Area. We are grateful for his decision to make public transit free to help alleviate traffic congestion [following that collapse]. But it’s stunning that, not two weeks later, his revised budget makes deep cuts to the operating and expansion budgets of the very transit agencies that have come to the rescue of the tens of thousands of drivers who today continue to rely on us as we wait for crews to repair the freeway.” 

And AC Transit Assistant General Manager for Communications and External Affairs said “it is always a battle [in Sacramento] at this time of the year. And, unfortunately, public transit is not in many circles a very ‘sexy’ issue.” 

Meanwhile, the governor’s public transportation cutback proposals brought immediate opposition from local legislators, who will now deliberate and vote on the governor’s proposed budget. 

“I think the proposed cuts would be devastating in their effect on public transportation,” Assemblymember Loni Hancock (D-Berkeley) said in a telephone interview. For AC Transit, Hancock said that the cuts “would likely result in fare increases and route cutbacks, which would result in fewer people riding the buses, and a further loss in revenue. It’s a downward spiral. With 80 percent of greenhouse gases coming from auto pollution, and a good proportion of that coming from single-person auto trips, the governor ought to be increasing money to public transportation rather than decreasing it if he is serious about addressing the problem of global warming.” 

Hancock added that “these cuts can’t stand,” and said that “I think you’re going to see a lot of negotiating in the next month.” 

And in a prepared statement, Assemblymember Sandré Swanson (D-Oakland), who sits on the Assembly Budget Committee and will have one of the first cracks at the May Revise, said “Bay Area residents are all too familiar with gridlock and overly congested freeways. This is why they have always taken advantage of our world class public transportation system to help relieve the pressure on our road systems. On top of that, the people in my District take pride in the part they play in reducing the threat of global warming. I believe that the budget should provide for investing in public transportation so that it reflects our growing population and our State’s commitment to creating a greener system for commuting. The proposed transportation cuts are moving in the wrong directions for these priorities. I will be fighting in Sacramento for a budget that reflects my district’s priorities.” 

In remarks reported in the online California Progress Report, Senate President Don Perata (D-Oakland) said that “it looks like, once again, the most vulnerable Californians are in the free-fire zone,” adding that “if you look at this budget, there is no rhyme or reason to anything that is being done. I would defy anybody to sit down and plot this out and say this is the fiscal policy of the state of California. It’s not there.” 

BART and AC Transit plan to count heavily on Hancock, Swanson, and Perata in a lobbying fight to prevent the governor’s proposed public transportation cutbacks. In this fight, AC Transit would appear to have an inside track, at least with Perata. Ward Three Board Director Elsa Ortiz (representing Alameda and portions of Oakland and San Leandro) currently serves as Special Counsel to Perata on issues affecting Indian Nations. And Ortiz is no stranger to the legislature, having previously served as chief of staff to Perata’s predecessor in the senate president’s position, Bill Lockyer. 

The long-running battle of Casino San Pablo is at an end, with both sides claiming victory. 

Under compromise legislation by Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), the Lytton Rancheria band of Pomos can continue to operate slot machine bingo games, but they can’t expand their operation nor can they add Las Vegas-style slots and poker machines. 

The settlement leaves the door open for new casinos, putting an end to a proposal by Governor Arnold Schwarz-enegger to grant Casino San Pablo a monopoly in the Bay Area. 

“I’m glad we have it behind us, and that we have precluded the construction of the big, giant casino,” said Assemblymember Loni Hancock, a leading opponent of the planned expansion of the East Bay’s only tribal casino. 

The terms of the legislation have already been endorsed by tribal chair Margie Mejia, who oversaw the transformation of the casino from a cardroom to a palace for wagering machines. 

“It freezes the number of machines at the current level, and it precludes building anything outside the casino’s current envelope,” Hancock said. 

The law would also overturn the backdating of the acquisition of the casino by the Lytton Rancheria band of Pomos, a provision slipped into federal law in 2000 by U.S. Rep. George Miller. 

Miller’s legal temporal legerdemain could have allowed the tribe to follow less stringent requirements for installing the full-scale Las Vegas gambling machines. 

Under his measure, the tribe would have had an easier path to installing regular slots and poker machines, dubbed Class III machines under federal gambling law, rather than its current collection of slot-like bingo machines, which fall under the less restrictive Class II provision that includes the more typical gaming board and marker bingo games. 

In the face of mounting opposition from local governments, the tribe had opted for bingo machines, installing the first allotment of 500 on Aug. 1, 2005. 

The machines, beyond challenge under federal law, proved a bonanza for both the tribe and the city, and revenues soared. Tribal payments to the city of 7.5 percent of the gross machine wager and a smaller PILOT (payments in lieu of taxes) fee accounted for two-thirds of San Pablo’s general fund budget by the following year, or $10.9 million, according to city records. 

Funds to the city from the 1,050 machines now in place total more than $1 million monthly, more than four times the revenues the city received from the casino’s previous card room incarnation. 

Feinstein’s measure would will also drive the final stake through the heart of the deal once proposed by the tribe and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to allow the tribe to build a massive, 5,000-slot gambling palace with a Bay Area casino monopoly in exchange for giving the state 25 percent of the casino’s take. 

While the measure still needs to pass both houses of Congress and a presidential signature, Hancock said she expects passage as a routine matter.

Berkeley’s Transportation and Planning commissions and the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee (DAPAC) will meet with representatives of AC Transit next Thursday night, May 24, to talk about Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). 

The bus agency hopes to create dedicated bus lanes that will enable commuters to make relatively fast trips along a 17-mile corridor connecting Berkeley, Oakland and San Leandro. 

If approved, the project could lead to major changes in the streetscapes of Telegraph and Shattuck avenues and Adeline Street. 

BRT plans are playing a key role in DAPAC’s discussions about the new downtown plan, and the proposal has the strong backing of the Transportation Commission. 

Thursday’s joint meeting, which begins at 7:30 p.m., has been shoehorned into the agenda of the Transportation Commission meeting, which starts at 7 p.m. 

The meeting will be held in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. at Martin Luther King Jr. Way. 

The project’s Draft Environmental Impact Review will be the subject of another meeting June 14, a public hearing that will be held at 7 p.m., also in the North Berkeley Senior Center. 

The environmental documents are available online at the AC Transit website. 

Copies are also available at the Main, South and Claremont branches of the Berkeley Public Library, and at UC Berkeley’s Environmental Design Library, 210 Wurster Hall.

School burglary 

At 1:12 p.m. on Sunday, three teenage boys broke into King Middle School, on the 1700 block of Rose, and an alarm went off. The police arrived on the scene and arrested the suspects. 

Nudity at Fat Slice 

On Sunday at 2:20 p.m., there was a case of indecent exposure at Fat Slice on the 2300 block of Telegraph Avenue. The man is not in custody. 

Home invasion 

On May 7, a little after midnight, several individuals wearing dark clothing broke into a home on the 2400 block of Milvia St and stole a laptop. No suspects have been identified. 

Stabbing with fire 

At 4:21 a.m. on May 7, on the 2600 block of Shattuck Avenue, somebody broke into the Fire Station and stabbed two firefighters, who were injured. The Police Department arrested the suspect. 

Forceful trespassing 

On May 7 at 6:56 a.m. an intoxicated man forced himself into a private residence on the 2300 block of Seventh Street. The residents forced him back out of the house. The man was detained and arrested on the scene. 

Auto burglary 

On May 8, somebody broke into a vehicle at night and smashed the window on the 2900 block of Hillegass Avenue. Nothing was taken and no suspects have been identified. 

Another auto burglary 

On May 8, someone smashed the window of a teal Ford Taurus. A GPS system was taken. Somebody driving by the vehicle witnessed the incident. The suspects have yet to be identified by the witness.

At a contentious meeting of the Point Richmond Neighborhood Council (PRNC) on Monday dues-paying members voted 60-7 against supporting a local committee’s proposal to tear down the Richmond library’s Westside branch in Point Richmond and move the branch’s operations to a nearby rental facility. 

The city of Richmond has a unique method of ensuring community participation in local issues: 37 neighborhood groups meet, many of them monthly, under the auspices of the Richmond Neighborhood Coordinating Council to discuss issues of importance to locals and bring concerns to the nine-member City Council. 

PRNC president James Bottoms said in his opening remarks on Monday that the gathering of about 80 people in the basement of Our Lady of Mercy church was the largest PRNC meeting he had ever attended. Also present were Richmond’s Vice Mayor Nathaniel Bates, Councilmember Harpreet Sandhu, and past Mayor Rosemary Corbin. 

Sallie DeWitt, a business analyst and longtime community volunteer, spoke on behalf of the committee to move the library. She explained that the move is part of a proposal to create a “village green” in the center of Point Richmond, much like town centers in Healdsburg, Windsor, San Rafael and Mill Valley. 

A village green would increase foot traffic in the area and stimulate business, committee members believe. “Business in Point Richmond is hurting,” said DeWitt, whose stepdaughter owns a framing shop and gallery downtown. “It’s not dying but hurting.” 

DeWitt told the audience that the committee seeks “a reopened library and community services center in a safe, secure, modern facility, and a vibrant, thriving, attractive and safe downtown where all can gather as friends” for art and musical events, as well as farmers’ markets. 

Such events already take place in the area around the library, she said in an interview on Tuesday, “but they’re in the street. Personally, I think it could be a more attractive event if we didn’t have to be in the street and work around a generally dilapidated center that’s been that way for years now.” 

The Westside branch library is located at 135 Washington Ave. in the heart of Point Richmond, on a pie-wedge-shaped block that also houses the area’s fire station. Opened in 1961, the library doubles as a community center. It was closed, along with the Bayview branch library near South Carlson Boulevard, in May 2004. 

According to Monique LeConge, director of library and community services, “The city of Richmond found itself in debt close to $35 million” that year. In addition to closing the two branches, Richmond cut library staffing from 80 to 21 people. Richmond’s only remaining library was then open to the public for only 24 hours a week. 

LeConge began working for the city in October 2004. The city library now has about 60 staffers, including librarians, library assistants, library aides and pages to shelve materials. The main library is open 42 hours a week, and the book-mobile runs four days a week. 

With capital improvement funds in hand “to do an extreme makeover” of the two branches, including adding new carpet and new paint and buying new materials and computers, the Westside (Point Richmond) and Bayview branches are scheduled to reopen sometime this summer, said LeConge. 

But on May 1, the Richmond City Council decided to consider whether the committee’s proposal to move the Point Richmond library was viable. No one seemed quite ready for this action. 

DeWitt said that the all-volunteer committee had no previous notice that the City Council intended to reopen the libraries this summer. “It was only a few weeks ago that (we heard) that the city was not only ready to reopen the library but to spend tens of thousands of dollars on it.” 

If the Point Richmond branch reopened, chances were that the village green would never become a reality. 

She said the City Council decision “caused [the committee] to go faster, and I think that’s what caused the problem of people thinking we were going behind their backs, which wasn’t true.” Some locals became suspicious that the committee had gone straight to the city council in order to bypass the city’s Design Review Board, which reviews proposed changes to local buildings. 

According to DeWitt, the committee would have preferred that the library reopen temporarily in its current location while the committee fleshed out its proposal with projected costs and a fuller plan. 

Meanwhile, back at the library, LeConge was eager to fix the Westside branch’s roofing and mold problems, and order carpeting and furniture. “It’s frustrating to be very close to remodeling branches, making them more like libraries in other communities that can really serve their communities, and then to have to wait.” 

Community members at Monday evening’s PRNC meeting were vocal in their opposition to DeWitt’s presentation about moving the library and creating a village green. Some audience members raised questions and comments as she spoke. PRNC president Bottoms asked the audience to hold all comments until after DeWitt had given her talk. 

So many people wanted to speak after DeWitt’s presentation that Bottoms limited them to two minutes of comments each. About 18 people spoke, most making sure to mention how long they had lived in Point Richmond. One community member used his allotted time to chastise people in the room for their rudeness, calling their behavior “reprehensible,” regardless of how they felt about the committee’s proposal. 

Asked the day after the meeting whether the committee would change its proposal to the city council, DeWitt said the committee would withdraw its proposal. 

“There’s no path forward for this proposal as we had envisioned it, none. We really wanted to know if the community wanted to consider a proposal that included at any time in the future relocating the library. And what we got back was a resounding ‘No.’ ... It was a little more intense and hostile than I would have liked, but I don’t expect people to always agree with me.” 

A longtime community activist who has raised funds for educational and nonprofit groups in Richmond and greater Contra Costa County, DeWitt said that the hostility she encountered at the PRNC meeting “has left me confused, quite confused, because I don’t know how to respond to that. So I’m going to have to consider that for quite some time. And when I do move into the future with this community, I will take that into consideration and be much more wary.”

West Berkeley’s been the top planning controversy in the news in the last couple of weeks. On the southern flank, yet another edgy, vibrant artists’ colony is being pushed out, this one The Shipyard, a prominent contributor to the annual Burning Man extravaganza. On the north, speculators seem to have big plans for the approximately 5 acre home of the former Cal Ink company, once a central player in a small industry. In 1999 Cal Ink (now owned by Michigan’s Flint Ink) was the oldest factory in Berkeley operating at its original location. If information about their plans gleaned from the internet by Public Eye columnist Zelda Bronstein is reliable, some developers might be hoping to parlay the Berkeley City Council’s authorization for the addition of a zoning overlay for auto dealerships into much, much more.  

A good guess would be the currently chi-chi form of gentrification: condos upstairs, retail down. A faux-urban mall like Silicon Valley’s Santana Row seems possible. But whatever’s going on, it should be going on in the open, not under the radar as it seems to be. 

The area is currently governed by the West Berkeley Plan, which took untold amounts of public money, years of citizen labor and much compromise to enact. Adding more space for auto sales is a logical extension of the spirit and intent of the plan, but it looks like the promoters of the new development might be trying for an even bigger bite of the apple, if the disclosures made as part of the offer to sell are to be believed. 

In Oakland, there’s been a similar effort to take over a big chunk of the land set aside for “dirty” uses like manufacturing and art and gentrify it for condo/retail use without bothering to make appropriate zoning changes. Jerry Brown’s administration came and went without making the official zoning amendments which were needed to support the city’s general plan for crucial areas of the city.  

It’s so much easier to do land use planning by making small changes to the rules which only the privileged few are party to, or simply by giving variances to the people you favor. That’s historically been a bit harder to pull off in Berkeley than in Oakland, but Berkeley’s Planning Department is now getting the reputation of doing sweetheart deals with people it likes, and the City Council has become accustomed to just rubberstamping them. That’s why former School Board chair Anna DeLeon, currently the proprietor of Anna’s Jazz Island, is suing the council. She alleges that all the concessions the city granted to her Gaia building landlord, Patrick Kennedy, were illegal, and that they’ve harmed her business.  

The worst thing about planning by privilege is that it almost always has results which aren’t consistent with the greater public good. Auto dealerships are good producers of sales tax revenue, and given California’s love affair with the auto they probably have to be near the freeway. But taking this well-defined and reasonable change in West Berkeley’s rules and trying to leverage it into more and different kinds of retail, including perhaps a Big Box store, is another matter entirely. Doing it by fooling around with the language of the proposed zoning overlay which was supposed to be specifically for auto dealerships is inexcusable. And some of the buildings on the Cal Ink site are designated historic resources protected by CEQA, but promoters seems confident that they can just be demolished anyhow, no problema.  

The condo part of the conventional equation, if it materialized in West Berkeley on that site, would add many new drivers to the already overloaded freeway exits without contributing a fair share of the city’s tax revenues. There’s not much public transit in that area, and what there is doesn’t go much of anywhere that condo-dwellers would want to go. And when manufacturing is driven out to the distant burbs while the cities are packed with cheap condos for singles, it creates reverse long-distance commuters. It’s happening all over the country, not just in Berkeley or Oakland. 

In the meantime, back at Berkeley City Hall, they’re again talking about about funding the mayor’s no-smoking plan for improving downtown by raising parking fees. Here’s a question for our Berkeley readers, and even for the couple of hundred anonymous members of the Kitchen Democracy claque: why don’t you shop downtown? Is it (a) the weird people on the street, (b) parking problems, (c) nothing much to buy there any more or (d) all of the above?  

It’s a cinch that making (b) worse will do nothing at all to make (a) or (c) better. That’s our city management, dropping the planning ball again. And the city manager floated another trial balloon at the budget workshops recently: raising property taxes yet again. Even Berkeley’s public-spirited citizens are finally starting to notice that all we seem to get with each new tax is bigger and better pension plans for city employees, while services continue to go downhill fast.  

Here’s what current West Berkeley trends, if they’re not addressed by the City Council, will add up to: fewer good jobs for local residents, more new residents who don’t pay their share of the upkeep for public services and shop elsewhere, and higher taxes for the long-suffering taxpayers in the rest of the city. It looks like a bad deal, but it also looks like it will be hard to stop.  

A few years ago the publisher and I were tourists in London, and we stopped to look at a lovely old churchyard in Hampstead or somewhere. The kindly grey-haired old vicar saw us looking at his tombstones, and came over to tell us a few interesting stories about local history. Then, with no apparent segue, he launched into a tirade about what savages the Irish were, how they were making England uninhabitable and worse. Now, to be fair, this was during the time when some IRA members were planting bombs in British cities, so his annoyance was not unjustifiable, but he went way over the top with accusations of superstition and illiteracy against the whole Irish nation. We went on our way quickly at that point, terrified that he would introduce himself and we would have to cop to our shared Irish surname.  

The British (my own ancestors) have always counted a fair number of bigots among their number, so the vicar’s rant was not surprising, though the source was. “Wogs” was the term of endearment applied uniformly to any foreigner in past generations, often with no distinction made among different racial, ethnic or national origins. The appalling anti-Islam video from a British website which Peace and Justice Commissioner Jonathan Wornick circulated to his fellow commissioners was right in step with this historic posture. The speaker was an actor, apparently expressing his own opinions, though one might think he was simply playing the part of “Colonel Blimp,” the traditional voice of British bigotry. 

As a citizen of the United States, Wornick has every right to his own opinion, and every right to endorse and forward the opinions of others. But after he shocked his fellow commissioners by circulating that video, some might question Councilmember Gordon Wozniak’s judgment in appointing a fellow like Wornick to the Peace and Justice Commission, where presumably tact and diplomacy are part of the job description.  

Although I’ve never met the gentlemen, I’ve become aware that his ideas about good taste and appropriateness are, shall we say, unusual. I myself received this letter from Wornick at my personal e-mail address (I’ve no idea how he got it):  

Becky, 

Sometimes I go to bed pleased that your crappy insignificant paper is read by so few people. And those who do read it, (there are of course a couple hundred graying leftists) many are like myself, who check it out online only to see what outrageous and entertaining bullshit you (or the couple dozens regular letter writers) will say about an evil real estate developer, or Republicans or Christians or Zionists.  

You’re delusional, really angry and alone and I’m sorry to say, very fat. You should know that people like that die early and sad.  

Enjoy your little playing field where the ball is yours. The rest of us will be playing on planet earth—making a real difference. 

Jonathan 

I forwarded the letter to Wozniak when I got it a couple of months ago, but apparently it didn’t cause him to think twice about Wornick’s suitability for his commission slot, as it should have. 

The traditional White Anglo-Saxons in the United States (my own ancestors among them) have also had trouble telling one non-northern-European from another. People my age with White Anglo-Saxon Protestant names like my birth name grew up hearing disparaging references to all kinds of people, Jews and “Ay-rabs” among them, often lumped together, with African-Americans called by a name too rude to repeat here. I’ve also heard elderly Yiddish speakers speak disparagingly of “schwartzes” (blacks), and I’ve heard ignorant anti-Catholic rants when I was not using my (Episcopalian-raised) husband’s Catholic-sounding name. Moslems and fat people might seem like easy safe targets these days, but bigotry is a slippery slope, and when someone like Wornick thinks he’s shoving a despised group down it he might find that his own group goes tumbling after.  

And speaking of tumbling, some bicycle enthusiasts seem to have taken a fall in the eyes of the public, judging by the letters we, other papers and craigslist have been getting. It’s fine to say that the road should be shared by all regardless of method of transport, but allowing a gang of riders to bully law-abiding motorists is very different. Even the edited version of Critical Mass’ video, which they posted on the Internet, clearly showed that they’d trapped a couple of frightened older people who were driving carefully on their way to care for their disabled daughter. I suspect that if we’d seen the whole thing it would have looked even worse. 

Circulating a video displaying vile pejorative opinions about Moslems is a protected civil liberty in this country, though it does seem to be what some are trying to ban as “hate speech,” a murky category easily abused. But the website where the Critical Mass video was posted was sponsored by something called the “Bicycle Civil Liberties Union.” That’s a misappropriation of a fine old name—pushing others off the roads is not civil liberties, it’s just plain rude, and dangerous to boot. It crosses over the line from free speech, within the territory covered by the First Amendment, to illegal action.  

But the real problem in both cases is attitude: self-righteousness about opinions which are arguably fine carried to inappropriate extremes. Both Jason Meggs, spokesperson for the bicyclists and a former Transportation Commissioner, and Jonathan Wornick, a current Peace and Justice Commissioner, are doing harm to the causes which they claim to espouse. The councilmembers who appoint commissioners need to take some responsibility for their actions as well. Uncivilized behavior, whether or not it’s legal, is not good PR for either Israel or bicyclists. 

KITCHEN DEMOCRACY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Using Kitchen Democracy to see which way the wind blows (on the street behavior proposal or any other issue ) is not an accurate or wise way for the mayor to gauge public opinion. 

A lot of people don’t have computers. And of those who do have computers, not everybody sits around the house all day sending e-mails. They have to go to work, cook dinner and put the kids to bed. 

I’m sure the people who “vote” using Kitchen Democracy are in no way a cross section of the Berkeley populace. And there is no way to know if the participant is a Berkeley voter or even lives within 50 miles. You are asked, but you can lie and there is no verification. 

Yet, I’m sure I will hear reference to the Kitchen Democracy “vote” as support for the mayor’s proposal, as it was used for the Wright’s garage issue. 

I suspect the people who started Kitchen dDemocracy would agree they are not a polling organization and city policy should not be based on “votes” from their web site. 

If the mayor wants to know what the people of Berkeley think, hit the pavement; talk to people.  

F. Greenspan 

• 

PUBLIC COMMONS FOR EVERYONE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am against this neo-lib proposal. I myself have never had a bad experience with the homeless. Some have put money in meters for me. Yes, they’re out on the streets, asking for money. So? You do the same at your fundraisers. They’re urinating, defecating, and sleeping on the streets. So? What are they supposed to do, kill themselves because they’re poor and alone?  

Solution: Put up public toilets, create some humane shelters and day centers.  

