Berkeley community members react to efficacy of vaccine verification mandate

Can Jozef Saul/Staff

The city of Berkeley’s Sept. 10 mandate requiring proof of vaccination has been met with various degrees of effectiveness. The city intends on expanding its mandate to require full proof of vaccination or mandatory testing for employees Oct. 15

While the city of Berkeley has required restaurants and most businesses to check proof of vaccination following its mandate that went into effect Sept. 10, community members have reported varying degrees of success with its implementation.

The mandate primarily restricts gyms and dine-in restaurant services to vaccinated individuals, requiring customers to show their COVID-19 vaccination card and ID card before entering. 

Campus junior Tomo Yoshino, who works at Hearst Memorial Gymnasium, has followed policies about checking campus access badges for everyone who enters. However, he did not have a similar experience with restaurants checking proof of vaccination.

“I’ve only been asked to (show vaccination status) once when me and my friends decided to go to Blaze Pizza,” Yoshino said. “I think we’ve been enforcing it really strictly just because we’re part of the campus, and we have to maintain that image.”

According to a campus website, the campus access badge tracks COVID-19 vaccination and surveillance testing status. 

Yoshino also noted that only accepting the campus access badge can be frustrating even for students, and it excludes people such as sports coaches who do not have campus access badges. 

Pho K & K waiter Tran Luyen said the restaurant requests vaccination cards and government identification from customers upon entrance. Much of its customer base consists of students and restaurant regulars, Luyen added.

Students can show proof of vaccination with a mobile device and, for frequent customers, the restaurant may bypass the formality of checking identification, according to Luyen.

However, the additional step of verifying vaccines can be stressful for Pho K & K, as Luyen noted that the sign requiring proof of vaccination posted outside the restaurant sometimes deters new customers from entering the restaurant.

“Travelers come by and they see the sign and they walk past,” Luyen said. “Some hesitated to show their proof; they just don’t want to show their personal information.”

However, campus freshman Samantha Johnson prefers the tighter health restrictions for increased comfort and security from COVID-19.

Berkeley’s vaccination mandate will expand to require full proof of vaccination or mandatory testing for employees Oct. 15, according to the mandate.

“I don’t think it’s a hassle,” Johnson said. “I kind of like it because everyone in the restaurant is vaccinated … I would rather eat there.”

As of press time, Berkeley city representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

Contact Cindy Liu and Lily Button at newsdesk@dailycal.org.

The Daily Californian

UCPD Chief Margo Bennett plans to retire, Black Student Union looks forward

Brendan Tinney/Courtesy

Following two decades of service, UCPD Chief Margo Bennett will retire in June 2022. Campus’s Black Student Union noted the changes and practices it hopes to see implemented within UCPD moving forward, such as increasing transparency and working more closely with the IAB.

After two decades of service, UCPD Chief Margo Bennett will trade in her uniform for retirement in June 2022.

UC Berkeley’s Vice Chancellor for Administration Marc Fisher announced Bennett’s plans to retire in a campuswide email Monday. Bennett joined UCPD as a captain in 2002, according to Fisher. With the support of the campus administration and her fellow officers, Bennett was promoted to UCPD Chief of Police in 2013.

“It has been an honor to serve the Cal community for the last 20 years, and I will truly miss my colleagues on campus,” Bennett said in an email. “I’m proud of the leading-edge work we have done to improve community policing, and yet I know there is more work to be done. I am confident my colleagues stand ready and are committed to carrying on this important work.”

In her eight years of leadership, Fisher said one of the most “important and exciting” initiatives Bennett has worked on is the development of a mental health response team. This team of mental health professionals will be tasked with responding to mental health crises instead of uniformed officers. According to Fisher, this plan will be put into practice sometime between January 2022 and the start of the fall 2022 semester.

Bennett also championed the removal of the carotid chokehold throughout the UC system, according to Fisher. This was part of the 8 Can’t Wait initiative, a series of eight policies designed to curtail police violence in response to the murder of George Floyd.

