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Berkeley arts fest begins on high note

By Peter Crimmins Special to the Daily Planet
Monday August 12, 2002

The 5th annual Berkeley Arts Festival kicked off Saturday afternoon with a bang, rattle, “squonk” and “blat.” Shattuck Avenue became a corridor of noise with musicians on every downtown street corner. With crowds promenading past groups of political petitioners, bullhorns of street poets and open-jam musicians, the day was typical Berkeley turned up a notch or two. 

Center Street was closed to traffic, allowing pedestrians to wander from the Farmers’ Market at Martin Luther King Jr. Way to Oxford Street and the UC Berkeley campus. The festival’s main stage featured the City Council Singers and hip-hop artist Azeem attracting a few dozen listeners. 

Professional “tinkerer” Fran Holland had a difficult time attracting people with his “buffoons” – noise-making horn-like instruments, made from plastic straws and movie posters. He also had trouble giving away the instruments from his assigned post in front of the Bank of America parking lot. 

So he wisely moved to the corner of Center and Shattuck where interested pedestrians were more plentiful. 

“There’s more action down here,” said Holland, as he blew two horns eliciting a noise that a potential customer compared to a passing truck. 

Holland contributed to the overall din of the street. From the apex of the Shattuck triangle, visitors could hear saxophone and drums on the northwest corner, a melodic solo sax on the northeast corner, Holland’s “passing truck” from the southeast, blues by a duo on a steel guitar and wash-bucket bass from the southwest and amplified poets by the taxi stop. 

Political activists were also present, affirming the theme of this year’s festival, “art and politics.” Covering the red-brick sidewalk near the BART station entrance were the Green Party, the Socialist Party, the National Women’s Political Caucus, the Berkeley Organization for Animal Advocacy and Jonathon Keats, who petitioned to turn a law of philosophy into a city ordinance. 

The conceptual artist and absurdist, dressed in a three-piece suit on a 90 degree day, is proposing the principle of non-contradiction, which says that every entity must be equal to itself. Or, put simply, A=A. Although a fundamental law of philosophical logic, it has never been introduced into a civic legal code. Most passers-by ignored the petition, some were confused by its premise, and a few were indignant to its uselessness. 

But some were game for the idea. Keats managed to collect 65 signatures by the end of the day. However, 24 were not county residents and one was a Mayor Shirley Dean forgery, which left only 42 legitimate signatures. Keats is planning to bring his petition to the next Berkeley City Council meeting in September. 

The Berkeley Arts Festival continued Sunday with a marathon piano recital at the Wells Fargo Annex building on Center Street. The five-hour recital performed by local pianists was a musical memorial to Robert Helps, the composer and UC Berkeley professor who passed away last year. Works by Helps and some of his known favorites, including Ravel, Chopin, Schubert and Debussy, were performed on a hand-made Fazioli grand piano donated by Piedmont Pianos for the duration of the festival. 

Pianist Jerry Kuderna prefaced his performance Sunday afternoon with an announcement that he had never played a Fazioli until a week prior and pondered if the acoustics of the square room with high ceilings would do the justice to the piano’s tone. Kuderna was a student of Helps and played two of his mentor’s pieces Sunday. 

Music performances at the Wells Fargo Annex at 2081 Center Street will continue during the Berkeley Arts Festival, on Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday evenings. Schedules of these and all festival events can be found at www.berkeleyartsfestival.com.