<i> Snapshots of life in the Golden State.</i> : Billboard Artists Will Try to Sell the Virtue of Voting

Watch these spaces. Until Election Day, in-your-face billboards will try to get out your vote. Artists from guerrilla-poster boy Robbie Conal to the students of Griffin Avenue Elementary School are putting their messages on Gannett Outdoor’s medium--eight or nine donated billboards:

From performance artist Skip Arnold, an aimed gun with the words, “You don’t vote . . . I WIN.”

From Liz Young, another performance artist, a chain of words burned into a faux plywood background: “Trust just join rule roots reap guts wits grit vow virtue vote.”

From Joe Bergman, creative director at Gannett, the donor of the billboards, a lot of white space and the warning: “What millions of Americans achieve by not voting.”

Conal’s panel of five faces--deteriorating from a smiling L.A. to a shriveled death’s-head--is “what happens if we don’t vote. . . . The threat of regular people voting is the only thing we have left to hold them in line. . . . We’re really gonna die if you don’t vote: The politicians are gonna kill us.”

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Cui Bono? Sporting the lamb-to-loom look in last Sunday’s New York Times men’s fall fashion supplement was, yes, Sonny Bono, once Palm Springs mayor, now Republican candidate for Congress.

Posing in Thermal’s summer heat under Hadley date palms and among a local farm girl’s 4-H sheep, Bono looks very much the man about town in a $1,120 dark wool suit, $175 wool vest, $135 Gucci shirt and brown shoes of unidentified price and provenance.

The photo spread, “Second Time Around,” features men who got two shots at life and work--and wardrobe. As Bono notes, staid GOP garb is right for now, “just as a sheepskin vest was apt for another time.” That other time, you remember, was with another sheepskinned singer by the name of Cher.

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Poll axed: Pete Wilson, Kathleen Brown--you and your consultants have already committed three strikes.

A bill just signed by the governor with the intended purpose of preventing campaign hacks from swaying elections by paying someone to vote or not vote a certain way could in fact be the strictest campaign reform measure California ever saw:

In the strictest reading, it could outlaw campaigning altogether. (Please, hold your applause.)

The new law adds to existing law to make it illegal to pay or spend money to “induce any voter” to, among other things, “vote or refrain from voting at an election for any particular person or measure.”

Wait. All those mailers . . . all those expensive TV spots trying to “induce” us how to to vote . . . illegal?

It’s punishable by as much as three years in the slammer--so you get out in time for the next election.

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Timber line: Legend holds that the palm and pine trees growing in the center divider of California 99 near Madera were planted to define the state’s precise geographic center.

Unfortunately, they’re about 50 miles off, but the palm (for Southern California) and the pine (representing the north) may in fact be the real center, at least as it matters here--in vehicle miles, as measured from the days when Highway 99, which once ran the length of the state, had dominion over palm and pine.

(n.b.: Happy 144th birthday this month, California, north and south, wherever your twain meet.)

Teacher Salaries

With school days here again, teachers are sizing up their paychecks. Here are the average annual salaries of kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers in public schools last year in the top nine states and District of Columbia. The average salary nationally was $35,958. California’s teachers came in ninth.

Avg. ‘93-’94 State Salary 1.Connecticut $49,500 2.New York 46,800 3.Alaska *46,581 4.New Jersey 45,308 5.Pennsylvania 43,688 6.Dist. of Columbia $42,543 7.Michigan *42,500 8.Illinois 40,989 9.California *40,289 10.Maryland 39,937

* Estimate

Source: National Education Assn.

Research by TRACY THOMAS/Los Angeles Times

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Patent medicine: Finally, the state Capitol gets some coverage from Southland commercial television stations. The Legislature is out of session; this hard-hitting story noted that an episode of “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” was being filmed in the Capitol’s venerable precincts.

(Some have suggested that the building was being put to more profitable use this way than its intended purpose.)

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DiFi on line: Sen. Dianne Feinstein got booted up this week to Internet’s Global Network Navigator in its first “paid political advertisement.” The electronic campaign brochure offers the gist of what looks like every press release and constituent message her office ever produced, as well as a record of her votes vs. opponent Mike Huffington’s; he could conceivably respond by buying Internet and forcing her off the information superhighway.

EXIT LINE

“I know they went all-world, but they’re still just the national champs, just like us.”

--Monique Mejia, first baseman of the 12-and-under American Softball Assn. champs, the Riverside Dynasty. They too won their national championship, but got only a fraction of the coverage of the Northridge Little League boys team.