The worst street behavior I’ve encountered was done by Tom Bates when he stole newspapers and thereby revealed what his core values are all about. He embarrassed Berkeley far more than the homeless do. Yet, here he sits, head of our once great city none the worse for wear. 

Besides being intolerably cruel, the Public Commons for Everyone proposal reveals a terrible lack of imagination as to how to turn Berkeley back into the hot place it used to be. Clue: It’s through the arts. Oakland today is far more exciting than Berkeley. For example, learn about their monthly Art Murmur if you don’t know about it.  

But encouraging something like Art Murmur would bring the wrong kind of crowd to Berkeley, that is the diverse 20-35-year-olds that Bates and cronies are deathly afraid of. 

Bates’ vision seems to be nothing more than people happily consuming on neatly managed green space, never creating street music without a permit, never creating street theater without a permit, just constantly stuffing their mouths, and going to discreet, safe jazz clubs. And never, ever encountering a homeless person to interrupt the fantasy of living “the good life.” 

If you truly want to do something about the homeless, Mayor Bates, why not organize the mayors of this country and do some direct action in D.C. for money to build really low cost housing. You know, the money for subsidized housing Reagan starting whittling at and Clinton finished erasing. 

If you want to see what a vital city looks like, go to Mazatlan where everything is out in public. Unlike here, people there seem to be happy. 

Maris Arnold 

• 

A TOWN WITHOUT PITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

If city staff can retire at 55 with benefits and lifetime pensions, then city residents should also be allowed to retire, in a manner of speaking. After 55, we shouldn’t have to pay so much in property taxes. When a person has paid taxes for 10, 15, or 20 years, that’s a substantial part of retirement savings that’s been lost forever. Instead, we have to keep working after age 55. We have to support city staff in the style to which they’ve become accustomed. They’ve become accustomed to taking advantage of us. 

Carla Katz 

• 

VERY RIGHT, VERY WRONG 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In the May 15 Daily Planet James K. Sayre writes on Public Commons, and offers opinions that are frustratingly very right and very wrong. This results from his confusion of a general premise with a particular problem. He is absolutely right in decrying the state of health care in the United States. It is intolerable that this, the wealthiest nation in the world, does not provide universal health care. The care of citizens of every economic class, which includes not just medical attention but minimal subsistence, demands a comprehensive national policy. 

But he then castigates the City of Berkeley for failing to undertake, single-handedly, the solution to this problem. He suggests that the mayor and the City Council were intent on making life miserable “for the down-and-out that have the misfortune of currently living in Berkeley.” Can he possibly be unaware that they are “currently living in Berkeley” because this city has a 40-year reputation as a tolerant haven for drifters, runaways, and other vagrants? Think the homeless problem is bad now? Provide shelters and amenities for them, and Berkeley will become even more their perpetual campground. Mr. Sayre praises the accommodations provided for travelers and the poor in France and New Zealand—but those are countries! Yes, it would be great if those accommodations were provided by the United States, or even by the state of California, but until they are, Berkeley, for once, should attempt a realistic solution. 

Jerry Landis 

• 

CRITICAL MASS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

James K. Sayre seems to be so angry at Critical Mass that he condemns bicycling and bicyclists in general. He should remember that Critical Massers are a tiny minority of bicyclists. You should not blame all bicyclists for their behavior, any more than you would blame all motor vehicle users for the behavior of the Hell’s Angels. 

Though it has nothing to do with Critical Mass, Mr. Sayer insists at great length that bicycles are not non-polluting vehicles, detailing the materials that have to be produced and transported to manufacture bicycles. But a bicycle uses 20 or 30 pounds of materials, while a car uses thousands of pounds of similar materials. If you divide the weight of a bicycle by its useful life, you find that owning a bicycle consumes only one or two 2 pounds of materials in a year. 

Cars generate the great bulk of their pollution when they are being driven, not when they are being manufactured. Motor vehicles account for 40 percent of the CO2 emissions in California—and that only counts their emissions when they are being driven. Of course, bicycles emit no pollution when they are being ridden, so they meet the standard definition of a non-polluting (or “zero-emission”) vehicle. 

Now that we are beginning to realize how great a threat global warming is, we should make a personal effort to reduce the amount we drive, in order to reduce the number-one source of greenhouse gas emissions in California. Mr. Sayre writes: “Not all of us are young, healthy, courageous and single enough to be able to depend on bicycles for local transportation and shopping expeditions.” Yes, but many of us could easily shift some of our local trips to bicycles, if we remembered that driving the average car one mile emits about one pound of CO2. 

I myself am not young, not single, and not very courageous, but because I have bicycled all my adult life, I am healthy. 

Charles Siegel 

• 

“WAR ON THE POOR” 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In his May 18 letter to the editor titled “War on the Poor,” written in response to my commentary, Alameda Point Collaborative Director Doug Biggs ignores facts and re-writes history to his convenience: 

First of all, I did collect Alameda PD crime states for Alameda Point, where his Collaborative is located, and I did perform an analysis of that data. I did this in response to a publication in the local newspaper claiming that Mr. Bigg’s Alameda Point Collaborative was a “crime and drug infested ghetto.” 

Second, I offered my data set for Mr. Biggs or anyone else to analyze by their own methodology to see if they came to a different conclusion regarding the number of crimes and type normalized to population. This offer stands. To date, neither Mr. Biggs nor anyone else accepted this offer. However, Mr. Biggs and his friends keep falsely accusing me of “egregiously” manipulating data. 

Third, I was privately contacted by a Bay area resident with relatives living at Alameda Point Collaborative who expressed similar concerns to me about drugs and crime at Alameda Point Collaborative and about the response to her concerns from Mr. Biggs himself. 

Fourth, I did share my analysis with various groups with an interest in the Collaborative and Alameda Point—to get them to investigate the anecdotal reports of crime and my statistical conclusions. 

Finally, Mr. Biggs pays no mind to the suggestion that car ownership for low income families improves outcomes for those families. And he ignores that fact that “Measure A” which he is trying to change, supports housing density up to 21.78 dwelling units per acre, (du/ac) and that the City of Alameda’s own hired experts indicated that density of 12 to 15 du/ac is the minimum at which public transit is workable. He also ignores the fact that public transit usage is well under 30 percent in Alameda. There is no reason that workable transit oriented community can’t be built at Alameda Point within the constraints of Measure A while also providing support for low-income families to improve their lot in life with the benefits of a (low-emission) hybrid automobile. Of course, Mr. Biggs’ job depends on a steady supply of low-income people to his Collaborative. 

David Howard 

Alameda 

• 

WOZNIAK’S APPOINTEE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I write to thank the Daily Planet for Judith Scherr’s article exposing the use of city funds to disseminate racist propaganda, and to add a few points. The first regards Commissioner Wornick’s absurd claim that e-mailing a hate filled tirade was “…an honest attempt to bring dialogue.” It seems dubious to believe that a hateful diatribe labeling Muslim women “mentally ill,” and calling Mohammed a “desert nomad with a psychological disorder” would provoke meaningful discussion, but assuming for a moment that this were true, it would mean that Councilmember Wozniak’s commissioner admits he intended to unlawfully violate the Brown Act, which requires discussion to be publicly noticed and held in open meetings, not by the secrecy of e-mail. 

Councilmember Wozniak’s appointee therefore either intentionally violated the law, or intentionally used City personnel and resources to transmit racist propaganda. Neither is acceptable. 

More disturbing is the attempt to excuse this vile racist attack by labeling it “diversity.” I wonder if the councilmember would have offered the same defense if the victims had been black or Jewish? Equally troubling is Councilmember Wozniak’s comparison of his commissioner’s action with an incident involving ill-tempered insults made during heated debate, with the thoughtful and deliberate actions of Councilmember Wozniak’s appointee, which required: 

1. Watching the video clip. 

2. Creating an e-mail containing a link. 

3. Addressing and e-mailing the link of a racist video clip to a city employee, knowing the employee is required, in his capacity as secretary, to use city resources to disseminate it. 

Since arguments of diversity have been raised to excuse this, we should not be surprised if some defend it as “free speech.” In anticipation of this I want to make clear I respect the First Amendment right of any citizen to say or write what they please. Speech is clearly protected, but when a person acts in his or her capacity as a city commissioner, as Councilmember Wozniak’s appointee did here, they are not acting as a private citizen, but as a government official, and as such they are accountable for their statements and actions. 

Ironically, Councilmember Wozniak has devoted substantial energy to removing some commissioners, claiming service on multiple city commissions was somehow inappropriate. Inappropriate? How about this letter that Wornick sent to Daily Planet Executive Editor Becky O’Malley: 

“Sometimes I go to bed pleased that your crappy insignificant paper is read by so few people. And those who do read it, (there are of course a couple hundred graying leftists) many are like myself, who check it out online only to see what outrageous and entertaining bullshit you (or the couple dozens regular letter writers) will say about an evil real estate developer, or Republicans or Christians or Zionists. You’re delusional, really angry and alone and I’m sorry to say, very fat. You should know that people like that die early and sad.” 

When it comes to “inappropriate” Councilmember Wozniak’s appointee wins hands down. He actually sent the above quoted e-mail to the editor. Whatever one may think of this paper I implore you to consider if this is the manner in which a city commissioner should address a member of our community. 

More shocking than the above e-mail, or the use of city resources to spread racist propaganda, is the sad fact that to this day Councilmember Wozniak continues to sanction such conduct by allowing the individual who conceives and spreads such hatred to remain his appointee. 

I hope you will join me in respectfully asking the councilmember to find an appointee who better reflects the City Council endorsed policy that Berkeley be a Hate-Free Zone. 

Elliot Cohen 

Peace and Justice Commissioner 

• 

SWEATING THE SMALL STUFF 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Holding fast to my resolution to lay off President George Bush—at least for the time being—I will instead “sweat the small stuff.” Having a deep-seated need to always gripe about something, I shall now take on television, listing a few of my pet peeves. 

1. The whale story. If I hear one more word about the whales sailing up the Sacramento Delta, I shall hurl a heavy paperweight at my TV. Sorry, animal rights activists! 

2. “Breaking News.” There was a time that whenever those words were spoken, the blood would turn cold in my veins, assuming a 9/11 type disaster had occurred. I know now that the “breaking news” most likely will be about the misfortunes of Paris Hilton or Britney Spears, or if it’s really breaking news, Angelina Jolie adopting a new baby. 

3. Use of expression “You Guys.” I literally cringe when supposedly polished, articulate TV anchor men (i.e., Charlie Gibson) uses the term “you guys” when speaking to senators, Supreme Court judges, priests, etc. I recall that in a recent discussion about an important Supreme Court decision, Charlie asked one of the judges, “What do you guys think about .......? You guys? I could go on at great length but I’ve let out enough steam for the moment. (This isn’t as satisfying as blasting Bush.) 

Dorothy Snodgrass 

• 

THE SHIPYARD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I’m writing in opposition to Berkeley’s recent decision to force a quick eviction of the artist’s space in Berkeley known as the Shipyard.  

New culture as a rule does not usually emerge from mainstream cultural establishments; it emerges from the fringes. The same could be said about truly innovative technologies. 

The decision to evict the Shipyard is the 21st century equivalent of Kitty Hawk banning kite flying or Paris disallowing the Salon des Refusés. 

The Shipyard has been a place where artists have been allowed to make important and ambitious work over the last six years. Artists and engineers have created hundreds (thousands?) of innovative pieces and performances there, including elegant, substantial new work: giant steam powered Victorian vehicles, working wooden clock towers, and a carbon-neutral pickup truck that runs on refuse. The current gasification project has the potential of reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. This is important work by any cultural or technological standard. The physical plant is itself an important experiment in alternative energy use.  

We understand that there were code violations, but we also understand that the Shipyard has been working with the City, in good faith, to mediate those violations. Is it really so difficult to accommodate artists and inventors? As a city employee myself (Palo Alto Art Center) I understand liability and safety issues, but there needs to be a balance, and there must be a place for our innovators to work. Otherwise, we are doomed as a culture of any lasting importance.  

The timing of Berkeley’s action is particularly reprehensible. Three days notice to remove over a million pounds of artist’s material and structures is ridiculous and arbitrary. A team of artists was just gearing up to build a breathtakingly ambitious work, “Mechabolic,” that would be enjoyed by thousands of people and likely be a subject for future art historians, as well as advancing our understanding of gasification as an alternative energy source. The project was recently mentioned favorably in the New York Times.  

Berkeley has an international reputation for progressive “out of the box” thinking. With this action, Berkeley is saying to the world that this reputation is no longer deserved. You are opting for a safer, less vibrant culture. In the words of Benjamin Franklin, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” 

Larnie Fox 

• 

THE WAR TSAR 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The Bush administration, after a month long search, has finally found one an active duty general willing to serve as the nation’s first “War Tsar.” Lt. General Douglas E. Lute, if approved as a special assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor, will bear responsibility for coordinating operations and for infusing “a more proactive role” among the commanders and ambassadors in Afghanistan and Iraq.  

Some senators will no doubt welcome this creative approach to harmonizing discordant activities in the messy situation over there; a Tsar, after all, is an autocrat, a figure possessing absolute authority over everyone. Philip Zelikow, former State Department official, predicts that General Lute will be a “force multiplier” which I take to be military jargon for an individual who keeps everyone bent to the objectives of the surge with multiplied force.  

On the other hand—the hand holding facts not the one holding wishes—there’s sure to be criticism. General Lute must coordinate individuals who out rank him. So, say critics, how can a subordinate coordinate?  

Save a place for General Lute on the shelf now occupied by other dis-appointees, failed advisors like George Tenent, Jay Garner, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.  

Marvin Chachere 

San Pablo  

• 

UC INC. 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It is increasingly obvious that the line between UC Berkeley and private sector Corporate America, has become so blurred (i.e., audit of UC offices, etc., San Francisco Chronicle, May 17) that it’s high time and appropriate for UC to go private, a la Stanford and U.S.C. Then, at least, California taxpayers wouldn’t be burdened by having to support an institution which has all the symptoms of a Corporation. Perhaps, then, UC could go “public,” and we could all invest in the University of California Inc. and make big bucks. 

Robert Blau 

• 

THE PUPPET MAN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

You have no idea what great responses I have had to the editorial you generously posted regarding Tom Roberts, the Puppet Man. Here is a short version of everything to date that I have received. 

Tom Roberts was born Morris Diamond and came to California following his failed acting career New York. He had a son (still alive, and an author) named Jed Diamond. Mr. Roberts suffered from manic depression. This would make success of any kind difficult. But he managed to win over the Berkeley college kids with his great puppet performances held outdoors. Roberts wrote bold, honest poetry and presented his books to students. Imogen Cunningham, a great photographer, took his portrait and mentioned the book he gave to her. He died in 1996 at the age of 89. He was a witty, engaging, warm-hearted man. His son is very much alive and thrives as an author and professional counselor. 

For those who want a larger document, including Robert’s obituary, e-mail here: rhubarbfarm@hotmail.com 

Nathaniel S. Rounds 

• 

WEAPONS INDUSTRY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The weapons industry: With the world already overstocked with misery, why keep manufacturing more? 

With all the millions and millions of people in this world who are hurting and dying, why does the one of world’s largest industries keep manufacturing a product whose only goal is to make sure that even more people are hurting and dying? What’s the point?  

It seems to me that deliberately manufacturing even more ways to create misery in this world is a bad business practice. Get a clue! The misery market has already been overstocked and swamped. What about the law of supply and demand? Doesn’t anyone read Adam freaking Smith any more? There is more than enough misery in this world to go around already as it is. Why deliberately go out and manufacture cluster bombs, depleted uranium ammunition, nuclear weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, suicide belts and improvised explosive devices? Why bother? It just doesn’t make sense—when we already have our warehouses and stockyards and supply depots bulging to the seams with all kinds of high-quality misery-producers like starvation, drought, famine, global warming and AIDS. 

The misery market is already glutted! Get a clue! 

Just look at Iraq, Darfur, Afghanistan and Palestine. You can find misery on every corner—and it’s for sale at bargain prices that you wouldn’t believe. Guys! Enough already. It’s time to diversify. 

My suggestion? There’s still an wide-open market in other areas. This is your chance to get in on the ground floor. There’s still a tremendous shortage of healthcare, education, food, medicine, housing, etc.—and a very high demand. Let’s move our production capabilities over to this almost untouched consumer market—one that hasn’t already been saturated.  

And here’s another suggestion. Let’s recommend to the weapons industry that they have just one more big sale—a going-out-of-business sale. I know a guy here in Berkeley who will buy off your weapons, melt them down and cast their metal into sculptures. It’s time to recycle our arms—while we still have any arms—and legs, fingers and toes—left to recycle. 

And here’s a word to the women: “Ladies, do your sons, husbands, fathers and/or significant others lack enough business acumen and self-control to stop manufacturing a product that no one needs any more? Then perhaps it is time for you to take away their credit cards—and even lay them off—until they stop their obsession with manufacturing misery, come to their senses and go into a more productive line of work.” 

Jane Stillwater 

• 

IMMIGRATION REFORM? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Senator Ted Kennedy’s immigration reform package has eerie similarities to that of the famous 16th Century Spanish reformer Bartolome de las Casas. Kennedy is known for sympathy for immigrants. Las Casas was known as the friend of the indigenous in Spain’s colonies. 

Kennedy responds to a labor crisis in which the right-wing inspired roundups of “illegal” workers break up families and leave businesses without labor. Las Casas responded to a crisis in the colonies in which death from overwork of enslaved indigenous and Africans, combined with rebellion and flight, was leaving plantation owners without labor. Kennedy co-sponsors a “compromise” intended to help both employers and immigrants. The latter will be granted a torturous path to citizenship that begins with the Z card. It allows the immigrant to work in the U.S., but is invalidated if he or she stops working. The Z card holder is denied welfare, food stamps, SSI, non-serious Medicaid, “or other programs and privileges enjoyed by U.S. citizens”—states a White House blurb of support for the Kennedy plan. As presently written, the “reform” will help some immigrants while placing others more on a path to slavery than to citizenship. 

Father Las Casas argued before the Royal Council of the King of Spain that the solution to the labor shortage in the colonies was the abolition of the murderous institution of slavery. On a preliminary council vote slavery was abolished. But plantation owners declared free people would not labor hard enough. The liberal minded Las Casas then proposed that, in exchange for abolition of slavery for the Indigenous, there would be African slavery on a large scale. This labor “compromise” of 1542 is considered the beginning of the intense Africa to America slave trade.  

Ted Vincent 

• 

JERRY FALWELL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Even though Jerry Falwell had a lighter side one tends to remember the other side, the public persona of the preacher we came to know so well.  

Falwell spotlighted everything that is wrong with Christian conservatives and the fundamentalist right. The preacher spent years fanning the flames of hate. Falwell led the charge of those trying to tear down the wall between church and state. 

Falwell was a major player in the frontline of the anti-abortion crazies and had a serious case of homophobia. If the right reverend had had his way we would have prayer in school. Let’s not mince words and try to glorify Jerry Falwell. 

Ron Lowe  

Grass Valley 

GUILT BY IMAGINARY ASSOCIATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have never participated in any Critical Mass ride, but James K. Sayre’s commentary about “Critical Mob” is so based on insupportable guilt by (imaginary) association that even I, a lapsed cyclist, feel compelled to respond.  

Equating the “mind-set” of the Bush “crime family” (as if they were cartoonish Mafiosi instead of the figureheads of something much more nefarious) with that of activists agitating for increased bicycle visibility would be hilarious if Sayre weren’t so self-contentedly serious. The Bush administration isn’t just some inbred motley crew of arrogant extortionist bullies who like to push people around whenever they feel like it; they are the latest in a series of plutocratic American gangsters bent on expanding the Atlanticist Empire with all the economic and military muscle available to them. Critical Mass participants, by way of extreme contrast, are an ad hoc group of individuals with varying degrees of commitment to bicycle activism, who use the power—and safety—of numbers to get their message across to a mostly apathetic automobile-addicted public; the point of Critical Mass is to make bicycles visible as vehicles using and sharing public roadways. Any cyclist who has been doored, or forced into a parked car (or other stationary or moving object), or hit by a car, bus, truck, or SUV will have some sympathy for the way Critical Mass participants make their point: effectively taking over some streets and causing traffic to travel at their speed.  

This may seem like bullying to non-bicyclists, who are in the habit of getting their own way all the time when they’re on the road. It is certainly inconvenient; but a regular traffic jam due to too many motor vehicles using a limited amount of roadway is, at the very least, equally inconvenient. Critical Mass happens once a month; normal (that is, non-bicycle-related) traffic problems occur multiple times each day. Confrontations tend to spring up where inconvenience occurs. However, road rage was not invented or pioneered by bicyclists; that innovation belongs to automobile drivers who feel that their privileges (having the law cater to your whims or actually being above the law) have been impinged upon by others.  

The issue of what resources and industries are required for the manufacture and maintenance of bicycles is a red herring. I don’t know of any bicyclist (activist or not) who isn’t already aware that they rely on the same industries as automobiles—Sayre forgot to mention all the cement that’s required for roads to be maintained. The patronizingly smug tone of those middle paragraphs is as palpable as it is obnoxious. The point of Critical Mass and other low-tech partisans is that the current exclusive reliance of the US economy in general, and motor vehicles in particular, on fossil fuels is what is highly polluting and ultimately unsustainable. 

It would be much easier to take seriously the criticisms of the anti-Critical Mass crowd if motor vehicle drivers themselves would follow the rules of the road and pay attention to motorcycles, bicyclists, and pedestrians, not to mention other motor vehicles! Participants in Critical Mass have no access to economic sanctions, blockades, international pressure, or military action. Sayre is being deliberately dishonest, trying to whip up the emotions of his readers by appealing to their assumed hatred of Bush and Company. In this technique, he is much more like Bush than he would like to admit. 

C. Boles

On May 10, the office of Mayor Tom Bates sent out a press release to announce that seven new board members have been chosen for the Berkeley Housing Authority (BHA), as part of the effort to salvage the embattled agency from a HUD takeover, and to keep it under local Berkeley control. 

On May 22, the full City Council is expected to approve the mayor’s pick for the BHA, which includes many well respected members of the community. The seven new board members are to replace the old BHA board members which included the mayor, the full City Council, and two tenant board members receiving housing assistance from the BHA. 

Despite the assurances that the City of Berkeley is doing all that is possible to get the BHA back on track, and to pull it out of it’s status as a troubled agency, the mayor sent the wrong message by re-appointing two of the old board members back to the BHA. 

Dorthy Hunt and Adolph Moody, were with the old BHA board, and it is deceptive of the mayor to announce that seven new board members were appointed to the BHA, when there are actually only five new members being appointed.  

