One of America’s unsung masters of cartooning is rolling through town with the release of his new book, Alias the Cat.

Kim Deitch will be signing copies of the new book Thursday, May 3 at 6pm at Family (436 N. Fairfax Ave, 90048) and then at 8pm the party moves down the street to The Silent Movie Theatre where Deitch is going to be guest programmer, presenting an eclectic selection of fightin’ girl serials and shorts! Pearl White! Ruth Roland! Harry Houdini! Episodes from The Iron Claw, Lightning Raider, Plunder and much more! A real treat for both film and art fans.

Kim Deitch is widely regarded as one of the best cartoonists of his generation. A seminal figure in the Underground Comix movement in the 1960s, he has worked nonstop for the last 30 years, having his work published in McSweeney’s, Raw, and The LA Weekly, amongst others. The new graphic novel from the author of The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (“A masterpiece”–Time) and the recent Shadowlands, is one of the wildest, surrealistic, bittersweet pieces of work you will ever read. Pygmie islands, early film history, talking dolls, midget towns, madness, autobiography, cats, and obsession all blend together in Alias the Cat, creating an eye bending classic and one of Deitch’s best works.

A large limited edition silkscreen print of Deitch’s poster will be for sale while supplies last.

Come join us for what will undoubtebly by a totally rad night of comics and movies.

Purchase Tickets:
http://silentmovietheatre.com/

http://familylosangeles.com/

Los Angeles Times

Howard Larman, 73; host of folk music show

By Valerie J. Nelson, Times Staff Writer
April 26, 2007

Howard Larman, who helped shape the local folk music landscape as the longtime co-host of the Sunday night public radio show “FolkScene,” has died. He was 73.

Larman died Saturday at West Hills Hospital and Medical Center of complications related to a car accident last June, his family said.

The night after his death, co-host Roz Larman — his wife of 50 years — returned to the airwaves at KPFK-FM (90.7) and served as the show’s interviewer, a job her husband had done with low-key aplomb since 1970.

She plans to continue the radio program.

“Their show has been a stopping-off point for just about every single name in folk music in the last 30 years,” Steven Starr, then interim general manager of KPFK, told The Times in 2002.

“They are the folk music radio equivalent of the Grand Ole Opry,” Starr said.

Howard Larman had an encyclopedic knowledge of folk music and an elastic definition of the genre. “FolkScene” could feature little-exposed Celtic or roots-rock musicians and such prominent artists as Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, Randy Newman and Pete Seeger.

More than 3,000 musicians, often performing live, have appeared on “FolkScene,” according to the show’s records.

When singer-songwriter Dave Alvin first went on the show with his old band, the Blasters, “it was a huge thing for me,” Alvin told The Times. “There were so many artists in the folk music underground that I learned about as a kid from listening to Howard on KPFK in the ’70s.”

Folk singer-songwriter Richard Thompson told The Times, “Howard had an infectious enthusiasm for the music, and the show had a wonderful, relaxed style. It was like talking to friends.”

Larman was a “warm, witty and wise interviewer…. just a great guy,” singer-songwriter Peter Case said in an e-mail.

The interview that started it all was conducted in 1970 at the Montecito, Calif., home of Guy Carawan, the folk musician who helped introduce the song “We Shall Overcome” to civil rights protesters.

“And the next one we did was the Don McLean, the Tropicana Motel in 1970. We premiered ‘American Pie’ on the West Coast,” Larman told National Public Radio in 2000.

In the early days, the show was often taped in the Larmans’ San Fernando Valley living room “on this little $99 Sony tape deck,” Larman told NPR.

Over the years, the Larmans also produced folk and bluegrass festivals and music fairs.

By the 1990s, they had been downsized from their day jobs and retired early to focus even more on folk music, including releasing three CDs of “FolkScene” performances.

They also started broadcasting Internet versions of the show at folkscene.com after leaving KPFK in 2000 in a dispute over control of the program.

When KPFK management changed in 2002, the Larmans returned to the North Hollywood station.

