Local writers Steve Abee and Gordon Henderson are working on a line-up of 10 writers to present their work during a two hour, outdoor performance. In addition, entertainment coordinator Sonya Mims is working on adding a flamenco dance group as well as a live theatrical performance that will take place on Lemoyne Street at Sunset Blvd.

More than 20 artists have signed up to be included on the studio tour. Three shuttle buses will transport festival participants between the studios and galleries or visitors can pick up a map and tour on their own. Call Nancy Lissaman at 481-0142 for more tour details Artists who want to be included in the professional exhibition have until Sept. 10 to submit their slides or photos to Echo Park Artists Festival, 1539 Parmer Ave., LA, CA 90026. Please include a stamped, self-addressed envelope for the return of materials. The show, which will run on Oct. 10 & 11, will be curated by artist OliviaSanchez Brown.

Katrina Alexy and her crew are busy spreading the word at local schools about the student art exhibition and art workshops. The exhibition is open to students in k-12. The student exhibition group is approaching local arts stores and business who would like to contribute art supplies or services that will be give away as prizes. If you would like to volunteer, call Katrina at 662-6083.

ART ON THE AVENUE
The most notable feature of the intersection of Echo Park and
Morton avenues used to be Magic Gas station. Now, the same area is emerging as the neighborhood’s gallery row. By late September, three galleries are expected to be open in side-by-side store fronts on Echo Park Avenue.

Joining Ojala Fine Arts & Crafts, which opened in May, will be Delirium Tremens (look it up), at 1553 Echo Park Ave. Owners AaronDonovan and PattyCastillo will open their space in early September with a group exhibition featuring the paintings and drawings of VanArno, Stacey Lande, John Parra and Jason Kraus.

Next door, Merrick Morton, Robin Blackman and Katrina Alexy are ripping out walls and restoring historical features as they prepare to open Fototeka, an exhibition space for the photographic arts. They are planning a late September opening. Call 661-5563 for more information.

All three exhibition spaces are scheduled to participate in a Eastside Gallery tour on Thursday Sept. 24 and Friday Sept. 25, when about a dozen art venues in Echo Park, Silver Lake and Los Feliz will be open from 5 PM to 11 PM.

ARTISTS ON THE GO
An exhibition featuring the photography of DellaRossa will be held
during the month of August at The Perfect Exposure in Los Angeles. The Day They Killed Ruben Salazar includes photos from Della’s book on the death of the Los Angeles journalist on August 29, 1970. The sow opens with a 7 PM reception at Friday, Aug. 7. The Perfect Exposure is located at 3501 W. Sixth St. Call 213-381-1136 for more info.

Paintings by NancyLisssaman and ZohrehPartovi will be on
exhibition at Ojala Fine Arts & Crafts, 1547 Echo Park Ave., during the month of August. The opening reception included a performance by Echo Park musician DevinSarno.
In September, WilliamNettles will exhibit his photographs at Ojala as part of a historical exhibition and debut of a new book–Ghosts of Echo Park–on local history. The opening reception and book signing will take place on Saturday, Sept. 5. Call 250-4155 for more information.

Painter CooperTomlinson was part of the Mad River Post Summer Collection exhibition in Santa Monica.

Photographer MartinCox is included in the LA NUDE VI exhibition at Photo Impact–931 N. Citrus Ave.– in Hollywood. The show runs through Sept. 18.
KatrinaAlexy and HillaryMushkin were part of the most recent show in the While You Wait Series at the Hollywood Department of Motor Vehicle.
MerrickMorton’s photographs from a recent trip to Cuba were included in a group exhibition titled Not So Distant Lands at George’s in Los Feliz.

Paintings by PatssiValdez and an installation by EricaSuderberg were included in the COLA: 1997-98 Individual Artists Grants show at the Municipal Art Gallery at the Barnsdall Art Park. Patssi and Erica were among the 12 artists exhibited in the May-June show who received $10,000, unrestricted grants from the city.