This is a bad sign, and raises the possibility that city officials are not really serious about fixing the numerous problems facing the housing authority through the years. 

As board members, Hunt and Moody remained largely silent as the problems grew within the BHA through the years, and this is very troublesome to Section 8 tenants that expected more from these two tenant board members. 

After discussing this with several members of the tenant’s group called Save Berkeley Housing Authority, it was apparent no one felt that re-appointing old board members to the new board, was a real solution to resolving the problems at the BHA. 

In addition, recent reports reveal that problems with the BHA’s Section 8 program have become so severe that it’s become apparent that landlords have actually been charging rent to dead people for several months and more in Berkeley, while the BHA kept making payments to these greedy landlords. 

In other cases, former landlords still kept receiving rent checks from the BHA, long after the tenants moved away, and it turns out that the BHA ended up making payments to both old and new landlords simultaneously, for several months and more. Full details of these very serious problems have not yet been fully disclosed to the public. 

Since April of 2004, the nation’s Section 8 program was switched from being a fully funded voucher based program, to an underfunded budget based program, and every dollar that is now being misspent by the BHA, it ends up taking away funding from all the other voucher holders needing help in the program. 

These serious types of problems need to be remedied immediately, and the landlords need to return the money that they did not deserve back to the BHA, so that the money can be used to house real tenants who are in need. 

To the good, out of the so-called seven new board members appointed by the mayor, at least two of them seem promising because one has experience in affordable housing projects, and another was employed in the past by the Housing Action Coalition. 

As well meaning as the other new appointees may be, it does not appear that they have the real experience needed to run the BHA, during such a critical period in it’s history. 

At this point, the BHA needs new board members that have some knowledge and understanding of HUD’s policies, and will not just be political appointees that are expected to rubberstamp the failed old policies of City Manager Phil Kamlarz and BHA’s Steve Barton. 

The elderly, disabled and poor need Berkeley’s housing authority, and the opportunity to save this housing authority from reaching a point of total collapse seems to diminish day by day. 

Lynda Carson is a member of Save Berkeley Housing Authority.

I should disclose up front that I do not generally agree with the points of view of the Daily Planet’s editorials. I find many of the editorials offensive, frankly. I was not surprised, therefore, as I read through the May 18 editorial (“Rude, Crude and in Your Face”), to find myself thinking: “What planet is Mrs. O’Malley living on?”  

For example: “The British (my own ancestors) have always counted a fair number of bigots among their number ... .” The qualification that the British are Mrs. O’Malley’s “own ancestors” does not excuse the ignorance or offensiveness of that comment. First of all, unless she is British, she does not have the authority to make such a comment. Second, even if she were British, it’s an ignorant comment. Putting aside the definition of “a fair number,” I’m reasonably certain you could say the same thing of any group. Berkeley residents, to name but one, not to mention every nation on the planet. (No offense intended to the planet’s other nations.)  

Then there was this: “People my age with white Anglo-Saxon Protestant names like my birth name grew up hearing disparaging references to all kinds of people, Jews and ‘Ay-rabs’ among them, often lumped together, with African-Americans called by a name too rude to repeat here.” Once again, I am at a loss about where to begin. First of all, why not leave it at “I grew up hearing disparaging references about various ethnic, religious and racial minorities”? I think most of us can guess which groups she is referring to. Why inflame the situation by repeating the specific disparaging comments, eg, “Ay-rabs,” instead of saying that she heard disparaging comments about Arabs? Why try to be obsequious, eg, by referencing “a name too rude to repeat here,” instead of saying that people used the N-word?  

Beyond all that, I would point out that everyone of her age grew up hearing these disparaging references, most importantly, the people about whom the disparaging references were made. Does the fact that she heard the disparaging references somehow create solidarity between her and the folks to whom the references were directed? I note, by the way, that she did not include people with white Anglo-Saxon Protestant names among those who were referred to disparagingly. And who was making these comments, anyway? Was this her coy way of saying that people her age with white Anglo-Saxon Protestant names grew up in families that made these disparaging references? If so, why not just say so?  

As offensive as I found all of this, I would probably have shrugged, said “there she goes again,” and moved on, had it not been for the editorial’s final sentence: “Uncivilized behavior, whether or not it’s legal, is not good PR for either Israel or bicylists.”  

What?! That’s funny, I thought, I don’t remember anything in the editorial about Israel. Sure, she discussed Critical Mass, so I understand the reference to bicyclists, but Israel? And she referenced Jews when she spoke about the disparaged minority groups of her youth, although of course we know that Jews and Israel are not one and the same. Then I re-read the piece and found the word “Zionists,” which was used incidentally in a somewhat ranting letter from Peace and Justice Commissioner Jonathan Wornick that she quoted. But that was it. There were no references to the State of Israel in the entire editorial.  

Please correct me if I am wrong, but I believe I have found the connection. Mrs. O’Malley cited the “appalling anti-Islam video” that Mr. Wornick circulated to his commission. I just watched the video. It is indeed offensive. Mrs. O’Malley then tells us, towards the end of the editorial, that Mr. Wornick is “doing harm to” the cause that he “claim[s] to espouse." She doesn’t say what this cause is, but, two sentences later comes the comment about Israel. So that’s it, then. Mr. Wornick must be “pro-Israel,” to use that offensive phrase. But where is the evidence?  

According to an article in the same edition of the Planet, Mr. Wornick forwarded the video “in an honest attempt to bring dialogue.” I’ll admit that I don’t see how viewing this video could bring any useful dialogue, but that’s not my point. Let’s say, only for the sake of argument, that Mr. Wornick explicitly said he was forwarding the video to remind people that Muslims are bad people, and Muslims hate Israel, and that everyone should therefore support Israel. He didn’t, but let’s say that he did. I’d say that was “pro-Israel.” I’d also say it was bad PR . . . for Mr. Wornick. Why, though, would it be bad PR for Israel? As far as I know, Mr. Wornick is not an official of the Israeli government, nor an official spokesman for Israel. He is a private citizen who happens to be Jewish. Apparently Mrs. O’Malley and the Planet need reminding that not everything that a Jewish person does is automatically attributed to and associated with Israel. It strikes me as the height of hypocrisy for you to decry the “disparaging references” about other people that you heard as a child, then to make your own disparaging reference by lumping together one particular Jewish person and all of “Israel.” I would love to hear your explanation. And yes—before you make an offensive insinuation—I am Jewish.  

Joel Tranter is a Berkeley resident. 

Jonathan Wornick may be an unpleasant human being but he’s not a loose cannon. He’s a Zionist ideologue, doing the job to which he has been assigned: to keep the Peace and Justice Commission from functioning. 

Let us remember that after the commission’s Rachel Corrie vote, John Gertz, according to Commissioner Elliot Cohen, met with several commissioners and “demanded” that they rescind their votes. “‘He told us we had to reverse our vote or else,’ Cohen said.” (Planet, July 22, 2005). Failing to get the recision, Gertz solved his problem by packing the commission with Zionist stalwarts, including Wornick. “My sense,” Gertz said of his nominees, “is that, consistent with the principles of the Peace and Justice Commission, they are waging a peace campaign—they want peace to return to Berkeley on this issue.” (Planet, July 29, 2005). Since “this issue” may be presumed to include not only the Israel/Palestine conflict narrowly construed, but everything related thereto—such as the U.S. war on “terrorism”; current U.S. hot wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; potential U.S. hot wars in Iran and possibly Syria; the Middle East in its entirety; oil policy; nuclear weapons policy; immigration policy; relations with Europe; the U.N.; homeland security; military recruitment; and peace concerts (just for starters)— pretty much everything for which the Peace and Justice Commission was established is, under the Gertz plan, off its table. 

Should Wornick be kicked off the commission because he’s not a nice guy or has bad taste in videos? I don’t think so, since I’m a first amendment absolutist and also agree with Gordon Wozniak that a diversity of opinion is useful. But something more serious is at stake here. Wornick’s role is to subvert the commission itself. That is, he intends to keep the will of the people of Berkeley from being expressed, whether we wish to support human rights; to stop, limit, or ameliorate current wars; or to prevent future ones. We know why he is doing this. Both he and his mentor, John Gertz, are serving what they believe to be the interests of a foreign power. Not to put too fine a point upon it, on behalf of Israeli hegemony in the Middle East, they are at work to prevent us Berkeleyans from taking what steps we can to end the sacrifice of American lives. 

But what’s up with Gordon Wozniak, who presumably does not share Gertz/Wornick’s fealty to a foreign master? Either he is marvelously naïve about Zionist politics, or some consideration—such as campaign contributions or the threat of withholding same—is outweighing the embarrassment of his appointee’s severe case of political incorrectness. Of course there is always the possibility that, for his own reasons, Wozniak, too, seeks to stymie the Peace and Justice Commission. Perhaps the councilmember will let us in on his reasoning. 

At least the e-mail Wornick sent O’Malley wished only indirectly for her death. Direct death threats from rabid Zionists are, sadly, all too common. Ask Rabbi Michael Lerner, whose home address was posted on a website along with a suggestion that he should be taken out. Ask Rabbi Stephen Pearce, who made the mistake of inviting an Israeli refusenik to speak to his San Francisco congregation. Ask revisionist Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, who has moved to England to protect his family. Some death threats are even official. Ask (until recently Member of the Knesset) Azmi Bishara, who faces a death-penalty-carrying charge of treason should he ever step foot again in his native land. 

I’m sufficiently familiar with Zionist thought to believe that Wornick was sincerely trying to do his fellow commissioners a favor by alerting them to the true nature of Muslim barbarism. Fine. He’s entitled to his point of view. If you disagree, argue, don’t freak. What’s important is that Zionists play hardball. Therefore we must not bog down in liberal angst but play hardball right back. Heck, if you don’t like your e-mails, delete them! And if you think there’s anybody on the Peace and Justice Commission who has no business being there, get on the phone to the relevant persons and say so. The last time I looked it was still a democracy, if spottily, and John Gertz et alia get to run things only if we let them. 

Joanna Graham is a Berkeley resident.

CRITICAL MASS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I read with some concern your article on the Critical Mass confrontation. Normally as a long-time bike and motorcycle rider I would assume that, of course, the mini-van driver and their kind would be at fault. But after having had a very similar confrontation with a Critical Mass Berkeley ride I can sympathize with the confusion and mistakes that can be made while trying to negotiate the road with a CM group. 

My confrontation was a similar situation. I was driving and found myself surrounded by the group. I am generally patient and I like the thought, that on some occasions, bikes should get to rule the road. I went along at pace with the group as they went slower and slower and completely surrounded me, obviously on purpose, so as to make stopping or changing lanes or anything else impossible without causing harm to someone. I asked a participant if I could change lanes to get out of their way and was treated by one participant with respect and by others with derision and contempt. I was finally allowed to change lanes to get to my destination but not without hearing an earful from some of the cyclists. I was very aware that there was a power play going on here.  

After my experience I can see how a melee could break out. If these groups mess with the wrong people, they could get very hurt by their arrogance. An older person unaware and confused may be driving a vehicle that they could not control at the very low speeds that Critical Mass uses to punish cars the cars on “their” road. The confusion could lead to accidents with much worse consequences than a few wrecked bikes.  

Don’t get me wrong. I think Critical Mass should have the right to take over the streets, but maybe they should do it with the attitude that everyone gets treated with respect and compassion if they happen upon a ride. Maybe they should offer an alternative to the errant car who is more interested in getting out of their way than playing chicken.  

I once thought that any political action is better than none. Now I’m not so sure.  

Connie Lane 

• 

BERKELEY GREENS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It is with great enthusiasm that I am pleased to announce to all Berkeley voters and politically active community members that a new political organization—or “political club”—has recently been established in the city: the Berkeley Greens organization (or, more formally, the Green Party of Alameda County Berkeley Local).  

Like Berkeley’s other established political clubs—the Berkeley Democratic Club, Berkeley Citizens Action, Berkeley Progressive Alliance—the Berkeley Greens represent thousands of registered Green Party members across the city. Green Party members are the second largest block of registered party voters in Berkeley.  

The Berkeley Greens look forward to the local 2008 election cycle when the organization will evaluate in detail—and formally endorse or oppose—local/municipal-level candidates and ballot issues.  

The founding of the Berkeley Greens affiliate comes in the aftermath of the Green Party of California’s important 2006 electoral breakthrough: the election of Gayle McGlaughin as Richmond mayor. 

Richmond becomes the largest California city to ever elect a Green Party mayor. To win, Mayor McGlaughlin unseated a sitting, incumbent Democratic Party mayor—a nearly unprecedented electoral achievement. 

During 2006 election cycle, the Green Party of California elected 61 candidates across the state at the local, municipal and county levels, including a Green Party majority to Sebastopol’s City Council in Sonoma County. 

The Berkeley Greens are honored to acknowledge the current Green Party elected officials serving the City of Berkeley: Councilmember Dona Spring—the longest serving elected Green Party city councilmember in the nation—School Board Director and former Board president John Selawsky, and Rent Stabilization Board Commissioner and former Rent Board president Howard Chong. 

Three more Green Party members also serve as elected officials in Berkeley, and another several dozen Green Party members serve on city commissions and boards. 

The Berkeley Greens welcome new members and encourage politically active citizens to participate. The Berkeley Greens usually meet once a month in the Berkeley Main Library. 

For information, meetings and updates contact the Berkeley Greens at: www.acgreens.org/berkeley.  

Chris Kavanagh  

• 

A TAXING SITUATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Many homeowners will have to work into their 70s to set aside enough money to pay property taxes for the rest of their lives. Where is this money going? It turns out that 80 percent of the city’s budget goes right into the pockets of city staff, including guaranteed pensions for life for all city employees, who retire at or after age 55. (“Two-Year Berkeley City Budget Unveiled,” by Judith Scherr, May 11.) 

While I don’t begrudge the pensions for police officers and firefighters after age 50, it’s preposterous for ordinary city employees to become eligible for lifelong pensions at age 55, while the rest of us work have to keep working to support them.  

I don’t pretend to know which officials made this promise on behalf of Berkeley homeowners, present and future, but we should be looking for solutions fast, instead of raising taxes and fees again. Let non-emergency workers wait until age 65 to retire, like the rest of us. And let’s start cutting non-emergency staff positions at the highest levels today. These are some of our most expensive employees, and yet they preside over a system that often treats residents with contempt. Most notable are the Planning Department employees, who in case after case, ignore the concerns of neighborhoods in favor of developers. Many of them could be fired for cause, given how they circumvent the laws designed to protect neighborhoods. We should also terminate the city attorney and deputy city attorney who help them implement these decisions and the city manager who allows all of this to happen on his watch. 

I’m sure that many Planet readers have constructive ideas to balance our budget without taxing residents more. Let’s hear what you have to say about how your money is spent. 

Gus Lee  

• 

WORNICK NOT IGNORANT,  

JUST DECEITFUL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

When Commissioner Wornick states that his Peace and Justice Commission “spends so much time vilifying the Bush administration,” that commissioners are “blinding people to the real threat of radical Islam in the real world,” he expressed himself in the clearest way possible—his own words—his irrelevance to any debate and discussion on the Peace and Justice Commission, leaving aside for now the appalling tone and content of his video. 

In case Commissioner Wornick hasn’t noticed, the vilification of the Bush administration that he refers to is a view held by almost the entire world community (see any international poll conducted in the last two or three years), the majority of the American people, their Congress (see polls and remember the election of 2006) as well as more and more members of his own party.  

Furthermore, this public view is also widely held by experts and scholars of international affairs and relations, especially those with expertise in the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy in this critical and dangerous part of the world. Countless studies, surveys, , National Intelligence Estimates, Pentagon reports, etc.,, have well documented the fact that the Bush foreign policy, so forcefully planned, advocated and defended by such groups as the neo-cons, American Likkudists, AIPAC, and Christian fundamentalists (one such group, the very powerful and influential Christians United for Israel, formed by the Evangelical pastor, John Hagee, opposes any territorial concessions to Palestinians on Biblical grounds) are in fact creating more terrorists, acting as a recruiting agent for al Qaeda—in fact building popular support throughout the Islamic world for “radical Islam” that commissioner says he wants to warn us about. 

Contrary to the comment of the city councilmember who appointed Mr. Wornick to the PJC, he does not bring diversity or a different viewpoint to the commission. Rather, he just sits there and votes “no” on almost every resolution. (No on a peace concert sponsored by St. Joseph the Worker?—Really!) If Mr. Wornick was really serious about confronting and challenging “radical Islam,” he could begin by putting his energy and time into ending the 40-year occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem (a good place to start would be to support the Saudi peace initiative 2002/2007)—an occupation that is the most radicalizing issue for Muslims worldwide. 

It’s not out of ignorance that Mr. Wornick expresses the views and takes the positions that he does. It’s his way of attempting to obscure the truth behind the worst foreign policy disasters in the history of the United States and Israel, who is to blame for the very scary situation the world finds itself in today, and why.  

Michael Sherman  

• 

PUBLIC SMOKING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

After reading the Matier & Ross column in the May 16 San Francisco Chronicle about addressing homelessness on Berkeley’s streets by citing homeless smokers (and I assume non-homeless smokers) and funding this effort by increasing parking meter revenue...gee, I just don’t get the equation. 

Yes, smoking is bad for people, and even though I used to smoke it makes me queasy to smell the fumes in public, regardless of whether the smoker looks homeless or not. So, if I am following correctly, we may be enforcing the smoking ban with extra policing, and paying for this with...increased parking fees? 

Is this another way to gouge people who drive cars, as if gas prices were not bad enough? Let’s face it: People with money can afford to pay for gas and can afford to pay $5, $10 or more dollars to park in a lot while going to a movie or running an errand. As for the rest of us, we endure the pain in the neck it is to find parking downtown at a meter to save money. I drive to downtown Berkeley to go to movies, the drugstore, Ross, the post office, and more. I like to patronize local businesses. I take my car because I can’t/don’t want to devote up to an hour and a half to riding the bus round trip. Am I going to continue buying groceries at the Bowl and then schlep them home on the bus because there is even less parking? Downtown Berkeley already has scant to offer a mature adult like me who does not go to the clubs or to the university, and if you make it harder to park people will take their business out of town. Then who will be left on Shattuck? The homeless? 

Put the focus on social policies and practices that actually address the causes of homelessness: untreated mental illness, addiction, disintegrated families, the lack of place in our society for the poor. 

Lisa Mikulchik 

• 

BERKELEY BOWL  

PARKING METERS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I read in yesterday’s Matier & Ross’s column in the Chronicle that Mayor Bates is proposing to install parking meters around the Berkeley Bowl. 

I am a senior resident of Harriet Tubman Terrace, a residence for seniors and disabled people between Oregon and Russell streets, directly across from the Bowl.  

I own a small car, which I drive only rarely, for instance when I visit my granddaughter and/or help care for her new baby in Vallejo in an area not served by public transit; go to church in Kensington where the bus runs once an hour on Sundays; transport my paintings to galleries; church; or visit doctors that are an hour away by two buses but 15 minutes by car. 

There are no available spaces in the building’s parking lot (there is a 1.5-year waiting list), and the only unrestricted parking in this neighborhood are the six spaces immediately in front of our building, most of which are usually taken up by Bowl shoppers between 9 a.m. and 8 p.m. I was denied a resident sticker to park across the street on Milvia, Russell, or Oregon. I was told at the Traffic Department that this was a trade-off for not having alternate-side-of-the-street cleaning hours on Adeline Street in front of our building. 

If there are meters near the Bowl, this would only encourage even more shoppers to try to find free parking in front of or around our building, making a difficult situation even more difficult for us, the residents of Harriet Tubman Terrace.  

Marin Fischer 

• 

MORE ON PUBLIC SMOKING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am wondering how health-conscious people can raise awareness that smoking in public places is like littering in public places. Smoke is invisible. It vanishes into the air. But the air it vanishes into now includes pollutants which harm the lungs of children and mothers and older people. Who would want to harm the health of the good people passing by? What can we do to help smokers make that connection? Many of them might stop smoking near BART stations and bus stops if they knew they were causing harm to others. 

Romila Khanna 

Albany 

• 

LASTING PEACE IN  

NORTHERN IRELAND? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The historic power-sharing agreement between Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party that took place earlier this month in Northern Ireland has engendered hope for a lasting peace in that blood-soaked country. Such hopes have been dashed in the past. But this time, with long-time enemies Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness finally sitting down together, a time of peace may truly have arrived. 

Sectarian differences won’t suddenly disappear because of the agreement, so it’s worth noting another event that took place a few months ago in the Republic of Ireland. The occasion was the Six Nations Rugby competition held in Dublin. The match on February 24th was between England and Ireland. Sporting events often become an excuse for head bashing, and extra police were patrolling the streets. Adding to the tension was the fact that the match was being played in Croke Park, where in November 1920, British ‘Black and Tans’ had fired into a crowd attending a Gaelic football match. Fourteen civilians were killed, including a Tipperary footballer, Michael Hogan, for whom the park’s Hogan Stand is named. 

Memories of that November day were revived by protesters who campaigned against the English Rugby team being allowed into Croke Park. But when the players stood at attention to “God Save The Queen,” the stadium crowd was quiet. Nor was there any trouble after the match, in which Ireland trounced England, 43-13. The Independent newspaper quoted one fan as saying, “It is the day when Ireland says goodbye to its past and shakes hands with the future.” 

What can we learn from this? That political leaders sign agreements calling for peace, but peaceful actions come from the people who actually live, work, and play together. February’s events in Croke Park are a reason to be hopeful. 

Karen L. Branson 

• 

TELEGRAPH AVENUE  

SOLUTIONS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

You don’t have to go to the Haight in San Francisco to find solutions for Telegraph Avenue. We have them right here in Berkeley, but we seem to have forgotten history. And if you forget history, you have to repeat it, as the saying goes. 

About 30 years ago while I was still a merchant on Telegraph Avenue we merchants petitioned the city to put a foot patrol officer on Telegraph. He got to know the characters on Telegraph and was able to deal with them. Then the footpatrol officer was eliminated and the Avenue deteriorated. In the early 1990 the city hired the RESPECT Team, a group of 24 civilians. We patrolled the Avenue on weekend nights and the ratpack problem disappeared. Then Sgt. Boga from the BPD was put in charge of cleaning up the Avenue. He and some officers under his command from BPD and UC PD got to know the Avenue inside out—some people were arrested, and more were referred to Social Services. Again, peace returned to the Avenue. 

Because the RESPECT Team had been successful on Telegraph Avenue, the city hired the Berkeley Boosters to organize the Berkeley Guides, a group of civilians. Four uniformed Berkeley Guides patrolled Shattuck Avenue five days each week. They were equipped with police radios and trained in non-violent conflict resolution methods. 

The city provided the following scope of service: “Increase the feeling of safety and friendliness on the street and retail shops and to facilitate the delivery of, and access to, social and police services.” 