“Both my parents had a great ear for exposing people who … later became well-known,” said their son Allen Larman, who has a classic rock show on KCSN-FM (88.5) and works on “FolkScene” as an engineer. “They had people like Tom Waits or Dwight Yoakam on before they had record deals.”

Howard Larman was born in 1933 in Chicago to Robert Larman, who owned several businesses, and his wife, Ethel, an accountant.

During the Korean War, he served in the Marines, then spent 20 years as an electrical technician in the aerospace industry.

He also attended the Don Martin School of Broadcasting in Hollywood.

Larman was a part-time technician for KPFK in the 1960s, and a station manager suggested the show after learning that he loved folk music.

As the “FolkScene” hosts, the Larmans were unpaid volunteers who bore the program’s costs.

“We buy our own tape, pay for our phone calls, use our own equipment,” Larman told The Times in 1990. “I’ve spent time with people who go boating or play golf. They spend lots of money on that. This is our recreation.”

In addition to his wife, Roz, of West Hills and son, Allen, Larman is survived by another son, Greg; and a sister.

Services were pending.

CONCERT SERIES AT SWISS INSTITUTE •

MAY 2: BRAIN DAMAGE / IRA COHEN / TONY CONRAD & MAHASIDDHI (NYC)
www.iracohen.org/braindamage

IRA COHEN is a poet, photographer, publisher and artist. Among his
projects are collaborations with Brion Gysin, Jack Smith, Velvet
Underground founding member Angus MacLise, William S. Burroughs,
Warhol assistant and photographer Gerard Malanga, Paul Bowles and
Gregory Corso.

TONY CONRAD is an American avant-garde artist, experimental filmmaker,
musician, composer, sound artist, teacher and writer, best known for
such films as “The Flicker” and for his album, “Outside the Dream
Syndicate,” recorded with German group Faust and considered a
masterwork of minimal music and Krautrock.

MAHASIDDHI is a tactical psychedelic soundsphere, a noetic free-fall
that desires your perfection through anahata, the rituals of akasha
and the rites of the dreamweapon. Led by composer Will Swofford
and featuring David Kadden, obeo, Patrick Murphy, electronics, and
percussionist Ravish Momin.

TICKETS: Other Music, 15 East 4th Street, New York 10003, TEL. 212.477.8150
www.othermusic.com

With kind support of Pro Helvetia

Brain Damage presented with the support of Arthur Magazine

GALLERY HOURS TUESDAY TO SATURDAY 11 AM TO 6 PM

SWISS INSTITUTE / CONTEMPORARY ART
495 BROADWAY, 3rd FLOOR
NEW YORK, NY 10012
INFO@SWISSINSTITUTE.NET
TEL. 212.925.2035
WWW.SWISSINSTITUTE.NET

Well hello this is the first posting I have made, we’ll see how it goes!

Recently returned from Brazil where in Sao Paulo it is true, there is ABSOLUTELY NO public advertising. I found this extremely hard to believe for the 3rd largest city in the world. It was a beautiful thing. It gave the stunning graffitti that is everywhere more space to shine. For a place as fucked up as Brazil in terms of the economy and poor vs. rich they are far ahead of the U.S. with their use of Ethanol at every gas station and the new ban on public advertising. Good job Brazil.

Also in Sao Paulo hung out with some punk, feminist lesbians who have been active politically for many years now with their music and organizing efforts. They started the first Ladyfest Brazil last year. My friend Elisa Gargiulo who hosted us is one of the founders of the band Dominatrix.

She introduced me to one of the old school lesbian punker Vange Leonel who I photographed on the rooftop of her apartment. It was great.

The best part of the trip was going to see the two most famous all female samba bands. The Hangover Girls and Rainha do Samba (queens of samba) and dancing all night with some of the most excited people I have met. How I wish I had been morn dancing the samba….

Now back in LA with my new to me 1981 Peugeot 505 diesel. It was the car I bought after my 1987 Camry got stolen and then found in pieces. The insurance gave me a whopping $450 for my car! My plan is to turn it into a veggie oil car. Thanks to my friend Stanya there is someone who can hopefully help me do the conversion for cheaper than Lovecraft in Silverlake. I can’t wait.