Although Bennett was praised for the implementation of this and other initiatives, campus’s Black Student Union, or BSU, chair Kyra Abrams alleged that the Chancellor’s Independent Advisory Board on Police Accountability and Community Safety, or IAB, made similar recommendations long before Floyd’s murder. The recommendations, however, were not implemented until after the fact.

Fisher added that Bennett has “made her mark” on UCPD’s community engagement. She organized a campuswide survey about UCPD to get community feedback, implemented a peer-review process with police departments of other universities and included campus and community representatives in the officer hiring process, among other initiatives.

Such community engagement has also involved meeting with BSU. According to Abrams, these conversations have revolved around removing the fleet of UCPD cars from the back entrance of Sproul Hall, firing officers who have “brutalized Black students on campus” and working in tandem with the Black community.

Abrams noted, however, that such conversations are usually “one and done.” As a result, there has never been constant communication between UCPD and the Black community, Abrams said.

“(UCPD) either gets defensive or it’s like, ‘I’m only here to talk to you for this one meeting and that’s it,’ ” Abrams said. “Personally, I don’t think any of those meetings have been productive. That’s … one of the many reasons why we’ve called for the abolition of UCPD across all UC campuses.”

Short of abolition, Abrams said UCPD needs to implement certain practices. This includes removing fingerprinting, publishing their financial statement and budget and working more closely with the IAB.

Overall, Abrams is looking for complete transparency.

“They should have, in my opinion, no privacy,” Abrams said. “At the end of the day, if you’re not going to publicly give us information as we ask for it and be defensive, then there’s just no reason to have a conversation.”

Contact Veronica Roseborough at vroseborough@dailycal.org, and follow her on Twitter at @v_roseborough.

The Daily Californian

The duo’s unique hyperpop music features nightcore vocals and powerful bass beats.

Caroline Bryant

At the age of five, Jamie Calhoun, senior, learned how to skate. One year later, his hockey career began. While it seems crazy to trust a six-year-old with shoe blades and a big stick, Calhoun was eager to follow in his family’s footsteps.

“I was inspired to play hockey by my family,” Calhoun said. “Both my sisters played, and every winter my dad would build us a backyard hockey rink. All our time was spent out there, it brought our family so close.”

After leaving such a tight knit, ice-loving community back home for what will be Calhoun’s fourth year on FSC’s club hockey team, he can confirm that hockey isn’t second nature here.

“You can show up to a local park, or pond [in Canada]  and play with complete strangers and the coolest part is everyone kind of knows the ground rules,” Calhoun said. “With hockey so new down here that overall sense of common ground isn’t really established.”

To change that, the team has attended pewee practices and skate lessons at the Lakeland Ice Arena- the Moc’s home turf- in previous years to get more children throughout the Lakeland area involved in the sport. 

“Despite our team just being D3 club hockey, the little kids look up to you like you’re in the NHL,” Calhoun said. “It’s such an awesome experience giving back to them.”

While Calhoun has yet to step on the ice this year due to time commitments in professional water-skiing and the college’s own water-ski team, being a dual sport athlete has grown Calhoun’s appreciation for FSC athletics. He would like to thank both of his coaches on both teams for respecting his schedule, allowing him to continue both of the sports he loves.

Students can catch Calhoun at his season debut game against Tampa on Nov. 13 on Sunshine State Conference TV linked on the FSC Athletics website.

The post Hockey Senior Spotlight: Jamie Calhoun appeared first on The Southern Newspaper.

The Colorado State Rams volleyball squad is heading south to square off against familiar foes. The Rams (13-6 overall and 9-1 in conference) will head to Colorado Springs, Colorado, to face the United States Air Force Academy (5-15 overall, 2-8 conference). After Air Force, CSU will keep moving south to visit the University of New […]

In the 100-degree south Florida heat, Shivani Kumar (23C) visited a prison for the first time, witnessing the inhumane prison conditions that would spur her to found a club to fight for justice reform. 

Outside the prison, she saw families waiting for hours in direct sunlight to visit their loved ones. Inside, she learned that deadly Legionnaires’ disease prevented inmates from drinking water or showering.

“It was absolutely horrid,” Kumar said. “I looked at these people, and I was like, ‘I can’t just walk away and then go back to my nice life at Emory.’”