During 11 years the Berkeley Guides provided an excellent service to the city, but because of budget problems the service was eliminated. The Berkeley Guides would have been equally successful on Telegraph Avenue as they were on Shattuck. Now that Telegraph Avenue has deteriorated, it will cost much more to get it back into shape. Ongoing maintenance would have been cheaper. 

But the city never learns. 

Ove Wittstock 

Former owner, Laytons Shoes (Telegraph and Durant) 

Dénia, Spain 

• 

WAR ON THE POOR 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am writing in response to the opinion piece by David Howard in the May 11 edition of the planet. This latest piece by Howard continues a practice of not letting the facts get in the way of a good story. The facts that Howard employs to make a convoluted argument that mixed-density housing hurts low-income families aren’t worth debating, as they are absurd.  

As a board member of HOMES, I can categorically tell you that his assertions are false. HOMES is in favor of improving Measure A by allowing for a diverse mix of housing. This will allow families, couples and individuals at all economic levels and all stations of life to be able to become home owning community members in Alameda. Under Measure A, this is not possible. As passed, the law limits housing to single family homes on large lots, which in this day and age are running in the sub-million to million-dollar level. Because the measure was determined to be discriminatory, limited exemptions were made for some low-income and senior housing, Measure A proponents tout those developments as the success of the law, but they are the exceptions.  

The biggest legacy of Measure A is probably the Harbor Bay and Bayport developments—large, expensive single family housing that forces residents to rely on automobiles to get around. As a result of Measure A, traffic congestion has clearly risen more than it would have if transit oriented housing was allowed. While Measure A supporters have been busy plastering the town with signs saying higher density = higher traffic, it is in fact Measure A that is promoting traffic congestion.  

Howard sums up his screed by asking why HOMES is waging warfare on the lowest income families. Last year Howard launched a letter writing campaign attempting to defund a supportive housing program for the homeless in Alameda. In his campaign Howard manipulated crime data so egregiously that the police felt compelled to state that his analysis was “completely erroneous.” Howard went on from that episode to support a city council candidate who labeled the homeless the “dregs of society” and talked of the need to arm herself and put up barbed wire to protect herself from the homeless. If anyone is waging war on the poor in Alameda, it is David Howard. 

Doug Biggs 

Community Resources Director 

Alameda Point Collaborative 

• 

IMMIGRANT DEBATE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Farmers Branch, Texas, is the first community in the nation to pass a measure that prohibits landlords from renting to illegal immigrants. Legal, illegal, seems like a semantics game being played, used by the forces of bigotry and prejudice, to further their anti -immigration vendetta. “English speaking only” didn’t work so now it’s on to the next excuse. 

What about all the Mexican and Latino immigrants who clean the homes, take care of the children, clean the pools, do the yard work for the residents of Farmers Branch and then get discriminated against by the same folks when it comes to housing. Blatant hypocrisy, maybe even rampant racism, is still the driving force in the immigrant debate. 

Ron Lowe  

Grass Valley

Following two months of community pressure, the Berkeley City Council is considering strengthening Berkeley’s 1986 status as a City of Refuge for immigrants. Two competing measures, both of which would direct city staff to expend no funds nor staff time in aiding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), will be on the City Council agenda Tuesday, May 22. Last week, the Peace and Justice Commission passed a proposal for a San Francisco-style ordinance that would also require the city manager to notify the public whenever ICE asks for assistance. City Council members Kriss Worthington and Dona Spring will be introducing this ordinance. And Mayor Tom Bates is weighing in with a resolution offering language similar to San Francisco’s ordinance, minus the enforcement provisions and durability, since unlike the other proposal, it would not be adopted as part of the city’s municipal code.  

Community organizations led by parents and teachers are calling for a community rally on the front steps of the City Council Chambers in support of Berkeley’s defense of immigrant rights. Second-grade students from Rosa Parks will offer moving poetry testimonies about their deported classmate, Gerardo Espinoza, a 7-year-old U.S. citizen. The tragic deportation of Gerardo and his older brothers Felipe and José, both attending Berkeley public schools, fostered an outcry of community support. 

Last month, a diverse crowd of teachers, labor activists, parents and city officials packed the Rosa Parks multi-purpose room at a teach-in to inform immigrants of their legal rights. The event, largely organized by Berkeley Organizing Congregations for Action (BOCA) with the help of the LeConte PTA, Berkeley Federation of Teachers (BFT) and the Rosa Parks Collaborative among others, was entitled, “Know Your Rights to Melt the ICE; dispelling myths and fears.” In a courageous statement, Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) Superintendent Michele Lawrence lamented the tragic deportation of Rosa Parks’ student Gerardo and his brothers and said regarding any ICE’s laws requiring the violation of confidentiality between BUSD and families, “I would resign rather than break those confidences to Imigration.” Pressure from the organizers and public culminated in consideration of the current City of Refuge proposals. 

But critics of immigration reform argue that sanctuary proposals send the wrong message to immigrants who, they argue, are responsible for eroding citizens’ living standards. They say what’s needed is the opposite: stiffer penalties and stronger barriers. A Public Policy Institute of California report (Feb. 27) by University of California, Davis, economist Giovanni Peri shows that actually the opposite is true.  

“During 1990-2004, immigration induced a 4 percent real wage increase for the average native worker. An increase in the number of immigrants evidently increases the demand for tasks performed by native workers and raises their wages.” 

“Between 1990 and 2004, as the percentage of immigrants in California’s labor force rose, immigration helped boost natives’ wages as much as 7 percent, even giving a tiny bump to native high school dropouts,” reports Kristin Bender in the Oakland Tribune, (2/28/07) “A well-organized program that allows some legal way for less-educated workers to work in the United States will benefit the rest of American workers,” Giovanni concludes. 

U.S. workers are not the biggest winners in the “immigrant sweeps-takes” —or at least in one game which is driving immigrants northward: the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA.) A little known fact is stricter immigration policies, such as Operation Return to Sender, are products of NAFTA—a trade policy which is primarily enriching only a tiny sector. 

Thanks to protectionist measures like NAFTA, over an eight year period, “Resource transfers from the poor to the rich amounted to more than $400 billion,” reported Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Noam Chomsky in The Nation (“Notes on NAFTA.”) “The World Bank reports that protectionist measures of the industrialized countries reduce national income in the South by about twice the amount of official aid to the region—aid that is itself largely export promotion,” Chomsky states.  

In Mexico, “Poverty has risen by over 50 percent during the first four years of NAFTA and wages in the manufacturing sector have declined,” reports the Data Center.  

A 2004 report published by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means states that “At least 1.5 million Mexican farmers lost their livelihoods to NAFTA.” The situation is only expected to worsen in 2008 when Mexico is required to comply with a NAFTA deadline to totally eliminate its corn and bean import tariffs. Many policy experts predicted that farmers displaced by NAFTA would migrate to the United States.  

Indeed, a comparison of U.S. censuses of 1990 and 2000 shows “the number of Mexican-born residents in the United States increased by more than 80 percent,” states Jeff Faux in “How NAFTA Failed Mexico,” The American Prospect (July 3, 2003.) “Some half-million Mexicans come to the United States every year; roughly 60 percent of them are undocumented. The massive investments in both border guards and detection equipment have not diminished the migrant flow; they have just made it more dangerous. More than 1,600 Mexican migrants have died on the journey to the north.” 

While NAFTA is responsible for the latest “migration hump,” it is not the sole culprit. Practices by bodies like the World Trade Organization, “along with the programs dictated by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, have helped double the gap between rich and poor countries since 1960,” reports Noam Chomsky in The Nation. The ensuing foreign debt deprives these countries from accumulating capital to develop competitive industries and has lead to mass migration northward. 

After NAFTA was passed by Congress in 1992, “the agreement raised concerns in the United States about immigration from south of the border,” according to “NAFTA, The Patriot Act and the New Immigration Backlash” by the American Anthropological Association. To counter the predicted influx of Latin Americans, President Bill Clinton signed The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. “The 1996 Welfare Reform bill included anti-immigrant and other measures that eliminated many social services for undocumented immigrants,” the report states. The current ICE raids are a result of these long term policies.  

According to the Contra Costa Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, thousands of people have been detained in the Bay Area since the beginning of Operation Return to Sender, a campaign that has resulted in over 18,000 arrests nationwide and the deportation of 800 immigrants in Northern California cities alone. Over 58 sanctuary city initiatives have been promulgated in 21 states across the country. These cities include: Richmond, San Francisco, San Jose and East Palo Alto, and most recently, Oakland. 

Berkeley’s stance condemning these raids, if approved, would be a statement that families like Berkeley’s beloved Espinozas should not be forced to suffer tragic separations or deportations because of our nation’s trade policies. And in fact, a move offering more protection to immigrants residing in Berkeley would comply the Federal government’s request to “Return To Sender,” since the “Sender,” or source of the problem lies on U.S. soil. 

For more information about the rally, contact BOCA at 665-5821.  

Margot Pepper is a journalist and author whose work has been published internationally by Utne Reader, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, City Lights, Monthly Review, Hampton Brown and others. Her memoir, Through the Wall: A Year in Havana, was a top nomination for the 2006 American Book Award. 

Your May 15 front-page story, “Critical Mass Cyclists Confront Driver in Melee,” was an eye-opener. It seems that bicycling bullies-on-wheels, otherwise known as Critical Mass (or Critical Mob), has spread from San Francisco across the bay to Berkeley. This is not progress. There is a propensity of East Bay bicyclists to consider themselves as above the rules of the road and then ride through both stop signs and red lights. Now we have bullies-on-bicycles in group rides openly flaunting the rules of the road (for everyone else) and daring the local police or anyone else to stop them. They have the false courage of a mob. These folks seem to have a very large chip on their shoulder. Actually, bicycling bullies seem to have the same mind-set as the Bush crime family: ordinary rules and laws don’t apply to us: it’s our way on the highway… 

Part of their arrogance comes from the false notion that bicycles and their riders are somehow “non-polluting.” Let’s take a quick look at the raw materials that go into the manufacturing of a modern bicycle: the iron ore and the aluminum ore that has to be mined, smelted and refined into usable metal, which then has to be rolled, extruded, stamped or cast into parts for bicycle frames. Then there is the petroleum which has to be located, drilled and pumped out of the ground, shipped to a refinery where is converted into lubricating oils and greases for bicycles. More petroleum has to be converted into plastics for bicycle seats, cables, handlebar tapes, pumps and other accessories. Don’t forget the fabrics and leathers that are made into special bicycling gloves, hats, shirts, pants, socks and shoes. Then there are also the plantations of rubber trees that have to be planted, tended and the raw latex harvested, refined and extruded into bicycle tubes and tires. All of these products have to be transported by ship and truck, both of which burn diesel fuel. It takes many thousands of kilowatt hours to run bicycle assembly plants. So bicycles are definitely part of our modern industrial system. Admittedly, bicycles use much less energy and material than cars and SUVs, but don’t let anyone claim that bicycles are “pollution-free.” Also, militant bicyclists should bear in mind that not all of us are young, healthy, courageous and single enough to be able to depend on bicycles for local transportation and shopping expeditions. Some of us actually enjoy being able to drive out of town, to the ocean or into the Great Central Valley and up into the Sierras, in our cars… 

In the Critical Mass/Critical Mob incident which occurred at the end of March in San Francisco, many militant bicyclists surrounded a SUV driven by an out-of-town woman and began beating on the sides of the vehicle and finally trashed the rear window with a thrown bicycle (!). This terrorized the woman and her children. Heck of a job terrorizing, huh, Critical Mob… And in Berkeley, the Critical Mass/Critical Mob group recently got into a nasty confrontation with an elderly couple who were riding in their mini-van. It’s too bad that these bullies-on-bicycles can’t pick on folks their own size and age, instead of picking on women, children and old folks. 

The common thread uniting the Bush crime family gangsters and our local Critical Mass/Critical Mob bullies is their feeling that they are above the law, and above the rules and that it is OK to use threats and intimidation to achieve their goals. It would be far better for East Bay bicyclists to simply follow the rules of the road, which apply equally to them and motorized vehicles. They could also follow the lead of Critical Manners, a new bicycling group in San Francisco, who actually stop at stop signs, stop at red lights and yield to pedestrians during their group rides around town. Also, our local police should equally enforce all the traffic laws that apply to bicyclists and motorists. 

James K. Sayre is an Oakland resident.

It’s been a crappy year for wildflowers, but a great one for roses. When I mistook something for a startling pink tree and then realized it was a ‘Cecile Brunner’ rose climbing fifteen feet up a utility-pole guywire, and then did the same double-take for the same cultivar climbing a tree on Sacramento Avenue, I decided to write about roses this week. 

People have all sorts of theories (meaning unproven hypotheses, not “theories” in the scientific sense) about roses, and that’s contributed to their reputation as finicky. I’ve long thought that the reason for the multiplicity of theories is rather the opposite, and similar to the reason for the bewildering variety of theories about raising children.  

Like children, roses are tough enough to survive most of the wacky things that get done to them. When they do so, the owners of the wacky theories conclude that whatever regimen they’ve put their charges through must have been The One True Way™, and thereupon publish those theories.  

Inexperienced people setting out to raise roses (or rear children) and confronted with this great stack of undifferentiated data conclude that there must be a great deal to learn, since there’s a great deal being taught, and that doing it exactly right is absolutely necessary. Many try earnestly to do what they’re told, even when it’s self-contradictory.  

Needing to reconcile contradictory dictates can make people try even harder to fulfill them. It looks like some neuropsychological reward-frustration cycle to me: King Tantalus’ syndrome with a side of unimpeachable virtue. 

This may explain religion and gambling, as well as Dr. Spock and his spiritual heirs. It certainly explains at least half the tomes on growing roses, and the regrettable tendency of gardeners to douse their roses and soil with weird cocktails of fertilizers and pesticides. 

Sometimes they get ingenious. A surgeon of my acquaintance, in the years before AIDS triggered a lot of epidemiological restrictions, used to take home age-expired units of blood from the hospital, usefully recycling the wasted blood by pouring it around his roses. Lots of nitrogen there, and trace elements; he said it tended to repel deer too.  

I’m sure his plants loved their vampirish treat. I have first-hand evidence of the bloodthirsty nature of roses, and so does anyone else who’s spent time pruning them. No matter how scrupulous one is about wearing gloves—leather gloves, goatskin gloves, Kevlar for all I know—those thorns are going to find a way through to skin. The rose-lovers’ mantra is “Ow.” 

Sometimes people just get desperate and pile the storage shed with scary compounds that happen to get marketed with “rose” somewhere on the label. I’ve seen a collection that included several things specifically aimed at Japanese beetles—which (knock wood) we don’t have here in northern California.  

This foofaraw is not necessary. 

There are a couple of rose cultivars that demonstrate the essential toughness of roses. Those ‘Cecile Brunner’ heroines I noted are members of one. 

Cecile’s blossoms look frail enough, heaven knows. They’re an ethereal pale pink, aging to a paler shade still, and small and delicately shaped. They have a light, fresh version of the classic rose scent and they’re generous about casting it to the breeze.  

Cecile bears those flowers in profusion even under less than ideal circumstances. This year, they’ve been stunning; as you go about Berkeley and the rest of the East Bay, you’ll see cataracts and tumbles and swells and sprays of them coming over fences, arbors, trees, and anything else that holds still long enough.  

Every other rose in the area is showing off this spring too. I swear I’ve been dazzled by rushes of roses’ perfume while driving on main streets. Heady stuff. 

Because Cecile Brunner roses are small and hold together well as they age, people like to put them on cakes and such edibles. Fortunately, the plant seems to be extraordinarily resistant to diseases, so there’s no need to taint it with unhealthful or even unaesthetic remedies. If you’re the sort of person who wants to eat roses—and why not? Ten thousand deer can’t be wrong—this is a rose to eat. 

There’s one by our driveway; it’s been there for who knows how long, certainly since before we moved here 12 years ago. It’s in partial shade and still blooms prolifically, and I’ve never noticed a spot of rust or mildew or anything else nasty on it. The only care it gets aside from incidental water is pruning, and that only when it gets in the way.  

It got top-heavy this year, and one of those big windy rainstorms flopped a hunk of it over into the driveway. It was a week before we got to tie it up, and it responded to being driven through just as it’s responded to any other mistreatment: it went on blithely blooming, as I scattered rose petals from the RAV4 and occasionally arrived somewhere sporting a pink car-corsage.  

Photograph by Ron Sullivan. 

Cecile’s blossoms are tough despite thier ethereal pale pink color, aging to a paler shade still, and they are small and delicately shaped size.

Figuring out the motives and actions of a wartime President while those actions are taking place is always difficult because, after all, one of the key elements of the successful prosecution of a war is deceiving the enemy, and you cannot very well do that while honestly explaining your true plans and intentions to your own people. Wish it weren’t so, friends, but that seems to be a fact. And for democracies, which bill themselves as being based on an informed public, it is a contradiction that will never be fully resolved. 

Perhaps Franklin D. Roosevelt’s most famous speech was the “day of infamy” address he gave following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, mobilizing the nation to go to war. We did not learn until many years later that this was not as much a surprise to Mr. Roosevelt as he wanted us to believe, with credible historical evidence now emerging that the Roosevelt Administration may have goaded the Japanese into an attack—although the belief almost certainly was that the attack would be on a lesser American military base, and not on Hawaii—on the assumption that the then-isolationist American public would probably not otherwise support U.S. troops going to the defense of Britain and France against the German Axis. 

That being said, we who live in war times do not have the luxury of historians to be able to comb through declassified documents and interview survivors freed of national security restraints. We have to make our decisions in real time, based upon our imperfect assessments and the available evidence, and so we risk that la historia no nos absolverá, to paraphrase Fidel Castro’s famous phrase, but may, in fact, find our assumptions wrong. But that is the chance, and we have no choice but to take it. 

And so, let us try to figure through this morass we face. 

To begin with, I do not think that the Bush Administration threat to enter war with Iran is more than a feint and, if it is, there is little we could do about it, anyway, before it could be carried out, and its effects felt. 

Having never served in the military, I know as little about assessing military strengths and weaknesses as the average person, but it seems a valid question to ask that if the United States were to engage in a prolonged military conflict with Iran beginning while we are still engaged in other military matters, one has to wonder, with what forces? We know that the current United States military has been stretched and strained in trying to man and manage two wars—Iraq and Afghanistan—and that the country has been drained of the conceivably available National Guard troops. We see that it is difficult for both the National Guard and the regular military to maintain enlistment levels under the present circumstances and absent an Iranian nuclear strike on, say, Los Angeles, it is also difficult to imagine circumstances that would cause such enlistments to suddenly increase. Without such a troop increase, how would the nation open up a third front in these wars, considering that the Iranian military would be a significantly superior force to what the country faced against either the Taliban or the Sadaam Hussein regime? 

But we have long ago learned that what seems insensible and irrational to the rest of the country and the world can seem perfectly reasonable within the White House of George W. Bush, and so it is certainly possible that the Bush Administration believes that it could get away with lobbing a few missiles from a carrier group into what it says is an Iranian nuclear weapons-making facility, with few consequences to America beyond the loss of several thousand pounds of ordnance. To do so risks bringing Iranian troops, in uniform, across the border into Iraq to hit the flanks of American forces currently bogged down in the Baghdad “surge,” but the Bush White House might believe this would also bring the generals back into line, as well as a run of flag-waving young American men and women to the recruiting stations. Seems doubtful, but who knows what lurks within the minds of these men of the Bush Administration? 

But to plot progressive strategy to try to end the current conflict, we must try to look into these dark recesses. 

At the beginning of April, when the Democratic-controlled Congress was considering war funding measures that put a timetable on U.S. military involvement in Iraq, I wrote in a column that progressives should look at this as the first skirmish, and not the place where the line in the sand should be drawn. 

“Much as we would like them to move immediately,” I said, “Congress must move cautiously on the war issue. Because the anti-war majority in the country has not yet hardened, this is not the time to test its resolve in a showdown with the President. If Mr. Bush vetoes the military spending bill because of its withdrawal language—as he has promised—Congress should give in, and pass legislation that leaves the withdrawal language out. A point will have been made, and in the next budget showdown—which will inevitably come—the anti-war members of Congress will have the stronger hand.” 

In response, a local progressive activist—whose work and opinion I respect—wrote me privately, “I followed the rationale of your article, but, alas, and probably for the first time, I find myself in disagreement with your conclusion. To my mind, best you had left it at outlining the various alternatives and leave it to each to ponder their personal selection.” He suggested another option—a proposed bill that “would approve the requested funding, but, with the stipulation that the funds can ONLY be used for disengagement and withdrawal,” which he was suggesting to House and Senate leaders. 

But, respectfully, I think my good friend missed the point I was trying to make, most probably because of my inadequacies in attempting to explain it. I’ll try again, now that events have helped to make the situation clearer. 

Democrats hold a majority in both the United States Senate and the House of Representatives, but it is the slimmest of majorities, certainly not veto-proof. Further, while there is a mandate coming out of the last Congressional elections for the United States military involvement in Iraq to end—a mandate that has spilled over into the consciousness and actions of some Congressional Republicans as well most Democrats—there is no generally agreed upon “plan” by which such an end should take place, or what Americans think should be left when American military forces are gone. By the end of the war in Vietnam, for various reasons, neither of those were national issues in this country, and so the call to “Get out NOW!” resonated in those days. But these are different days. 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid can certainly put forward a military funding measure with a date-certain withdrawal provision on it. But so could Glendower in Shakespeare’s King Henry IV call spirits from the vasty deep. “Why, so can I, or so can any man,” Hotspur responded. “But will they come when you do call for them?” 

How would Congress respond to such date-certain language? They would probably pass it, again, but there does not seem to be, for the present, a workable, veto-proof majority to uphold it. 

In no small part, this comes from no small fear that the Bush Administration might purposely put American troops in greater danger than necessary in order to advance their political goals if the funding bill is further delayed. And so the seeming impasse, with two things appearing possible which might break it. 

The first would be a virtual revolt among the troops. Though conventional thinking may be that this is something out of the realm of possibility, that is, to some extent, what happened in Vietnam, and what helped lead to an end to that war. But Vietnam was a mostly involuntary war, made up in large percentage by troops who came there not by choice, but by coercion. Other than large sections of the National Guard forces, the American troops in Iraq are for the most part voluntary. They may grumble, but they are almost certainly going to continue to follow orders so long as they are there. 

The other factor that could lead to an earlier end to the U.S. involvement in Iraq would be a virtual revolt within this country itself. That, again, was what helped lead to the early U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. That included massive anti-war demonstrations, as well as widespread civil disobedience campaigns. 