Yesterday in my garden I planted quinoa, foxglove, carrots, kale ( I know it’s off season), fava beans and more. I am reading a permaculture book called Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway, Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden And Your Neighborhood into a Community by H.C. Flores and Urban Wilds: Gardeners’ Stories of the Struggle for Land and Justice. They are all extremely helpful and interesting so far. Thanks for reading.

x Eden

Los Angeles Times

Family: a place for avant-garde lit, music and clothing on Fairfax

The new independent book, record and clothing store on Fairfax has a Left Bank feel.

By Jeff Weiss, Special to The Times
April 26, 2007

The often-parroted line is that indie bookstores are DOA in the 21st century, fallen victim to the formidable onslaught of Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com and continued reader apathy. And the statistics on the ground would seem to confirm that thesis, considering the recent closures of Angeleno institutions such as Dutton’s North Hollywood, the blink-and-you-missed-it Dutton’s Beverly Hills and the possible uprooting of the Brentwood Dutton’s store.

But don’t tell that to the crowd of twentysomethings gathered at Family, a recently opened independent book, record and clothing store on Fairfax Avenue, where a capacity crowd spills out onto the street on an unseasonably hot Sunday evening. At the moment, they’re listening to a reading/slide show presentation of Ian Svenonius’ new book, “The Psychic Soviet.” But the week before, the store hosted a wake for the shuttered cult magazine Arthur. And the week before that, hundreds flocked to the Family launch party for a set by local indie-rock royalty Lavender Diamond.

If you look closely, you can see the fledgling beginnings of a new Los Angeles scene, one removed from the hipster enclaves of Silver Lake and Echo Park and including this unorthodox bookstore, the brainchild of cartoonist Sammy Harkham and his wife, Tahli, along with their friend and partner, writer-journalist David Kramer.

“It’s a real counterculture of what’s happening in L.A. right now,” said Harkham, a co-owner of the recently revitalized Silent Movie Theatre. “Interesting things are happening between the Arthur connection and the bands. A real scene is emerging and coming together. This place is working as the hub. People can see and feel our aesthetic.”

Indeed, the store’s aesthetic reflects the owners’ left-field sensibilities. A new Dave Eggers book lies next to an obscure 7-inch noise-rock record, next to a Daniel Clowes graphic novel, next to a DVD of the 1983 comedy, “The Man With Two Brains.” Stuff there one week will be gone the next, as Family’s owners don’t do reorders and are obsessed with making sure that the bookstore isn’t stagnant.

As for the “counterculture” crowd, it consists of a mishmash of various underground scenes: noise rockers, antiwar kids, bearded and bespectacled Eastside males, arty Bohemian girls in black leggings and striped shirts — and even the occasional senior citizen strolling in off the street after chomping on stuffed cabbage at Canter’s. The address might say Fairfax Avenue, but the vibe is more Parisian Left Bank.

According to the owners, the store has been bustling so far; the throngs who pack into the store during special events certainly are an encouraging sign. Yet the owners maintain that when they conceived Family, their only goal was to create a space that would make their 14-year-old selves proud.

“I never tried to have a do-it-yourself aesthetic. We just wanted to get the most awesome stuff around, the stuff that people don’t see,” Kramer said. “We told people we were going to sell obscure experimental European literature, and people told us that we must be crazy because no one reads in L.A. People here don’t get enough credit. People are into the weirdest, strangest stuff that we sell.”

One of the store’s patrons, Alex Klein, agreed: “The selection here is just impeccable. When I walk in here, it feels like I’m at a farmers market in France, knowing that every apple and every avocado has been hand-selected personally. L.A. has needed a place like this for a long time.”

The owners aim to nurture the scene by hosting events several times a month — next is a signing by psychedelic comics guru Kim Deitch. Additionally, using San Francisco’s City Lights as an inspiration, Family plans to go into publishing later this year, initially focusing on high-end art books.

Understandably, many in Los Angeles’ underground scene seem galvanized by this new bookstore with avant-garde leanings. In particular, Jay Babcock, the publisher and editor of (the now-revived) Arthur, gushed effusively about Family’s potential: “Family is the most exciting commercial space in L.A. I get a feeling when I walk in here that I have walked into the best curated bohemian library I’ve ever been to. It feels like home. It’s ground zero for a new Edenism.”

thank you katie smith!