Artist/Millie’s waiter Aaron Donovan and Pac Bell operator/Spaceland doorgirl Patricia Castillo saw a need—an unpretentious place where artist could show—and a space—a turn of the century storefront in need of restoration. One sold ’64 Galaxie station wagon and countless tips later, Delirium Tremens was born. To settle an argument on the name, Donovan and Castillo chose one by a blind opening of the dictionary (a method used by countless bands in the same neighborhood). And yet Delirium Tremens—the formal name for the DT’s, or the shakes and hallucinatory visions drunks suffer upon withdrawals—fits perfectly with the duo’s vision of aesthetic provocation.

I really like art that people love or hate—nothing lukewarm,” says Donovan, whose hard luck getting his own show led him to open his own space. “I was taking my slides around, kind of frightened, and the galleries were so pretentious. They’d glance at the slides, look you over, look at their watch, and boom! You’re outta there.” An Art Center College of Design graduate, Donovan realized that many of his former schoolmates were likely undergoing the same experience.

He finally got a break last May when Ojala Fine Art, located next to the DTs space, opened its doors and gave him a show.

“There’s a lot of talent, but no venues,” says Jesus Sanchez, the proprietor of Ojala. Sensing a wealth of untapped talent in Echo Park, Silver Lake and Chinatown, Sanchez is committed to showing work for those communities. And so is Fototeka, a photography gallery that is set to open nearby before the end of the year.

“We want to bring people in, not be a snobby presence,” says Robin Blackman, one of three people launching Fototeka. As for Delirium Tremens’ niche in this mini art zone, the concept is to explore the fine line between illustration and fine art. “Think brain damage,” Donovan suggests.

glue style and action in los angeles is the new fashion and arts magazine busting out of Los Angeles, covering the trendsetting East Side of town. This is the world of Beck, indy film, cheap rent, affordable designer clothes, boutiques selling Mexican love potions, web geeks on crank, the Darby Crash Memorial Punk Rock Museum, and a million bands that will never get signed. Glue sees it all and takes pictures! Glue magazine is available at all major newsstands in LA, and at the following stores:
Squaresville, Amok, NYSE, The Swell Store, Eduardo Lucero, Retail Slut, Rojas, and Melrose Music.

The most notable feature of the intersection of Echo Park and
Morton avenues used to be Magic Gas station. Now, the same area is emerging as the neighborhood’s gallery row. By late September, three galleries are expected to be open in side-by-side store fronts on Echo Park Avenue.

The free directory will be aimed at residents, business owners and
artists. The guide will include Echo Park commercial photographers,
garden designers, arts attorneys, musicians, architects, graphic
designers, jewelry makers, writers-for-hire, printers and many other
creative professionals.

Delirium-Tremens joined Ojala Fine Arts & Crafts, which opened in May 1998, in an emerging ‘‘gallery row’’ on Echo Park Avenue. In September 1998, a third art space—Fototeka, which focuses on photographic arts—opened its doors on the same block.

Aaron Donovan, whose paintings and have been exhibited in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New Orleans, and Patti Castillo, who works in ceramics, are both residents of Echo Park.

The artist’s photo-manipulations, lush and brimming with imagery and texture and a wide range of emotion, are hand-produced, using traditional collage-making techniques, mixing painting, photography and film.

Batts, who is African-American, draws upon a multi-layered set of influences, from early African art and Cubism to the work of the African-American artist Romaire Bearden as well as from comic books, horror movies and porn. What emerges is an abstract, complex style, grafting peculiar shapes and forms across a seemingly liquid surface — one that uses light and color to push the envelope of photography in a non-digital way.

Twenty-six years old, Batts has worked in the fields of erotica and fashion, often using the imagery of bondage and sexual fetish, pushing it into the realm of aesthetics. The artist takes subject matter that is inherently out of context, removes it once gain, and places it in a new context of light and texture and the human search for connection. The resulting works bring emotion and dimension to a range of subject matter associated with the lack of it.

