PACIFIC AND COOPER STREETS 1894. We're looking at the Pacific Wave County Bank north east corner just after the fire. The fire burned down all the wooden buildings so they re-built them of brick and mortar. Those came down in the E'Quake of 1906 and the FEMA disaster of 1989. photo credit: Covello & Covello Historical photo collection. Additional information always welcome: email photo@brattononline.com

STEVE WRIGHT RUNNING FOR JUDGE!!! Go to www.stevewrightforjudge.org
See all the support Steve Wright has for becoming Superior Court Judge in 2010. Luis Alejo, Paul Burdick, Kit Landis, Austin Comstock, and Enda Brennan are some of the many attorneys that support Wright. Lots of educators are listed and Debra Foster is the treasurer for the campaign. Santa Cruz has never had a Criminal Defense Attorney as Superior Court Judge...this will be the time. Read Steve's statements on gang violence and about the importance of electing the best Judge.

FELTON NOT QUITE FLOWING. After Felton's long and incredibly successful battle to get back their own water rights you'd think it would be over and everybody would be happy. Nope! Now for some odd reason the San Lorenzo Valley High School Board has decided NOT to pay their share of the tax bill. They say they don't have to. The school was saved maybe $30-32,000 per year by this water buy out and they're not paying...what kind of community based school move is that??

DE-SAL PLANTS, SANTA CRUZ WEEKLY, ALDO GIACCHINO. Aldo wrote a letter under the heading "Desal Talk A Waste" to the Santa Cruz Weekly reacting to what the Water Districts wrote in the Weekly earlier..."Let us put the desal process in the right context. The message from the Water Districts, in the August 5-12 issue of Santa Cruz Weekly, completely sidesteps the issue of adapting ourselves to a changed climate condition.

The State has just issued the 2009 Climate Adaptation Strategy Report which summarizes the tremendous cost of global warming to all of us here at home. The Report makes it clear that we must reduce dramatically greenhouse gases and we must take all steps possible to avoid any new activities that make the problem worse. So, Reduce and Avoid are the two imperatives that form the core of the strategy.

But instead of Reduce and Avoid, the solons who run our water agencies are proposing just the opposite – increase water supply through desalination. The desalination process consumes a huge amount of energy to run the sea water at high pressure through the filters, to pump the filtered water to the treatment center, to pump the water all the way from Santa Cruz to Soquel, and pump all the brine residue from the desalination process to the sewage treatment plant and then out to the ocean. A huge amount of electricity will be used to do all this filtering and pumping, and the creation of the necessary electricity will create more greenhouse gases. This is not Reduce and Avoid, it is just the opposite.

Even though we are in the third year of drought, we are living quite happily with the current mandatory conservation measures that have reduced consumption by over 15% without causing any appreciable difficulty on anyone. So much more conservation is possible without significantly harming anyone. Conserved water is FREE WATER. There is no cost to it and it fits the mandate to Reduce and Avoid further damage to our environment and all the costs associated with that damage. If we do not follow the Reduce and Avoid path, we will have to bear the huge cost increase of desal plus the increased cost of environmental damage. Let's get with the program, Santa Cruz and Soquel Water Districts. Stop wasting huge sums on a plan that runs counter to the State's strategy and that will ultimately run into huge popular opposition", ALDO GIACCHINO. Aldo's head of the Local Sierra Club Chapter, and SCRP.

UCLA Squirrels. Watch this extra cutesy about cute squirrels and cute students at play.

THAT UGLY PLAIN SANCTUARY CENTER!!! Judy Riva writes to say she
The artist's rendering of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary Exploration Center to be built in Santa Cruz as pictured in Friday's Aug 21^st Sentinel (Page B1) looks pretty awful. Nondescript - it could be a lighting showroom. Or something similar, for its apparent lack of any stylistic elements that relate to a theme of water or sea life. Maybe it will look nicer from inside...The rendering shows a parking lot with no landscaping. Yuck! Surely this design was available for the public to review prior to its approval, but I guess I missed that. Judi Riva". I agree, why do we have to have such plainness, such a lack of imagination....and this is supposed to attract tourists? It looks more like a 1942 Civic Toilet Building. Who designed it? Was it approved by any sort of aesthetic group?

PATTON ON POLITICS. Gary Patton wrote a foreword to Bill Domhoff's book, The Leftmost City. I had a link to Gary's addition here 2 weeks ago. I got to read it a few days ago...it is for me, an absolutely excellent summation of where the progressive movement was, is, and will be in Santa Cruz City and by definition Santa Cruz County. If you ever wondered about local politics and where Gary and a huge number of us are coming from read this over....it says a lot. You can link up with Gary's complete "augmentation" here.