New York Times – April 25, 2007

Preserving Fossil Fuels and Nearby Farmland by Eating Locally
By MARIAN BURROS

JESSICA ABEL may have gone to extremes when she collected seawater from Long Island Sound and boiled it down to make two cups of salt. But people who are determined to eat only food made within 100 miles, give or take, sometimes find themselves reaching for creative solutions.

Ms. Abel and her husband, Matt Madden, cartoonists who work at home in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, have given three strictly enforced local-only dinner parties over the past year. A fourth scheduled for next month will feature fiddleheads, ramps, new fresh cheese and baby lamb.

“Last summer it was goat stew with peaches and onions, and in the middle of winter it was an all-butter, all-the-time meal,” she said. “We all missed white flour and sugar.”

Ms. Abel and Mr. Madden are dabblers in a small but increasingly popular effort to return to a time before the average food item traveled 1,500 miles from farm to table. In that sense, the only thing new about the phenomenon is its name, locavore, which was coined two years ago in California. But the appearance of the word seems to have given shape to a growing subculture. Weeklong locavore challenges have been popping up all over the country, even in places like Minnesota and Vermont, where it would seem to be pretty hard to eat local foods in the dead of winter.

Many drawn to the movement say they have been eating that way for years and had never thought about the implications beyond the flavor. “Initially it was the taste thing for me,” said Robin McDermott, who lives in Waitsfield, Vt., where locavores call themselves localvores. “But now when I think about what it takes to get lettuce across the country so I can eat it in the middle of winter, between the fuel costs and the contribution all the transportation is making to global warming and climate change, I just can’t do it. It’s not sustainable and I don’t want to contribute to it.”

Those who think this is another harebrained scheme of the food fringe may be surprised to learn that locavores are poised to move into the mainstream. Barbara Kingsolver, the best-selling novelist, has written one of three books out this spring about eating locally.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins) recounts her family’s adventures during the year they spent eating food raised in their corner of southwest Virginia. Her book and others are successors to several earlier books including Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods by Gary Paul Nabhan and “Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection” by Jessica Prentice, who coined the word locavore and founded the Web site locavores.com.

Ms. Prentice’s group claims to have started the grass-roots locavore challenges that sprang up in California in 2005. Participants exchange recipes and advice.

Some locavores follow the 100 Mile Diet, created by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, authors of the just-released Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally (Harmony). They spent a year in British Columbia eating only food grown within a 100-mile radius.

It wasn’t easy. Faced with potatoes, once again, for lunch, Ms. Smith recounts her feeling that “I’d kill for a sandwich.” When Mr. MacKinnon said he would make her one, she couldn’t imagine what he had in mind because they had no local flour for bread. But soon enough he produced greenhouse-grown red peppers and fried mushrooms with goat cheese between two golden brown slices of something. Something turned out to be turnips.

The authors held so strictly to their plan that when they eventually found locally grown wheat they took it even though it was filled with mouse droppings. Mr. MacKinnon painstakingly separated the droppings from the wheat with the edge of a credit card.

The plan outlined in Ms. Kingsolver’s book is much less strict than the one in “Plenty.” The author said that in her attitude toward food she is something between a Puritan (“I’m going to be holy right now”) and a toddler (“I want absolutely everything every minute and the idea of not having fresh peaches in January is sort of horrifying”).

Each member of her family was allowed one luxury item that came from far away. Her husband chose coffee, her children hot chocolate and dried fruit. Spices were Ms. Kingsolver’s indulgence.

“Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” gives no sense of privation or even boredom. Ms. Kingsolver spent a fair amount of time putting foods by when they were in season so that the larder was stocked.

But most readers would have trouble following her program, which included raising much of what the family ate on their farm, including chickens and turkeys.

“We undertook this project because it brings together so many compelling issues of the moment: carbon footprint, global warming, the local economy, the nutritional crisis and community,” said Ms. Kingsolver. “Community is very important to me and every book I’ve ever written is on this subject: what is the debt of the individual to the community?”

