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Saturday was a great day for art in Humboldt, starting in the morning with dozens of artists circling the Arcata Plaza with vibrant colors for Northcoast Children's Services' 25th Annual Pastels on the Plaza. Sponsors make a donation to the nonprofit and either find an artist to represent them or one is assigned. The ephemeral creations last for a few days before foot traffic and/or rain fade them into history.

Journal graphic designer Lynn Jones created this life-like Stellar's jay for a local birding shop.

The Journal sponsored this square designed by arts editor Bob Doran and front office assistant Sophia Dennler as a tribute to the 25th anniversary of the sidewalk chalk event. (Sophia, a talented artist, did the bulk of the detailed pastel work.) 

HSU journalism professor and photojournalist Mark Larson sent us this collection of images capturing and preserving the artists in action and the beauty they created. 

Artist Alan Sanborn, Arcata, brushes pastels on his creation for Solutions during Pastels on the Plaza in Arcata on Saturday, Oct. 6, 2012. The pumpkin artwork in the foreground was created for the Humboldt Area Foundation by Janine Melzer and Jill Moore.

Artist Amy Jo Wahlberg created a "still life with apples" for Plaza Professionals.

"Every day is a good day for Day of the Dead," said artist Darcy Brown, Eureka, during her work on the Clarke Museum's square for Pastels on the Plaza.

Pedro Morandi, a Rotary Club exchange high school student from Brazil, used pastel chalk to create a flag on the cheek of fellow exchange student Franco Calleja (from Chile) during Pastels on the Plaza.

Duane Flatmo, featured on the poster for the 25th annual Pastels on the Plaza, works on one his imaginative neo-cubist portraits.

Howdy Emerson, Trinidad, put the finishing touches on his art work for the Westhaven Center for the Arts.

Anna Peters, a high school student in Arcata, created the HSU Children's Center artwork for Pastels on the Plaza.

Artist Joyce Jonte, Fieldbrook, checks the photo of her children, Molly (right) and Calvin (left), and husband, Bruce, as she finishes her artwork for Los Bagels.

Artist and disc jockey Amy Berkowitz, Eureka, paused during her pastel creation for KHUM-FM.

Amy Berkowitz in action with some photographic artistry by Mark Larson.

Micha Royce, Arcata, puts the finishing touches on her art for the Natural History Museum during Pastels on the Plaza.

The artists during Pastels on the Plaza transformed the pastel chalk sticks into a wide array of powder, paste and paint.

Trevor Shirk, Arcata, provided pastel artwork and a Quick Response Code (the barcode matrix) for his Genevieve Schmidt Landscape sponsor during Pastels on the Plaza.

Jordan Caya, Eureka, volunteered to help pass out and recycle pastel chalk during the Pastels on the Plaza benefit for Northcoast Children's Services. He works for Head Start.

And you'll find lots  more photos from Pastels here.

In case you missed them, a couple of California's major dailies ran Humboldt-centric stories this week. 

A travel piece in the Sacramento Bee titled "Arcata both embraces and rises above its cliches" offers a tourist-eye view of Arcata describing it as "a little bit of everything: a college town, a neo-hippie enclave, a haven for environmentalists and activists, a nature lover's paradise, a crash pad for the homeless, and a close-knit community of families in stately Victorians and quaint bungalows with tree-lined sidewalks more Eisenhower-esque than Kerouacian." (Feel free to offer your thoughts in our comment section.)

The Los Angeles Times had a story by Joe Mozingo, "Veteran Emerald Triangle pot growers see their way of life ending," about the declining fortunes of mom-n-pop ganja farmers positing that, "Pioneering marijuana cultivators in the hills of Mendocino and Humboldt counties are being pushed to the margins by the legalization they long espoused." The dateline is Laytonville, but Humboldt is well represented throughout.