Shivani Kumar (23C) founded 4 Justice Emory in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 as a way to take action toward criminal justice reform. (courtesy of Shivani Kumar, 23C)

4 Justice Emory, founded by Kumar in 2020, aims to work toward criminal justice reform by spreading awareness for the issue and collaborating with nonprofit organizations. 

In the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, Kumar was inspired by poets, musicians and others who used their talents to fight racial injustices, and she wanted to contribute her leadership skills to the cause. So, in the early summer of 2020, Kumar created 4 Justice Emory starting with an Instagram account.

After forming the club’s executive board, Kumar contacted organizations like CAN-DO Clemency — a “non-profit foundation that advocates clemency for all non-violent drug offenders” — and Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM) to facilitate collaboration with 4 Justice.

In the fall of 2020, Co-Vice President of 4 Justice Kheyal Roy-Meighoo (23C) was the leader for a collaborative project with CAN-DO Clemency that reorganized the nonprofit’s website. Her group ensured the consistency of prisoner profiles, consolidated information and identified missing information on the website.

Simultaneously, a second collaborative project with CAN-DO Clemency gathered materials and information to write a proposal for a clemency file. Another checked for grammatical errors and consistency within existing clemency files, Roy-Meighoo said.

At a meeting with CAN-DO Clemency in late 2020, the club worked directly with three incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people to learn about mandatory minimums, which are sentences the court must give to a person convicted of a crime, regardless of the offender or the offense.

“There’s no nuance to understanding what people did and what their actions were,” Roy-Meighoo said. “I think that it was really impactful to hear that.” 

The club’s collaborative projects vary in topic and skill level. Secretary Jessica Cruz (23C) said she joined 4 Justice during the early stages of its formation, with no prior knowledge or experience with justice reform.

“I remember [I became interested] during [the] time the Black Lives Matter movement was happening,” Cruz said “So I really thought it was a good time to bring more awareness towards justice reform.” 

By the end of the fall semester, the club was able to see some of the incarcerated individuals released, and three people who had recently been granted clemency spoke to the club.

Co-vice President Kheyal Roy-Meighoo (23C) explains 4 Justice Emory’s accomplishments at the club’s first GBM of the semester on Oct. 15. (Courtesy of Oli Turner, 25C)

Within their first year of operation, the club also promoted a Compassionate Release Petition through Twitter and other forms of social media to collect signatures in the spring of 2021. The club was able to collect over 2,000 signatures during the semester.

Roy-Meighoo said the club also held a panel in the spring, which included the current president of FAMM and several contributors affiliated with CAN-DO Clemency.

Following the panel, she and other executive board members received an outpouring of positive feedback.

“I had so many people message me after the event being like, ‘Thank you for this,’ ‘This was so impactful, and I did not know this,’” Roy-Meighoo said. “So I think I would just encourage people to be open to learning about what the problems are, and then that’s how we can reach the solution.” 

Roy-Meighoo believes that the fight for justice reform begins with awareness, and 4 Justice strives to call the Emory community’s attention to the issue.

“There [are] just so many issues with how we even view criminality and how we view the criminal justice system and how we view prisons that it really needs to start with that awareness,” Roy-Meighoo said.

Kumar also stresses the urgency of the issue and the importance of 4 Justice Emory, as well as its relevance to the social justice turmoil of the past year.

“It’s so much more than politics or legislation,” Kumar said. “It’s mothers being separated from their children; it’s little kids not knowing where their parents are; it’s people being subjected to solitary confinement. It’s scary, it’s traumatizing and it’s morally wrong. It needs to be fixed, and it hasn’t been fixed yet. That means it’s time for us to step up.”

The post Emory student founds criminal justice reform club appeared first on The Emory Wheel.