“We wanted to see if we could show that it’s possible and even a lot of fun, not just an experiment in sacrifice,” she said. “It was so much more fun than we expected it to be.”

Most locavores are not strict constructionists. They tend to make exceptions for coffee, pasta, spices, salt and flour.

While West Coast residents can use olive oil, Ms. McDermott had to substitute sunflower oil made in Vermont, which has obvious drawbacks. “It definitely tastes like sunflower seeds,” she said, “but another alternative is to make ghee from local butter.” Wheatberries take the place of rice, and ground cherries or gooseberries, she said, “can kind of pass for raisins.” A birthday cake of mashed parsnips was sweetened with maple syrup and maple sugar.

Ms. McDermott, who designs Web-based training for manufacturing companies with her husband, Ray, started one of the several localvore groups in Vermont last year in the Mad River Valley. During their first event in September, 150 participants took the pledge to eat locally for a week. Only slightly fewer tried it again this January, and more events are planned this year.

“The two biggest barriers to eating local are time and cost,” she said. “A lot of people think this is somewhat elitist because if you buy a local chicken it is $3.50 to $4 a pound and you can get them for a lot less in the supermarket. If you want boneless chicken breasts you’ll go broke, but if you buy a whole chicken it’s affordable because you will use it all. The same thing with lesser cuts of meat. You do need time and a desire to cook something.

“And you need a freezer, something like a root cellar. Last year I got into making kimchi and sauerkraut as a way of preserving of food.”

By far the most pragmatic of these locavores is Ms. Prentice. “To restrict yourself to eating locally is an interesting exercise,” she said. “It’s consciousness raising to see what you’d be living on, but I don’t think of it as a necessary or practical solution of our globalized food system. I am not opposed to any importation, but what we can grow locally we should grow locally.

“We have a situation in California where we export as many strawberries as we import. It’s gotten ridiculous.”

People who have tried to eat a strictly local diet, even those like Ms. Abel who are dabblers, say it has been a life-changing experience. “One of the things about having this party is becoming aware of how far things have come,” she said. “So now we are eating differently. Having a dish of eggplant, tomatoes and zucchini in February is weird to me. We are eating a lot of kale and root vegetables in winter and buying a lot of stuff at the Greenmarket year round. It’s not a life philosophy but it’s not a game.”

Though eating locally can be a difficult feat, in many parts of the country it is easier than it was five years ago. Farming land continues to disappear as larger farms go under, but the number of small farms that cater to their neighbors has increased 20 percent, to 1.9 million in the last six years. The number of farmers’ markets and farm stands, food co-ops and community-supported agriculture groups is growing. In his new bookDeep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (Times Books) Bill McKibben writes that the number of farmers’ markets has increased from 340 in 1970 to 3,700 in 2004.

New Seasons, an eight-store supermarket chain in Portland, Ore., has made its name as a place where local food is king. Byerly’s and Lunds in Minneapolis also feature local products.

Schools are catching on to the idea. In 2002 400 school districts in 22 states had farm-to-cafeteria programs that provided students locally grown food. Today 1,035 districts in 35 states participate.

But before locavores take too much credit for the phenomenon, there are a bunch of back-to-the-landers in Vermont who ate local foods 30 years ago. “There are a lot of people here who call themselves yokelvores,” Ms. McDermott said. “They get their food from within 100 feet of their homes — homesteaders who have their own cows, chickens and grow their own vegetables. They consider people like us as Johnny-come-latelies.”

New York Times – March 25

N.Y. Police Spied Broadly Before G.O.P. Convention
By JIM DWYER

For at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention,
teams of undercover New York City police officers traveled to cities
across the country, Canada and Europe to conduct covert observations of
people who planned to protest at the convention, according to police
records and interviews.

From Albuquerque to Montreal, San Francisco to Miami, undercover New
York police officers attended meetings of political groups, posing as
sympathizers or fellow activists, the records show.

They made friends, shared meals, swapped e-mail messages and then filed
daily reports with the department’s Intelligence Division. Other
investigators mined Internet sites and chat rooms.