Incidentally, for those interested in what are described as the "Environmental Challenges of Marijuana Agriculture in the Age of Prohibition," Humboldt State University is hosting a symposium on the topic next Friday, Oct 12, 1-5 p.m. in Behavioral and Social Sciences Building Native Forum Room 162. Panelists include reps from law enforcement, county and state government and enviro groups including Sheriff Mike Downey, District Attorney Paul Gallegos, Third District Supervisor Mark Lovelace, Scott Greacen from Friends of the Eel River, Gary Hughes from E.P.I.C., Tasha McKee from Sanctuary Forest and Scott Downie, a senior biologist with the soon-to-be-renamed California Dept. of Fish and Game.

Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill this week that will change the department's name from "Fish and Game" to "Fish and Wildlife" as of Jan. 1, 2013. Assemblyman Jared Huffman, who put the bill forward, explained to AP reporter Don Thompson, "This department's been around under the same brand for over 100 years. The resources of the department have not kept pace with its mission, which has become very broad. The trend not just in California but in the United States has been away from managing only for hunting and fishing, and managing broadly in a way that includes hunting and fishing."

As the piece duly noted, groups representing hunters, who see "wildlife" as "game," are not exactly happy with the change fearing it signals a new more restrictive attitude on their activities. (The S.F. Chronicle titled the news story, "Calif. sporting groups leery of dept. name change.") Huffman, a Democrat, who seems to be a shoe-in in his run for the Congressional seat in our redrawn district, suggests that there's no need for worry, assuring hunters that he's "very confident this is going to be good not only for hunting and fishing but for all aspects of the department's mission."

Incidentally, Brown signed the bill alongside a hunting bill that will ban the use of dogs in hunting bears and bobcats, as discussed in this blog post yesterday.

 

 

A lot of folks have been seeing bears lately as the bulky beasts amble into backyards to grab up fall's berries -- big, gorgeous bears, some cinnamon, some black with blonde noses. The power of the black bear's beauty and mischief has been known to distract folks from important indoor endeavors such as, say, watching presidential debates on TV (as a friend reported happening to her Wednesday evening), or cause them lurch to a stop in their vehicle to watch one bound playfully toward them down a slope.

Well, we do have a lot of bears in Northern California, where consistently the most bears are killed during the annual bear hunt season. Statewide, the bear population has been gradually increasing since the 1980s, and since 1990 it's gone from roughly 20,000 to a high of roughly 36,000 in 2009, according to the California Department of Fish and Game's 2011 California Bear Take Report, published Sept. 27,2012.

But since then, the statewide black bear population has dropped by as many as 10,000 bears. That's still a lot of bears, said DFG spokesperson Mike Taugher on Thursday. However, he added, about the big drop in bear numbers:

"We're a little concerned. We don't know yet what happened -- there's an analysis we're waiting for."

The Humane Society of the United States has ideas about what's happened, which it put out in a news release earlier in the week that analyzes the 2011 Bear Take Report:

"If the state's estimates are to be believed, Californians should be alarmed at the loss of a quarter of our bears in just two years," said Jennifer Fearing, the organization's California senior state director, in the release. "Bears in California are under pressure from poaching, habitat loss, road mortality, pollution and recreational hunting including harassment practices like the use of hounds, which will be prohibited come Jan. 1."

That's true -- the governor has banned the use of dogs in bear hunts, starting next year.

The 2011 report notes, among other things, that of the 1,745 bears taken legally in last year's bear hunt season, 42 percent of them were females (a figure that triggers official concern), 47 percent were hunted down with the use of dogs and that the highest takes were in Siskiyou (14 percent), Shasta (12 percent), Trinity (9 percent), Humboldt (8 percent) and Butte (6 percent).

Looking at the figures from 2009 and 2010, the humane society extrapolates that the legal take of bears in the past two years only accounts for less than a third of reduction in bears.

For the last couple of years, every time auditor-controller Joe Mellett told Humboldt County supes he really needed some more accountants, it was "basically just me whining to the board," Mellett recalled over the phone on Thursday afternoon.

So Mellett sucked it up like lots of people on understaffed job sites. Sometimes work went unchecked. Including his work. Including the calculations that went into creating every single property tax bill in Humboldt County.

The bills that went out recently aren't very wrong, Mellett said, but plenty of them are off by a few dollars.

