Ilana Wexler wants a new president.
September 2004 | Dock of the Bay
This Kid’s for Kerry
Twelve-year-old Ilana Wexler, John Kerry’s smallest big-time supporter, wowed them in Boston when she marched to the podium of the Democratic Convention and told Dick Cheney to take a “time out” for using bad language. To her Bay Area friends, Wexler is no stranger to politics. When a local film crew showed up for her birthday party earlier this year, a reporter shouted out the inevitable question: “What do you want for your birthday.” Without missing a beat (or a bite), Wexler looked up from her cake and chirped: “I want a new president!”
Pound for pound, this Julia Morgan School student is Kerry’s most effective volunteer. As founder of Kids for Kerry (www.kidsforkerry.org), she can frequently be spotted in East Bay coffeehouses lugging armloads of envelopes, fliers, sign-up sheets, and freshly sharpened pencils. The Dock caught up with Wexler at Berkeley’s Espresso Roma in June where, quicker than you can say “caucus,” she commandeered tables and set to work. Soon a swarm of eager faces gathered; nametags were slapped on shirts; and the Kids for Kerry prepared to tackle their assignments: enlisting voters and raising donations at shopping centers and outside theatres showing Fahrenheit 9/11.
“The environment, healthcare and education are the key issues to focus on,” Wexler instructs her pre-teen posse as she hands out sign-up sheets.
A freckled-faced dynamo with a crown of curly red hair, Wexler has the ready rap of a born leader.
She recalled with amazement how, earlier this year, she was asked to speak in front of a crowd “with 500 other women” at a Women for Kerry confab. One of the “other women,” Theresa Heinz Kerry, was so impressed by Wexler’s passion that she invited the East Bay DEMoiselle to meet her husband. So instead of attending camp, Wexler spent her summer on the campaign trail.
She may be too young to vote but she’s not too young to register an opinion. Wexler wants to see a new family in the White House come January 1 — and she’s not just kidding around.
—Gar Smith
Salt of Life
Flying into San Francisco, have you ever noticed those brightly colored jigsaw shoreline shapes above the South Bay and wondered what they are? (I once sat next to an art student who insisted they were an earthworks installation. Can we have the next slide please?)
Answer: Salt farms!
Twice a day, the tides roll in, and up until the Gold Rush era, California’s First Peoples farmed salt along the Bay for their diet. When the land became property, salt farming became an industry. Over the past century, 90% of the 300,000 acres of seasonal wetlands, tidal marshes, creeks, and streams that once hemmed the Bay Area with an emerald green ribbon of biodiversity have been paved over for buildings, roads, and parking lots.
All is not lost. Now the salt ponds are being restored to mudflat, marsh, and other wetland habitats (price tag: $100 million). After the Mississippi River and the Everglades, this ranks as one of our largest wetlands restorations. Altogether, some 16,500 acres of salt farms ringing the South Bay from Hayward to Menlo Park are being transformed, plus a spot up on the Napa River.
So what’s the big de-saltation? Wetlands not only help flood control and water quality, there’s also the spiritual, aesthetic, and recreational boost — and not just for us warm-blooded two-legged visitors. The changes will add an extra star to our ratings in the Migratory Bird Zagat Guide to the Pacific — the Bay Area having already been voted Best Roadside Facility by the majority of fair-feathered cousins migrating along the left coast from South America to the Arctic. Birds and humans alike will welcome the return of our brother and sister steelhead, salmon, and sturgeon.
On July 19, sluice gates opened to let the first fresh bay waters flow into five salt ponds in the Silicon Valley region as 1,350 acres of salt ponds near Moffett Field were opened to the Bay. The plan is to complete long-term restoration of more than 15,000 acres of industrial salt ponds by 2008.
For more, contact: www.southbayrestoration.org
— Gary Gach
Blue Fiddler
Vassar Clements has been called the father of Hillbilly Jazz. But his improvisational style transcends facile categories. His expressive sound grooves with whatever genre he plays — bluegrass, jazz, swing, rock, or blues. At home with them all, he blends their colors and moods like a master painter.