But although sentiment within the United States against the war in Iraq rose and converged to critical mass vastly quicker than it did during the war in Vietnam, that sentiment has not reached a level where large numbers of Americans feel so much in opposition that they will walk down, en masse, to the nearest Army recruiting station and sit down in front and block it until the police come and take them away to jail. 

Unless and until that happens, or some other manifestation of mass sentiment against the war comes to the surface, it would appear that President Bush—and the people who want to continue to prosecute the war in Iraq, regardless of the consequences to the military and the nation—currently hold the current upper hand, no matter how much otherwise we wish it so. 

The present work, therefore, would seem to be not so much to convince Congress, but to first catalyze the crowd.

Not every house in Berkeley can boast of an illustrious resident. Fewer can boast of two. Fewer yet can demonstrate a connection between the two notables. The house at 1335 Shattuck Avenue is one of the latter. 

Built in 1894 by Captain John Slater, the house is one of the first Classic Colonial Revival buildings constructed in the East Bay. At the time it was erected, Queen Anne was the prevailing fashion, and the shingled Arts & Crafts style was just beginning to emerge from the cradle with a few examples such as the Anna Head School at Bowditch and Channing (1892). 

John Slater (1849–1908) was born on one of the Shetland Islands in Scotland. At the age of 15 he left school to join the crew of a fishing sloop. Four years later, he went to sea as a sailor before the mast, working his way up to an officer’s position. In 1871, he came to California as a mate on the ship Seminole of Boston. Impressed with the outlook on the Pacific coast, he decided to stay. After plying the coast trade for several years, he was lured into gold mining on the Stikine River in northwestern British Columbia but did not find it profitable. 

Going back to the sea, Slater became master of several ships belonging to the Sam Blair line. In 1889, he joined the shipping firm of William E. Mighell and Charles C. Boudrow. For seven years Slater was master of the bark Wilner. After this ship was burned at the docks in Tacoma, WA, he took charge of the clipper ship Charmer, which he commanded on the San Francisco-Honolulu route until his retirement in 1907. 

Captain Slater married Louise M. Colby in 1888. The couple lived in San Francisco before they built their house in the Berkeley Villa Association tract. The move to Berkeley may have been inspired in part by Slater’s employers—both Captain Boudrow and Captain Mighell owned mansions nearby, on what is now the 1500 block of Oxford Street. And they weren’t the only ones. North Berkeley was a mini-Mecca for seafarers, who no doubt were attracted by the sweeping marine vistas commanded from its hills. 

The Slaters picked a double lot directly to the south of Captain Jefferson Maury’s house. Sited on a double lot at 1317 Shattuck Avenue, the Maury residence featured a wrap-around porch and an angled corner turret. In 1922, John Hudson Thomas would transform this house into a shingled English country cottage. 

Across the street from the Slaters, at 1322 Shattuck Avenue, lived Captain William B. Seabury and his family. Like Captain Maury, Seabury was a commodore of the Pacific Mail Steam Ship Company. Also like Maury, he built his house in 1885. But while the Maury house survived to become a City of Berkeley Landmark, the Seabury house has been replaced with an apartment building. 

The Slaters engaged prominent San Francisco architect T.J. Welsh to design their residence. The contractor was Charles Murcell of East Oakland, whose Berkeley quarters were located at the lumber office of Barker & Hunter, on the southwestern corner of Shattuck Ave. and Dwight Way. 

In January 1896, the Berkeley Herald described the Slater house in detail, noting that it commanded “a magnificent view of the Golden Gate, the city of San Francisco, San Francisco Bay and the ocean beyond:” 

A notable feature of the exterior is a pleasant porch, running the entire width of the building, at the front entrance. 

The walls are covered from foundation to first story in rustic [wide wood siding] and from first story to cornice with clapboard. It is painted in Colonial yellow, with white trimmings. The roof is of slate. The building is 42x80 feet, which includes the front piazza. It contains eight large rooms, well arranged for light and heat. The front vestibule is trimmed in oak. The spacious exterior hall is trimmed with curly, native redwood, wainscoted with Lincrusta-Walton [an embossed, linoleum-like material] and lighted from transoms over doors of French bevel plate-glass. 

The staircase is separated from the main hall, the posts of which extend to the ceiling. Between the posts are spindle transoms supported on ornamental brackets. The parlors are finished in natural redwood and are provided with open fireplaces of Roman brick; hearth of same, and mantels of curly redwood of unique design. The dining-room is trimmed and finished in antique oak, including paneled wainscoting. The divan is built with arm-rest and lockers underneath. There is a spindle arch across the bay-window, resting on turned columns. The fireplace is built of Roman brick facings and hearth, mantels made of oak of exquisite design, including lockers and bevel plate mirrors. The walls are tinted a deep sea green, ceiling of Nile green. 

The article went on to describe the kitchen, pantry, butler’s pantry and china closet finished in natural redwood and “fitted up in modern style”; bedrooms “fitted up in like manner, with closets and dens attached”; a bathroom of oak, “with tile floor and tile wainscoting five feet high, and containing a porcelain bathtub with shower bath attached, oval wash-basin, all plumbing exposed, with locker and medicine closet attached.” The cost of the building to complete was $5,750, well above the $4,608 figure provided in the contract notice of Aug. 2, 1894. 

The first floor housed the Slaters and their four children, James Herbert, Marguerite, Norman and Colby. The basement is said to have housed the servants, although the 1900 census listed only one domestic living with the family. There were also rooms on the attic floor; these are said to have been reserved for guests (by 1970, the attic and basement floors were subdivided into six apartments each), but it appears that some if not all of the guests were of the paying kind. For several years in the first decade of the 20th century, one such “guest” was Andrew H. Irving (1875–1947), plant superintendent at the Paraffine Paint Company, a manufacturer of roofing materials under the Pabco brand name. 

The vice-president and manager of Paraffine Paint Co. was Andrew Irving’s elder brother, Samuel C. Irving (1858–1930). In 1906, Samuel acquired 1322 Shattuck Ave. from the Seaburys, who had moved to the Southside eight years earlier. We’ll return to the Irvings in part two of this series. 

Captain Slater died at the age of 58 following a bout of cancer. Twenty-one months later, his widow married Edward A. Phillips, a recently arrived magazine writer from Salt Lake City. Phillips, too, was not long for this world, and by the mid-1910s, the twice-widowed Louise and some of her children had moved to 1426 Spruce Street. This house, a modest Queen Anne, still exists, albeit altered, on a row of surviving Victorians. 

This is the first part in a series of articles on north Berkeley houses and the families that inhabited them. 

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

Photograph by Daniella Thompson. Symmetry and Classic elements, such as columns and a pediment on the dormer, distinguish the Slater house at 1335 Shattuck Ave.  

One might be forgiven for thinking otherwise, but there are things to buy at The Gardener that actually have something to do with gardens. 

The tony and tempting Fourth Street shop has been, shall we say, wider in its scope than the average nursery or hardware store since its inception. I do believe that the proportion of garden stuff has shrunk over the years, but that’s entirely subjective. 

Maybe I’m just personally dazzled by the perfectly Zen furniture—imagining each piece playing solo in a room of hand-burnished cypress and off-white rice paper—or the perfectly textured fabrics in table linens and scarves, or the perfectly hilarious renditions of an entire Shakespeare play in relatively fine print on a poster.  

Of course, the stuff displayed on the sidewalk outside is suitable for outdoor use, in the garden or on the deck or by the front door. 

I do like the recycled rainbow-rubber renditions of those familiar school foot-scraper doormats in a couple of sizes, and the weathered-wood Adirondack chairs, though, having some experience with weathered wood, I have to wonder about splinters.  

There’s an interesting strategy going on inside. If you have the same tendency I do to wander through a store in a circle, you’ll find the path leads from garden stuff first through garden stuff last whether you go sunwise or widdershins.  

On your right, you’ll encounter the $200 birdhouses and zinc plant markers (carbon pencils to use on those are sold separately) along with more practical items like the “tip bag” and Bosbag-type gadgets for toting your pruning scraps or leaf litter, and a few models of the indispensable Felco pruning shears. I do think that at those prices the birdhouses should come with at least a pair of orioles.  

What else? 

Well, while you’re on your expedition to pick up a castle for the kids or lunch at Bette’s or a yummy rat for your snake, you can drop by The Gardener for some Italian veggie seeds—or Seeds of Change or Kitazawa seeds—maybe a Designer watering can. A waterproof notebook; I’d thought only birders were crazy enough to need those.  

Maybe you need West County gardening gloves, or a pair of rose gloves with long gauntlet cuffs. Speaking of Zen: natural-fiber cordage for tying up vines or tomatoes.  

Maybe a stylish gardening hat. Hand hoes and other such clever tools. Garden clogs (for the kids, too) or big plastic bucket/baskets like those used in Spain. Polished pebbles to mulch your potted plants.  

And when you’re finished with planting and maintaining, some fragrant soap (maybe Juniper Ridge wildcrafted California scents: bay laurel, juniper, cedar) and a handsome $18 nailbrush to clean up with, scented hand cream afterwards.  

Then off to your South American-style hammock, with a copy of Sunset’s latest edition, or Native Treasures, or some such garden book, or Yoga for Gardeners. Maybe a hand-thrown cup of fancy tea.  

And dream of the garden that The Gardener thinks you should have: perfect in every way.  

The Gardener 

1836 Fourth St. 

548-4545 

www.thegardener.com 

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Daily Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Daily Planet.

Hi Matt: Enjoyed your excellent article on foundation capping.One thing that I sometimes mention to my clients is that the faulty grade problem may sometimes be solved by simply digging away the dirt and debris that has accumulated against the foundation. This of course is the most economical solution when a complete foundation replacement isn’t needed for structural reasons! Do you think this is an okay observation to make?  

—Betsy Thagard  

Absolutely Betsy,  

As I often say to folks who write me with valid point regarding the subject of the article, if I weren’t limited to about 1000 words, I’d probably have said just what you mentioned. 

Caps are often “technically” required by the Structural Pest Control Act but, in fact, silly and largely unnecessary. Soil has often built up on the outside (and sometimes on the inside due to later work such as basement development) and simply needs to be cut away. 

The trick is to first dig a pit next the foundation to see the total depth in one spot prior to digging out along a long stretch. 

As long as you’re not undermining the foundation and there are at least a few inches left, it’s fine to cut back the soil and create a two-four-inch gap. It’s also a good idea to make sure that client know not to mulch or plant right along this boundary and to keep it clear. 

Six-inches is code but not really required. Some very short footings (10 inches or so) are not good candidates for this technique but replacement of a good solid unrotated footing of solid concrete is usually unnecessary and capping does very little for any of us. All that said, a new inverted T is a nice improvement that adds value in several ways. 

You Harvard grads are so smart! 

—Matt

Nightmare On Elm Street? 

Even though Halloween is months away, let’s consider some things that make for a scary house: 

• It was built before 1989 and you’re not sure about the retrofit 

• You’re not home 24/7, but you don’t have an automatic gas shut-off valve 

• The heavy furniture, wall hangings, and appliances haven’t been secured 

• There isn’t enough food, water, and emergency supplies to last a week 

• You’re not sure about the safest place to be in each room during a serious quake 

Don’t get overwhelmed, folks, just decide to do something about your family’s and your home’s safety—one step at a time. 

Larry Guillot is owner of QuakePrepare, an earthquake consulting, securing, and kit supply service. Call him at 558-3299, or visit www.quakeprepare.com.

TUESDAY, MAY 22 

CHILDREN 

Comedy & Tricks with Dana Smith & his dog Lacey, for ages 3 and up at 6:30 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Free. 524-3043. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Peter Irons, author of “God on Trial: Dispatches from America’s Religious Battlefields,” in conversation with Jeffrey Brand, dean of USF Law School, at 7:30 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. lewis@litminds.org 

Rebecca Mead talks about “One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Debussy Trio at 8 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Tickets are $20. 525-5211. www.berkeleychamberperform.org 

Courtableu, cajun, zydeco, at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Singers’ Open Mic with Ellen Hoffman at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Audrey Auld Mezera with Nina Gerber at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Jazzschool Tuesdays, a weekly showcase of up-and-coming ensembles from Berkeley Jazzschool at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

WEDNESDAY, MAY 23 

FILM 

International Latino Film Festival “Barrio Cuba” at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $5-$6. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

David Talbot describes “Brothers: A Hidden History of the Kennedy Years” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Writing Teachers Write, student teacher readings, at 5 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Fred Randolph Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Tamsen Donner Blues Band at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Swing dance lesson at 7:30 Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

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

Hip Bones, instrumental jazz with funk and rock, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

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

THURSDAY, MAY 24 

THEATER 

“The Other Side of the Mirror” written and performed by Lynn Ruth Miller at 8 p.m. at Spud’s Pizza, 3290 Adeline. Cost is $10. 650-355-4296. 

Travelling Jewish Theater “Death of a Salesman” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave., through June 10. Tickets are $15-$44. 1-800-838-3006. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Residency Projects, Part I” Reception for Kala Fellowship artists, Freddy Chandra and Su-Chen Hung at 6 p.m. at Kala Art Institute, 1060 Heinz Ave. Exhibition runs to June 30. 549-2977. www.kala.org 

FILM 

POV 2 Bay Area Animation Festival at 9:15 p.m. at El Cerrito Speakeasy Theater, 10070 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. Cost is $6. 848-1994. www.picturepubpizza.com  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Christopher Hitchens and Chris Hedges on “Is God Great?” at 7:30 p.m. at King Middle School, 1781 Rose St. Tickets are $20 from www.kpfa.org/events/Hitchens 

Eric Drooker: Musical Slide Lectures, spoken word to projected graphics at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. pegdowntown@sbcglobal.net 

Nomad Spoken Word Night at 7 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Clotilde DuSoulier introduces her cookbook “Chocolate and Zucchini: Daily Adventures in a Parisian Kitchen” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Richard Walker reads from “The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Tim O’Brien at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $25.50-$26.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Dick Conte Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $9. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Falso Baiano, Brazilian instrumental at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Haale, Samvega, The Hobbyists at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Fishtank Ensemble at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Selector: Cubik & Origami at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

FRIDAY, MAY 25 

THEATER 

Altarena Playhouse “The Last Five Years” Fri and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at 1409 High St., Alameda, through June 10. Tickets are $17-$20. 523-1553. www.altarena.org 

Berkeley Rep “Oliver Twist” at 8 p.m. at the Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. through June 24. Tickets are $45-$61. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org  

Impact Theatre “Measure for Measure” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave., through May 26.Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. 

Just Theater, “I Have Loved Strangers” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., to May 26. Tickets are $12-$25. 421-1458. www.justtheater.org 

Shotgun Players “The Cryptogram” Thurs.-Sun. at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., through June 17. Tickets are $17-$25. For reservations call 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

“The Striders Club” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Malonga Casquelourd Arts Center, 1421 Alice St., Oakland. Tickets are $5-$11. 450-0891. 

Subterranean Shakespeare “Macbeth” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St., near Rose in Live Oak Park, to May 26. Tickets are $12-$17. 276-3871. 

TheatreFIRST “Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 3 p.m. at Old Oakland Theatre, 481 Ninth St., Oakland. Tickets are $18-$25. 436-5085. www.theatrefirst.com 

Travelling Jewish Theater “Death of a Salesman” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave., through June 10. Tickets are $15-$44. 1-800-838-3006. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Milvia Street 2007 Readings and art showing from Berkeley City College’s art and literary journal at 7 p.m. in the 3rd flr Community Meeting Room, Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6107. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Jerry Kuderna Piano “From Bach to Babbitt” at 1 p.m. at 2323 Shattuck Ave. www.berkeleyartsfestival.com 

“Dance Elixir” with Leyya Tawil and Zari Le’on Fri. and Sat. at 8:30 p.m. at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St., Oaklakland. Tickets are $20. 435-6413. 

Jerry Kuderna, piano and Nora L. Martin, vocalist perform Hanns Eisler’s cycle of 18 songs on Poems by Bertolt Brecht at 8 p.m. at the Berkeley Arts Festival, 2323 Shattuck Ave. www.berkeleyartsfestival.com 

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

Brother Resistance, Chalkdust, and the D Platinum Crew at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $TBA 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

The Dave Matthews Blues Band at 8 p.m. at The Warehouse Bar, 4th & Webster, Oakland. 451-3161. 

Katie Garibaldi and Jeremy Rourke at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Spotlight Stealerz at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Flowtilla, Judea Eden Band at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Social Unrest, Hellbillys, Static Thought,at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

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

Saoco, Rico Pabon, Santero at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $7. 548-1159.  

Mingus Amungus at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Filthy Thieving Bastards, Druglords of the Avenues, The Sore Thumbs at 9 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $10. 451-8100. www.uptownnightclub.com 

SATURDAY, MAY 26 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Amazing Blooms” Floral art by Leslie Winoku. Artist reception and tea at 3 p.m. at Expressions Gallery, 2035 Ashby Ave. Exhibit runs to June 1. 644-4930. 

FILM 

Berkeley Arts Festival “Noisy People” a documentary on the artists and musicians from the San Francisco Bay Area’s improvisational music community, at 8 p.m. at 2323 Shattuck Ave. Costi si $5-$10. www.berkeleyartsfestival.com  

Lost Film Fest with shorts from The Yes Men, TV Sheriff, Guerrilla News Network at 8 p.m. at AK Press, 674-A 23rd St., Oakland. Suggested donation $5-$10. 208-1700. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

The Sitka Trio Medieval and Baroque music for recorder, vielle, ‘cello, harp and voice, at 8 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana St. Tickets are $8-$12. 549-3864. www.trinitychamberconcerts.com 

Jesus Diaz & su QBA at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

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

Baba Ken and the Afro-Groove Connexion at 7 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Mystic, Conscious Daughters, Pam the Funkstress at 8 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $10-$15. 548-1159. www.shattuckdownlow.com 

Nate Lopez and Olivia Voss at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Ben Goldberg at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Caroline Chung Jazz Trio at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $5. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Skinlab, WillHaven, Ankla at 6:30 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $10. 763-1146.  

Culann’s Hounds, The Mor Rigan’s Wake at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

Tracorum, roots music, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Animosity, As Blood Runs Black, The Faceless, at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, MAY 27 

FILM 

“The Kreutzer Sonata” at 3 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“Love” a two act musical for soprano and baritone at 7:30 p.m. at The Berkeley Arts Festival, 2323 Shattuck Ave., between Durant and Bancroft. Tickets are $10 at the door. www.berkeleyartsfestival.com 

“Low-down Hoedown” with Cosio, Hardy Harr, The Parish at 1 p.m. at The Living Room Gallery, 3230 Adeline St. Barbeque facilities available. livingroomgallery@gmail.com 

Brazilian Soul! at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $9. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Trick Kernan Combo at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Americana Unplugged: Tom Huebner at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Vernon Bush Group, soul, gospel, jazz, at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

MONDAY, MAY 28 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Stan Apps and Ara Shirinyan read at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Blue Monday Jam at 9 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $5. 451-8100.

SONGS AND POEMS OF BERTOLT BRECHT 

Jerry Kuderna and Norah Martin, the dynamic duo, will preside over a program of Hanns Eisler’s Cycle of 18 Songs on Poems by Bertolt Brecht at 8 p.m. Friday. $10.  

Fidelity Bank Building, 2323 Shattuck Ave. 665-9496. www.berkeleyartsfestival.com. 

‘IS GOD...GREAT?” 

Journalist and and literary critic Christopher Hitchens, noted for his iconoclastic wit, outspoken anti-theism and fiery political temperament—not to mention his abrupt abandonment of both a Trotskyist youth and, more recently, the progressive left—joins journalist Chris Hedges in conversation under the title, “Is God... Great?” at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at King Middle School. $20. The event is sponsored by KPFA and will be introduced by and moderated by Sasha Lilley, formerly co-host of Against the Grain, and presently KPFA’s interim program director. 1781 Rose St.

In a swirl of scenes that quickly alternate between darkness and light, at first very different in what they show, then interpenetrating, Just Theater stages the Bay Area premiere of Berkeley native Anne Washburn’s “text about message,” I Have Loved Strangers, for just three more performances, through Saturday. 

In the darkness, the cast files in, intoning a Gregorian chant, giving the City Club a cloistered air. But just for a moment. Lights on, there’s a downtown rush of busy-ness and overlapping dialogue, techno-chatter, banalities ... reading from the book in which “he wrote it all down,” Baruch (Michael Barrett Austin) throws the immediate into retrospect: “It was a day of astounding light, bursting out everywhere ... Not yet noon ...” 

Above the audience, seated on the sides of the Julia Morgan-designed salon, is a structure that resembles the model for a freeway overpass. And there is a recurrent atmosphere in the play of backrooms and of the subterranean, of being underneath something.  

Into the contemporary bustle wanders a rudely robed, bearded man (Ryan Oden)—a street person? He starts speaking in apocalyptic, scriptural rhetoric as the others shy away from him. It’s recognizable: from Jeremiah in the King James Bible. 

Other scenes follow, seemingly disjointed. A couple (Mick Mize and Alexandra Creighton), clearly cityfolk, hike in the dark, with the sound of frogs and the stars overhead, later exploring the headstones in an old cemetery, the rest of the ensemble in tableau as the Victorian funerary sculpture. One woman asks her friend (Creighton again and Lindsey Gates) to tell her who she (the questioner) is. Are they old school friends playing a game? Or is it a change to a nom-de-guerre? ... A man (Carson Creecy IV) posed with an espresso cup (with which he’ll later do a wry flamenco) asks the Old Testament prophet out to dinner—from which he’s abducted. A modern-day prophet (Anthony Nemirovsky) chats at a cocktail party about how he receives his prophecies, later telling his wife (Gates again) how he was whisked away by armed men while buying coffee beans and questioned by—the king? (later played by Joseph O’Malley) ... The Old Testament prophet wakes up in a safe house in the middle of the night as the Whore of Babylon (Meera Kumbhani) sings to him. 

Ensemble work and the portrayal of individuals provide a contrast, yet in their back-and-forth provide the fluid motion of the show. All the disparate pieces, in their various registers of tone and rhetoric, are gathered up into one odd compound that is—refreshingly—never completely pinned down by plot or “back story.” Besides the scriptural passages, the author and her collaborators were inspired by “material overheard on the streets of New York [in 2005] ... and the activities of the Weather Underground.” 

The binding together of the different vignettes into one tale displays irony, quite different from the usual melding of discrete episodes in a film or TV show. Maybe the lyrical passages take off too much of the edge (which the humor of unlikely juxtapositions relieves pretty well), but they might also provide some of the bright notes in a scale that runs from admonitory to conversational. 

Washburn spoke of how she’s used memories of her childhood in ’70s-’80s Berkeley, “a city obsessed, in the most graceful and graceless ways possible, with the truth.”  