"It's human error on my part," he said, and "the most significantly embarrassing one" since he took office.

If it's any consolation, Mellett also caught the blooper himself, when his own tax bill showed up in the mail. He looked, looked again, and then realized the school bond rates imposed on his lot were about $5 higher than the rates he'd remembered running for that bond.

"With growing horror I go back and research it and realize the wrong bond rates were applied" -- not just for one but for 25 different school bonds, which can wobble up or down by a few dollars each year. The slip-up happened when he failed to properly enter the updated rates into another, computerized step of creating a tax bill.

So, um, if you haven't paid yet, Humboldt County would like you to kindly disregard your property tax bills -- the original ones are teal -- and wait for the corrected ones, which it plans to send out soon on yellow paper.

And next year, Mellett said, he'll use one of his thin-stretched junior staffers to generate some of the basic work, and he'll review it, so at least there are two pairs of eyes on the numbers instead of just one.

"Most accountants will tell you, you really can't review your own work. Once you've spent 40 hours with your own work, you're pretty much blind to it," he said.

Until it shows up in the mail.

Above: Capleton performs at the Red Fox Tavern in 2010.

Humboldt County loves its reggae. Check our calendar section this or any week for proof. And it makes sense. Reggae's feel-good, pan-cultural message of "one love" jibes perfectly with our community's streak of irie idealism, to say nothing of the ganja connection.

But in recent years, the tumultuous social landscape in Jamaica has given birth to a more troublesome and controversial genre called dancehall. As the name suggests, dancehall music is infectious and beat-heavy. But where reggae's message was largely a unity-focused rebellion against the slavery and oppression in Jamaica's past, some dancehall reflects the country's modern, conflicted attitudes about race, masculinity and sexuality. It's often viewed as a backlash against the bourgeois utopian grandstanding of Jamaica's political leaders, and many of the genre's biggest stars, including Buju Banton, Bounty Killer and Capleton, have become notorious -- in Jamaica and beyond -- for performing songs that advocate violence against homosexuals. In Jamaica such violence is commonplace.

We've written about this issue numerous times. Whenever local promoters and venue owners have booked one of these offending dancehall artists, perhaps unaware of their gay-bashing lyrics, they've encountered passionate objections from the local lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community and their allies. These folks have threatened to organize boycotts of any venue that hosts a show by dancehall artists who've been identified as hatemongers. And those threats have proved successful: Several concerts have been canceled in recent years, leaving owners and promoters feeling bullied and prompting cries of "censorship" from disgruntled music fans ("Irie vs. Irate," March 4, 2010).

The issue has erupted again in the past two weeks. Capleton, a dancehall artist with numerous songs in his catalog calling for the murder and brutalization of gays, was scheduled to play a show at Eureka's Red Fox Tavern later this month. Under pressure from local activists that show was canceled, but promoter Beau DeVito of Bonus Entertainment soon announced that the Capleton show would be held at a different venue to be announced the day of the performance (see here).

Capleton apologists, including DeVito, offer a variety of defenses. They point to his May 2007 signing of The Reggae Compassionate Act, which declared that "there's no space in the music community for hatred and prejudice." However, Capleton was recorded singing gay-bashing songs later that same year. They claim that Capleton's lyrics are metaphorical or that they haven't been accurately translated from Jamaican patois, even though the message of these songs is plain. But their most common complaint, one that attempts to twist privilege into victimization, is that people in the LGBT community are trying to censor Capleton and thus, somehow, violating the First Amendment.

This argument is simply wrong.

Here's the deal: The First Amendment protects our right to expression free from government censorship. One of the consequences of this free expression, inevitably, is conflict. Short of threatening actual violence, such conflict comes with the territory of the First Amendment. Protests and boycotts are part of the deal, too.

Here's an analogy: Say you're at Thanksgiving dinner and you start making fart noises with your mouth -- you know, to entertain people. If your host tells you to shut up and stop being a dipshit, he's not infringing on your legal rights. If you're never invited back, that's not censorship. It's a predictable consequence of your behavior.