Wet’s LP ‘Letter Blue’ is broody, sincere, sad girl fall anthem

Other Exotica/Courtesy

Grade: 3.5/5.0

If the autumnal blues — characterized by the cold and stormy weather, days getting shorter and a desire for sunnier days — were epitomized into sound, then Wet’s third album, Letter Blue, would fit perfectly. The band’s newest release is alternative, bedroom-pop paradise, where lead vocalist Kelly Zutrau’s dreamlike vocals float throughout the 10 tracks on the LP. Pulling from the trio’s Tumblr and teen angst upbringing, the album exudes a vulnerable, even naive sincerity. In short: Letter Blue is a delicate album that transports the listener through past, present and future. 

Since the release of its self-titled EP in 2014, the band has continuously produced “sad girl” anthems that carry the emotion of a stuck-in-the-middle teen. “Don’t Wanna Be Your Girl” is the group’s most-streamed song on Spotify, and rightfully so, as the breakup anthem would go on to define the Brooklyn-based band’s sound of broody teenage yearning. Letter Blue still carries this, but in a refined way — the album reconciles with these past feelings, evolving them into more mature, clear vocals and beats. Longtime listeners will surely relate, with the newest album closing the chapter of growing up with a band and watching its progression into a sophisticated, mature sound.

Letter Blue begins with the track “On Your Side,” a similar relationship anthem to the group’s past releases that evokes a nostalgic sound. Zutrau’s vocals open the song alongside the calming sound of an owl coo-ing. The four-minute track has an upward progression, where angelic vocals follow behind Zutrau who sounds confident and clear. Lyrics such as “Looking straight ahead and in stride/ Like I told you, I’m on your side,” evoke feelings of honesty and trust that bring the listener in closely for the rest of the album. It reopens a wound that wasn’t exactly closed, with an approach to revisit feelings that may have been hidden in the dark. Zutrau’s confident vocals highlight this, approaching this distant feeling head-on. 

“Bound” is the only song to have a feature — and a very cohesive one at that — with Blood Orange (Dev Hynes) appearing in complementary background vocals for Zutrau. The track has Hynes’ distinctive R&B tempo and sound that intertwines with Wet’s simplistic rhythm. While the track’s overall aura feels more like a Blood Orange beat, Wet’s inclusion of the record on the album tiptoes around exploring with features and new sounds in the future (which is exciting). It’s rare to find a feature on a Wet album, and “Bound” makes for a perfectly balanced record that is difficult to dislike. 

A good love song is hard to write, especially one that contains the duality of uneasiness in falling for someone alongside feelings of hopefulness and innocence: “Clementine” checks all the boxes. The song is just as sweet to listen to as a clementine is to eat — the track has a pop-y made-for-radio type beat but finds itself centered in Zutrau’s calming cadence. Zutrau transports the listener back into moments of falling in love, unpeeling layers of a diary filled with love letters that were once stored away. Lyrics such as, “After a while, I still think you’re the best,” and “Do you love me like you love Clementine?” feel teenage in the best possible way.

What Letter Blue does differently than previous records is demand the spotlight. Zutrau’s vocals are quieter, yet on the album, its nostalgic sound combined with soft vocals sound like a vivid memory. “Larabar” opens with a stunning piano intro where Zutrau’s voice is cut with autotune and static. Listeners almost tune in closer to decipher Zutrau amongst everything else going on in the background. “Far Cry” has a similar piano sound where Zutrau’s confidence builds up as the track goes on. Each track has its own personality and a little weirdness, demanding simple yet thorough listening.

The aura of Letter Blue and all it encompasses is what fans of Wet have been waiting three years for. It avoids going above and beyond what the trio is capable of and instead refines its distinctive hallucinatory sound while reopening past relationship wounds. It’s charming, sincere, and perfectly balances the thin line of teenage brooding and introspective care. 

Contact Kaitlin Clapinski at kclapinski@dailycal.org.

The Daily Californian

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@fishyist_fish

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Brian Sella performing in Atlanta – (The Emory Wheel / Elaine Zhou)

Some bands you discover on an arbitrary night in 8th grade, and they hold your head up high through the countless heartbreaks and coming-of-age anxieties symptomatic of your emerging teenagehood. New Jersey-bred band The Front Bottoms does just that with tracks that transcend and fuse the genres of folk, pop punk and emo revival. The alternative duo’s wit and sound are undoubtedly refreshing to the scene, yet still reminiscent of older comfort bands like American Football or Blink-182. The group, composed of Brian Sella and Matt Uychich, have put out anthems such as “Twin Sized Mattress” and “Flashlight” that fans can recite like scripture.