Just Theater’s a young troupe, with the show directed by Jonathan Spector, literary manager of Playwrights Foundation (which partnered in presenting the show), and produced by company founder Molly Aaronson-Gelb, who’s worked with Shotgun, Berkeley Rep and CalShakes. Based in the East Bay, they’re a welcome addition to our diverse stage scene. 

Photograph: Jay Yamada 

Alexandra Creighton and Lindsey Gates in I Have Loved Strangers. 

I HAVE LOVED STRANGERS 

8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave.  

$12-$25. 421-1458.

It’s been a crappy year for wildflowers, but a great one for roses. When I mistook something for a startling pink tree and then realized it was a ‘Cecile Brunner’ rose climbing fifteen feet up a utility-pole guywire, and then did the same double-take for the same cultivar climbing a tree on Sacramento Avenue, I decided to write about roses this week. 

People have all sorts of theories (meaning unproven hypotheses, not “theories” in the scientific sense) about roses, and that’s contributed to their reputation as finicky. I’ve long thought that the reason for the multiplicity of theories is rather the opposite, and similar to the reason for the bewildering variety of theories about raising children.  

Like children, roses are tough enough to survive most of the wacky things that get done to them. When they do so, the owners of the wacky theories conclude that whatever regimen they’ve put their charges through must have been The One True Way™, and thereupon publish those theories.  

Inexperienced people setting out to raise roses (or rear children) and confronted with this great stack of undifferentiated data conclude that there must be a great deal to learn, since there’s a great deal being taught, and that doing it exactly right is absolutely necessary. Many try earnestly to do what they’re told, even when it’s self-contradictory.  

Needing to reconcile contradictory dictates can make people try even harder to fulfill them. It looks like some neuropsychological reward-frustration cycle to me: King Tantalus’ syndrome with a side of unimpeachable virtue. 

This may explain religion and gambling, as well as Dr. Spock and his spiritual heirs. It certainly explains at least half the tomes on growing roses, and the regrettable tendency of gardeners to douse their roses and soil with weird cocktails of fertilizers and pesticides. 

Sometimes they get ingenious. A surgeon of my acquaintance, in the years before AIDS triggered a lot of epidemiological restrictions, used to take home age-expired units of blood from the hospital, usefully recycling the wasted blood by pouring it around his roses. Lots of nitrogen there, and trace elements; he said it tended to repel deer too.  

I’m sure his plants loved their vampirish treat. I have first-hand evidence of the bloodthirsty nature of roses, and so does anyone else who’s spent time pruning them. No matter how scrupulous one is about wearing gloves—leather gloves, goatskin gloves, Kevlar for all I know—those thorns are going to find a way through to skin. The rose-lovers’ mantra is “Ow.” 

Sometimes people just get desperate and pile the storage shed with scary compounds that happen to get marketed with “rose” somewhere on the label. I’ve seen a collection that included several things specifically aimed at Japanese beetles—which (knock wood) we don’t have here in northern California.  

This foofaraw is not necessary. 

There are a couple of rose cultivars that demonstrate the essential toughness of roses. Those ‘Cecile Brunner’ heroines I noted are members of one. 

Cecile’s blossoms look frail enough, heaven knows. They’re an ethereal pale pink, aging to a paler shade still, and small and delicately shaped. They have a light, fresh version of the classic rose scent and they’re generous about casting it to the breeze.  

Cecile bears those flowers in profusion even under less than ideal circumstances. This year, they’ve been stunning; as you go about Berkeley and the rest of the East Bay, you’ll see cataracts and tumbles and swells and sprays of them coming over fences, arbors, trees, and anything else that holds still long enough.  

Every other rose in the area is showing off this spring too. I swear I’ve been dazzled by rushes of roses’ perfume while driving on main streets. Heady stuff. 

Because Cecile Brunner roses are small and hold together well as they age, people like to put them on cakes and such edibles. Fortunately, the plant seems to be extraordinarily resistant to diseases, so there’s no need to taint it with unhealthful or even unaesthetic remedies. If you’re the sort of person who wants to eat roses—and why not? Ten thousand deer can’t be wrong—this is a rose to eat. 

There’s one by our driveway; it’s been there for who knows how long, certainly since before we moved here 12 years ago. It’s in partial shade and still blooms prolifically, and I’ve never noticed a spot of rust or mildew or anything else nasty on it. The only care it gets aside from incidental water is pruning, and that only when it gets in the way.  

It got top-heavy this year, and one of those big windy rainstorms flopped a hunk of it over into the driveway. It was a week before we got to tie it up, and it responded to being driven through just as it’s responded to any other mistreatment: it went on blithely blooming, as I scattered rose petals from the RAV4 and occasionally arrived somewhere sporting a pink car-corsage.  

Photograph by Ron Sullivan. 

Cecile’s blossoms are tough despite thier ethereal pale pink color, aging to a paler shade still, and they are small and delicately shaped size.

TUESDAY, MAY 22 

Tuesdays for the Birds Tranquil bird walks in local parklands, led by Bethany Facendini, from 7 to 9:30 a.m. Today we will visit Redwood Regional Park. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233. 

Half Dome: a Primer on Hiking to the Summit at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Solo Sierrans Hike Hike at Lake Chabot Reservoir Meet at 6:30 p.m. at the boat house. Optional dinner follows. For information call Delores 351-6247. 

“Rethinking the Market: How Conservatives Get It Wrong and Progressives Can Get it Right” with Dean Baker at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 1924 Cedar St. at Bonita. Suggested donation $10. No one turned away for lack of funds.  

“A Crucial Conversation about the War between Religion and Law in America” with Peter Irons at 7:30 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Donation $5, no one turned away. lewis@litminds.org 

“Climate Change and US” with Andrew Hoerner, Director of the Sustainable Economics Program at Redefining Progress, at the El Cerrito Democratic Club’s meeting at 7:30 p.m. at Makemie Hall, Northminster Presbyterian Church, 545 Ashbury Ave., El Cerrito. 375-5647.  

“Movement and Healing: Coping With Cancer And With Trauma Of War” with Ilene Ava Serlin at 7:30 p.m. at Institute for World Religions/ Berkeley Buddhist Monastery, 2304 McKinley, at the corner of McKinley and Bancroft. Free. 527-2935. 

Free Diabetes Screening from 8:30 to 11 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Do not eat or drink anything for 8 hours beforehand. 981-5332. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704.  

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991.  

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, MAY 23 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland “New Era/New Politics” highlights African-American leaders who have made their mark on Oakland. Meet at 10 a.m. and the African American Museum and Library at 659 14th St. 238-3234.  

“Two Angry Moms” A documentary about mothers trying to get healthy food for their children at 7:30 p.m. at Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Cos tis $5-$10. 388-8932.  

“When the Levees Broke” Part 1 of Spike Lee’s documentary on New Orleans, post-Hurricane Katrina at 7 p.m. at CodePINK office, 1248 Solano Ave, Albany. Donation $5. RSVP to 524-2776. 

Organic Cooking Class “A South Indian Feast” at 6:30 p.m. in the Temescal neighborhood of North Oakland. Cost is $60. To register call 914-1142. daramerin@gmail.com  

“Listen to Iran’s People: A Call For Peace” Margot Smith’s video of her March 2007 visit to Iran with Fellowhip of Reconciliation will be shown at 1:30 p.m. at the Berkeley-East Bay Gray Panthers monthly meeting at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 548-9696. 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. 548-9840. 

Stitch ‘n Bitch at 6:30 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

THURSDAY, MAY 24 

Tilden Tots Join a nature adventure program for 3 and 4 year olds, each accompanied by an adult (grandparents welcome)! We’ll explore pond life, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 636-1684. 

Berkeley Retired Teachers Association Awards Luncheon at 11:30 a.m. at the Berkeley Yacht Club, Berkeley Marina. 251-2127. 

“Is God ... Great?” A discussion with Christopher Hitchens and Chris Hedges at 7:30 p.m. at King Middle School, 1781 Rose St. Tickets are $20-$25. 848-6767, ext. 609.  

Baby and Toddler Storytime at 10:30 a.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

FRIDAY, MAY 25 

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing on Fridays until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com 

Tilden Tots Join a nature adventure program for 3 and 4 year olds, each accompanied by an adult (grandparents welcome)! We’ll explore pond life, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 636-1684. 

Free Compost for Berkeley Residents Self-serve from 11:45 to 2:45 p.m. at the Berkeley Marina Maintenance Yard, 201 University Ave, next to Adventure Playground. 644-6566. 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Andy Stern on “Journalism” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925.  

“Dam Nation: Dispatches From the Water Underground” with Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, Laura Allen and July Oskar Cole on river restoration worldwide at 7:30 p.m. at AK Press, 674 23rd St., Oakland. 208-1700. www.akpress.org 

0 to 100 Watts in 4 Days: Build an FM Broadcast Transmitter A workshop sponsored by Free Radio Berkeley to teach you how to build a 40 watt FM broadcast transmitter and related items from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Free Radio Berkeley Workshop, 2311 Adeline, Unit P, Oakland. Cost is $200-$250 sliding scale. 625-0314. www.freeradio.org 

Solo Sierrans Briones Sunset Hike Meet at 6 p.m. in the first parking lot, near kiosk inside Briones Regional Park. Bring warm, layered clothing, flashlight, and optional snack to share. 601-1211. 

Circle Dancing, simple folk dancing with instruction. Potluck supper at 7 p.m., dancing at 8 p.m. at Hillside Community Church, 1422 Navellier St. Donation of $5 requested. 528-4253. www.circledancing.com 

Kol Hadash Shabbat at 7:30 p.m. at the Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin Ave. Please bring finger food to share and non-perishable food for the needy. 428-1492. 

SATURDAY, MAY 26 

Walking Tour of Historic Oakland Churches and Temples Meet at 10 a.m. at the front of the First Presbyterian Church at 2619 Broadway. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. 

Mini-Farmers in Tilden A farm exploration program, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. for ages 4-6 years, accompanied by an adult. We will explore the Little Farm, care for animals, do crafts and farm chores. Wear boots and dress to get dirty! Fee is $6-$8. Registration required. 636-1684. 

Reptile Rap Meet our resident snake and turtle friends in an interactive talk for the whole family at 2 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Lost Film Fest with shorts from The Yes Men, TV Sheriff, Guerrilla News Network at 8 p.m. at AK Press, 674-A 23rd St., Oakland. Suggested donation $5-$10. 208-1700. 

Berkeley Hillside Club Fundraiser for Building Maintenance at 6 p.m. at 2286 Cedar Street at Arch. Cost is $35. www.hillsideclub.org 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

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

SUNDAY, MAY 27 

Children’s Garden Fun at People’s Park Join naturalist Terri Compost from 1 to 3 p.m. as we plant sunflowers and an heirloom bean garden, play games and go on a bug safari. Especially for children in grades K-5, but all welcome. Meet at the community garden at the west end of the park. 658-9178. 

Wild About Watersheds A 4.5 mile hike from Tilden Nature Area to Wildcat Canyon to explore the watershed. Meet at 1 p.m. For information call 525-2233.  

Silent Spring? Celebrate the 100th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s birth as we listen to bird songs in Tilden Park. From 9:30 to 11 a.m. 525-2233. 

Berkeley City Club Tour of the “Little Castle” designed by Julia Morgan at 1:15, 2:15 and 3:15 p.m. at 2315 Durant Ave. 883-9710. 

“Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West” A documentary at 1 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. Sponsored by Stand with Us. info@sfvoiceforisrael.org 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

Tibetan Buddhism with Mark Henderson on “The Life of Shakyamuni Buddha” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

MONDAY, MAY 28  

Tilden Open House With farm songs at 11 a.m., meet a snake at noon, and games at 1 p.m. at the Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Masquers Playhouse Annual Garage Sale from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 201 Martina St . corner W. Richmond Ave. Pt. Richmond. 236-0527. 

Junktique II Garage Sale to benefit Masquers from from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at United Methodist Church, 201 Martina St. Pt. Richmond. Pancake Breakfast from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. and chili lunch from noon to 3 p.m. 236-0527. 

Read Aloud Theater A free Berkeley Adult School class at 9 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. 981-5190.  

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. 548-0425. 

CITY MEETINGS 

City Council meets Tues., May 22, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers. 981-6900. www. 

ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Civic Arts Commission meets Wed., May 23, at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7533.  

Disaster and Fire Safety Commission meets Wed., May 23, at 7 p.m., at the Emergency Operations Center, 997 Cedar St. 981-5502.  

Planning Commission meets Wed., May 23,at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7484. 

Police Review Commission meets Wed. May 23, at 7:30 p.m. at at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-4950.  

Transportation Commission meets Thurs., May 24, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7010.  

Mental Health Commission meets Thurs., May 24, at 6:30 p.m. at 2640 MLK Jr. Way, at Derby. 981-5213.  

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., May 24, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410.  

FRIDAY, MAY 18 

THEATER 

Altarena Playhouse “The Last Five Years” Fri and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at 1409 High St., Alameda, through June 10. Tickets are $17-$20. 523-1553. www.altarena.org 

Aurora Theatre “Private Jokes, Public Places” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St., through May 20. Tickets are $38. 843-4822. 

Berkeley Rep “Blue Door” at 8 p.m. at 2025 Addison St., through May 20. Tickets are $45-$61. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org  

Berkeley Rep “Oliver Twist” at 8 p.m. at the Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. through June 24. Tickets are $45-$61. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org  

Impact Theatre “Measure for Measure” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave., through May 26. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. 

Just Theater, “I Have Loved Strangers” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., to May 26. Tickets are $12-$25. 421-1458.  

Shotgun Players “The Cryptogram” Thurs.-Sun. at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., through June 17. Tickets are $17-$25. For reservations call 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

“The Striders Club” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Malonga Casquelourd Arts Center, 1421 Alice St., Oakland. Tickets are $5-$11. 450-0891. 

Subterranean Shakespeare “Macbeth” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St., near Rose in Live Oak Park, to May 26. Tickets are $12-$17. 276-3871. 

TheatreFIRST “Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 3 p.m. at Old Oakland Theatre, 481 Ninth St., Oakland. Tickets are $18-$25. 436-5085. www.theatrefirst.com 

EXHIBITIONS 

fer•ma•ta UCB Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition opens at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way and runs through June 10. 642-0808. 

Richmond Art Center Spring Reception for all exhibitions at 6 p.m. at 2540 Barret Ave., Richmond. 620-6772. 

“Significant Others” Art from LGBTQ Communities. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Women’s Cancer Resource Center Gallery, 5741 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. 601-4040, ext. 111. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Camilo Mejia reads from his book "Road From AR Ramadi" at 7 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker, 1640 Addison St. 499-0537. 

Representa! Bilingual spoken word and poetry with Paul Flores and Julio Cardenas at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $15. 849-2568.  

Comics Out Loud! with cartoonists Julia Wertz, Shannon O’Leary, Justin Hall, Geoff Vasile and many others at 7 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

State of the Arts 2 Conference sponsored by UC Institute for Research in the Arts with Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Lectures on the current role and future of the arts in California and beyond, Sat. and Sun. at BAM/PFA. 2626 Bancroft Way. For complete schedule see www.ucira.ucsb.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Ballet Theater Spring Performances, including “Cinderella” at 7 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $21. 843-4689. 

Oakland East Bay Symphony “Porgy and Bess” at 8 p.m. at Paramount Theater, 2025 Broadway, Oakland. Tickets are $20-$67. 625-8497. 

Women’s Antique Vocal Ensemble “Transitions: Spanish Influence in the New World” at 8 p.m. at Lake Merritt United Methodist Church, 1330 Lakeshore Ave. Tickets are $5-$15. www.wavewomen.org 

Volti “the San Francisco Experience” with the Piedmont Children’s Choirs at 8 p.m. at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, One Lawson Rd., Kensington. Tickets are $8-$20. 415-771-3352. www.voltisf.org 

Bay Area Classical Harmonies “The Passion of St. John” at 7 p.m. at St. Mary Magdalen Church, 2005 Berryman St. Tickets are $12-$25. 868-0695. www.bayareabach.org 

San Francisco Chamber Orchestra “Crossroads: Music from the African Diaspora” at 8 p.m., pre-concert talk at 7:30 p.m., at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Free. 415-248-1640. www.sfchamberorchestra.org 

Jazz City Singers Spring Concert at 8:30 p.m. at Rockridge Methodist Church, 303 Hudson St., Oakland. Tickets are $5-$7. 658-7136.  

Nanette McGuiness, soprano, and flutist Marha Stoddard, at 8 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. Cost is $12-$15. 848-1228. 

Jerry Kuderna Piano “From Bach to Babbitt” at 1 p.m. at 2323 Shattuck Ave. www.berkeleyartsfestival.com 

“Dance Elixir” with Leyya Tawil and Zari Le’on Fri. and Sat. at 8:30 p.m. at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St., Oakland. Tickets are $20. 435-6413. 

SFJazz All-Star High School Ensemble at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10-$12. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Hurricane Sam & the Hotshots at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Gypsy Dances from the Romani Trail, belly dance performance at 8 p.m., Diiin at 10 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Rajeev Taranath on sarod with Abhiman Kaushal on tabla at 8 p.m. at Gaia Arts Center, 2118 Allston Way. Tickets are $18-$25. 517-8952. nssensalo@gmail.com 

Ron Thompson, blues, at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

Solo Bass Night with Michael Manring, Jean Baudin, Jeff Schmidt and Dave Grossman at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761.  

Avatara and The Wicker Men at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Workingman’s Ed with guest Joe Rut at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

California Love, Drain the Sky at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

The P-PL at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Ashkon, Bumbalo, Richie Cunning at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$7. 548-1159.  

Socket, jazz, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Resistoleros, New Faith, One Word Solution at 8:30 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $10. 763-1146. www.oaklandmetro.org 

SATURDAY, MAY 19 

EXHIBITIONS 

Berkeley Art Center 40th Birthday from 1 to 4 p.m. with guest speakers, concert, children’s activities and art exhibition, at 1275 Walnut St. in Live Oak Park. 644-6893. 

“Jazz Icons” photography by Carl Lewis at the Jazzschool, 2087 Addison St.  

ACCI Gallery 50th Anniversary Celebration with music by Red Wings and an exhibition honoring ACCI alumni Tim Baskerville, Elizabeth Kavaler, Bob Stocksdale and Catherine Webb, at 6 p.m. at 1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527.  

THEATER 

Eastenders Repertory Company “Fear and Misery of the Third Reich” by Bertolt Brecht at 7:30 p.m., Sun. at 3 p.m. at the JCC of the East Bay, 1414 Walnut St. Tickets are $20. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Representa! Bilingual spoken word and poetry with Paul Flores and Julio Cardenas at 2 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $15. 849-2568.  

The Great Night of Rumi with spoken word, music and dance at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $20.50-$21.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

“Medieval Seminar: Music, Liturgy, and Architecture in Medieval England” with Professor William Mahr, Dept. of Music, Stanford Univ. from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at MusicSources, 1000 The Alameda. Cost is $15. 848-5591. 

“Stepping Away From the Stereotypes: Two Latina Authors Discuss Fact and Funny Fiction” with Marta Acosta, whose latest book is “Midnight Brunch at Casa Dracula” and Rose Castillo Guilbault, on her memoir “Farmworker’s Daughter” at 2 p.m. at the Rockridge Library, 5366 College Ave., Oakland. 531-4275. 

Bay Area Storytelling Festival Sat. and Sun. from 9 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the Kennedy Grove Regional Recreation Area, El Sobrante. Tickets are $33-$75. 869-4969. www.bayareastorytelling.org 

Jazz in Literature, Photography and Fine Art with readings by Al Young and Michael McClure at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $20. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Young People’s Symphony Orchestra Concerto Concert at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $12-$15. 849-9776. www.ypsomusic.net 

Voci Women’s Vocal Ensemble “Songs of Heavenly and Earthly Love” at 4 p.m. at Lake Merritt United Methodist Church, Oakland. Tickets are $15-$20. 531-8714. www.vocisings.com 

Contra Costa Chorale with the Kensington Symphony Mozart’s “Coronation Mass” at 7:30 p.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, One Lawson Rd., Kensington. Tickets are $12-$15, children free. 527-2026. 

Sacred and Profane “Summer on the Baltic Sea” Music from Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Sweden at 8 p.m. at All Souls Episcopal Church, 2220 Cedar St. Tickets are $12-$18. 524-3611. 

Chora Nova “Celebrating Peace – music to celebrate the end of war” at 8 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley, 2407 Dana. Tickets are $10-$15. contact@choranova.org 

Kairos Youth Choir Sat. and Sun. at 4 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. Tickets are $8-$10. 704-4479. 

Ruth Botchan Dance Company and Shahrzad Dance Company “Bridging Jewish and Persian Cultures” at 7:30 p.m. at Congregation Beth El, 1301 Oxford St. Tickets are $10. 848-3988. 

Winds Across the Bay “Views From the Stage” at 2 p.m. at Hilltop Community Church, 3118 Shane Drive, Richmond, just across from Hilltop Mall. Tickets are $5-$10 at the door. 243-0514. info@WindsAcrossTheBay.org 

Jack L in a benefit for the Darfur Women’s Center at 7:30 p.m. at the Hills Swim and Tennis Club, 2400 Manzanita Dr., Oakland. Tickets are $85. 339-0234.  

Rockin’ Solidarity Labor Chorus and the Freedom Song Network in a performance to Save the Oaks at 2 p.m. at Memorial Oak Grove, east side of UC Campus, off Gayley Rd. 649-1423. halih@yahoo.com  

Las Mujeres del Hip-Hop Cubano with Las Krudas, DJ Leidis, and Magyori La Lave at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Robin Gregory & Her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Native Elements, Lakay, Caribbean, Haitian, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $11-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Stephanie Crawford, jazz, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Wayward Monks at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Gil Stancourt & Friends at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7. 558-0881. 

Druid Sisters Tea Party at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

R’N’R Adventure Kids at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, MAY 20 

CHILDREN 

Orange Sherbert with members of Hot Buttered Rum at Ashkenaz at 3 p.m. Cost is $5-$20. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

“Summer Time at the Little Farm” A puppet show about life on the farm and the mishaps of a farmer, at 10:45 and 11:30 a.m. at the Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Monoprints and Collage Works 1991-2005” by Larry Stefl Opening reception at 3 p.m. at Mudrackers Cafe Gallery, 2801 Telegraph Ave. Exhibit runs to June 30. 547-8846. 

Allison Smith “Notion Nanny” an exhibition exploring traditional art and craft-making from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the Berkeley Art Museum Galleries, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Representa! Bilingual spoken word and poetry with Paul Flores and Julio Cardenas at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $15. 849-2568.  

Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition Artsts’ Talks at 3 p.m. in the Berkeley Art Museum Galleries, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. 

