In what has become a years-long saga pitting the Woodfin Hotel in Emeryville against its workers, the hotel has again defied an Emeryville City Council order to pay back wages, workers’ advocates say.

In 2006, hotel employees first charged the Woodfin with defying a city-wide living wage ordinance. Measure C, approved by Emeryville voters in November 2005 and put into effect that December, set guidelines for low wage work in the city. Among these guidelines was a limit to the workloads assigned to hotel attendants, or housekeepers. According to the ordinance, these workers were to be paid time-and-a-half were they to clean more than 5,000 square feet of room space in an 8-hour work day. At the Woodfin, this square footage would have been equal to nine or ten hotel suites.

But workers have charged that for nearly a year, the hotel did not comply, and they continued to clean around 17 suites per day. They are now demanding back wages for the work they say exceeded the ordinance’s limits.

“We didn’t know about the law,” says Maria Martinez, who has worked at the Woodfin for eight years. All the workers involved, she says, are immigrant women. “Nobody told us. Only when people from EBASE came to tell us, that’s when we found out.”

The East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, an Oakland-based community organization advocating for low-wage workers in the area, has taken on the case.

“This isn’t charity; it’s not a gift,” says Brooke Anderson, the deputy director of EBASE, “It’s money earned by their own sweat and their own backache.”

With the support of EBASE and other community and legal aid groups, the workers approached the City Council and simultaneously filed a lawsuit for back wages against the hotel chain in September of 2006.

After investigating, the City Council ordered the hotel to pay $200,000 in back wages in 2007. The hotel  challenged the Council’s order in Alameda County Superior Court. In 2008, the court upheld the validity of Measure C, while ordering the City Council to redo the hearing process in order to guarantee the hotel its right to due process.

In the latest turn of events following the court decision, the City Council revisited the case, holding a series of hearings between November and January. At these hearings, the hotel challenged the order on several grounds, including the argument that room inspectors, or supervisors, conducted room cleaning as part of their jobs, and that therefore the hotel’s “team approach” rendered the Councils’ calculations of housekeepers’ workload, and corresponding back wages, inaccurate.

After an in-depth audit of the hotel’s records and workers’ time sheets, the Council rejected the hotel’s argument. At the last hearing on January 15, the Council issued its second order to the hotel to pay up.  Hotel officials were told to pay workers by March 31, and to provide the city with proof that the back wages had been paid by April 15.

April 15 came and went, and the hotel did neither.

Tim Rosales, spokesperson for Woodfin, says that the hotel has not complied because it continues to disagree with the Council’s decision and will be appealing the order again through the courts. The City Council, says Rosales, is in no place to judge the hotel’s cleaning practices, nor the measurement of square footage, since they are not specialists in the industry.

The hotel was also not satisfied with the fairness of the second round of hearings. “It was a huge waste of taxpayer money,” says Rosales, explaining that the hotel saw no difference between these hearings and the previous ones that the court had ruled inadequate.

But workers and their advocates are getting increasingly frustrated with the hotel’s defiance. “This is the second time the City Council has ordered Woodfin to pay,” Anderson says. “We know for a fact that they’ve thrown twice as much money into lawsuits than they would have had to pay workers.”

While the hotel is currently in compliance with Measure C, Rosales says that there is cause for broader concern arising from the living wage ordinance, saying that with increased operating costs such as bookkeeping called for by the law’s regulations, the measure is seen by many in the local hotel industry as a “hinderance to development.”

“With the economy now,” says Rosales, “Businesses are leaving the city. As long as the measure is on the books, hotels will be very reluctant to do business in Emeryville.” And when they see another business such as the Woodfin “dragged through the mud,” he says, hotels will think twice about doing business in the city.

But for Martinez, a mother of four who lives in Richmond, the $12,000 she says Woodfin owes her trumps considerations of a city’s economic development. At times, she says, the fight for back wages has turned ugly for these immigrant workers.