From these operations, run by the department’s “R.N.C. Intelligence
Squad,” the police identified a handful of groups and individuals who
expressed interest in creating havoc during the convention, as well as
some who used Web sites to urge or predict violence.

But potential troublemakers were hardly the only ones to end up in the
files. In hundreds of reports stamped “N.Y.P.D. Secret,” the
Intelligence Division chronicled the views and plans of people who had
no apparent intention of breaking the law, the records show.

These included members of street theater companies, church groups and
antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed
to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies.
Three New York City elected officials were cited in the reports.

In at least some cases, intelligence on what appeared to be lawful
activity was shared with police departments in other cities. A police
report on an organization of artists called Bands Against Bush noted
that the group was planning concerts on Oct. 11, 2003, in New York,
Washington, Seattle, San Francisco and Boston. Between musical sets,
the report said, there would be political speeches and videos.

“Activists are showing a well-organized network made up of anti-Bush
sentiment; the mixing of music and political rhetoric indicates
sophisticated organizing skills with a specific agenda,” said the
report, dated Oct. 9, 2003. “Police departments in above listed areas
have been contacted regarding this event.”

Police records indicate that in addition to sharing information with
other police departments, New York undercover officers were active
themselves in at least 15 places outside New York — including
California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts,
Michigan, Montreal, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas
and Washington, D.C. — and in Europe.

The operation was mounted in 2003 after the Police Department, invoking
the fresh horrors of the World Trade Center attack and the prospect of
future terrorism, won greater authority from a federal judge to
investigate political organizations for criminal activity.

To date, as the boundaries of the department’s expanded powers continue
to be debated, police officials have provided only glimpses of its
intelligence-gathering.

Now, the broad outlines of the preconvention operations are emerging
from records in federal lawsuits that were brought over mass arrests
made during the convention, and in greater detail from still-secret
reports reviewed by The New York Times. These include a sample of raw
intelligence documents and of summary digests of observations from both
the field and the department’s cyberintelligence unit.

Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the Police Department,
confirmed that the operation had been wide-ranging, and said it had
been an essential part of the preparations for the huge crowds that
came to the city during the convention.

“Detectives collected information both in-state and out-of-state to
learn in advance what was coming our way,” Mr. Browne said. When the
detectives went out of town, he said, the department usually alerted
the local authorities by telephone or in person.

Under a United States Supreme Court ruling, undercover surveillance of
political groups is generally legal, but the police in New York — like
those in many other big cities — have operated under special limits as
a result of class-action lawsuits filed over police monitoring of civil
rights and antiwar groups during the 1960s. The limits in New York are
known as the Handschu guidelines, after the lead plaintiff, Barbara
Handschu.

“All our activities were legal and were subject in advance to Handschu
review,” Mr. Browne said.

Before monitoring political activity, the police must have “some
indication of unlawful activity on the part of the individual or
organization to be investigated,” United States District Court Judge
Charles S. Haight Jr. said in a ruling last month.

Christopher Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil
Liberties Union, which represents seven of the 1,806 people arrested
during the convention, said the Police Department stepped beyond the
law in its covert surveillance program.

“The police have no authority to spy on lawful political activity, and
this wide-ranging N.Y.P.D. program was wrong and illegal,” Mr. Dunn
said. “In the coming weeks, the city will be required to disclose to us
many more details about its preconvention surveillance of groups and
activists, and many will be shocked by the breadth of the Police
Department’s political surveillance operation.”

The Police Department said those complaints were overblown.

On Wednesday, lawyers for the plaintiffs in the convention lawsuits are
scheduled to begin depositions of David Cohen, the deputy police
commissioner for intelligence. Mr. Cohen, a former senior official at
the Central Intelligence Agency, was “central to the N.Y.P.D.’s efforts
to collect intelligence information prior to the R.N.C.,” Gerald C.
Smith, an assistant corporation counsel with the city Law Department,
said in a federal court filing.

