A Book Festival With A Mission? Literary Arts Purveyors Wanted

What's this?

Organized by Anthology, Inc., a Mesa, AZ, based literary non profit organization, the Mesa Book festival is intended to be the annual event to showcase the literary arts in the east valley.

Organizing Partner

Mesa Book Festival is organized with the support and assistance of Downtown Mesa Festival of the Arts, which offers a great opportunity to shop for locally created art.

 

Downtown Mesa, Macdonald St. between Main and 1st Ave.

What's the Mission?

In keeping with the Anthology.org mission, we seek to build a world-class book festival and encourage readers of all ages.

 Who's Invited?

Everyone!

Authors, Publishers, and Book Sellers are invited to  egister for space to showcase, promote, and sell their books.

Readers are invited to come and buy their books direct.

We're encouraging a wide variety of literary arts purveyors to share their work to create a bigger audience for everyone.

What's happening?

• Eighty-five vendors, including a diverse offering of books and authors 
• Free to the Public
• Open Mic Poetry
• Authors, Presentations and Panels
• A whole lot more!

__________________________________________________________________________________

Mesa Book Festival 2017

 

Mesa City Council Meeting Mon 04 Dec 2017

Here's Kevin Christopher doing a fast-read of the entire Meeting Agenda - business as usual here in the City of Mesa with a population of over 480,000 where few know or care or are informed what their elected government is doing .... Why is that?
Published on Dec 5, 2017
Views: 4

Why Aren't We Horrified by This Police Killing Here in Mesa?

This from The Atlantic three days ago:
". . . The case hasn’t attracted the higher degree of attention from the press, the public, or policing-reform activists, partly because body-cam footage of the killing has been withheld from the media and partly because the cop and the dead man were both white, rendering the killing less controversial than one possibly animated by racism. But it warrants more attention than it has received. . . " 
Your MesaZona blogger has published more than a few posts in the last year about the killing of Daniel Shaver. They can be found here >
https://mesazona.blogspot.com/search?q=Daniel+Shaver 
UPDATE TODAY FROM Courthouse News:
Fate of Mesa Cop Accused of Murder Is in Jury’s Hands

December 6, 2017December 6, 2017

PHOENIX (CN) — A jury begins deliberations Wednesday on the fate of a former Mesa, Arizona, police officer accused of shooting an unarmed man to death as he lay in a hotel corridor.
Philip “Mitch” Brailsford, 27, is charged with the second-degree murder of Daniel Shaver, 26, at a La Quinta Inn & Suites in Mesa.

. . . Brailsford says the shooting was justified because he saw Shaver reach toward the waistband of the basketball shorts he was wearing.
Jurors were shown Brailsford’s body camera footage of the shooting during trial. It was the first time an unedited version of the footage has aired publicly, but the footage has not been fully released to the public yet.
Before the trial started, Maricopa County Judge George Foster granted a motion filed by the defense to prevent the media from recording the body cam footage. Portions of the video, including the actual shooting of Shaver, remain sealed until Brailsford’s sentencing or acquittal. . .
READ MORE > Courthouse News
______________________________________________________________
Here's more from The Atlantic's reporter Conor Friedersdorf:
". . . Even if police killings were rare in America, this case would warrant more attention, not only because of the deadly shots fired by Brailsford, but also due to the confounding commands issued by Langley. It would warrant more attention regardless of the race of the victim. . . . it would still remain the case that American police officers kill many more people overall––and many more unarmed and mentally ill people in particular––than do police officers in other democratic countries. 

A Police Killing Without a Hint of Racism

Daniel Shaver begged officers not to shoot him. What role will his death play in the push for law-enforcement reforms?

By Conor Friedersdorf 03 Dec 2017

Daniel Shaver’s case is instructive. His killing deserves more journalistic coverage as a matter of substance and more activist attention as a matter of strategy. Here is how Mark Geragos, an attorney in the case, describes the body-cam footage, which has been shown in court but not released to the public:

I know why they have not released it. It’s not bloody. It’s the most chilling, horrific thing you’ve seen in your life. This kid was begging for his life. He raised his hands, did everything the cops told him to do. And then they just executed him. It’s bone chilling. One of the worst experiences I’ve ever had in my life is sitting in a court room with his widow, who watched it for the second time, and she literally went into convulsions. I had to grab her to hold her in a bear hug. It was just awful.

Given all that—and understanding that police kill roughly twice as many white as black people every year, with some killings of whites among the most egregious and best-documented unjust killings—the tendency of some journalists and activists to put less emphasis on unjust killings of white people, whether because they are less controversial or less illustrative of disparities, undermines both the journalist’s task of informing the public about the scope of the police-killing problem and the activist’s task of building a winning coalition.
If you’re horrified by Daniel Shaver’s untimely death, yet against Black Lives Matter, consider that Shaver might well be alive if only the Mesa police department had long ago adopted reforms of the sort that Black Lives Matter suggests.