I've included some of the HOT Points (salient issues) Gary makes: "I think that Santa Cruz politics during the period from the mid-1970's through the mid-1990's is of exceptional importance. The genuine political revolution that took place in Santa Cruz County during the period from the mid 1970's to the mid-1990's was definitely a countywide phenomenon, although political actors from the City of Santa Cruz definitely played key roles, and the "progressive" accomplishments of Santa Cruz politics are quite correctly associated with the City. I end up being convinced that our local politics does largely reflect the accuracy of the "growth coalition" approach to understanding urban power.

There is often considerable opposition to expansionary projects advanced by local power structures when these project proposals affect neighborhoods. I absolutely agree that "neighborhood" opposition often drives opposition to the projects of the "growth coalition", as residents become activated around the need to protect and preserve a place they care about. It should also be remembered, though, that while the growth coalition always claims that their proposed projects will have economic payoffs for the community at large, many if not most of such proposals are really seeking community subsidies of various kinds. Resistance to these projects is also a kind of "economic resistance" to business elites, in an effort to deny them subsidies that actually undermine the quality of life of current residents. Whether consciously or unconsciously, I think that kind of resistance has played a part in our community struggles to deal with the projects of the "growth coalition."

Ricky Gervais talks about Humpty Dumpty

The book indicates that members of what is described as a "use-value" coalition agree that they are brought together by concerns with their quality of life, not profits. Again, I have no basic disagreement. However, I see the political involvement of the kind of coalitions you describe as actually being much more of an effort to realize a deeply sought ability to make what I call "self-government" work. In other words, from a political theory framework, these coalitions are not mainly motivated by either "profits" or by the desire of various individuals to defend their current "quality of life." They are motivated; instead, mostly by a community desire actually to have the community decide, for itself, as a community, what it will make happen, as opposed to letting things simply "happen to" the community.

To my mind, "politics" is how we act together, in communities, to create the world we want. That's what politics is all about. Politics, thus, is "generative" and not "derivative." The economic or social realities of any particular community (and the "theories" which delimit and describe those economic and social realities) cannot, in my view, ever really capture the truth of politics, since while such economic and social realities are, by definition, "real," the practice of politics is always "utopian" in its ambitions. Politics always holds out the promise that we can make a better world, together, and can accomplish, together, what we collectively want. The recent Obama campaign is a great example of how politics practiced correctly presents itself as an opportunity for community "change," and as the instrument of informed and active community "hope."

Mostly, communities do not actually practice "politics" as I define it above. Events unfold, and those with money and power do what they want, more or less. The community never mobilizes itself as a community to debate and discuss alternative futures, and then to decide and implement a community conclusion. But in Santa Cruz County, during the period from the mid-1970's to the mid-1990's, the community actually did practice politics in just this way. That is why our local political history is so important".

For me, the point to be drawn from the history of the era studied in The Leftmost City is that "government" in Santa Cruz County is now largely seen as a way for the community to do what it wants, and to chart its own future. This is a concept of government that doesn't exist most other places, and that didn't exist in Santa Cruz County before the mid-1970's. This is the concept of government that makes Santa Cruz County "progressive."

Measure J, the county growth management measure adopted by a countywide vote in June 1978, is perhaps the prototypical example of this kind of progressive, democratic self government. At the very same election that Santa Cruz County voters helped enact Proposition 13, and in an election in which two progressive members of the Board of Supervisors were recalled, County voters enacted a set of policies that has fundamentally changed the development of the County, vastly lowering the value of thousands of acres of agricultural land, which were reserved for agricultural use alone, and inaugurating in this county the kind of "smart growth" principles that weren't even called that till almost twenty years later. How that was done, at the political level, using initiatives and referenda and other techniques of community based politics to help the community understand that its own democratically adopted decisions can in fact determine the future of the community, is a history well worth studying, and a story well worth telling"

BOB HALL HAS LEFT THE CITY. If we can ever get over losing the original Cooper House to the greedy developers we should get over the loss of Bob Hall on Pacific Avenue. He died three weeks ago. Bob was part of the M.C. Hall Insurance Company family that insured at least half of early Santa Cruz, but he didn't like to admit it, and the Hall family never liked to admit Bob either...it was mutual. Bob was kind and gentle to a fault and wrote 100's of letters to every editor of our newspapers trying to improve things. There'll be a Memorial for Bob Sunday, September 13^th at 6 p.m. in room 23 at Vet's Hall, by the Post Office. Bob was a real believer in the Bill Motto Post. Harry Meserve of Veterans for Peace will preside as post Chaplain, and you know what that means. I'll meet you there.