Clements began fiddling in Florida during the 1940s Big Band era. “Swing style,” he writes, “subconsciously has always come through in almost everything I’ve played.” By 1949, he was a regular “Bluegrass Boy” with Bill Monroe and went on to work with the Earl Scruggs Revue. A 1972 album, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s classic Will the Circle Be Unbroken, re-launched his career, and Clements soon became a hot item on the pop circuit, recording with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, Linda Ronstadt, and Paul McCartney.
Throughout his 50-odd year career, Clements has been a musician’s musician, particularly in jazz circles where he jammed with Miles Davis veterans Dave Holland, John Abercrombie and Jimmy Cobb, and recorded Together At Last with Stephane Grappelli, which earned him Grammy #5.
Now Grisman’s San Rafael-based Acoustic Disc has released a CD smoking with blues talent. Among its gems, Livin’ With the Blues (ACD 58) features Clements trading solos with blues harmonica great Charlie Musselwhite in a raunchy rendition of “Green Onions,” the signature theme song for the film Get Shorty. Clements and Musslewhite bend its stalking 2/4 rhythm with suggestive, half-finished phrases and unexpected melodic twists.
Another highpoint is Mama I’m All Out and Down, Clements’ duo with Berkeley guitarist Marc Silber, arguably the West Coast’s finest, if woefully under-recorded, exponent of traditional country blues guitar. Silber’s singing and playing inspire Clements to even zanier, fiddle lines that perfectly echo Silber’s wry, self-mocking lyrics:
The woman I love she broke my heart in two
So I went down to the drugstore and bought myself some glue
I’m gonna lay my head on that lonesome icy track
I see the train acomin and I know I snatch it back
Elvin Bishop, Maria Muldaur, Norton Buffalo, and Ruth Davies also shine on this exceptional CD, one of the finest musical collaborations of traditional acoustic players and blues artists in memory.
— Carl Nagin
Reaching for the Healing Arts
While lawmakers bicker over the best path to avoid another terrorist attack (more troops, more security checks, more surveillance), Bay Area activists are seeking peace through art, not argument, with a two-day conference on the third anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
As a testament to the remarkable healing power that the creative arts have on the body and the mind, Arts Reach 2004 will gather visual artists, musicians, doctors, dancers, therapists, poets, actors, and storytellers on Saturday and Sunday, September 11 and 12 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for talks, performances, interactive workshops and contemplative practices. Participants include drummer Barbara Borden, storyteller David Roche, and choral director Linda Tillery.
The keynote speaker is Michael Grady, head of the Department of Arts and Consciousness at Berkeley’s John F. Kennedy University and former Dean of Students at the San Francisco Art Institute. “Art,” Grady says, “leads us from pain, isolation and ignorance into transformation and wholeness. We’ve always relied on art to show us what’s important.”
Conference-goers will meet Catherine Sneed, founder and director of the Garden Project, whose on-the-job training in jailyard gardening and tree care has been called one of the most innovative crime-prevention programs in the country. Also on hand: Susan Griffin, author of What Her Body Thought, an exploration of the way modern society responds to illness. Utne Reader named Griffin one of a hundred important visionaries for the new millennium.
The main focus of the event will be a communal celebration in song, music, dance and visual arts with the goal of reclaimiing a national identity free of fear. In the words of Nina Wise, who organized ArtsReach with John Zorn: “We can, together, take this moment in human history to wake up to who we already know ourselves to be: a free people dedicated to a sane and just world made up of individuals who celebrate their common humanity and this planet of indescribable beauty through song and dance, poetry, and care for all sentient beings.”
ArtsReach 2004 will be held Sat., Sept. 11, 9:00am-10pm and Sun., Sept. 12, 9:00am-5:15pm at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Cost is $249 for both days; $139 for one day. Call (415) 978-ARTS (2787) or go to www.artsreach.com. The conference meets qualifications for 12.5 hours of continuing education credit for MFCCs and/or LCSWs as required by California Board of Behavioral Sciences.