Balancing Safety and Surveillance

For nearly four decades, the city, civil liberties lawyers and the
Police Department have fought in federal court over how to balance
public safety, free speech and the penetrating but potentially
disruptive force of police surveillance.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Raymond W. Kelly, who became police
commissioner in January 2002, “took the position that the N.Y.P.D.
could no longer rely on the federal government alone, and that the
department had to build an intelligence capacity worthy of the name,”
Mr. Browne said.

Mr. Cohen contended that surveillance of domestic political activities
was essential to fighting terrorism. “Given the range of activities
that may be engaged in by the members of a sleeper cell in the long
period of preparation for an act of terror, the entire resources of the
N.Y.P.D. must be available to conduct investigations into political
activity and intelligence-related issues,” Mr. Cohen wrote in an
affidavit dated Sept. 12, 2002.

In February 2003, the Police Department, with Mayor Michael R.
Bloomberg’s support, was given broad new authority by Judge Haight to
conduct such monitoring. However, a senior police official must still
determine that there is some indication of illegal activity before an
inquiry is begun.

An investigation by the Intelligence Division led to the arrest —
coincidentally, three days before the convention — of a man who spoke
about bombing the Herald Square subway station. In another initiative,
detectives were stationed in Europe and the Middle East to quickly
funnel information back to New York.

When the city was designated in February 2003 as the site of the 2004
Republican National Convention, the department had security worries —
in particular about the possibility of a truck bomb attack near Madison
Square Garden, where events would be held — and logistical concerns
about managing huge crowds, Mr. Browne said.

“We also prepared to contend with a relatively small group of
self-described anarchists who vowed to prevent delegates from
participating in the convention or otherwise disrupt the convention by
various means, including vandalism,” Mr. Browne said. “Our goal was to
safeguard delegates, demonstrators and the general public alike during
the convention.”

In its preparations, the department applied the intelligence resources
that had just been strengthened for fighting terrorism to an entirely
different task: collecting information on people participating in
political protests.

In the records reviewed by The Times, some of the police intelligence
concerned people and groups bent on causing trouble, but the bulk of
the reports covered the plans and views of people with no obvious
intention of breaking the law.

By searching the Internet, police investigators identified groups that
were making plans for demonstrations. Files were created on their
political causes, the criminal records, if any, of the people involved
and any plans for civil disobedience or disruptive tactics.

From the field, undercover officers filed daily accounts of their
observations on forms known as DD5s that called for descriptions of the
gatherings, the leaders and participants, and the groups’ plans.

Inside the police Intelligence Division, daily reports from both the
field and the Web were summarized in bullet format. These digests —
marked “Secret” — were circulated weekly under the heading “Key
Findings.”

Perceived Threats

On Jan. 6, 2004, the intelligence digest noted that an
antigentrification group in Montreal claimed responsibility for hoax
bombs that had been planted at construction sites of luxury
condominiums, stating that the purpose was to draw attention to the
homeless. The group was linked to a band of anarchist-communists whose
leader had visited New York, according to the report.

Other digests noted a planned campaign of “electronic civil
disobedience” to jam fax machines and hack into Web sites. Participants
at a conference were said to have discussed getting inside delegates’
hotels by making hair salon appointments or dinner reservations. At the
same conference, people were reported to have discussed disabling
charter buses and trying to confuse delegates by switching subway
directional signs, or by sealing off stations with crime-scene tape.

A Syracuse peace group intended to block intersections, a report
stated. Other reports mentioned past demonstrations where various
groups used nails and ball bearings as weapons and threw balloons
filled with urine or other foul liquids.

The police also kept track of Richard Picariello, a man who had been
convicted in 1978 of politically motivated bombings in Massachusetts,
Mr. Browne said.

At the other end of the threat spectrum was Joshua Kinberg, a graduate
student at Parsons School of Design and the subject of four pages of
intelligence reports. For his master’s thesis project, Mr. Kinberg
devised a “wireless bicycle” equipped with cellphone, laptop and spray
tubes that could squirt messages received over the Internet onto the
sidewalk or street.

The messages were printed in water-soluble chalk, a tactic meant to
avoid a criminal mischief charge for using paint, an intelligence
report noted. Mr. Kinberg’s bicycle was “capable of transferring
activist-based messages on streets and sidewalks,” according to a
report on July 22, 2004.