                                                                          

 

                                            

Mesa-born Photographer Pedro Guerrero Gets Some Unexpected Attention In Maine

Art Talk at the Farnsworth

Unexpected Journeys: Louise Nevelson and Pedro Guerrero

Posted:  Tuesday, December 5, 2017 - 8:00pm   

Event Date: Thursday, December 7, 2017 - 2:00pm

On Thursday, December 7, the Farnsworth Art Museum will present a talk by Farnsworth Chief Curator Michael K. Komanecky entitled Unexpected Journeys: Louise Nevelson and Pedro Guerrero.

The program will take place at 2 p.m. in the museum's auditorium.

http://www.penbaypilot.com
 

The sculptor Louise Nevelson and photographer Pedro Guerrero both reached the peaks of their chosen professions, though their paths to success were anything but expected. Both came from humble origins. Leah Berliawsky came as a young girl with her family from the present-day Ukraine to settle in Maine, joining her father who had come a few years earlier; and Pedro Guerrero grew up in the "dusty desert town" of Mesa, Arizona, shortly after Arizona became a state.

Nevelson, a Jewish immigrant from the Russian empire, did not gain citizenship until 1920 when she married an American.

Guerrero's family had been in Arizona since the 1870s, yet his experience was shaped by the ways in which being of Mexican heritage was viewed by the community in which he lived.

This presentation will explore the nature of their work, the reputations they forged during their long and productive careers, and how their early life experiences shaped their artistic personae.

The fee for this program is $10, and $8 for Farnsworth members.

For more information or to register, please visit www.farnsworthmuseum.org 

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Noted in Passing:

Pedro Guerrero, Who Captured Art in Photos, Dies at 95

By WILLIAM YARDLEYSEPT. 13, 2012

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/14/arts/design/pedro-guerrero-95-dies-captured-another-dimension-of-art.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

City of Mesa: Open, Transparent & Accountable?

Like probably far too many things here in Mesa, Arizona, the Public Right-To-Know somehow gets by-passed when we are all rightfully concerned over demanding that government is open, transparent and accountable.

City Hall too often falls short-of-the-mark in meeting or honoring those goals. That issue has been addressed numerous times on this blog before and will continue to get into focus on featured posts with a strong resolve.

Secrecy in government, the Supreme Court has stated, is fundamentally anti-democratic.

With that being said, let's take a look at a respected national news organization that took the time to report on local news that hasn't received much local public attention: the case of an officer-involved killing from last January 2016 where testimony just ended in the trial.

Slate reporter Amy Gajda addresses the issue of police body cam footage - just one aspect of the public right-to-know

When Public Records Aren’t Made Public

The troubling trend of judges keeping police body camera footage hidden.

By Amy Gajda Nov. 16 2017 10:35 am (See link below to the entire original source)

Former Mesa, Arizona police officer Philip Brailsford has been charged with second-degree murder after shooting unarmed Daniel Shaver at a hotel in January.

Image credit: Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office

"The video is said to be graphic. Taken by an officer’s body-worn camera, it apparently shows a man crawling toward the officer, looking confused. The man makes a “quick movement”—maybe it’s a move to pull up his shorts, maybe it looks like he’s about to pull out a gun—and the officer shoots him to death.

Those of us who weren’t in the Arizona courtroom the day the body camera video was played for the jury can’t assess either man’s behavior. That’s because the judge in Mesa police officer Philip Brailsford’s second-degree murder trial agreed with the defense that the media should not be allowed to see the video of Brailsford killing Daniel Shaver. While part of the bodycam footage was released last year, the Mesa police edited out the footage of the actual shooting. In his ruling last month, Judge George Foster agreed that the media should not get its hands on the full video evidence, even though the videotape was central to a case of intense public concern and was shown in open court. . .
Taken together, as sympathetic as the individuals in these cases may be, those decisions and the accompanying rhetoric do not bode well for public access to government documents and freedom of information. In the Arizona case, we’ll likely see the video footage as soon as the trial is over; the officer’s attorney has argued it should be kept from public view only until acquittal or sentencing."
The trial just concluded a few days ago

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017

Grabbing-Up MFUs Like Crazy!

Other than the scurrilous and curious headlines topping-off what's called 'news' in the current cycle of things or euphemistically referring to 'private parts', these recent sales of Multi-Family Housing Units here in Mesa were recently made public.
The Take-Away = In Real Estate We Trust or REITs are back BIG TIME
At the same time new-construction costs are rising, so why not buy Value-Added properties of one kind or another?

MFUs aren't the only hot places to throw your money for either so-called safe havens or speculative markets, with interest rates so low, million$ sitting on the sidelines in ca$h on hand -  needing to go somewhere while the goin's get good to make more money.
That makes the local economy - and global world markets go 'round and 'round where interest rates have never been so low and tax reform so high a priority for those who have the dough and want to raise more.
Who can blame them for wanting to make more buck$?