“They said that because there was a lot of people working illegally, that they didn’t have any rights,” says Martinez, speaking of some of the hotel managers’ references to the workers’ immigration status. According to Martinez, many workers have been fired since the conflict erupted, and their immigration status has been the primary excuse. “If someone defended themselves, or stood up for their rights,” she says, “they looked for an excuse to get rid of them. A lot of people have been fired for defending themselves.”

A month after the initial lawsuit was filed in 2006, workers received “no match” letters from the Social Security Administration informing them that the social security number and name they had provided did not match. Ordinarily sent out as courtesy to workers in the case of an administrative error or typo, the letter states that receiving the notice is not an indication of immigration status and that taking action against a worker would put the company in legal liability. Regardless, Anderson, of EBASE, says that 10 days before Christmas, 12 workers were fired and were only rehired after an injunction was put into place by a judge.

In spite of these challenges, Martinez is hopeful.

“We will win,” she says, adding that she is grateful for the community support the workers have received.

“We have to know how to defend ourselves. And they have to know that just because someone’s an immigrant, they can’t do with them what they want.”

Wheel Estate from Shaleece Haas on Vimeo.

For one Berkeley man, an RV is more than just a recreational vehicle. It’s the home he turned to when his house went into foreclosure.

Photo courtesy of Maricopa County Environmental Services

As the California heat begins to usher in the summer, as well as usher water enthusiasts into the swimming pools, counties, including Alameda County, are integrating a new federal law that will further protect people from accidental drownings in public pools and spas. All hotels, community recreation centers, and high schools must install new federally-approved drain covers to prevent swimmers from being held down by the suction force of water ducts.

All swimming pool and hot tubs have drainage systems in order to clean the water, but the suction power of some drains is strong enough to trap swimmers at the bottom of pools and spas and drown them. While the suction created can be powerful enough to hold down an adult’s body, small children and swimmers with shoulder-length or longer hair are at the greatest of for entrapment.

According to a report by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (UCPS) released in March 2005, between 1990 and 2004, there were 74 reported cases of body entrapment in pool and spa drainage systems. Thirteen of those cases resulted in deaths. The commission suggests that there may be many more unreported incidences of body entrapment.

In December, 2007, this safety hazard prompted Congress to pass the Virginia Graeme Baker Pool Spa and Safety Act. Named after former US Secretary of State James Baker’s granddaughter, who drowned in a hot tub, the law forces all public pools and spas to install drainage covers designed to prevent accidental deaths by making it harder for a swimmer to become entangled with the drain.

According to Ariu Levy, Director of Alameda County’s Environmental Health Department, the agency has notified roughly 1,500 local water facilities of the need to install these drain covers immediately, and the county’s 22 pool inspectors have received the necessary training in order to determine compliance. In an email, Levy explained that “sites found not to be in compliance will be given a period of time to submit plans and complete the necessary work to meet the new standards.”

The new law has affected some public pools more than others. “Our pool already meets the new regulation requirements, so we’re lucky,” said Michael Moran, Aquatic and Safety Director at the Oakland YMCA. “But I’ve heard from people working at other pools in the area … and they have to pay a lot of money for the improvements.” Some pools are even going to close because they can’t afford the total cost of repairs, which, according to Moran, can amount to tens of thousands of dollars. “If we had to pay several thousands of dollars,” he said, “we would have to close our pool too…we can’t afford that.”

But according to Don Atkinson-Adams, an environmental health specialist with the county, the drain cover replacements should be affordable. “The cost to install them don’t typically cost more than a thousand dollars,” he said, suggesting that the heftier bills somefacilities face are probably derived from other more drastic repairs they must make in order to meet other safety standards.

Atkinson-Adams said the county is taking a practical approach to enforcing the rules. “Yes, we’re going to shut down a pool that poses an immediate safety hazard,” he said. “But if a facility follows the rules and is trying to comply, we’ll work with them…we’re pushing to have all the pools in compliance by the end of the year.”