The date of the Capleton show, Oct. 11, happens to be National Coming Out Day, a celebration of people who publicly identify as gay, lesbian, transgender or bisexual. Humboldt County has a proud and vibrant LGBT community, and our county government includes that community in its non-discrimination policy. To my knowledge, no one has suggested that Capleton should be legally barred from performing here. But to many in our community, his invitation feels worse than an obnoxious fart noise at Thanksgiving dinner. When you stop to consider the violent consequences of homophobia (hate crimes against LGBT people, and those perceived to be LGBT, are more likely to result in death than any other kind of reported hate crime), the invitation feels like something much more offensive -- a clueless and insensitive provocation. Threats of a boycott are a predictable consequence of that provocation.

You've probably seen pictures of the fire-spewing octopus El Pulpo Mecanico created by Duane Flatmo and friends Steve Gellman and Jerry Kunkel for Burning Man. It was featured in a recent spread in no less than Time Magazine. The gigantic kinetic sculpture was built in a local warehouse, but it's never been fully assembled and operated here in Humboldt. You first chance to see El Pulpo in action comes Saturday during Arts Alive! when the octopus comes alive in the sculpture garden at the foot of C Street.

Flatmo sent us this note and some pictures:

The mechanical octopus El Pulpo Mecanico was built in Arcata; designed and created by artist Duane Flatmo -- the spectacular fire effects and electrical systems were created by Steve Gellman. Our good friend Jerry Kunkel came on board with his expertise in building and electrical to round out the group.

El Pulpo is a combination of art and technology melded together. We built this knowing that it would be fun to watch as the giant cam spun up through the center moving the tentacles and eyes in and out while fire spewed from the tentacles and head. No hydraulics or computers were used in this contraption, which stands 23 feet tall and shoots flames 35 feet into the sky. We built the sculpture primarily out of recycled and used junk found at our local scrap yard. A special thanks to Bonnie Connor who worked out a trade with us to have full access to her wonderful place: Arcata Scrap and Salvage.

Don't miss this first time appearance in our town.

Visit El Pulpo's home on the web here.

Where: the foot of C Street in Eureka near the waterfront.
When: Saturday, Oct. 6, between 6-10 p.m. during Arts Alive!

There should be something like a carnival atmosphere that night: Along with El Pulpo, there is the official debut of a new sculpture (as noted here earlier), Don's Neighbors will be playing music, and Eureka High is holding some sort of pep rally, all in the same general vicinity. 

At a Tuesday afternoon press conference, Sheriff Mike Downey announced that the Humboldt County Sheriff's office identified a "person of interest" in custody in relation to last Thursday's hit-and-run incident that claimed the life of HSU professor Suzanne Seemann and injured two other joggers. He's also "of interest" in the recent Hoopa homicide investigation, according to Downey.
 
Jason Anthony Warren was arrested late afternoon on the day of the accident on earlier assault charges and is being held without the possibility of bail. Downey said no other suspects are currently being sought in the case.

UPDATE: The Times-Standard  is reporting that Warren had already been in custody on assault with a deadly weapon charges but was released on a "Cruz waiver" prior to his Sept. 7 sentencing date. He failed to show, which is why he was out and about on Sept. 27, the day the three joggers were hit.

Good news, Eurekans! You've got a bunch of new stuff to look at.

As they tend to do about once a year or so, the City of Eureka and the Redwood Art Association have swapped out the public art pieces that adorn the edges of the C Street Market Square for new eye grabbers. Unlike recent year's collections, this year they've decided bestow the honor of artistically representing Eureka to just one dude, retired Humboldt State University art professor Mort Scott.

In a press release sent out by Eureka Main Street to promote an opening reception for Mort at this Saturday's Arts Alive, Scott describes his art:

“My art has always been influenced by my surroundings and my environment. My work addresses fishing, logging, earthquakes, casinos, landslides, flooding, friends, and other natural activities that affect my world.”

Sure, we could have waited for Saturday, but the Journal offices are just too close and this October weather is just too nice for us to not walk on down there. Thus, here's your preview (click 'em to big 'em):