Marsh faces first degree murder charges and is up against several special circumstances including committing multiple murders, heinous and depraved murder, lying in wait and torture. Marsh was 15 at the time of the homicides and there are no other suspects in the case.

Documents from the Yolo County District Attorney’s office said the murder was, “willful, premeditated and deliberate,” and Marsh used a “deadly or dangerous weapon…a knife.”

Northup and Maupin, longtime Davis residents, were discovered stabbed to death in their South Davis residence at 4006 Cowell Blvd on April 14. Police arrived on the scene because a family member had requested a welfare check after she had not heard from her parents all day.

According to the Sacramento Bee, the Davis Police Department served several search warrants on June 17. Two of the locations were 3306 Lillard Drive, where Marsh’s mother resides and 4018 Cowell Blvd, where Marsh’s father lived.

Marsh’s arraignment is set for June 19 at 1:30 p.m.

— Paayal Zaveri

The DPD discovered the two deceased, Northup, 87, and Maupin, 76, on April 14 at 9:20 p.m. while responding to a welfare check at 4006 Cowell Blvd in South Davis.

DPD has been working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the California Department of Justice, the Yolo County District Attorney’s Office, the West Sacramento Police Department and the Dixon Police Department and have served many search warrants in regards to the case said Darren Pytel, DPD Assistant Police Chief in a press release.

No further information has been released because the investigation is ongoing and it involves a minor. Anyone with information related to the case should contact the DPD at 530-747-5400.

— Paayal Zaveri

On August 29, MGMT will make a stop in Davis during their 2013 tour. Widely popular around the world, MGMT hit top-selling charts in 2008 with their songs “Electric Feel,” “Kids” and “Time to Pretend,” and was Grammy-nominated in 2010 for Best New Artist.

Tickets will become available for purchase on songkick.com on June 14, starting at $35. Doors open at 7 p.m.

Andrew Bird will be stopping in Davis on November 14 for his California solo tour, traveling across the state from Arcata to Santa Barbara. Joining him on tour will be the alternative country duo, The Handsome Family.

For more information, visit mondaviarts.org.

Every summer, DSE puts on a production of one of Shakespeare’s famous works. Having presented the historic Henry V last season for their annual summer production, the company decided to take a comedic route this time around.

The play features a series of short songs to carry the plot through the natural landscape of the play. Returning director Rob Salas, a graduate of UC Irvine’s MFA Directing program, saw the potential in the play’s songs to enhance the audience’s experience of the setting. He decided that incorporating actual music to accompany the lyrics of the songs would help to give the play a distinctive edge.

“Our take on it was to take the music and really blow it up so that it kicks off the show, but is still a recurring theme throughout,” Salas said. “The music ties into the forest setting because it’s very earthy and a kind of mountain music. It’s this kind of mystical presence that pulls everyone into the Forest of Arden.”

Richard Chowenhill, alum of the UC Davis Music Department and the company’s associate artistic director, composed the music to accompany the song lyrics. Salas hopes the music will stay true to the natural mountainous feel of his vision for the production.

“The style of the music is inspired by Appalachian music. It has a bluegrass, Ozark feel. We’ll be using banjo, dulcimer, mandolin, kind of unusual instruments,” Salas said.

This production is set to incorporate a live band consisting of multiple musicians from the cast. The vocalist and head of the band is the play’s musician, Lord Amiens, played by DSE founder Gia Battista.
Members of the cast have worked in theatre from Sacramento to New York to the UC Davis Department of Theatre, and all have acted in both classic and modern works of theater.

Acting veteran Casey Worthington portrays the brave, love-stricken Orlando, whom he describes as “a bad poet” who writes poetry anyway. Having played the title role in the ensemble’s last annual summer production of Henry V, Worthington has had his fair share of the professional and passionate atmosphere the ensemble has brought to fans of modern theatre.

“Everybody is just jazzed to be doing this play, no matter how many times they’ve performed before,” Worthington said. “The company is a really impressive thing. They have a really good community support. They have all the mixes of a good regional theatre. They’re young and I have a good outlook for them.”