“This bicycle, having been built for the sole purpose of protesting
during the R.N.C., is capable of spraying anti-R.N.C.-type messages on
surrounding streets and sidewalks, also supplying the rider with a
quick vehicle of escape,” the report said. Mr. Kinberg, then 25, was
arrested during a television interview with Ron Reagan for MSNBC’s
“Hardball” program during the convention. He was released a day later,
but his equipment was held more than a year.

Mr. Kinberg said Friday that after his arrest detectives with the
terrorism task force asked if he knew of any plans for violence. “I’m
an artist,” he said. “I know other artists, who make T-shirts and
signs.”

He added: “There’s no reason I should have been placed on any kind of
surveillance status. It affected me, my ability to exercise free
speech, and the ability of thousands of people who were sending in
messages for the bike to exercise their free speech.”

New Faces in Their Midst

A vast majority of several hundred reports reviewed by The Times,
including field reports and the digests, described groups that gave no
obvious sign of wrongdoing. The intelligence noted that one group, the
“Man- and Woman-in-Black Bloc,” planned to protest outside a party at
Sotheby’s for Tennessee’s Republican delegates with Johnny Cash’s
career as its theme.

The satirical performance troupe Billionaires for Bush, which
specializes in lampooning the Bush administration, was described in an
intelligence digest on Jan. 23, 2004. “Billionaires for Bush is an
activist group forged as a mockery of the current president and
political policies,” the report said. “Preliminary intelligence
indicates that this group is raising funds for expansion and support of
anti-R.N.C. activist organizations.”

Marco Ceglie, who performs as Monet Oliver dePlace in Billionaires for
Bush, said he had suspected that the group was under surveillance by
federal agents — not necessarily police officers — during weekly
meetings in a downtown loft and at events around the country in the
summer of 2004.

“It was a running joke that some of the new faces were 25- to
32-year-old males asking, ‘First name, last name?’ ” Mr. Ceglie said.
“Some people didn’t care; it bothered me and a couple of other leaders,
but we didn’t want to make a big stink because we didn’t want to look
paranoid. We applied to the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act
to see if there’s a file, but the answer came back that ‘we cannot
confirm or deny.’ ”

The Billionaires try to avoid provoking arrests, Mr. Ceglie said.

Others — who openly planned civil disobedience and expected to be
arrested — said they assumed they were under surveillance, but had
nothing to hide. “Some of the groups were very concerned about
infiltration,” said Ed Hedemann of the War Resisters League, a pacifist
organization founded in 1923. “We weren’t. We had open meetings.”

“If the police want to infiltrate and waste their time — well, it’s a
waste of taxpayer money,” Mr. Hedemann said.

The war resisters announced plans for a “die-in” at Madison Square
Garden. They were arrested two minutes after they began a silent march
from the World Trade Center site. The charges were dismissed.

The sponsors of an event planned for Jan. 15, 2004, in honor of the
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday were listed in one of the
reports, which noted that it was a protest against “the R.N.C., the war
in Iraq and the Bush administration.” It mentioned that three members
of the City Council at the time, Charles Barron, Bill Perkins and Larry
B. Seabrook, “have endorsed this event.”

The report said others supporting it were the New York City AIDS
Housing Network, the Arab Muslim American Foundation, Activists for the
Liberation of Palestine, Queers for Peace and Justice and the 1199
Bread and Roses Cultural Project.

Many of the 1,806 people arrested during the convention were held for
up to two days on minor offenses normally handled with a summons; the
city Law Department said the preconvention intelligence justified
detaining them all for fingerprinting.

Mr. Browne said that 18 months of preparation by the police had allowed
hundreds of thousands of people to demonstrate while also ensuring that
the Republican delegates were able to hold their convention with
relatively few disruptions.

“We attributed the successful policing of the convention to a host of
N.Y.P.D. activities leading up to the R.N.C., including 18 months of
intensive planning,” he said. “It was a great success, and despite
provocations, such as demonstrators throwing faux feces in the faces of
police officers, the N.Y.P.D. showed professionalism and restraint.”