UC Extension Writing Students read at 4 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Susan Southworth reads from her latest novel “The Last Kosovo Serb Won’t Leave” following the 3 p.m. performance of “Serjeant Musgrave” at Old Oakland Theater, 481 Ninth St., at Broadway, Oakland. Tickets are $21. For reservations, call 436-5085. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

11th Annual Jazz on Fourth Street from noon to 5 p.m. featuring the Marcus Shelby Quartet, Sugar Pie DeSanto, Wayne Wallace Latin Jazz Group and the Berkeley High Jazz Ensemble.  

Laurel Ensemble in celebration of Berkeley Art Center’s 40th Anniversary, at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Cost is $15-$20. 644-6893. 

Songs from Spain and Cuba with Elizabeth Caballero, soprano and Leesa Dahl, piano at 5 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Churhc, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$20. 845-6830. 

Oakland Public Conservatory of Music Student Recital at 7 p.m. at 1616 Franklin St., Oakland. 836-4649.  

Prometheus Symphony Orchestra at 3 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 114 Montecito Ave., Oakland. www.prometheussymphony.org 

Sacred & Profane “Summer on the Baltic Sea, Sounds of Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Sweden” at 4 p.m. at All Souls Episcopal Church, 2220 Cedar St. Tickets are $12-$18. 524-3611. www.sacredprofane.org 

Golden Gate Boys Choir and Bellringers at 2 p.m. at Calvary Christian Center, 1516 Grand Ave., Alameda.. 887-4311. www.ggbc.org 

“Jazz at the Chimes” featuring Shanna Carlson and Cathi Walkup at 2 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave. Oakland. Tickets are $10, children under 12 free. 228-3218. 

Voci Women’s Vocal Ensemble “Songs of Heavenly and Earthly Love” at 4 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. Tickets are $15-$20. 531-8714.  

Season of Praise Gospel Concert at 6 p.m. at St. Paul AME Church, 2024 Ashby Ave. Proceeds will help sponsor youth on a trip to a gospel convention in Phildelphia this summer. 848-2050. 

Spring Choirs Concert with Angel Choir and Joyful Noise Choir at 5 p.m. at First United Methodist Church, 201 Martina St., corner of W. Richmond Ave., Point Richmond. Suggested donation $10. 236-0527. 

Concerto Festival with winners from the Concerto Competition at 4 p.m. at Valley Center Concert Hall, Holy Names University, 3500 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. Cost is $5-$10. 436-1225. 

Novello Quartet at 3 p.m. First Presbyterian Church of Oakland, 2619 Broadway. Donation $10-$15. www.novelloquartet.org 

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

Jenny Jens & Her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Americana Unplugged: The Whiskey Brothers at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Willow Willow at 2 p.m. at Mod Lang Records, 6328 Fairmount Ave., rear, at San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. 486-1880. 

Art Lande/Peter Sommer Duo at 4:30 at the Jazzschool. Cost is $20. 845-5373.  

Benefit for the Albany High School Music Fund at 7 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10-$15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Glen Staller at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Gather, Risen, 7 Generation at 5 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

Rwake, Black Cobra at 9 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $8. 451-8100. 

MONDAY, MAY 21 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Art for Food’s Sake!” Restaurant Industry Artists Exhibition, opening reception at 5 p.m. at Downtown Restaurant, 2102 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$10. Bring a non-perishable food donation. Proceeds benefit the Alameda County Community Food Bank. RSVP to art@downtownrestaurant.com 649-3810. 

FILM 

“Jazz on a Monday Afternoon” Films and discussion on Jazz Innovators at 2 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St., 3rd flr. 981-6100. 

“When the Levees Broke” Parts 3 and 4 of Spike Lee’s documentary about Hurricane Katrina’s effect on New Orleans at 6:45 p.m. at the Upstairs Lounge at Geoffrey’s Inner Circle, 410 14th St., Oakland. Suggested donation $10. 262-1001. info@wellstoneclub.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Artists in Berkeley: Is There a Future? at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6150. 

Judith Goldman and Geoffrey G. O’Brien read at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. This will be Judith’s last Bay Area reading before she moves to Chicago. Join her friends in wishing her farewell. 849-2087. 

Jeffrey Kripal describes “Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion” at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. 559-9500. 

Susanna Moore introduces her novel “The Big Girls” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 559-9500. 

Poetry Express with John Moore and Roy Johnston at 7 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Ed Neff and Friends, bluegrass, at 7 p.m. at Le Bateau Ivre, 2629 Telegraph Ave. 849-1100. www.lebateauivre.net 

Trovatore, traditional Italian music, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Blue Monday Jam at 9 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $5. 451-8100. www.uptownnightclub.com 

West Coast Songwriter’s Showcase at 7:30 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $5. 548-1761 www.freightandsalvage.org 

TUESDAY, MAY 22 

CHILDREN 

Comedy & Tricks with Dana Smith & his dog Lacey, for ages 3 and up at 6:30 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Free. 524-3043. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Peter Irons, author of “God on Trial: Dispatches from America’s Religious Battlefields,” in conversation with Jeffrey Brand, dean of USF Law School, at 7:30 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. lewis@litminds.org 

Rebecca Mead talks about “One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Debussy Trio at 8 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Tickets are $20. 525-5211. www.berkeleychamberperform.org 

Courtableu, cajun, zydeco, at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Singers’ Open Mic with Ellen Hoffman at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Audrey Auld Mezera with Nina Gerber at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Jazzschool Tuesdays, a weekly showcase of up-and-coming ensembles from Berkeley Jazzschool at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

WEDNESDAY, MAY 23 

FILM 

International Latino Film Festival “Barrio Cuba” at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $5-$6. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

David Talbot describes “Brothers: A Hidden History of the Kennedy Years” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Writing Teachers Write, student teacher readings, at 5 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Fred Randolph Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Tamsen Donner Blues Band at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Swing dance lesson at 7:30 Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

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

Hip Bones, instrumental jazz with funk and rock, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

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

THURSDAY, MAY 24 

THEATER 

“The Other Side of the Mirror” written and performed by Lynn Ruth Miller at 8 p.m. at Spud’s Pizza, 3290 Adeline. Cost is $10. 650-355-4296. 

Travelling Jewish Theater “Death of a Salesman” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for teh Arts, 2640 College Ave., through June 10. Tickets are $15-$44. 1-800-838-3006. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Residency Projects, Part I” Reception for Kala Fellowship artists, Freddy Chandra and Su-Chen Hung at 6 p.m. at Kala Art Institute, 1060 Heinz Ave. Exhibition runs to June 30. 549-2977. www.kala.org 

FILM 

POV 2 Bay Area Animation Festival at 9:15 p.m. at El Cerrito Speakeasy Theater, 10070 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. Cost is $6. 848-1994. www.picturepubpizza.com  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Christopher Hitchens and Chris Hedges on “Is God Great?” at 7:30 p.m. at King Middle School, 1781 Rose St. Tickets are $20 from www.kpfa.org/events/Hitchens 

Eric Drooker: Musical Slide Lectures, spoken word to projected graphics at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. pegdowntown@sbcglobal.net 

Nomad Spoken Word Night at 7 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Clotilde DuSoulier introduces her cookbook “Chocolate and Zucchini: Daily Adventures in a Parisian Kitchen” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Richard Walker reads from “The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Tim O’Brien at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $25.50-$26.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Dick Conte Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $9. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Falso Baiano, Brazilian instrumental at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Haale, Samvega, The Hobbyists at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Fishtank Ensemble at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Selector: Cubik & Origami at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

BERKELEY ART CENTER CELEBRATES 40 YEARS 

The Berkeley Art Center will  

celebrate its 40th anniversary from  

1-4 p.m. Saturday with guest speakers, a concert, children’s activities (including a “Recycollage” workshop) and an art exhibition of  

collages, found objects and installations by Bay Area artists Jenny Honnert Abell, Marya Krogstad, and Thomas Morphis. Admission is free. The celebration will continue at 7 p.m. Sunday with a benefit concert by the Laurel Ensemble. Admission is $20, $15 for members. Designed by Robert Ratcliff Architects in 1967, the Berkeley Art Center was built by the Rotary Club of Berkeley as a gift to the city.1275 Walnut St., in Live Oak Park. 644-6893. 

50TH ANNIVERSARY FOR ACCI GALLERY 

The ACCI Gallery will celebrate its 50th anniversary at 6 p.m. Saturday with music by the Red Wings, and an exhibition featuring ACCI alumni  

Tim Baserville, Elizabeth Kavaler, Bob Stocksdale and Catherine Webb.  

1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527. 

CLASSICS AND KIDDIE MATINEES IN EL CERRITO 

The Cerrito Theater will present Rob Reiner’s 1987 fairy tale The Princess Bride as part of its ongoing series of weekend matinees for kids. The film screens at noon and 3 p.m. Saturday and at 2 p.m. Sunday. The theater will also show the 1959 comedy Some Like it Hot (Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, Anthony Curtis) as part its ongoing Cerrito Classics series at 6 p.m. Saturday and 5 p.m. Sunday. 10070 San Pablo Avenue, El Cerrito. 814-2400. www.picturepubpizza.com.

In the prologue to his 1945 novel Cannery Row, John Steinbeck articulated the difficulties inherent in capturing a real time and place in a work of artistic fiction, likening the process to that of a marine biologist attempting to capture the most delicate of specimens. Ultimately, Steinbeck concluded, it is easier to simply open the jar and let the little creatures ooze in of their own accord, and this is the approach he took to his novel—“to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.” 

Charles Burnett’s 1977 Killer of Sheep, opening this weekend at Shattuck Cinemas, has this quality. It is an episodic film that moves at a languorous, summertime-like pace as it charts the life of Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), a slaughterhouse worker struggling with depression amid the ghettoes of South Central Los Angeles. The film captures the dark reality of racism and poverty, of a bleak existence with little hope for the future, and yet it resorts neither to easy cynicism nor simplistic idealism. Images of despair and disillusionment are juxtaposed with the simple, almost transcendent joys of love and family and friendship: the embrace of a loved one; the gaze of a child; a quiet moment of togetherness in the fading light of evening. It is as though Burnett simply opened the lens and allowed the essence of 1970s Watts to flow into the frame, whole and untouched. 

One of the film’s most remarkable achievements may be its authentic portrayal of children at play. With the directness of a documentary, Burnett’s unassuming camera records the exploits of kids left to their own devices, staving off boredom and adulthood with improvised games amid tenement complexes and dusty vacant lots. They haven’t much, but they make do with what they have, from dirt clods to battered dolls, from passing trains to accessible rooftops. And Burnett succeeds beautifully in depicting the seemingly innate inclination of boys everywhere to take any opportunity to throw a rock. Put an unfamiliar object in its path and a dog will sniff it; an infant will put it in his mouth; and an 8-year-old boy will invariably throw a rock at it.  

The dangerous terrain between youth and old age is one of the film’s central themes. “You’re not a child anymore!” a father tells his son in the opening scene. “You soon will be a goddamned man! Start learning what life is about now, son.” The father’s scolding is punctuated by a mother’s slap across the face, a stark wake-up call delivered with a sad, maternal smile.  

Later an iconic shot expands on the theme, showing kids jumping from one roof to another across a two-story drop, symbolizing the perilous gap between childhood and adulthood. The camera then tilts downward to follow Stan as he descends a stairwell into that very chasm, looking up at the children as they hurdle over his head.  

Along the way, the adult world is burnished with echoes of a long-lost past in the form of old Southern words and phrases that suggest where these characters have come from and what they’ve left behind, evoking memories almost archetypal in their ability to comfort as well as afflict with nostalgia for days gone by.  

Rediscovering classic films can be like a series of “a-ha moments,” with missing links in the progression of cinematic style, technique and vision revealing themselves like long-lost Rosetta Stones. Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, while clearly drawing on preceding films and genres, is a seminal film for many reasons, but primarily for its application of the Italian neo-realist techniques of the ’40s and ’50s to black urban life in America; its low-budget indie aesthetic; and its use of popular music in shaping and defining its imagery.  

The film’s obscurity is in large part due to its soundtrack, a wonderful blend of classic jazz, blues, R&B and pop songs for which Burnett was unable to afford the legal rights. Thus Killer of Sheep never enjoyed commercial distribution and was bottled up under threat of litigation for three decades, until Dennis Doros of Milestone Films (with a bit of financial help from director Steven Soderbergh) undertook the daunting and expensive task of securing those rights and presenting a beautifully restored 35-millimeter print, courtesy of UCLA Film and Television Archive. 

Since the advent of MTV, the use of popular music in films as the all-consuming soundtrack to a scene has proliferated, most often in youth-centered films. At its worst it is a lazy method of direction, using the song rather than the image to carry the essence of the scene. But at its best, as in Killer of Sheep, lyrics and music deepen and amplify the impact of the imagery. One especially effective scene features Stan and his wife (Kaycee Moore) in a heartbreaking slow dance to Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth,” played out in silhouette against the harsh glow of sunlight through a tenement window. Another scene, of a weekend outing derailed by a flat tire, is granted both gravity and humor by the strains of Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues.” 

Only one song remained out of reach. Milestone was unable to secure the rights to Washington’s “Unforgettable,” which originally punctuated the final scene, so Burnett instead opted to repeat “This Bitter Earth,” which proves not just an adequate substitute but perhaps an improvement, providing a fitting reprise for the film’s central themes. 

Killer of Sheep poses no easy questions, seeks nor finds no easy solutions; it merely presents the African-American experience in a particular time and place. And, through a relentless focus on character—on everyday people and their everyday lives—Burnett manages to find the universal in the specific, depicting the timeless struggle of men and women to—as Washington sings—ensure that the dust does not obscure the glow of the rose. 

KILLER OF SHEEP (1977) 

Directed by Charles Burnett. Starring Henry Gayle Sanders and Kaycee Moore.  

Playing at Shattuck Cinemas, Rafael Film Center (San Rafael) and the Castro Theater (San Francisco). 80 minutes. Not rated. 

A Milestone release.  

Photograph: Henry Gayle Sanders and Kaycee Moore share a delicate moment in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, opening this weekend at Shattuck Cinemas.

“Alas, alas, that so bright a moon should be hidden by the clouds.” From this first translation of Rumi into a European language, circa 1780, by Sir William Jones in his Grammar of the Persian Language, through Ralph Waldo Emerson’s solitary version of a Rumi poem, to today’s outpouring of interpretations, the great mystic poet of Islam has become the bestselling poet in English today. 

“The Great Night of Rumi,” Dan and Dale Zola’s program of spoken poetry with music and a whirling dervish dance, set for 8 p.m. this Saturday night at Freight and Salvage, intends to return this revered verse to spoken, sung and performed poetry, taking an audience beyond what academic discussion or silent reading from the page can accomplish. 

“We’re not talking about Rumi, or about poetry, at ‘The Great Night of Rumi,’” said Dale, who has produced the events for six years with her husband. “We’re not plugging anything. Our readers all go up to the mic and recite from memory, while the musicians improvise. Aziz, our whirling dervish, does the turn. Hossein, our Kurdish friend, sings a Rumi poem in Farsi. Dan mc’s, announcing the next person. We modelled it after variety shows—after Ed Sullivan!” 

“We’re bringing people to poetry through the back door,” Zola continued, “though I think of the oral tradition as the front door, with the book as the back door. It’s like a communion; people come because they want that experience. To be in a roomful of people, to be transported—yet in the present moment.” 

The Zolas use the Coleman Barks translations of Rumi. Readers from all ethnic groups and walks of life recite, accompaned by Gary Haggerty (from Stella Mar), Arshad Said, Sheldon Brown of the Jazzschool and Claude Palmer playing on a panoply of instruments, both Eastern and Western, with singers Kirsten Falke (from Bobby McFerrin’s Voicestra) and Debbie Golata of the Berkeley Community Chorus and Orchestra. 

Readers include Ron Sebring (pastor of the Northbrae Community Church), Andre Andrae (father of Hit It!), Claressa Morrow of Stage Bridge, Shakespearean actress Chetana Karel and Barry and Maya Spector (who do oral tradition events in the South Bay), Alexis Bennett and dancer Guillermo Ortiz, among others.  

The event is co-produced by Cody’s Books, which will provide books for sale, and presented by Roger Housden, editor of 10 Poems to Change Your Mind and 10 Poems to Change Your Heart. Assisting is Victoria Lee, “a Rumi-inspired psychologist” and author of the forthcoming Rumi Secret (Outskirts Press).  

The Zolas have been involved in poetry for 20 years. “Dan was on the staff of the Mendocino Men’s Conferences,” said Dale, “where he worked closely with poet Robert Bly, with Michael Mead and James Hillman. About 15 years ago, we went to an event by Doug Von Koss, one of his one-man poetry shows. That made a big impression. A couple years after that, we began to produce poetry events.” 

They also produce “The Great Night of Soul Poetry,” featuring poems of W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Mary Oliver and others. 

Dale, who lived in Istanbul and traveled around the Middle East and South Asia, emphasizes the humor in Rumi’s poetry and Barks’ translations. “That’s one reason we’re so into it. If it makes you laugh and cry, it’s a good one. The more it gets you laughing, the more you can get with the sad stuff.” 

Rumi’s contemporary success was preceded by that of another medieval Persian poet. For about a century, Edward Fitzgerald’s version of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was the bestselling single volume of poetry in English. Rumi, born in what’s now Afghanistan, founded the Mevlevi Sufi Order (”Whirling Dervishes”) in Turkey. His poetry, according to Marshall G. S. Hodgson in The Venture of Islam, “became prized even by non-mystics wherever Persian was used ... His work is addressed to a living, complex individual, and is meant to confront him time and time again throughout his complex life, and this process can never really be completed ... Rumi intended to illuminate the Islamic conscience of his time ... If [his] message is to be summed up, it can perhaps be described as a summons to go beyond the routine.” 

Other Rumi translators include R. A. Nicholson, A. J. Arberry, W. S. Merwin and Peter Lamborn Wilson.  

THE GREAT NIGHT OF RUMI 

8 p.m. Saturday at Freight and Salvage, 1111 Addison St. $20.50 - $21.50. 

548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org.

Berkeley’s Himalayan Fair celebrates its 24th year in Live Oak Park this weekend. It might be its last as the city of Berkeley has increased restrictions on the event which may force it to move next year or shut down, according to fair organizers. 

The fair—a constantly moving pageant of onstage South and Central Asian musicians, singers and dancers, and the vibrant fairgoers, straying down alleys of bazaar-like booths featuring the aroma of ethnic foods, many crafts and much artwork and a fabulous assortment of other goods, or gathering under the trees or on the rocks by the creek—was modelled by founder Arlene Blum on the village spring festivals she encountered on her mountaineering treks in Nepal and India. 

The fair is “a victim of its own success,” in the words of Fair Committee member Barbara Framm. She is asking for help from the community to determine how to continue the annual event after an escalation of restrictions by various city departments. 

“This could well be the last year of the Himalayan Fair at Live Oak Park,” said one committee member. “And maybe the last year of the fair.” 

At a meeting of the committee on Wednesday, members discussed options for different sites, and Blum presented a petition to be circulated at the fair to try to convince the City Council to keep the fair at Live Oak Park. 

“The petitions will be at all the food booths and at the information booth,” said Rosa Mendicino, who coordinates the food concessions and runs the popular vegetable curry and ice cream booths.  

Mendicino says that complaints, mostly about traffic and parking problems and some reports of noise in the neighborhood, have provoked the increase of city intervention. “We were told to put wooden floors under the food booths,” she said. “Yet Park and Rec said that would be bad for the grass. So this time the booths are on the basketball courts.”  

There have also been complaints about lack of wheelchair access. “Not all the booths are on walkways,” said Mendicino. “Two years ago we inaugurated a program with volunteers at the ready, to help disabled people, to push wheelchairs or get whatever they wanted from the stands.” 

This year there will also be a shuttle that will run a loop from North Berkeley BART, with stops on Shattuck at Lincoln and Berryman, to try to reduce traffic volume.  

“My children and now grandchildren have grown up at the Himalayan Fair,” Mendicino said. “I don’t want to see that tradition squelched. It can’t be so bad that we won’t be able to stay in Live Oak Park. We’ve looked at other parks, and come to the conclusion that no other place lends itself so well to the character of the fair.”

Not every house in Berkeley can boast of an illustrious resident. Fewer can boast of two. Fewer yet can demonstrate a connection between the two notables. The house at 1335 Shattuck Avenue is one of the latter. 

Built in 1894 by Captain John Slater, the house is one of the first Classic Colonial Revival buildings constructed in the East Bay. At the time it was erected, Queen Anne was the prevailing fashion, and the shingled Arts & Crafts style was just beginning to emerge from the cradle with a few examples such as the Anna Head School at Bowditch and Channing (1892). 

John Slater (1849–1908) was born on one of the Shetland Islands in Scotland. At the age of 15 he left school to join the crew of a fishing sloop. Four years later, he went to sea as a sailor before the mast, working his way up to an officer’s position. In 1871, he came to California as a mate on the ship Seminole of Boston. Impressed with the outlook on the Pacific coast, he decided to stay. After plying the coast trade for several years, he was lured into gold mining on the Stikine River in northwestern British Columbia but did not find it profitable. 

Going back to the sea, Slater became master of several ships belonging to the Sam Blair line. In 1889, he joined the shipping firm of William E. Mighell and Charles C. Boudrow. For seven years Slater was master of the bark Wilner. After this ship was burned at the docks in Tacoma, WA, he took charge of the clipper ship Charmer, which he commanded on the San Francisco-Honolulu route until his retirement in 1907. 

Captain Slater married Louise M. Colby in 1888. The couple lived in San Francisco before they built their house in the Berkeley Villa Association tract. The move to Berkeley may have been inspired in part by Slater’s employers—both Captain Boudrow and Captain Mighell owned mansions nearby, on what is now the 1500 block of Oxford Street. And they weren’t the only ones. North Berkeley was a mini-Mecca for seafarers, who no doubt were attracted by the sweeping marine vistas commanded from its hills. 

The Slaters picked a double lot directly to the south of Captain Jefferson Maury’s house. Sited on a double lot at 1317 Shattuck Avenue, the Maury residence featured a wrap-around porch and an angled corner turret. In 1922, John Hudson Thomas would transform this house into a shingled English country cottage. 

Across the street from the Slaters, at 1322 Shattuck Avenue, lived Captain William B. Seabury and his family. Like Captain Maury, Seabury was a commodore of the Pacific Mail Steam Ship Company. Also like Maury, he built his house in 1885. But while the Maury house survived to become a City of Berkeley Landmark, the Seabury house has been replaced with an apartment building. 