I had the honor of interviewing frontman Brian Sella, and we delved into a variety of topics ranging from his creative process to his philosophy on the Front Bottoms’ fame. 

The lyricism of the Front Bottoms documents situations so personal, yet rich enough in imagery and sentimentality for one to resonate with its raw portrayal. 

In my interview with Sella, I was curious about the muses behind the lyrics. Their hometown was invariably one of them; recalling his adolescence in Bergen County, Sella reminisces, “I would ride my bike everywhere, hang out with Matt. That is where the art came from.” Sella also finds this art in the “people I’m around … like if I’m sitting at a restaurant and interacting with somebody, that’s really, like, where a lot of the feelings come from.” He finds meaning for his tracks mostly through the conversational subtleties of his day-to-day, relating to listeners through their ordinariness. He said, “I realized during the pandemic, I’m most myself when I’m around other people.” Sella accredits a lot of the music’s backstories as well as his identity formation to the people close to him.

Among the band’s many alluring quirks, The Front Bottoms captivates listeners through their employment of diverse instruments. Supplementing the elements of horns, bells and strings, Sella explains the reason behind the instrumentals: “It was always about making the music better.” He expands, “Whoever was around and was good at a particular instrument, they should be playing with The Front Bottoms.” Creating, to Sella, is largely about uplifting other musicians to enhance the group’s greater musicality. He then went on to say his favorite instruments they’ve added to songs were the banjo or the melodica, with the trumpet, xylophone and cello as honorable mentions.

In an introspective final question, I asked Sella how it felt that The Front Bottoms were now over a decade old. “I honestly can’t even believe I get to go on tour and make people happy,” Sella answered. “I always tried to just go with the flow, and never tried to force anything. I always just tried to be kind to people…and it feels awesome.” Even after all these years, Sella still adopts a humble, laissez-faire attitude to fame. In tender reflection, he admits, “Thank you so much for those nice words … I felt like I was going to cry,” to which I responded, “I felt like I was going to cry!” Bonding over the tragedy of the New Jersey winters, I was lucky enough to tell him his music helped me brave my high school years and the constant dullness of suburbia. 

Finally, coming out of the pandemic, The Front Bottoms are going on tour alongside headliners Oso Oso and Sydney Sprague. Sella and I discussed the release of their most recent album in August 2020, “In Sickness and in Flames,” which plays like a document of the band’s life in isolation. Sella commented on the uncertainty of releasing art during a national lockdown, “It felt kinda weird to throw it [the album] in the void.” He then added, “I’m excited that I get to now play some of the songs live, you know, how it’s always meant to be for me.” Playing live shows has always been constitutive of being a musical artist for Sella, and he is overjoyed to be returning to the stage for the first time in over a year.

Unsurprisingly, I did end up crying. At their show at the Masquerade in downtown Atlanta, The Front Bottoms rocked a setlist full of classics like “The Beers”, “Skeleton”, and “Au Revoir”. It was a mix of their old and new music, and the crowd was overcome with excitement and nostalgia. Throughout the show, the band maintained their lovable wittiness. At one point, Sella even asked, “should I start an OnlyFans?” during the monologuing in “Plastic Flowers.” As the show went on, Sella confessed he was finally happy to escape Orlando where they had played prior, and the love was palpable in Atlanta that night. Fans were moshing, crowd-surfing and flashing “rock on” signs to the sky. Just when the night could not have gotten better, the band returned for not one, but two encores. They performed a stripped-down rendition of “12 Feet Deep” along with “Flashlight”, “Leaf Pile”, and “Be Nice To Me” all after the set finale. After an entire show of joyful tears and screaming the words until my throat gave out, I could feel 14-year old me smile from ear to ear. 

Thank you, The Front Bottoms.

The post New Jersey, eccentric instruments, and a lot of gratitude: The Front Bottoms’ Brian Sella on the music-making process and return to live shows appeared first on The Emory Wheel.