Some pool professionals say the new standards are worth the fuss. “I’ve worked on some hot tub drains where the suction is so strong, my arm gets glued to it,” said Dale Hiebing, owner of The Pool Doctor, a pool and spa repair and servicing company in El Sobrante. “And hot tubs can be especially dangerous because small kids can easily get to the bottom of them.”

According to Hiebing, powerful suction occurs when a body blocks most of the drainage hole. “It’s like when you put your hand over a vacuum, it sucks you in,” he said. But the new covers make blocking the water flow impossible—they either have jagged grooves or tiny holes that prevent a person from covering the whole drain, or they’re designed in a way that decentralizes water flow so the drain doesn’t gather the suction that makes it hazardous.

Although the new law only mandates the changes for public facilities, Hiebing recommends that private owners change their pool and spa drain covers as well. “A lot of the pools in Oakland homes are pretty old,” he said. “They normally have a single drainage pipe that’s so small in diameter that the suction it creates is incredibly strong…anyone who has a grandchild or a young kid around should get those drains covered.”

For more information about the VGB Act, visit the Alameda Environmental Health Department website. For more on pool safety, go to the National Swimming Pool Foundation.

For nearly 10 years, federally funded career centers in the East Bay have offered little in the way of job training. Last year, as the region lost 40,000 jobs, local career centers offered training to just 449 adults.

That is because about two thirds of the federal money pays to run the career centers, which also offer more basic services such as résumé workshops, English classes and free computer access to search for jobs. And when jobs were plentiful, career centers saw little need to increase more intensive training because most workers could find positions without it.

Now, heavy job losses and the Obama administration’s ambitious economic recovery program have prompted a dramatic change of course for federal workforce programs. The economic stimulus package signed by President Obama in February contains nearly $4 billion—more than last year’s entire budget—for employment and training services, at least $488 million of which is going to California. Local governments will be able to tap those funds later this month, and the Department of Labor wants them to use much of it for training.

But the money will flow to a system with little experience training large groups of workers. In fact, many local career centers say they have actually discouraged training  by requiring workers to wade through forms, testing, counseling and other requirements.

“Training is really the last resort,” said Monica Castrillo, a career counselor at the Richmond Works One-Stop Career Center in Richmond.

Richmond Works is one of 13 career centers in the East Bay, and 1,700 nationwide, that use federal funds to serve the unemployed. Funded under the 10-year-old Workforce Investment Act, the centers are overseen by workforce investment boards, which are appointed by cities and counties, and include representatives from business, labor and other groups. In the East Bay, there are boards representing Alameda and Contra Costa counties, and the cities of Richmond and Oakland. Federal money flows to the boards using formulas based on unemployment rates and other factors.

Together, the four East Bay boards expect to receive more than $16 million from the federal stimulus. That money will be welcomed by the career centers, which are being flooded with newly unemployed workers. Staff at Richmond Works say the center is serving more than 4,000 people per month, double the number they served last year.

Inside Richmond Works on a recent Thursday afternoon, about 20 job seekers were scanning the public computers for job listings. Alex Medrano, 46, of Richmond, looked over his resume. Two years ago, Medrano paid to attend the ITT Technical Institute to learn construction management, but that industry slumped before he could find a job.

“I chose the wrong class,” Medrano said.

Medrano knows he may have to “upgrade” his skills, but he is not sure whether he will look for more training. If he is eligible Medrano could receive a voucher for up to $3,500 for training at one of hundreds of schools. But first, he’ll have to attend an orientation and a workshop on resume writing, and do a preliminary job search. He’ll also have to pass a basic skills test showing a ninth grade education.

Medrano will also have to meet with a career counselor like Castrillo, who helps match workers with open jobs, and approves some of them for training. When Castrillo approves training, the government evaluates her based on whether or not the trainee gets hired.  That makes Castrillo cautious to approve only the most motivated workers for training.

“We have to make a judgment about whether they are do-ers,” Castrillo said. “It all boils down to numbers.”