PYNCHON'S NEW BOOK "Inherent Vice". Back in September 2006 I wrote in this space..."THOMAS PYNCHON IN SANTA CRUZ. The literary world changes on November 21, according to Amazon.com. That's when Thomas Pynchon's new book "Against the Day" is released. Pynchon's been working on it for ten years, and each of his book releases is talked about world- widely. I enjoy relating as often as possible that I met Pynchon when he lived here. He has a good friend who lives in Santa Cruz. This mutual friend has known Pynchon as a friend a very long time. This friend emailed me last week relating to Pynchon's excerpt on Amazon's book order page. That as famous an author as Pynchon has been able to remain elusive all these years in the face of such scrutiny and deep investigation, says a lot about his friends and his own integrity. Sure, I'm going to read it. But I won't tell anything more about Pynchon either, ever or never". Now Pynchon's new book "Inherent Vice" is out and of course is number one on the N.Y Times lists. It's shorter than most of his books and canters on LA in the '60's. I honestly don't know if Pynchon has visited here since those early years, I'll ask.

The Big Dipper in case you missed it this summer.

BRATTONONLINE SUBSCRIPTIONS & SPAM FILTERS. Patrick Casey tells me that probably the main problem with subscribing to BrattonOnline is that your SPAM Filters send the weekly email notice to SPAM. You need to check your email Monday nights and physically re-route and label that BrattonOnline notice "Not Spam". Nope, I'm still not sure how many readers we have...but it's growing rapidly, and will continue to grow IF you subscribe and follow through...thanks.

CORRECTIONS, REDUX. Stalwart and longtime Sentinel reporter Len Klempnauer caught this one he emails..."Elerick's Input" in your Aug. 17 column referred to AVP Coach Jeff "Alvina." His name is Jeff Alzina, a native Santa Cruzan, 1986 graduate of Soquel High and coach of one of America's men's beach volleyball teams at the 2004 Olympics. Jeff is the son of the late Jack Alzina, also a native Santa Cruzan, Santa Cruz High graduate, teacher first at SCHS and then Soquel High and varsity basketball coach at both schools. Jack's and Jeff's ancestor, Francisco Alzina, born in 1821 in Minorca, Spain, was Santa Cruz County's first sheriff, serving from 1850 to 1853. The Alzina House on Sylmar Avenue is Santa Cruz's oldest wood-framed house. Francisco Alzina died in 1887. -- Len Klempnauer, Capitola

PATTON'S PROGRAM. (from Gary's daily KUSP radio program) Gary and just about everybody else who cares about the environment congratulates Mark Stone and his appointment to the Coastal Commission. He talks about the Supervisors in San Luis Obisbo and about the ongoing problem of mobile home parks changing ownership. He closes his broadcast week by discussing IRWMP. Not everybody deals with IRWMP the way Gary Patton does, so look into IRWMP right here. (Gary Patton is "Of Counsel" to the Santa Cruz law firm of Wittwer & Parkin, which specializes in land use and environmental law. The opinions expressed are Mr. Patton's.)

DEMOCRATIC DIALOGUE. The Democratic Dialogue this Thursday featuring Congressman Farr and Assembly member Monning will now be held at the Santa Cruz High School Auditorium - it is still 7:00 pm and free/open to the public. Feel free to pass the change along to your networks. Hope to see you all there! Entitled "Health "Care Reform", this discussion is jointly sponsored by the Santa Cruz Democratic Party and the Democratic Women's Club and will feature our own Congress member Sam Farr and California Assembly member Bill Monning who will explore the

Opera Star Hildegard Behrens died. Here's an interview with her, Placido Domingo and Franco Zefferilli about Tosca that is fascinating

healthcare reform proposals before Congress and the California State Legislature. This timely forum will explore critical issues such as funding, the public option, and the role of various interest groups trying to shape the legislation. These discussions with local experts and local political leaders are open to the public and will be a wonderful opportunity for us to "meet the experts" and engage in important dialogue.
When: Thursday, August 27, 7-9PM
Where: Santa Cruz High School, 415 Walnut Ave, Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Contact: Glen Schaller, 831-325-8575, glenschaller@gmail.com