Hayley Palmer, who will receive her MFA in acting from UC Irvine in 2014, portrays Rosalind, the play’s witty, love-drunk heroine.

“It’s been so much fun. Rob is just so encouraging when it comes to [actor] creativity, but he also has a specific idea in mind and is very passionate about fulfilling his vision of the play,” Palmer said. “It’s just such a great balance between work and play. I hope this company continues to be supported by the community and grow in the future.”

The play will run from Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 6:30 p.m from June 13 to June 30. Tickets are $15 for Adults, $12 for Students/Seniors, and $10 for 12 and under. June 13 is a preview performance, and that day only all ticket prices will be $5 off. To purchase tickets visit www.shakespearedavis.com or call (530) 802 – 0998.

AKIRA OLIVIA KUMAMOTO can be reached at arts@theaggie.org.

Since elite groups can no longer use violence upon the population at any whim, they have evolved other mechanisms to stop us from achieving the society that we want and that we know is right. They must. We live in a world of institutions. Institutions run the society, and institutions are operating to maintain themselves.

There is a great analogy between natural selection in biology and selective forces upon institutions. Those institutions that took certain actions persisted more, so then all of them became that way. Then, as time went by, they became more and more crafted.

By this point, institutions are so well-evolved that they fiercely compete with each other for survival in a highly complex and direct manner. So, when one group of people does something that increases their collective power, other groups must do that same thing or something better. Otherwise, the first group will perpetually dominate them.

Then, after many iterations of adaptation, all of the groups have taken on many new characteristics to help them dominate. By this point, the institutions are primarily shaped by their power struggle, and they are so well-adapted at this task that human beings, if they ever even could, have extraordinary difficulty in decoding and diffusing these mechanisms.

Since public institutions are mildly accountable via the vote, people might take actions which would undermine the power that these institutions have evolved to have. Naturally, they counter-evolve, and they do it very quickly. Organisms take many generations to evolve; human institutions can do it overnight.

So the information that we all receive, that we base our lives upon, it is channeled through these institutions. In order to mitigate the threat of our vote, it filters the information in whatever way it can. Now, notice that I never talked about people doing anything in the institution, only the institution itself. People actually perform the actions of the institutions, but clearly, no single person is aware of the totality of what a major corporation actually does.

That is, the actual causes and effects of a company, they are far too complicated to know. Economists try to scientifically measure what the collective set of them do, which is far easier than analyzing what one in isolation does. Even economists admit that there are massive gaps in our knowledge and massive gaps in what we could know even in principle.

Institutional coercion of thought pops up in every one of our concepts. This leads to my favorite game, the point of this column. Take any thought, then ask yourself — how has this been poisoned by power? The simplest method is to look at how powerful groups use the concept. Then look at how it was used in the past. How has it changed? The gap between the two reveals the ideological interests of elite institutions.

What about the term “conservative”? That is a fun one. Long ago, it meant someone who wanted to uphold traditional values or traditional ways of life. Now it means something like radical upholder of elite ideology. We could get into the precise meaning of conservatism now, but a much more interesting question arises. If the concept is poisoned by power, how would the proper, non-poisoned concept apply?

Surely there is something good about conserving traditional ideologies. The imposition of new ideologies comes from the elites. So proper conservatism actually hampers the coercion of our thoughts and values. But it is a very, wildly different concept of conservatism than the one that drives the Republican Party. We should replace theirs with that earlier conception. That would be one step toward liberation by wiping out one instance of a power-infected concept.

BRIAN MOEN can be reached at bkmoen@ucdavis.edu. xxx

Construction of the Compassion Corner Earthbench came to an end last Friday, May 31st. While the majority of the construction took place during a community build on April 28th, the finishing touches have been added since.

The bench – constructed entirely from bottle bricks and cob – commemorates the work of David Breaux, who has dedicated the last four years of his life inspiring passers-by to reflect on the meaning of the word compassion. The California Aggie and Aggie TV were there to capture the construction of the bench, which is a gift to the City of Davis’ public arts collection.