But with a new mandate to train more workers, career centers are looking for ways to approve clients more quickly. The stimulus legislation allows centers to hire community colleges and others to train groups of workers, and the Department of Labor says it wants them to sign contracts with schools soon.

“These contracts are intended to provide a means of quickly ramping up much-needed training capacity,” Deputy Assistant Labor Secretary Douglas Small said in a March 18 letter to state workforce agencies.

Local workforce boards are talking to the Peralta and Chabot-Las Positas community college districts about potential training contracts, but it is still not clear what types of training colleges would provide. Typically, boards use economic data to target training toward growing industries, but they are scrambling to figure out where to focus when almost every sector of the local economy is losing jobs. Unemployment reached 9.6 percent in the East Bay in February, up 88 percent from the same month last year. In the past year, California as a whole lost more than 600,000 jobs.

“Everything has changed,” said Ed Kawahara, the top consultant for the California Economic Strategy Panel, a state commission that guides workforce policies.  “We’re in dire straits.”

Even when jobs were growing, training was scattered across dozens of fields ranging from truck driving to medical billing. Last year, the 449 trainees in the East Bay enrolled in more than 160 different programs. That makes it difficult to concentrate training resources on specific types of jobs, said Linda Chandler, strategic planner for the Contra Costa Workforce Investment Board.

“We haven’t typically had that many people at one time needing one kind of training,” Chandler said.

Once they receive the money later this month, the workforce investment boards say they will put it to work within months. That could mean starting with general programs like English and computer classes until they decide which industries to target, said Virginia Hamilton, spokeswoman for the California Workforce Association, which represents all of California’s 49 workforce boards.

“At the very least we can start investing in the basic skills of our workers,” Hamilton said. “We can do that right away before we know where the jobs are going.”

I was driving down Shattuck Ave this afternoon – the 6th anniversary of the Iraq war – and out of the corner of my eye I noticed quite a commotion out front of the Marine Recruiting Center. I circled around to get a better look, and saw the huge windows at the front of the Center being replaced. There were baseball-sized holes in the windows, and dripping red paint.

Read an article about the vandalism from the Oakland Tribune.

To learn how weatherization works, CLICK TO LISTEN: [audio:http://510report.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/weatherization_0310.mp3]

Making magic with caulk, insulation and duct blasters, Contra Costa County weatherization specialist Brett Crowe can reduce a house’s energy waste by two-thirds in just half a day.

By late spring, thanks to $5 billion of stimulus funding, thousands of new weatherizers similar to Crowe will be sealing up low-income homes in the Bay Area and across the country. They will primarily come from the country’s 1.7 million unemployed construction workers, retrained as lean, greening machines.

These new weatherization hires will be some of the earliest manifestations of stimulus money in local communities. The East Bay will likely receive millions in additional funding, creating scores of new jobs.

Brett Crowe trains new hire Jesus Ruiz to track the energy leakage at an older home in Richmond.

For 32 years, the federal Weatherization Assistance Program worked in relative obscurity, but since first mentioning weatherization in a presidential debate, President Barack Obama has repeatedly put the program front and center. He has called it “exactly the kind of program we should be funding.”

Obama said he wants one million households to benefit.

Weatherization funds create jobs so quickly because they flow into the existing federal program, which already has established procedures for everything from allocation formulas to material selection. The quick transformation of funds into jobs means weatherization will provide one of the first opportunities to put Obama’s stimulus approach to the test.

“Basically, we’re just doing more of the same things we’ve always done,” said Robert Adams, director of weatherization services for the National Association for State and Community Services Programs (NASCSP), the network for agencies that administer programs like weatherization for low-income households.

While the benefits of the program sound nice, Leslie Paige, spokesperson for Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), said she does not think the government should even be in the weatherization business in the first place.

Weatherizers use a blower door to force air into a house and measure how much leaks out.

“The private sector could provide us this type of need if there’s demand for it in the economy,” she said. Paige would have preferred to see tax cuts to stimulate private sector growth.