But if you're in the workforce and employed maybe supporting a family, don't yet own your home and pay significant chunks of your income to rent, expect a rise in rents if you haven't already been asked to pay more.

Multi-family housing units, in high-demand and popular here in The East Valley where a car-driven culture thrives, usually sited in close proximity to quick-and-fast entry ramps to highways and freeways to get to your job, are selling like hotcakes these days.
Why? Simply put - They generate cash for investors - fast!

If you want to know five other reasons, take a look at this entry from an investor industry publication Cash Flow Diary:
"If you’re new to real estate investing, you’re likely doing deals in single-family houses.But if you want to ramp up your income, you will move into multifamily properties.
Before you take that step, you need to find out if it is right for you. . . "

For some it’s a no-brainer.
__________________________________________________________________________
Three recent MFU sales transactions:

1

Berkadia completes $49M sale for local multifamily property

AZ Big Media-Nov 30, 2017

Berkadia today announced the sale of Indian Springs Apartments, a garden-style multifamily community in Mesa. Senior Managing Directors Ric Holway and Mark Forrester, along with Senior Director Dan Cheyne, completed the $49 million off-market sale on behalf of the seller, Stratford Partners LLC. Managing Director

 

 

2

MultifamilyBiz.com

MG Properties Group Acquires 676-unit Multifamily Property in Mesa ...

PR Newswire (press release)-Dec 4, 2017

The company is targeting further acquisitions in Washington, Oregon, Arizona, California, Colorado, and Nevada. MG Properties Group (www.mgproperties.com) is a privately owned West Coast real estate owner and operator specializing in multi-housing assets. Over the last 25 years, MG Properties Group ...

3









Recent deals between ready-willing-and-able sellers and buyers:
 

A Work-In-Progress? . . . bbbbut Nobody's Seen It Yet

Yesterday's report on KJZZ, owned by Sinclair Broadcasting in Salt Lake City, took your MesaZona blogger by surprise - a very pleasant surprise if ever there is one here in the most conservative city in America.

What's it all about? Non-Discrimination

Mesa Mayor Asking Valley Mayors To Support Nondiscrimination Law

By  Will Stone   

Published: Monday, December 4, 2017 - 5:00 am

Updated: Monday, December 4, 2017 - 8:53 am

That's been a hot topic that John Giles has wanted to avoid in public elected life by keeping it on the back burner for a very long time, dodging on taking a stronger leadership stand for supporting the approval by the Mesa City Council of a local Non-Discrimination Ordinance for what he self-admits that "It's the right thing to do" running for mayor in 2014. 

Simply put Non-Discrimination is a challenge for John Giles.

He's on public record, as you can see in the image to the right . . .

 

 

Has John Giles gotten transformed and  "Bloombergized"???

 

To be forthwith and honest - and getting down to the nitty-gritty - maybe sending John Giles to school and higher learning to educate mayors at the Kennedy Bloomberg School of Government @ Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts has produced local results.

Furthermore, you can't pledge to do things on the agenda for Bloomberg's Mayor's Challenge in the national spotlight in Washington D.C. and not do anything back home.

Let's be honest.. . . but what does Giles do?

Yesterday's KJZZ report tells us - a letter.

That no one has seen. Giles told reporter Will Stone the letter is a work in progress, so he doesn’t want to reveal the exact language or which mayors support it yet.

Phoenix and Tempe have local nondiscrimination ordinances, but many cities still do not, including Mesa.

What's the problem?

That's a question any reasonable person might ask.

Perhaps it's in the dynamic interplay of politics here in Mesa where Mormons have exercised a minority-majority control over government for generations.

That's a fact-of-life here few people want to face head-on.

The problem = religion in politics.

People, whatever their own personal religious practices, when aelected to public office entering City Hall have a calling and obligation to serve the public interests.

The question now arises will John Giles have the leadership skills to tackle the issue of Non-Discrimination here on his own home-turf?

From this account yesterday, it appears that while Giles might have fumbled-the-ball to get hands-free on this hot issue, he's recovered somewhat by now attempting to punt it to the brotherhood of Arizona State lawmakers for the 2018 election season ahead and 'kicking-the-can-down-the-road - out of the political ballpark here in his hometown where he could offend the LDS constituents and the Mormon Political Machine who got him into office.  

Reporter Will Stone writes this: "The Republican mayor for Arizona’s third-largest city wants state lawmakers to pass a nondiscrimination law.

Mesa Mayor John Giles said he’s trying to get Valley mayors to sign onto a letter in support ahead of the 2018 legislative session. . .

Blogger Note: While there's carefully-worded public opposition from David Farnsworth, other State lawmakers weren't ask to weigh-in, except for a declaration from fellow Republican Arizona Governor Doug Ducey clearly and strongly stating via an official spokesperson that " . . . Gov. Doug Ducey said he won’t comment on any proposed legislation before seeing the language, but that Ducey is against discrimination of any form. . . "

READ MORE > https://kjzz.org