LETTER TO THE EDITOR. From Lee Quarnstrom former San Jose Mercury/Watsonville Pajaronian reporter....
"Your column and the attached map with photos, etc., have finally made the scope of the fire clear. It's been difficult to get details in the two papers I read down here in La Habra, but -- surprisingly to folks up there, I'd imagine -- the Orange County Register has done a much better job of providing wire-service coverage than has the LA Times (which only seems to give space to news when the story is written by one of its own reporters, not by the Associated Press). Your map provided the best picture, by far! Re. the "bulls' balls" item: Yes, the Farm Bureau may be conservative by Santa Cruz standards, but I learned during my 19 years as a reporter for the Mercury News and nine years with the then-great Register-Pajaronian that the Santa Cruz County branch of the group is so liberal by statewide standards that Farm Bureau members elsewhere in California worry that their Santa Cruz County compatriots are dangerous radicals. And regarding the big testicle festival, don't you think that cooking and eating bulls' balls is a grand example of recycling, of not wasting resources?" Lee Quarnstrom

EAGAN'S DEEP COVER. Scroll down about two pages worth to pick up Mr. Eagan's view of freedom being just another word...etc.

WATERS WEIGHS IN. Christina's back from Seattle and a week of opera, with gushing Wagner comments, plus a review of Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia, some wine news and a few dining ideas. All at http://christinawaters.com.

LANDAU'S PROGRES. Read the latest issue of Progreso Weekly, especially where Saul Landau talks about Paul Jacobs and The Nuclear Gang...Click here!
Saul Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow, whose films are on DVD from roundworldproductions@gmail.com

CABRILLO FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC SCOREBOARD. I asked Ellen Primack the exec. Director of the Festival how the financial results of this year's festival looked so far. She said, "It went fabulously well...we're in the black... everybody came through for us AND we came through for everybody. We had a great time". That's wonderful news.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. I can't say often enough that this is one grand film. Quentin Tarantino has fulfilled his and our cinema dreams with this satire/tribute to war films. Glorious filmmaking, and his best yet. See it on the big Locally Owned screen.

DISTRICT 9. I have now seen this Sci Fi film 2 1/2 times. I like it very much, it's excellent and it took me that many times just to pick up on the subtlety (or missing plot points). Forget that idiocy of the metaphor of the space aliens to the Blacks in South Africa, just see it on the biggest locally owned screen possible.

JULIE & JULIA. This is just a re-plug for this well made film and for Meryl Streep's portrayal of the Goddess of the Gruyere. But be sure to check out KQED, KTEH and any other PBS stations you link to. They are playing many of the original Julia Child shows and comparing her to Meryl is great fun....all over again.

TAKING WOODSTOCK. After Crouching Tiger and Brokeback Mountain it's nearly impossible to believe that this foolish, pointless, failing comedy was directed by the same Ang Lee. There's no music in it, it's all back-story about staging Woodstock. Forget it, go see District 9 or Inglourious Basterds at least one more time.

FLYING KARAMAZOV BROTHERS & TOM NODDY SHOW. Consider this advance warning for the show at the Catalyst on Saturday October 24^th at 7:30. It's a benefit for the Tattoo Removal program. More later but tickets now at www.catalystclub.com

UNIVERSITY GRAPEVINE. Each and every Tuesday from 7:30-8:30 p.m. I host University Grapevine on KZSC 88.1 fm. or on your computer at WWW.KZSC.ORG. This Tuesday August I'll be talking about Pleasure with Amy and Janis Baldwin from Pure Pleasure next to the library...it's a great place!! After that retired UCSC Professor Bill Friedland will continue his earlier appearance discussing his research on Santa Cruz homeless back in the 1980's. Later on and TBA will be a return of activist Frank Bardacke relating his Watsonville political theories. In September Jane Lazzereschi and Tom Eklof from the TM organization will tell us about what's happening with them. On October 6^th Assemblyman Bill Monning will be my guest and later Congressman Sam Farr will reveal what's new in the State and Nation's Capitol. Later we'll talk to Supervisor Mark Stone about County Politics and probably swimming.

QUOTES. "When you're driving hard out on the limit and the true love of speed comes over you, you don't want to slow up. You know you ought to maybe. But you're locked onto something so big that you can't let go. It's always the same—the faster you go the less you care about being able to stop. Ever", Sam Posey, racing driver.

Deep Cover

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Bruce critiques films every Friday on KZSC-FM (88.1) on The Bushwhacker Breakfast Club at 8am.