County agencies said they expect to begin hiring as early as late April. That timeframe would be “really, really early” for stimulus funding that involves construction and hiring new workers, according to Steve Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy.

NASCSP estimates that California will receive $192 million over two years, pumping about half a billion dollars into the state’s economy through jobs, suppliers, and other related spending.

While the Department of Energy has not yet released final numbers for each state’s take, local organizations have already begun planning based on past allocations. The head of Contra Costa County’s program, Michael Angelo Silva, anticipates receiving $3 million from the stimulus.

He has already calculated that he will need to hire a dozen more staff, purchase and supply five more vans, and double his warehouse space.

Silva said he should have no trouble finding qualified applicants. When he posted a job opening in January, he ran one classified ad for one day in one local paper. Fifty people responded, many with decades of residential building experience.

Once in force, the program will create nearly 47,000 direct jobs, and an additional 86,000 indirect jobs for suppliers, according to an analysis by the non-profit Economic Opportunities Studies. Around 5,000 of these jobs will be in California, where employment rolls were particularly hard hit by the cessation of new residential construction.

The local sheet workers union covering the northern California coast said more than 50 percent of its members are unemployed. “We obviously welcome any opportunity to secure work in that market,” said Rob Stoker, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Alameda County.

These jobs, however, will be tied to the two years of stimulus funding. CAGW’s Paige said she was concerned that the private sector would not be able to absorb these trained workers once the stimulus times out.

Crowe reads the gages and determines that this home leaks the equivalent of having a three-foot square hole permanently in the side of the house.

“I suspect if they throw $4, $6, $8 million at it, they will create jobs,” she said. “What kind of jobs, though? Will there be an entrepreneurial market for it in the future?”

Contra Costa’s Silva said because the funding is temporary, new hires will not be full-time county employees; they will be hired on a contract basis. He said cyclical funding has always been problematic for weatherization—they train employees only to have to let them go a year or two later. Silva said the employees leave with training certifications that make them desirable to the local private sector.

Unlike the scramble for other stimulus funds, weatherization money is doled out to states based on an orderly, predetermined formula. It takes into account the size of a state’s low-income population, its climatic conditions, and the financial burden that energy use places on its low-income households. The states, in turn, contract out the actual weatherization work to a network of governmental and nonprofit agencies in each county.

California divides up coverage of the entire state into a network of 63 individual organizations, including the Contra Costa Community Services Bureau, Spectrum Community Services in Alameda County, the Economic Opportunity Council of San Francisco, and Community Action Agency in Santa Clara County.

The stimulus legislation mandates that the federal government disperse funds to states within 30 days of signing the legislation. The state will need less than a month to execute new contracts and disperse funds to the 63 governmental and non-profit agencies that perform the weatherization work, according to Helga Lemke, director for external affairs with the California Department of Community Services and Development. That signed contract is all Contra Costa’s Silva needs to get going.

Contra Costa County's agency expects it will need to purchase and outfit five new vans because of stimulus fudning.

Silva’s organization sends out two-person teams to help low-income households fix leaky homes. Lower energy bills save homeowners an average of $413 a year—extra icing on the stimulus cake.

They do this by following a basic maxim. “We want to be heating the indoors,” said specialist Crowe. “We don’t want to be heating the outdoors.”

That is easy to say but surprisingly hard to do.

New weatherization hires will learn the newest greening techniques through a mix of on-the-job training and formal education at an existing network of training facilities. Pacific Gas & Electric’s Energy Training Center in Stockton provides the preparation for northern California. It teaches how to audit homes and determine how much energy escapes in order to locate and fix the leakage.

At an older home in Richmond, Crowe maneuvered his equipment around the living room filled with knick-knacks and pictures of grandkids. He set up a door-sized fan that blew air into the house to measure how much disappeared. Based on the electronic readings, this house leaked the energy equivalent of having a three-foot-square hole permanently in the wall.