Collage works in “Love Hurts” include “Anti-Hero,” which explores a terrain of loneliness. A series of images — nudes, a man’s face, foliage that resembles fire, bodies that call to mind flames, bones and desiccated plant-life, written words, washes of color — are placed somewhat uneasily side-by-side, in three rows; they share space and ask questions.

“Queen Misery” shows a young woman, in heavy makeup and a crown; she is in motion, the image out of focus. Superimposed is the image of a woman’s upper torso, her breasts and neck covered in heavy chains; this image is still and taken at further distance. Washes of color not literally related to the scene, and the intrusion of shape from the edges of the composition, provide a context that opens “Queen Misery” to our eyes and minds.

Batts is credited with the acclaimed series “Hammer Will Fall”; “This Is Why I Hate Myself”; and “Anti-Hero: Alter Egos and Tales of the Superlibido.”

His work has been exhibited in gallery shows in the artist’s native Baltimore, New York City, Michigan, Los Angeles and San Diego. It has been featured in magazines such as DC/Vertigo Comics, Rap Pages and Taboo and on CD covers for bands that include The Dwarves, Radical Noise, Jakkpot, Iron Boss, Fury of Five, Daybreak, Thrall and numerous others.

“The City violated CEQA because it failed to give necessary attention to the project’s effects on wildlife, threatened habitat, air quality, and the extension of sprawl-inducing services to a rural area,” said Center staff attorney John Buse. “And the City utterly ignored the project’s greenhouse gas emissions.”

Temperatures are rising as a result of emissions of greenhouse gases, primarily from fossil fuel burning for energy. Environmental scientists have indicated that California is particularly vulnerable to global warming. Many consequences are already being felt statewide and are expected to intensify in coming decades. Evidence of impacts includes a reduced snowpack and water availability, increasing frequency and intensity of droughts and heat waves, the decline and loss of species, and coastal inundation from rising sea levels.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions now will prevent the worst consequences of future warming. Leading experts have also shown that reducing emissions to minimize impacts will be far cheaper than allowing emissions to continue and then attempting to adapt to the consequences. California is leading the nation in greenhouse gas reduction strategies, including new laws to limit greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles (AB 1493, Paveley, 2002) and the country’s first mandatory cap on greenhouse gas emissions (AB 32, Nunez and Pavley, 2006).

Compliance with CEQA is a critical component of achieving the state’s greenhouse gas reduction goals. Under CEQA, cities, counties and other agencies have a duty to disclose all of a project’s significant environmental impacts, and then to avoid, reduce and mitigate those impacts to the maximum extent feasible.

“One of the most significant environmental impacts from these additional 1500 suburban sprawl-style houses is increased greenhouse gas emissions,” said Kassie Siegel, Director of the Center’s Climate, Air and Energy Program. “Yet the City of Banning refused to even consider these emissions in the Environmental Impact Report. The City of Banning must be held accountable for compliance with its CEQA obligations.”

A sharply divided Banning City Council approved the Black Bench project in October over the objections of the Center, local businesses and residents who also argued that the project’s leapfrog development would lead to more intense development in the rural San Gorgonio pass area, destroy valuable wildlands and worsen the region’s already poor air quality.

“It would be fundamentally unfair to allow a major new source of greenhouse gas emissions like the Black Bench project to escape review,” said Siegel. “This may be the first case challenging a city’s shirking of its obligation to disclose and mitigate a project’s greenhouse gas emissions, but it won’t be the last.”

Pouring fluorides into water supplies has generated controversy and opposition for five contentious decades. Meanwhile, little attention has been paid to the fluoride pollution that pours into the atmosphere from thousands of industrial plants around the world.Fluoride pollution is not a new problem. As the two reports cited below show, concerns about the dangers of fluoride contamination were well known 25 years ago.