The Slaters engaged prominent San Francisco architect T.J. Welsh to design their residence. The contractor was Charles Murcell of East Oakland, whose Berkeley quarters were located at the lumber office of Barker & Hunter, on the southwestern corner of Shattuck Ave. and Dwight Way. 

In January 1896, the Berkeley Herald described the Slater house in detail, noting that it commanded “a magnificent view of the Golden Gate, the city of San Francisco, San Francisco Bay and the ocean beyond:” 

A notable feature of the exterior is a pleasant porch, running the entire width of the building, at the front entrance. 

The walls are covered from foundation to first story in rustic [wide wood siding] and from first story to cornice with clapboard. It is painted in Colonial yellow, with white trimmings. The roof is of slate. The building is 42x80 feet, which includes the front piazza. It contains eight large rooms, well arranged for light and heat. The front vestibule is trimmed in oak. The spacious exterior hall is trimmed with curly, native redwood, wainscoted with Lincrusta-Walton [an embossed, linoleum-like material] and lighted from transoms over doors of French bevel plate-glass. 

The staircase is separated from the main hall, the posts of which extend to the ceiling. Between the posts are spindle transoms supported on ornamental brackets. The parlors are finished in natural redwood and are provided with open fireplaces of Roman brick; hearth of same, and mantels of curly redwood of unique design. The dining-room is trimmed and finished in antique oak, including paneled wainscoting. The divan is built with arm-rest and lockers underneath. There is a spindle arch across the bay-window, resting on turned columns. The fireplace is built of Roman brick facings and hearth, mantels made of oak of exquisite design, including lockers and bevel plate mirrors. The walls are tinted a deep sea green, ceiling of Nile green. 

The article went on to describe the kitchen, pantry, butler’s pantry and china closet finished in natural redwood and “fitted up in modern style”; bedrooms “fitted up in like manner, with closets and dens attached”; a bathroom of oak, “with tile floor and tile wainscoting five feet high, and containing a porcelain bathtub with shower bath attached, oval wash-basin, all plumbing exposed, with locker and medicine closet attached.” The cost of the building to complete was $5,750, well above the $4,608 figure provided in the contract notice of Aug. 2, 1894. 

The first floor housed the Slaters and their four children, James Herbert, Marguerite, Norman and Colby. The basement is said to have housed the servants, although the 1900 census listed only one domestic living with the family. There were also rooms on the attic floor; these are said to have been reserved for guests (by 1970, the attic and basement floors were subdivided into six apartments each), but it appears that some if not all of the guests were of the paying kind. For several years in the first decade of the 20th century, one such “guest” was Andrew H. Irving (1875–1947), plant superintendent at the Paraffine Paint Company, a manufacturer of roofing materials under the Pabco brand name. 

The vice-president and manager of Paraffine Paint Co. was Andrew Irving’s elder brother, Samuel C. Irving (1858–1930). In 1906, Samuel acquired 1322 Shattuck Ave. from the Seaburys, who had moved to the Southside eight years earlier. We’ll return to the Irvings in part two of this series. 

Captain Slater died at the age of 58 following a bout of cancer. Twenty-one months later, his widow married Edward A. Phillips, a recently arrived magazine writer from Salt Lake City. Phillips, too, was not long for this world, and by the mid-1910s, the twice-widowed Louise and some of her children had moved to 1426 Spruce Street. This house, a modest Queen Anne, still exists, albeit altered, on a row of surviving Victorians. 

This is the first part in a series of articles on north Berkeley houses and the families that inhabited them. 

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

Photograph by Daniella Thompson. Symmetry and Classic elements, such as columns and a pediment on the dormer, distinguish the Slater house at 1335 Shattuck Ave.  

One might be forgiven for thinking otherwise, but there are things to buy at The Gardener that actually have something to do with gardens. 

The tony and tempting Fourth Street shop has been, shall we say, wider in its scope than the average nursery or hardware store since its inception. I do believe that the proportion of garden stuff has shrunk over the years, but that’s entirely subjective. 

Maybe I’m just personally dazzled by the perfectly Zen furniture—imagining each piece playing solo in a room of hand-burnished cypress and off-white rice paper—or the perfectly textured fabrics in table linens and scarves, or the perfectly hilarious renditions of an entire Shakespeare play in relatively fine print on a poster.  

Of course, the stuff displayed on the sidewalk outside is suitable for outdoor use, in the garden or on the deck or by the front door. 

I do like the recycled rainbow-rubber renditions of those familiar school foot-scraper doormats in a couple of sizes, and the weathered-wood Adirondack chairs, though, having some experience with weathered wood, I have to wonder about splinters.  

There’s an interesting strategy going on inside. If you have the same tendency I do to wander through a store in a circle, you’ll find the path leads from garden stuff first through garden stuff last whether you go sunwise or widdershins.  

On your right, you’ll encounter the $200 birdhouses and zinc plant markers (carbon pencils to use on those are sold separately) along with more practical items like the “tip bag” and Bosbag-type gadgets for toting your pruning scraps or leaf litter, and a few models of the indispensable Felco pruning shears. I do think that at those prices the birdhouses should come with at least a pair of orioles.  

What else? 

Well, while you’re on your expedition to pick up a castle for the kids or lunch at Bette’s or a yummy rat for your snake, you can drop by The Gardener for some Italian veggie seeds—or Seeds of Change or Kitazawa seeds—maybe a Designer watering can. A waterproof notebook; I’d thought only birders were crazy enough to need those.  

Maybe you need West County gardening gloves, or a pair of rose gloves with long gauntlet cuffs. Speaking of Zen: natural-fiber cordage for tying up vines or tomatoes.  

Maybe a stylish gardening hat. Hand hoes and other such clever tools. Garden clogs (for the kids, too) or big plastic bucket/baskets like those used in Spain. Polished pebbles to mulch your potted plants.  

And when you’re finished with planting and maintaining, some fragrant soap (maybe Juniper Ridge wildcrafted California scents: bay laurel, juniper, cedar) and a handsome $18 nailbrush to clean up with, scented hand cream afterwards.  

Then off to your South American-style hammock, with a copy of Sunset’s latest edition, or Native Treasures, or some such garden book, or Yoga for Gardeners. Maybe a hand-thrown cup of fancy tea.  

And dream of the garden that The Gardener thinks you should have: perfect in every way.  

The Gardener 

1836 Fourth St. 

548-4545 

www.thegardener.com 

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Daily Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Daily Planet.

Hi Matt: Enjoyed your excellent article on foundation capping.One thing that I sometimes mention to my clients is that the faulty grade problem may sometimes be solved by simply digging away the dirt and debris that has accumulated against the foundation. This of course is the most economical solution when a complete foundation replacement isn’t needed for structural reasons! Do you think this is an okay observation to make?  

—Betsy Thagard  

Absolutely Betsy,  

As I often say to folks who write me with valid point regarding the subject of the article, if I weren’t limited to about 1000 words, I’d probably have said just what you mentioned. 

Caps are often “technically” required by the Structural Pest Control Act but, in fact, silly and largely unnecessary. Soil has often built up on the outside (and sometimes on the inside due to later work such as basement development) and simply needs to be cut away. 

The trick is to first dig a pit next the foundation to see the total depth in one spot prior to digging out along a long stretch. 

As long as you’re not undermining the foundation and there are at least a few inches left, it’s fine to cut back the soil and create a two-four-inch gap. It’s also a good idea to make sure that client know not to mulch or plant right along this boundary and to keep it clear. 

Six-inches is code but not really required. Some very short footings (10 inches or so) are not good candidates for this technique but replacement of a good solid unrotated footing of solid concrete is usually unnecessary and capping does very little for any of us. All that said, a new inverted T is a nice improvement that adds value in several ways. 

You Harvard grads are so smart! 

—Matt

Nightmare On Elm Street? 

Even though Halloween is months away, let’s consider some things that make for a scary house: 

• It was built before 1989 and you’re not sure about the retrofit 

• You’re not home 24/7, but you don’t have an automatic gas shut-off valve 

• The heavy furniture, wall hangings, and appliances haven’t been secured 

• There isn’t enough food, water, and emergency supplies to last a week 

• You’re not sure about the safest place to be in each room during a serious quake 

Don’t get overwhelmed, folks, just decide to do something about your family’s and your home’s safety—one step at a time. 

Larry Guillot is owner of QuakePrepare, an earthquake consulting, securing, and kit supply service. Call him at 558-3299, or visit www.quakeprepare.com.

FRIDAY, MAY 18 

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Ilana Crispi on “Art in San Francisco” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. 526-2925.  

Iraq War Resister Camilo Mejia reads from his book “Road From AR Ramadi” at 7 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker, 1640 Addison St. Sponsored by Courage To Resist and the Fr. Bill O’Donnell Social Justice Committee of St. Joseph the Worker. 499-0537. 

“Homeland” A documentary of Native Americans and the destructive policies of coprporations at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 370 27th St., Oakland. www.HumanistHall.net 

Wavy Gravy’s 71st Birthday and Benefit for Seva Foundation at 8 p.m. at the Grand Ballroom, 1300 Van Ness, corner of Sutter. Tickets are $50-$250. 845-7382, ext. 332. www.seva.org/specialevents 

Free Skin Cancer Screening at Alta Bates Summit. Oakland. Appointments required. 869-8833, ext. 2. 

Red Cross Blood Drive from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Kaiser Premanente Conference Room, 1950 Franklin, Oakland. To schedule an appointment call 625-6188. 

Circle Dancing, simple folk dancing with instruction at 7:30 p.m. at Finnish Brotherhood Hall, 1970 Chestnut St at University. Donation of $5 requested. 528-4253.  

SATURDAY, MAY 19 

Berkeley Art Center 40th Birthday from 1 to 4 p.m. with guest speakers, concert, children’s activities and art exhibition, at 1275 Walnut St. in Live Oak Park. 644-6893. 

Berkeley Path Wanderers Walk on the Santa Fe Right of Way A five-mile walk to discover art, gardens and creeks. Meet at 10 a.m. at the ball court at the south end of Strawberry Creek Park, returning by BART. Bring water and a snack. 540-7223. www.berkeleypaths.org 

Bay Area Storytelling Festival Sat. and Sun. from 9 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the Kennedy Grove Regional Recreation Area. Tickets are $33-$75. 869-4969. www.bayareastorytelling.org 

Berkeley Climate Action Kick-Off with ideas and resources for reducing your emissions at 10 a.m. at South Berkeley Senior Center.. www.cityofberkeley.info/mayor/GHG/index.htm 

Solidarity with the Tree-Sitters with the Rockin' Solidarity Labor Chorus and the Freedom Song Network at 2 p.m. at the Memorial Oak Grove, east side of UC Campus, just off Gayley Rd. 649-1423. halih@yahoo.com 

ACCI Gallery 50th Anniversary Celebration at 6 p.m. at 1652 Shattuck Ave. 843-2527.  

Himalayan Fair with arts and crafts, music, dance and food, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. in Live Oak Park, 1300 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $8-$20, benefits grassroots projects in the Himalayas. 869-3995.  

Faerie Masque Ball “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Unitarian Fellowship, 1924 Cedar St. at Bonita. Tickets are $2-$5. 

“Making Waves to Fight Cancer” A 15.5 mile sea kayak and canoe paddle around Alameda Island to raise money for breast cancer research, from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Register and pledge online at www.calkayak.com 

Community Picket of the Port of Oakland to call for a halt to war shipments. Meet at 7 a.m. at the West Oakland BART station. There will be a shuttle to take people to the picketing site. 525-5497. 

A Clean Sweep: Thermometers, Medicine, and E-Waste Disposal from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at EmeryBay Market Place, Christie Ave. at 64th St., Emeryville. Bring unwanted or expired medication, mercury thermometers, and electronic waste, such as TVs, computers, monitors, cell phones and fax machines. No appliances. Bring thermometers sealed in two plastic zipper bags, and bring medication in original containers with your name marked out. 452-9261, ext 118. www.ebmud.com/cleanbay 

Tea Party and Old Time Music Jam at 3:30 p.m. in People's Park. Bring a teacup! 

Walking Tour of Oakland City Center Meet at 10 a.m. in front Oakland City Hall at Frank Ogawa Plaza. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. 

Tela de la Vida/Fabric of Life A bilingual walk for the entire family at 2 p.m. at the Miller/Knox Regional Shoreline. For information call 525-2233. 

Multicultural Health Fair for Children with hands-on activities from 1 to 4 p.m. at Hall of Health, 2230 Shattuck Ave., lower level. 705-8527. 

Vegetarian Cooking Class “A Taste of Thai” from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at First Unitarian Church of Oakland, 685 14th St. at Castro. Cost is $45, plus 435 for food and materials. Registration required. 531-COOK. www.compassionatecooks.com 

Berkeley Alliance of Neighborhood Associations (BANA) meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, Sproul Room, 2727 College Ave. All welcome.  

“U.S Weapons of Terror, the Global Proliferation Crisis and Paths to Peace” with Jacqueline Cabasso and Andrew Lichterman of the Western States Legal Foundation at 7 p.m. at the Alameda Public Affairs Forum, at the Home of Truth, 1300 Grand Street in Alameda. www.alamedaforum.org  

Friends of the Library Annual Book Sale from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sun. from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 526-3720, ext. 16.  

“My People Are” A short film on racial identities experienced through the eyes of young people at 7 p.m. at Park Day School, 215 Ridegway, Oakland. For informationcall Tasha at Bananas, 658-7353. 

“The Hidden Life of the Wild Elephant Herds of Africa” with author and researcher Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell at 6 p.m. at the Oakland Zoo, 9777 Golf Links Rd., off Hwy 580. 632-9525. www.oaklandzoo.org 

EcoVillage’s Earth Day and Spring Festival with keynote speaker Carl Anthony, Senior Ford Foundation Fellow, environmentalist, and social justice leader and workshops and lunch, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at EcoVillage Farm Learning Center, 21 Laurel Lane, Richmond. Cost is $15-$25. 329-1314. www.ecovillagefarm.org 

SoloSierrans Waterfront Biking from Emeryville to Berkeley Meet at 1 p.m. in front of the Watergate Clipper Club, 5 Captain Dr., Emeryville. 923-1094. 

Hopalong Animal Rescue Come meet your new best dog friend from noon to 3 p.m. at Pet Food Express Rockridge, 5144 Broadway, Oakland. 267-1915, ext. 500. www.hopalong.org  

Produce Stand at Spiral Gardens Food Security Project from 1 to 6 p.m. at the corner of Sacramento and Oregon St. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

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

SUNDAY, MAY 20 

Celebration of Old Roses Heirloom and hard-to-find roses from specialty nurseries, plus crafts, books, jewelry and clothing inspired by roses, from 11 to 4 p.m. at El Cerrito Community Center, on Moeser at Ashbury, El Cerrito. 

Wild About Watersheds A 3.5 mile hike from the Steam Train parking area to Tilden Nature Area to explore the watershed. Meet at 1 p.m. For information call 525-2233.  

Community Labyrinth Peace Walk at 3 p.m. at Willard Middle School, Telegraph Ave. between Derby and Stuart. Wheelchair accessible. 526-7377. 

People’s Park Design Help to design an open, respectful, community based visioning process for People’s Park. Planning meeting 3 p.m. in People's Park NW corner grove. 658-9178. 

Himalayan Fair with arts and crafts, music, dance and food, from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. in Live Oak Park, 1300 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $8-$20, benefits grassroots projects in the Himalayas. 869-3995.  

Hidden Gems of Berkeley Bike Ride exploring the Elmwood and South Berkeley starting at 10 a.m. at Halcyon Court, Prince St. Bring snack, lunch and water. mayith@yahoo.com 

Bike Tour of Oakland Explore Arrowhead Marsh on a leisurly 5-mile ride. Meet at 10 a.m. at the 10th St. entrance to the Oakland Museum of California. 238-3514. www.museumca.org 

SoloSierrans Hike in Tilden Meet at 4 p.m. at Lone Oak parking area for a one hour hike through the woods. Optional dinner follows. 234-8949.  

“Summer Time at the Little Farm” A puppet show about life on the farm and the mishaps of a farmer, at 10:45 and 11:30 a.m. at the Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Free Sailboat Rides from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Cal Sailing Club, Berkeley Marina. Wear warm, waterproof clothing and bring a change of clothes in case you get wet. www.cal-sailing.org 

CodePINK Newcomer Orientation & Activist Training at 3 p.m. at the CodePINK office, 1248 Solano Ave, Albany. RSVP to 524-2776. 

Bicycle Commuting Tips: Gear and Fixing Flats at 10 a.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Smart and Green Day at the Kensington Farmers’ Market with free thermometer exchange and free energy-efficient light bulbs, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 303 Arlington Ave., Kensington, behind Ace Hardware. 

EcoHouse Greywater Tour Learn about the first permitted residential constructed wetland greywater system in California. We will discuss the principles and process of safely irrigating with household waste water. Return home with ideas and plans of your own. From 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at EcoHouse, 1305 Hopkins St. Cost is $15 sliding scale, no one turned away. 548-2220 ext. 242.  

EarthTeam’s Environmental Film Festival and Awards Ceremony Screening of the student-created Our School/Our Planet videos, poetry, photography and silent auction from 2 to 5 p.m. at Ex’pression College for Digital Arts, 6601 Shellmound St., Emeryville. 704-4030. info@earthteam.net 

East Bay Atheists meets to discuss “Mormonism: the Goofiest Sect of All” with Don Havis at 1:30 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 3rd flr. meeting room, 2090 Kittredge St.  

“From Creeks to Coastline: Bay Watershed” Learn about our local San Francisco Bay Watershed through hands-on activities and exhibition from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St., at 10th St., Oakland. www.museumca.org 

“Democratization of the Media through the Internet” with Andrew Keen, author of “Cult of the Amateur,” and Dan Gilmor, author of “We the Media” at 7 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Cost is $15. 527-0450.  

“The Dark Side of Gluten in Pet Foods” at 2 p.m. at RabbitEars, 303 Arlington Ave., Kensington, behind Ace Hardware. 525-6155. 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

Tibetan Buddhism with “Jack Petranker on “Precious Jewel of the Dharma” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812.  

Dharma Dialogue with Catherine Ingram, author of “Passionate Presence” at 7:30 p.m. at 1940 Virginia St. Cost is $15. www.eastbayopencircle.org 

Berkeley Chapter of Hadassah Annual Donor Lunch with Gerrey Tenney on the history of Klezmer music in Europe and the United States, at noon at Congregation Beth Israel. 524-5333. 

MONDAY, MAY 21 

Four Mile Monday Join a four mile hike with history, vistas and birdwatching at 11 a.m. at Point Pinole Regional Shoreline. Bring layers, lunch and your binoculars. 525-2233. 

“When the Levees Broke” Parts 3 and 4 Spike Lee’s documentary about Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans at 6:45 p.m. at the Upstairs Lounge at Geoffrey’s Inner Circle, 410 14th Street, off Broadway, Oakland. Suggested donation $10. 262-1001. info@wellstoneclub.org 

Benefit for Vukani Mawethu Choir Silent auction and dinner with seatings at 5:30, 7:30 and 9 p.m. at Unicorn Restaurant, 2533 Telegraph Ave. For reservations call 841-8098. 

CodePINK Dinner with Iran Report Back & Honoring our Foremothers at 6 p.m. at MudRakers Cafe, 2801 Telegraph Ave., at Stuart St. Tickets are $23. RSVP to 524-2776. 

Read Aloud Theater A free Berkeley Adult School class at 9 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. 981-5190.  

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. 548-0425. 

TUESDAY, MAY 22 

Tuesdays for the Birds Tranquil bird walks in local parklands, led by Bethany Facendini, from 7 to 9:30 a.m. Today we will visit Redwood Regional Park. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233. 

Half Dome: a Primer on Hiking to the Summit at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Solo Sierrans Hike at Lake Chabot Reservoir Meet at 6:30 p.m. at the boat house. Optional dinner follows. For information call Delores 351-6247. 

“Rethinking the Market: How Conservatives Get It Wrong and Progressives Can Get it Right” with Dean Baker at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 1924 Cedar St. at Bonita. Suggested donation $10. No one turned away for lack of funds.  

“A Crucial Conversation about the War between Religion and Law in America” with Peter Irons at 7:30 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Donation $5, no one turned away. lewis@litminds.org 

“Climate Change and US” with Andrew Hoerner, Director of the Sustainable Economics Program at Redefining Progress, at the El Cerrito Democratic Club’s meeting at 7:30 p.m. at Makemie Hall, Northminster Presbyterian Church, 545 Ashbury Ave., El Cerrito. 375-5647.  

“Movement and Healing: Coping With Cancer And With Trauma Of War” with Ilene Ava Serlin at 7:30 p.m. at Institute for World Religions/ Berkeley Buddhist Monastery, 2304 McKinley, at the corner of McKinley and Bancroft. Free. 527-2935. 

Free Diabetes Screening from 8:30 to 11 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Do not eat or drink anything for 8 hours beforehand. 981-5332. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704.  

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991.  

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, MAY 23 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland “New Era/New Politics” highlights African-American leaders who have made their mark on Oakland. Meet at 10 a.m. and the African American Museum and Library at 659 14th St. 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

“Two Angry Moms” A documentary about mothers trying to get healthy food for their children at 7:30 p.m. at Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Cost is $5-$10. 388-8932.  

“When the Levees Broke” Part 1 of Spike Lee’s documentary on New Orleans, post-Hurricane Katrina at 7 p.m. at CodePINK office, 1248 Solano Ave, Albany. Donation $5. RSVP to 524-2776. 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. 548-9840. 

Stitch ‘n Bitch at 6:30 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

THURSDAY, MAY 24 

Tilden Tots Join a nature adventure program for 3 and 4 year olds, each accompanied by an adult (grandparents welcome)! We’ll explore pond life, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 636-1684. 

“Is God ... Great?” A discussion with Christopher Hitchens and Chris Hedges at 7:30 p.m. at King Middle School, 1781 Rose St. Tickets are $20-$25. 848-6767, ext. 609.  

Berkeley Retired Teachers Association Awards Luncheon at 11:30 a.m. at the Berkeley Yacht Club, Berkeley Marina. 251-2127. 

Baby and Toddler Storytime at 10:30 a.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

CITY MEETINGS 

Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board meets Mon., May 21, at 7 p.m. in City Council Chambers. 644-6128 ext. 113. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/rent 

City Council meets Tues., May 22, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers. 981-6900. www. 

ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Civic Arts Commission meets Wed., May 23, at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7533.  

Disaster and Fire Safety Commission meets Wed., May 23, at 7 p.m., at the Emergency Operations Center, 997 Cedar St. 981-5502.  

Planning Commission meets Wed., May 23,at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7484. 

Police Review Commission meets Wed. May 23, at 7:30 p.m. at at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-4950.  

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., May 24, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410.