Crowe got to work installing weather stripping, replacing the front door, and sealing off the kitchen fan. The ducts in this house were wrapped in asbestos, so Crowe could not do any work repairing potential duct leakage. Contra Costa Community Services Bureau outsources asbestos removal, but typically the services cost more than is allowed per house.

“It doesn’t take much,” said Contra Costa’s Silva. “You put a water heater in, and right there, there’s $2,400.”

But soon larger expenditures like furnace replacements and asbestos abatement will be possible since the stimulus package more than doubled the funding per house, up to $6,500.

NASCSP’s Adams said since California has a warm climate, most homes will not require additional funds. This means organizations in California will likely help proportionally more households than their counterparts in colder states.

While more households may benefit, Adams said weatherization programs aren’t new players in the ongoing drive to conserve energy. “These are things we’ve always been doing,” he said. “It’s nice to be finally recognized.” But with the recognition, comes pressure from Obama’s national spotlight.

About a month ago, the North Oakland branch of the San Leandro-based chain Pet Food Express was hit by an armed robber. Two weeks later, it happened again, this time at the Pet Food Express Rockridge store, located in the Safeway shopping center at 51st and Broadway. According to employees, it was the same guy.

It was then that the vice president of Pet Food Express, Mark Witirol, started hearing of other armed robberies at the Rockridge shopping center. Frustrated by what he thought was a predictable pattern of crime, he wrote a letter to Mayor Ron Dellums, posting a copy on a Montclair community Yahoo group.

“For the last few months, just about every Friday night, between 5-9 p.m., one of the stores in the Safeway Center at 51st and Broadway has been robbed at gunpoint by the same person,” Witriol wrote.  The letter continued: “Since the robber’s moves can be predicted, catching him should be as easy as fishing in a barrel.”

That message was then forwarded to the Rockridge Neighborhood Watch Network, magnifying its reach, as Witriol intended.

“I have raised the alarms all over the place,” he later said in a telephone interview.

The heightened attention got results. Witriol, as well as employees at various stores in the center, said they have noticed an increased police presence at the shopping center. And Witriol said that his letter prompted an outpouring of support from other Oakland residents, who wanted to know how they could help keep watch over his store and other local businesses. Perhaps most significantly, Oakland police arrested a suspect on the charges of one North Oakland robbery and are currently investigating connections into several more.

But Witriol’s original letter didn’t get it quite right. According to Oakland CrimeView, an online website affiliated with OPD that tracks recent crime trends, there have been six robberies at the Rockridge shopping center since December — a lot, but not nearly as regular a pattern as Witriol’s letter suggested. And the Oakland police said emphatically that the robberies were the work of a several robbers, not one.

Witriol’s letter may not be the most accurate portrayal of crime in North Oakland. But it spoke worlds about the city’s perception of crime, of its mood and frustrations, suspicions and cynicism. For a community beleaguered by crime, Witriol’s letter struck a chord.

“The people of Oakland are very, very upset, and they want to do something about it,” Witriol said.

The anxiety extends to those working at the shopping center, particularly at stores that have been robbed. At Jamba Juice, the site of an armed robbery this winter, most of the employees who were working at the time have since transferred to other locations. Even employees of neighboring businesses which have not been directly affected say they are nervous.

“My co-workers are very scared,” said Jocelyn Sprinkle, a Starbucks employee. Even though her store has not been robbed, she said that there was new focus on safety procedures to guard against robberies, such as bringing in outside furniture during daylight hours.

At the Dress Barn, there is now a full-time security guard sitting at the store’s entrance. An employee at GameStop, who asked not to be named because corporate headquarters has asked its employees not to speak with the media, said he was working one evening in February when a robber, armed with an automatic pistol, came into the store, demanding money from both the cash register and the store’s customers. The employee said that now he has started violating company policy of keeping doors unlocked during business hours, choosing instead to lock the doors once the sun goes down and let customers in himself.

“If it looks like one of the people that robbed me, they’re not getting in,” he said. “If they have a covering over their face, I’m not going near the door.”