Fluoride Pollution: In Our Water, Our Air and Our Food
“Fluorides are pollutants with considerable potential for producing ecological damage,” Edward Groth III warned in an article in the April/May 1975 issue of Environment. By the end of the 1960s, the EPA estimated that 155,000 tons of fluoride (calculated as hydrogen fluoride) was pouring into the atmosphere each year from aluminum smelters, phosphate processing, coal combustion and the manufacturing of steel, bricks and glass products.

Several types of coniferous forests are vulnerable to fluoride damage at one part per billion (ppb) or less. Because fluoride does not break-down, it slowly accumulates in the environment. As early as 1971, the National Research Council warned that fluoride pollution from US industry (in concentrations as low as 1 ppb) had caused serious damage to plants and posed a threat to livestock as far as 20 miles downwind of the emission points. Some grasses consumed by livestock have been found to contain 200,000 times more fluoride than in the ambient air.

A 1971 National Park Service study of the area downwind of an Anaconda aluminum company smelter and a phosphate plant found excessive elevations of fluoride in pines, firs, grasses, shrubs, herbs and hay. Honey bees had the highest fluoride levels among insects. Wildlife, from birds and ground squirrels to larger mammal predators, had fluoride levels that reached as high as 13,333 parts per million (ppm).

Foraging on grasses containing 30 to 40 ppm of fluoride can be toxic to cattle. Mussels, oysters, crabs, shrimp and prawns have been killed by aquatic fluoride pollution.

Groth noted that some plants can synthesize organic fluoride compounds like fluoroacetates which Fluoride Quarterly Reports identified as “among the most poisonous substances known.” Fluoro-organic residues have turned up in soybeans, lettuce, tea and oatmeal.

Airborne pollution dusts food crops with sodium fluoroacetate (which is sold commercially as Compound 1080, a deadly rodenticide). Groth observed that “a general buildup of fluoro-organic compounds in natural food webs” risks severe ecological damage.

Groth also noted that “fluoride may interact synergistically with other environmental pollutants to produce greater effects than either pollutant could cause were it acting alone.” This synergistic “boost” has been demonstrated between fluoride and copper and between airborne hydrogen fluoride and sulfur dioxide.

Fluoridating the water for 100 million people requires dumping approximately 20,000 tons of fluoride into municipal reservoirs each year. About half of the ingested fluoride winds up stored in human teeth and bones. The rest returns to the environment via the household toilet.

A 1964 scientific study of fluoride levels in sewage in 56 California cities “demonstrated that domestic sewage already contained fluoride over and above that naturally present in water or added for dental health,” Groth reported.

The study discovered that even residents in cities without fluoridated water were consuming so much excess fluoride in their foods and beverages that they were flushing “significant fluoride into receiving streams in their sewage.”

The “Unpublicized Pollutant”
In a 1973 report in the International Journal of Environmental Studies, researchers Elise Jerard and J.B. Patrick identified fluoride as “a highly unpublicized pollutant” that the President’s Science Advisory Committee once classified as a “highest priority” contaminant.

“During the past three decades, fluoride discharges from fossil fuel combustion – and more than 50 types of major industries – have steadily increased the burden of airborne contamination,” Jerard and Patrick wrote. “Invisible but potent, these emissions in both gaseous and particulate form, with their repertoire of ecological effects, pollute rain, soil, plant life and animals, surface waters [and] … both directly and through interactions of this cycle – man.”

Jerard and Patrick reported that “airborne fluoride accumulates in plants and can concentrate in the leafy portions by a factor of 2- to 260-fold without any visible sign of the contamination.”

Jerard and Patrick reported that in some regions of Florida, “25,000 acres of citrus trees have been destroyed” within 50 miles of the phosphate processing plants and apparently “normal” specimens of orange juice were found to contain 3-12 ppm of fluoride.