According to the police report, the sexual assault did not occur on the property of families first and the youth had left the property without permission. Other youth from Families First were present but their involvement is still being investigated.

“During the course of the investigation, multiple other incidents of illegal sexual activity were discovered,” said Lt. Glen Glasgow of the DPD in a press release.

This incident follows other felony arrests of youth at Families First, including many who were recently arrested for serious assault offences. The police report states that there have been over 500 calls to the DPD from Families First in 2013 and over 100 youth have run away from the group home.

The DPD has been working with Families First staff to reduce incidents but have not had much success. They are now working with the State Department of Social Services, the Yolo County District Attorney’s Office and Yolo County Child Welfare Services to investigate illegal behavior and any violations that go against the license for the facility. Several minors have been taken into protective custody and removed from the facility.

Glasgow said the DPD will not be releasing detailed information because of confidentiality requirements regarding juvenile cases.

— Paayal Zaveri

Taranbir S. Chowdhury is the owner of Raja’s Tandoor, an Indian restaurant in Downtown Davis, locatedright off campus on 3rd Street. He was born in the state of Punjab, India, and lived there for around 30 years before moving to California.

Before entering the restaurant business, Taranbir lived in Santa Clara and worked for an electronics company. When he got laid off in 1985 because of an industry recession, he moved up to Davis and worked for a medical company for a little over nine years.

After that job, he decided to open the restaurant with his family in order to help out students and pursue something that he loves.

“I like food service and I am in a student town, so I can see it’s very hard for students to afford regular meals,” he explains. “So I thought I should open a restaurant — an Indian restaurant, of course — and give them a good price and healthy food.”

Taranbir and his entire family like to cook and eat, so owning and operating a restaurant is a good family business for them to end up in. While he runs things and takes care of business inside the restaurant, his son is in charge of marketing and the booth at the Farmers Market, and his wife and daughter help out in the evenings and on weekends.

He alone works around 12 to 13 hours per day — over 60 hours a week — making sure that the food and the service are of highest quality. He lives in Natomas, so he commutes every morning and night. Most mornings a week, he stops at grocery suppliers in Sacramento to pick up fresh ingredients for the day.

On the surface is his welcoming and loving demeanor. He greets each customer with a warm smile and friendly “Hi, how are you doing?” and sometimes even a hug, and he is apt to remember faces of regular customers. “Our motto is, as soon as somebody walks in, they should feel like they are in a very comfort[able] restaurant where they have their own importance. We want to respect them and give them a very respectful welcome,” he articulates.

Raja’s Tandoor has already been in business for ten years, and hopefully we will be seeing Taranbir’s endearing countenance when we walk through the door for many years to come. If his words are any indication, we don’t have anything to worry about:

“I love to serve students. I treat them as my children — as part of my family — and I’d like to maintain the prices as is. If students are here, I’m here. This is for the students because they have a lot of expenses at school, and I want to maintain these prices as long as I can. Not only that, they can feel at home and like it is a very welcome place here; a very warm place. And that’s our family goal.”

 To see Taranbir in action, pay a visit to Raja’s, or watch this.

What we should focus on is the immediate, concrete values of our society, such as our concept of common decency. Our abstract, foundational political values permeate our immediate values anyway, and we need to challenge them in the most direct, accessible way, not some ethereal, distant, overly academic way. We want to actually change people, not make them puke at our self-righteous intellectualism.

Some things we rightly regard as indecent — when someone slams a door in our face instead of holding it open for us, when someone demeans or degrades a public facility, when someone drives only a few feet behind us on the freeway, etc.

People regard the actions listed above with great contempt, as they should. Our culture’s concept of common decency designates people who do such things as repugnant, as idiots. Most importantly, calls for their denunciation are mutually recognized public knowledge.

So, to finally state my thesis: our concept of decency is failing to include many actions and cultural elements that we should consider indecent. If we were to actually be consistent (which we should), we would regard every action that exhibits such disregard for the common good as grounds for denunciation.