But while merchants and their employees may be on the watch for a common thread, the OPD contests Witriol’s assertion that one suspect is to blame for all of the incidents.

“There is no pattern [of crime] at 51st and Broadway,” said Officer John Cunnie, a public safety officer for the nearby 12X police beat. “There is a pattern of stores getting hit, but there is no pattern in regard to one suspect.”

What is it about that particular location? Cunnie said he believes that the shopping center presents multiple opportunities for a would-be robber because there are so many stores clustered in one area.

The GameStop employee has a different theory.

“This is actually a good part of Oakland,” he said. “They [the robbers] know the security will be lax.”

The police arrested Quentin Carter earlier this month and charged him with armed robbery further down on Broadway and a parole violation. OPD Public Information Officer Jeffrey Thomason would not say whether Carter, 27, is also suspected of armed robberies at the Safeway shopping center, but he did say that police investigators are looking into possible ties to other robberies.

Witriol and other workers at the shopping center said that they believe Carter is responsible for at least some of the robbery attempts. Witriol said he believes that his employees will likely participate in a line-up to see if they can identify the suspect as the man who robbed their store.

News of the arrest has cheered many who work at the shopping center. But not all of them.

“That’s not the only guy,” the GameStop employee said.  “It’s not the guy that robbed me back in February. It was the one guy that robbed us in November.”

For now, Mark Witriol is pleased with the new attention being focused on the armed robberies. When asked about the recent arrest, Witriol praised the Oakland police efforts.

“We were all amazingly impressed,” Witriol said, further adding that cooperation from Oakland residents and other business owners was crucial. “It’s not about whose job it is. When something is at this level, it’s everyone’s job.”

But although they say they hope that this arrest will result in charges for the robberies, some of the center employees remained pessimistic.

“I think it’s going to continue,” the GameStop employee said. “Not that these guys have jobs anyway, but people use the recession as an excuse to commit a crime. We’re going to continue to get robbed.”

A congregation of look-alike Andy Warhols is not something that happens often. But on Friday March 6, in an Emeryville warehouse that reproduced the 1960s’ dark, industrial-driven art scene fathered by Warhol, the Third Annual Amoeba Art Show took place.

The Factory Party.

More than 60 artists showed their paintings, sculptures, installations, films, photographs and other mediums/works. And yes, there were also the Velvet Underground look-alikes, playing classic songs like Venus in Furs, Heroin, and Pale Blue Eyes in a huge, cold-concrete wing of the place, evoking the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Warhol’s multimedia road show.

It was still early; the labyrinthian depot was staring to get packed, seven or eight rooms transformed into galleries, food and beverage flowing and Christa Päffgen’s (Nico) voice in the background; like a sonorous fog covering everyone. The atmosphere conjured an artistic scene known for exploding in a promiscuous, heroin-nourished creative feast. And it was all very similar, except there were no needles passing around.

Later on, when the Nihilist Outlook & Grace (one of the two Velvet Underground cover bands that performed) was playing, the art show became a secondary thing; the Velvet Underground’s covers were flooding the main room, a bunch of eyes were closed and everyone singing.

“I guess that I’ll be the closest I’ll get to Andy Warhol’s idea of a party and his 1960s New York City Factory,” said one of the attendees, who had Fando & Lis’ (the first feature-length film by Alejandro Jodorowsky) spider woman tattooed in his chest. Very impressive.

One of the installations, the proliferation of fungal mycelia, created by Bruce Anderson, Dale Sophiea and Curtis Tamm, was a small tunnel made out of plastic garbage bags that finished in a warmed little room with natural grass and small tree stumps to sit on. The front wall had two screens just spitting nature images, 10 or more per second, very experimental. Grass disco balls hung from the ceiling — a fixture of intertwined ideas about nature and technology through art.

Amoeba Music, the East Bay Express, OFFSpace and contributing sponsor the de Young Museum teamed up to create a Peel Slowly and See session of art, music, and the artistic spirit of a character that defined a good part of today’s pop culture.