In 1966, Professor of Atmospheric Sanitation Morris Katz noted that, while most air pollutants are measured in parts per million, atmospheric fluoride must be monitored in parts per billion. Katz warned that prolonged exposure to airborne fluoride concentrations of less than 1 ppb “may create a hazard [since] … fluorides are more than 100 times more toxic than sulfur dioxide.”

In 1969, a massive fish kill that turned Placentia Bay, Newfoundland into “a biological desert” was traced to fluoride effluent from a plant that produced elemental phosphorus for metal finishing and consumer goods. Some 22,800 pounds of fluoride effluent poured into the bay each day, primarily in the form of hydrofluosilicic acid – the same substance used to fluoridate city water supplies.

According to US Department of Agriculture Handbook No. 380: “Airborne fluorides have caused more worldwide damage to domestic animals than any other air pollutant.” The handbook’s list of fluorosis symptoms included: “dental mottling, respiratory distress, stiffness in knees or elbows or both” and concluded with the observation that “Man is much more sensitive than domestic animals to F [fluoride] intoxication.”

In a 1970 report on “The Effects of Fluorides on Man,” Harold C. Hodge (See Earth Island Journal, Winter, Spring ’98) listed some of the symptoms of fluoride poisoning found in industrial workers: osteosclerosis, ossifications of ligamentous attachments, sinus trouble, perforation of the nasal septum, chest pains, coughs, thyroid disorders, anemia, dizziness, weakness and nausea.

Fluoride in the Food Chain
Twenty-five years ago, Jerard and Patrick issued an alarm about the growing presence of fluorides in the food chain. The researchers listed numerous examples of severe fluoride pollution on foods ranging from spinach, lettuce and tubers to the milk and meat of cows. In addition to contamination from atmospheric fluorides, Jerard and Patrick discovered that farm produce also picks up fluoride pollution from phosphate fertilizers and fluoride-bearing pesticides applied to apples, pears, celery and raspberries.

Coal-burning electric powerplants and the petroleum industry are major sources of urban fluoride pollution. Jerard and Patrick also noted a “considerable fluoride content, up to 16% or more, in a number of important drugs, including tranquilizers, corticosteroids, some preparations used in cancer therapy and anesthetics.”

“Fluoride-emitting factories, once scattered with wide exclusion zones, have proliferated and become more closely concentrated,” Jerard and Patrick observed in 1973. “Foods grown in fluoride-polluted regions are distributed over great distances… Foods and beverages processed with fluoridated water are mass-distributed.”

Each liter of fluoridated water, at 1 ppm concentration, contains a one milligram dose of fluoride – the so-called “recommended” daily amount. Water, however, is only one source of ingested fluoride. In 1991, the US Public Health Service estimated that the total daily intake for a 110-pound adult from all sources in an “optimally” fluoridated city, ranged as high as 6.6 milligrams. In 1997, the EPA estimated that Americans were ingesting nearly five times more fluoride than in 1971 – from food and drinks alone.

Children are more at risk of over-exposure than adults. A 1991 study by the Journal of Clinical Pediatric Dentistry found that every sample of bottled fruit beverages tested contained fluoride. One sample of Gerber’s grape juice contained 6.8 ppm – 70% higher that the EPA’s Maximum Contaminant Level of 4 ppm for fluoride in drinking water and 240% higher than the EPA’s 2 ppm standard set to protect against dental fluorosis.

Currently there is no federal program to detect or label the fluoride content in US foods or drinks.We hope that this special report will help to encourage a fundamental review of the health and ecological impacts of fluorides in the environment.

Sustainability principles have long been established within Lucent, but this is the first time they have been fully aligned with product development processes. The PBEMS is structured to facilitate integration of sustainability considerations into strategic business decisions, product evolution planning and product development.

Through this PBEMS, hardware design innovations are employed to meet more stringent legal and customer eco-environmental requirements while providing a competitive advantage over products without ‘green’ characteristics. Employees, customers and the world community can expect a consistent approach to the environmental management of wireless hardware products, wherever they are developed.