Let us apply our reasoning universally and see what results we get. We condemn tailgating and destroyers of public property because they undermine our values. So, we should be applying that same standard to everything.

The central destroyer of our values and central cause of suffering in our society is the institutional framework that imposes power over all of us, representing the interests of only the institutions themselves. “The system” that runs our society, that decides who gets what and how, is responsible for extreme misery.

So we should regard as paramount cases of indecency those actions and attitudes that uphold the system. That should certainly be the central focus of our concept of indecency. Small indecencies, such as the three examples listed earlier, are tiny infractions compared to lifestyles of submission to power.

What are some real, concrete examples of such indecency? This is the really fun part. We can only make loose accusations here, for lack of the massive research required to pin down a set of cultural memes. But some things are just plain obvious.

Wearing the clothing advertised by the largest firms, listening to the music that permeates mass media — this is a form of adopting the ideology of elite institutions. They craft the message, and some dupes buy it. It’s easy to buy their message, too. It is extremely pervasive in our media, and it has a brilliant message built into it — this is what everyone likes, so it must be good (even when it’s new and no one likes it yet).

The people who adopt these ways of life become embodiments of submission to these unjust and evil institutions. We do not regard them as violating our minimum for common decency. We should. They are the paramount cases for indecent lifestyles.

The fact that they have been duped so hard is not only grounds for contempt because it is so dumb, but because the consequences are so awful — the perpetuation of anti-democratic, anti-human institutions.

On the other hand, just because someone is not partaking in the most obvious cultural elements, we cannot conclude that they are not themselves living lives in submission to the elite. That is to say, hipsters are not off the hook. They are just buying into alternate versions of imposed ideology. That’s why they’re called “hipsters” and are worthy of such great contempt; their rebellion is fake.

The dupes, the suckers who own all the right products and use all the pop culture slogans, they are the ones who we should regard as contemptuous idiots, worthy of public shaming. Their lack of critical analysis and frantic desire to fit in to what they are told is the right way of life is the primary reason that we don’t live in an amazing utopia of only happiness.

In my final column here, in my final quarter, I would like to thank everyone insofar as they were critical. I would also like to raise two middle fingers to the shockingly passive and uncritical people who will continue to buy into “the hype” and play into systems of power despite four years at a university. What an epic waste of money your education was.

BRIAN MOEN can be reached at bkmoen@ucdavis.edu. xxx

This season was Hawkins’ first season playing with UC Davis. He sat out last year due to NCAA transfer eligibility rules.

Despite this, Hawkins looked at home out on the court as he led the Aggies in points with a stunning average of 20.3 points per game and was third on the team in rebounds with 5.6 rebounds per game. He also was second on the team in assists with a total of 93 assists and a 3.3 assist per game average.

Hawkins is known for his analytical ability to score the basketball, as evidenced by the season-high 40-point showcase at Hawai’i. He led the Aggies in scoring for 17 of the 31 games this season and dropped 20 or more points in 15 of those games.

Why has Hawkins had so much success this year? His hard work and determination have a large part to do with it.

“He has been spending time in the gym before practice, after practice and before games constantly working on his jumper,” said head coach Jim Les.

Hawkins’ big game brilliance was most evident in the Aggies’ game against Long Beach State at the Pavilion. Hawkins had one of his best performances of the season in the game, which was broadcasted on ESPN. He scored 34 points on 12-19 shooting from the field and a perfect 8-8 on the free throw line.

Hawkins also managed to corral seven rebounds and dish out eight assists, as he single-handedly carried a struggling Aggies offense. Even though the effort fell short, Hawkins put on a brilliant display on national television.

Hawkins has received widespread recognition for his work this season. He earned both Big West Newcomer of the Year and first team All-Big West awards this year. But perhaps the biggest recognition of Hawkins’ season was his nomination to the Lou Henson All-American Team, which recognizes the top 25 mid-major players in the nation.

Aggie basketball looks promising next year. With the addition of some new talent and the steady brilliance of Hawkins, UC Davis can go far next season. Maybe, it can even make it to the Big Dance.

— Kenneth Ling