— Tricia Cambron
California & Vietnam
If there was a “domestic front” during the Vietnam War, it was in California. Within the state’s boundaries you could find most of the nation’s defense contractors, the principal military centers where troops were trained and transported, the centers of legendary peace and anti-draft protests, the vanguard of the New Right ushered in by Governor Ronald Reagan’s election in 1966, and the portal for returning military and Southeast Asian immigrants.
“What’s Going On? — California and the Vietnam Era” is a 7,000-square-foot Oakland Museum exhibit exploring the impact of the war on Californian lives and culture. The exhibition, which runs through February 2005, includes more than 500 historical artifacts, photographs and documents interwoven with film clips, music, and oral histories — many contributed by veterans and refugees. The exhibition covers the period from the Cold War of the 1950s to the present, with emphasis on the decade from President Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965 through the war’s end, in 1975.
Events include:
Sun., Sept. 12, 2-4:30pm — “Where Do We Go From Here?” Cambodian, Mien, and Vietnamese performers discuss survival, resettlement, and assimilation in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
Sun., Sept. 19, 1-4pm — “A Question of Patriotism: The Chicano and Latino Experience during the Vietnam War Era.”
Fri., Oct. 1, 7-10pm — “Oakstock,” a concert in the museum gardens with Country Joe McDonald and Shana Morrison.
Sat., Oct. 2, 2-4pm — “In Conversation with Daniel Ellsberg,” a discussion of lessons learned from the Vietnam War and their application to contemporary America.
The Oakland Museum of California is located at Oak and 10th streets in downtown Oakland. Hours are Wed-Sat.,10am-5pm; Sun., noon-5pm, and the first Friday of the month, 10am-9pm. For information, call (510) 238-2200 or go to www.museumca.org. Special discount rates for school and community groups are available.
—TC
Watch Your Step
Some Americans like to call their hometowns “stomping grounds.”
With good reason. Consumer-driven cultures often treat planetary resources with the same respect that Godzilla showed Tokyo. Now there’s a new way to measure humanity’s imprint: one that highlights the toll our cities inflict on nature. The Ecological Footprint (EF) assesses the amount of natural resources required to sustain civilization and the land needed to dispose of its wastes. The EF reminds us that turning on a TV set or driving to the store isn’t just a local event: Both acts consume resources originating far beyond our remote controls and ignition keys. The EF can even assess the cost of a “3,000-mile salad”; the tasty collection of lettuce, cherry tomatoes and that croutons are individually trucked thousands of miles before reaching the family table.
The EarthDay Network and Oakland-based Redefining Progress (the folks who collect and crunch the EF numbers) have some good news: The “footprint” of Bay Area residents is 14 percent lower than the national average. San Franciscans have the lightestBay Area EF, with Alameda County close behind. (SF gets a break because the stats don’t include commuters). While it takes 23.6 acres to sustain a typical urban American, Bay Area residents only ask Nature to fork over 20.9 acres per capita.
Now the bad news: We still aren’t sustainable. Even if everyone on Earth wanted to live like “eco-frugal” left coasters, it would require more than 4.5 new Earths. Most of our footprint results from our massive energy consumption (coal, petroleum, gas, uranium) with food and fiber trailing close behind. Clearly, it’ll take more than toenail-trimming to reduce our EF. EF experts recommend a shift to local produce, renewable energy, compact “walkable” cities, waste reduction and re-cycling. Our EF score shows that we’ve been walking in the wrong direction. Maybe it’s time for new planetary lifestyle motto: Tread Lightly.
—GS
For more information on the Ecological Footprint, contact: www.earthday.net,http://www.redefiningprogress.org, or www.myfootprint.org
Recommend this page to a friend
Top Ten pages recommended to friends:
