01/20/05

LC050120

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Retaining walls keep thousands of homes from tumbling down Los
Angeles's steep hillsides, but is it time to cut them down to
size?

Robert Ringler>> Not to be elitist, but really to protect our
interests in having the community that still has mountains that
are made of dirt, of trees, that still have birds and animals
and not solid concrete.

Val>> And then, it's an offbeat documentary on the bizarre
artwork of a reclusive janitor. It probably won't set any box
office records, but is it worth seeing?

All that and more straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> The old adage that fences make good neighbors is not
necessarily true here in Southern California. Here fences, or
more accurately walls, are making some good neighbors very mad.
Retaining walls are getting higher and higher and, as David
Okarski tells us, these overbearing walls have led the city of
Los Angeles to pass some strict new limits on builders.

David Okarski>> When developers started building this palatial
estate in her Benedict Canyon neighborhood, Barbara Nichols
didn't like what she saw.

Barbara Nichols>> I see a totally ugly wall that is a blot on
this community.

David Okarski>> It's a retaining wall.

Barbara Nichols>> We are looking at a wall that is forty-two
feet high by two thousand feet long.

David Okarski>> Southern California with its hillside homes has
always had retaining walls, but over the past several years, new
ones have been getting bigger like these in the Santa Monica
Mountains. Homes are getting more extravagant and, to get ocean
views, developers are leveling whole mountain tops and putting
up retaining walls that often rise more than forty feet above
the surrounding landscape. Nichols was alarmed and so were
other members of the Benedict Canyon Association over which she
presides.

Barbara Nichols>> It is a retaining wall built to support a
house under construction, a step-built house. The entire
community is quite upset about this project.

Robert Ringler>> I feel bad for future generations because they
will never be able to enjoy the beautiful, pristine hillside
that was once here, a natural mountain with trees, with
wildlife, with birds. It's now concrete.

David Okarski>> Robert Ringler is the vice president of the Bel
Aire Beverly Crest Neighborhood Council which also took up the
fight, but they found there was nothing on the books at City
Hall to stop developers from putting up these giant walls.

Robert Ringler>> I think it was an excellent opportunity for
the City Council office, Councilman Jack Weiss, who actually
came to us and asked us our opinion.

Councilman Jack Weiss>> Right now, we have lots left on the
hillside areas that traditionally were not considered all that
developable. They were small. They were sort of postage
stamps. But now in Los Angeles, bank books and technology have
advanced to a new level.

David Okarski>> City Councilman Jack Weiss and Council
colleague, Ed Reyes, co-sponsored a bill that restricted the
size of retaining walls. It passed unanimously. Neighborhood
groups have persuaded the Los Angeles City Council to limit the
height of new retaining walls to twelve feet, twice my height,
or, if you must go higher, you can have two walls, one ten feet
high with a three-foot step and another ten foot wall for twenty
feet altogether. That's it, and then you have to plant
landscaping to cover them. Weiss says the ordinance will force
hillside developers to pay more attention to nature and to
neighbors.

Councilman Jack Weiss>> When you live in a neighborhood and
look up at one of these walls, all you see is concrete. When
you live in the home on top of one of these walls, all you see
is the ocean. It really isn't fair.

Councilman Ed Reyes>> These huge giant walls, the ability for
them to crack, to essentially collapse, enhances when more
weight is up against them. When we get saturated with water,
everything that is underneath it is in danger. They're like
little dams.

David Okarski>> It's too soon to know if a retaining wall
failure had anything to do with this slide in Laurel Canyon, but
the family that lived here was lucky to survive.

Councilman Ed Reyes>> So we want to shrink those walls and
allow for a more natural topography to flow as you're dealing
with the water runoff, and that enhances safety.

David Okarski>> Starting now, hillside developers will have to
scale back future projects. Even smaller retaining walls like
these off Beverly Glen would require a variance.

Brad Rosenheim>> The intent is good. I'm supportive of the
intent.

David Okarski>> But planning consultant, Brad Rosenheim, says
the new ordinance could cause unintended problems for ordinary
people.

Brad Rosenheim>> The house behind us, for example, is a good
example of a potential issue for the future in homes that might
be developed in a similar manner.

David Okarski>> If you need a retaining wall slightly higher
than the limit for a relatively normal size house, you'll still
have to ask the city for a variance. Rosenheim says that
process could be abused.

Brad Rosenheim>> So if there are neighbors who are not
interested in seeing the property next door be developed, they
can go ahead and appeal that and put that property owner who's
trying to build their home through a very prolonged and
expensive process that this ordinance was not intended to
address.

David Okarski>> And an amendment was added just before the
vote. It makes the height restrictions applicable to apartments
and condominiums as well. Reyes and Weiss say it's a matter of
fairness.

Councilman Jack Weiss>> These sorts of protection ought to
apply equally across the board, across the entire city, in
privileged parts of this town and in less privileged parts of
this town, and in parts of town where the only realistic type of
development is multiple units.

David Okarski>> But Rosenheim says that could create obstacles
for plans along some major streets, plans that require walls
higher than twelve feet.

Brad Rosenheim>> One area, for example, that could be
significantly impacted would be Ventura Boulevard where the city
has talked about creating more mixed-use projects along
transportation corridors like Ventura Boulevard and, in this
instance, much of Ventura Boulevard is designated as hillside
area.

David Okarski>> The ordinance isn't perfect, but Barbara
Nichols says that it's a start.

Barbara Nichols>> It's a step in the right direction, but it's
not the complete answer to the problem. We would like to see
the separation between the down-slope walls to be greater than
three feet to allow for planting substantial sized trees and
shrubs and landscaping that would allow the covering of the
second wall that's up-sloped more readily.

David Okarski>> She's also concerned that developers finish the
walls they start. Sometimes they run out of money.

Robert Ringler>> And when it comes time to build the house,
they've invested the entire amount of money that they've
allocated for this for the retaining wall and then they walk
away from it.

David Okarski>> This very project sat derelict for more than a
year. Nichols says there should be a law to ensure that any
project that substantially changes the hillside is finished.

Barbara Nichols>> We feel there should be a requirement for a
completion bond whenever significant grading is undertaken or
people endeavor to build these massive properties.

David Okarski>> Neighborhood groups also would like to see the
city do more to protect ridgelines and mountaintops.

Robert Ringler>> The city of Los Angeles -- it's mind-boggling
that a city this rich in resources and expertise is lagging
behind so far from other communities, other cities, who have
built-in ridgeline protection.

Barbara Nichols>> Recently, the Board of Supervisors for the
County of Los Angeles passed a ridgeline and grading ordinance
which we feel is a terrific step forward in protecting the
ridgelines and in reducing the amount of grading in the Santa
Monica Mountains. We would like to see the City Council of Los
Angeles pass that same ordinance for areas of the Santa Monica
Mountains under the jurisdiction of the city of Los Angeles.

David Okarski>> The neighborhood advocates say that Los Angeles
hillsides are for everyone to enjoy and the city should do
everything possible to protect them.

Robert Ringler>> It's one of our treasures, our landmarks, that
we must preserve not to be elitist, but really to protect our
interests in having a community that still has mountains that
are made of dirt, of trees, that still have birds and animals,
and not solid concrete.

David Okarski>> So their next goal is concrete protections,
more limits on development in the Santa Monica Mountains. David
Okarski for Life and Times.

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Val>> Living in earthquake country doesn't just mean a temblor
now and then. It also creates a culture of superstition, people
who claim they can predict earthquakes through cloud formations
or missing pets. Well, now a writer, David Ulin, has explored
the culture of earthquakes in a book called "The Myth of Solid
Ground". He talked with Vicki Curry about the fault lines that
exist between superstition and science.

Vicki Curry>> David Ulin, your book is called "The Myth of
Solid Ground: Earthquake Prediction and the Fault Line Between
Reason and Faith". What's a word like faith doing in a book
about earthquakes?

David Ulin>> That's a good question. I think that faith and
earthquakes are very related because I think to live in
earthquake country as we do is really an act of faith. You're
basically taking it on faith that your life won't be disrupted
or that when it is disrupted, it will be disrupted in a non-
destructive way. I mean, the earthquake will happen at night
when you're safe at home, the earthquake won't happen when
you're separated from your kids, you'll have enough water, your
house won't fall down, those kinds of things.

I think that the idea of living what we would call a normal life
anywhere, going to work, going to school, having dinner, going
out with your friends, in an atmosphere like this where at any
moment the earth could shift underneath us and cause, you know,
enormous havoc is in itself an act of faith.

Vicki Curry>> So you started your journey when you were working
on your book by looking into something called the X Files. What
is that?

David Ulin>> Well, the X Files is a collection of documents
that a woman up at the U.S. Geological Survey Office in Pasadena
has kept. What they are, they started -- earthquakes, like any
kind of inexplicable large force, attract their share of both
serious researchers and sort of fringe enthusiasts. Often those
fringe enthusiasts predict. At the U.S.G.S. in Pasadena,
there's a file called the X Files which is a collection of all
the predictions that have come in since, I guess, the late
seventies or early eighties since this file started being kept.

There are predictions of various stripes. You know, some are
simple little notes. You know, there will be a 7.8 earthquake
at 6:35 Thursday morning. Some are these elaborately
constructed theories of how earthquakes work. Oftentimes having
to do with electro-magnetics or having to do with other kinds of
factors, groundwater, all of these things. What's interesting
is that, in many ways, some of those areas are areas that actual
legitimate scientists are researching also, but the predictors
take them farther.

If you sit for several hours and read these predictions end to
end to end, you end up being drawn into what is almost like an
alternate universe where you're looking at the same phenomenon,
but they're interpreted differently and you kind of see echoes
from one prediction to the next. It really is like reading this
bizarre science fiction novel. It's kind of fascinating. So
from there, that sort of was the starting point and that led me
to everything else.

Vicki Curry>> So where did that take you? You met some of
these predictors?

David Ulin>> Well, I realized as I read some of these
predictions that they seemed to make sense to me. They read as
if they made sense. They followed a logical thought train.
They didn't seem completely out of left field. I couldn't
assess them because I had no background from which to work. So
I ended up going back and, also since I was at the U.S.G.S.,
making contact with a number of the seismologists and geologists
who were there and talking to them about both these predicted
theories and then I got really interested in the work they were
doing.

Vicki Curry>> But I have to say, a lot of us have heard a lot
about the U.S.G.S., CalTech, all the research that's going on
there. What was surprising to me in your book is all these
fringe predictors and people who call themselves "Sensitives".
Tell me about them.

David Ulin>> Well, the Sensitives are actually an interesting
subcategory of predictors because, when you look at the
predictors, you can really break them down into people who are
just out there and the people who may actually be on to
something. Again, whether their scientific discipline isn't
rigorous or, you know, that's a whole other issue, but the
Sensitives may in fact actually be tapping into something. The
idea is that certain people feel physical symptoms when an
earthquake is coming, whether it's a headache or body aches or
some people feel heaviness in their limbs or different kinds of
sensations, nausea, flu-like symptoms, different kinds of
sensations like that.

The theory is that certain humans have higher levels of
magnetite in the brain than others. You know, we all exist in
continuum and those people with those higher levels may be
sensitive to earthquakes in the same way that, say, dogs and
cats seem to be -- or some dogs and cats, I should say -- seem
to be sensitive to earthquakes.

I mean, not even all of us have heard these stories, but if you
go back in earthquake literature, you know, as far back as
ancient Greece and ancient China, there are stories of odd
animal behavior prior to an earthquake, which is a really common
anecdotal thread. So it seems unlikely that all of these
thousands of years and different culture that there wouldn't be
something to this even though we don't quite know what it is. I
think that human sensitivity may work the same way.

Vicki Curry>> And yet you make the point that the science of
seismology itself has changed radically over the years, so some
of the stuff that seems far-fetched now may not be in ten,
twenty or fifty years from now.

David Ulin>> If you really think about, seismology as a
subsection of geology is a baby science. People actually use
that phrase to describe it. Faults were in fact really only
identified in the 1880's, I believe, and it was really only in
the wake of the 1906 San Francisco quake that much of modern
seismology or the basis of modern seismology was developed. So
you're really talking about a kind of paradigm shifts that have
happened, you know, in the last hundred years which,
geologically and scientifically, is nothing.

The other thing about earthquakes is that you can sort of create
a very small fake earthquake in a laboratory by, you know,
putting pressure on rocks. You can't really construct an
earthquake in a laboratory, so you're waiting -- these
seismologists and geologist end up putting out theories and then
sort of waiting for the next quake to come to see how those
theories pan out.

That's why this Parkfield earthquake that happened a couple of
months was so fascinating and important because that section of
the fault was so heavily instrumented and they've been expecting
an earthquake there for a long time. They really were, for the
first time ever, sitting on top of an earthquake when it
happened and ready. So the data that comes out of that could,
who knows, as they analyze it, could change everything.

Vicki Curry>> Part of your journey was to go to Parkfield,
which was this spot that was expected to erupt at some point.

David Ulin>> Yeah, yeah.

Vicki Curry>> What did you do there?

David Ulin>> Well, Parkfield is a really strange place. When I
got there, as I was write in the book, there was literally
nobody there. It's a town where the population is only thirty-
seven people, so it's not like there would have been huge crowds
of people anyway. But I was there for several hours and never
saw an adult. There was a school. I did see some kids playing,
so I knew it wasn't a ghost town, but it had this very ghost
town feel.

It was really a fascinating place because it had all this sort
of ghost town stuff. It had these signs with sort of, you know,
early eighties bubble lettering about, you know, "Welcome to
Parkfield, Earthquake Capital of the World, Be Here When It
Happens". You could tell that they'd really tried to market
this thing like twenty years ago. I guess that's the key a
little bit, but it was way past its time.

What was really fascinating about Parkfield was the presence of
the San Andreas. It's a big chasm that's extremely present. I
mean, not just physically present, but you feel its presence.
It's there and it's always there five hundred feet away from the
school, five hundred feet away from everything. So in that
sense, I found Parkfield really became, to me, useful as a
metaphor for California.

This comes back to, I guess, what we're talking about, that the
notion that the fault is always somehow metaphorically five
hundred feet away, that the earthquake is always metaphorically
five hundred feet away. That was really useful for me in terms
of thinking about how Californians or how we as Californians
live in the presence of this.

Vicki Curry>> David Ulin, author of the "The Myth of Solid
Ground", thank you so much for being with us.

David Ulin>> Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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Larry Mantle>> Welcome to FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm
Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC. Our first film is a remake of the
John Carpenter 1976 movie, "Assault on Precinct 13". Ethan
Hawke and Laurence Fishburne star in the new version.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> I'm joined this week by critics Peter Rainer and
by Andy Klein of CityBEAT and ValleyBEAT. Peter, what did you
think of the remake of "Assault on Precinct 13"?

Peter Rainer>> Well, the original John Carpenter version was
kind of a lot of people's guilty pleasure. It's a real pulpy
exploitation picture and this is kind of in that vein too. It's
very exciting. It's very loud and it's not a terribly good
movie, particular given the A-list cast of Ethan Hawke, Brian
Dennehy, Gabriel Byrne, a whole bunch of good actors in this
film doing a lot of running around and shouting.

Larry Fishburne is the bad guy. Ethan Hawke is the cop who's
trying to hold things down in this precinct under siege from, it
turns out, the bad guys who are not the bad guys that you think
they are. It has a lot of pyrotechnics and explosions and most
of that is good, but it's not all that different merely from
what you see on television. A lot of cop shows and films like
that really have already, I think, filled up the need for this
sort of thing, so to see it on a big screen seems a little
superfluous.

Larry Mantle>> Andy, what did you think?

Andy Klein>> I think, as an action film, as what it promises to
be, it's really pretty effective. I'm not sure it would work as
well on television because it is sort of a big, you know, the
kind of thing you want to see on a wide screen with the Dolby
sound and all that stuff. The acting, there's actually some
pretty good performances in there. The plot doesn't completely
make sense, but I've got to say that I'll give them a truth in
advertising award for this. It's exactly what you see in the
trailer and that's sort of, by today's standards, pretty good.

Larry Mantle>> Our second film is from Academy Award winning
documentary filmmaker, Jessica Yu. "In The Realms Of The
Unreal" tells the rather odd story of outsider artist, Henry
Darger.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Andy, what did you think of "In The Realms Of
The Unreal"?

Andy Klein>> This is a fascinating documentary. Henry Darger
was a janitor in Chicago who had almost no friends and no
contacts and lived in a small rented room almost his entire
life. Shortly before he died, when they hauled him off to the
hospital because he was getting so ill, in his room was found a
manuscript of fifteen thousand pages of sort of an adventure
novel, an epic, and three hundred or more canvases that
illustrated this. There were these huge, like twelve-foot
canvases.

Amazing stuff. Jessica Yu's documentary really does probe into
this guy's life as much as you can, given that there's almost no
record of him. It's fascinating stuff and it raises a lot of
questions about what is genius and whether or not somebody like
him is kind of a naïve genius or just kind of schizophrenic and
managed to get it on paper. It's very fascinating.

Larry Mantle>> What did you think, Peter?

Peter Rainer>> Well, it fills one of the first criterion of any
good documentary, which is that it has a good subject. Once you
have that, you're halfway home. Henry Darger, as the people in
the movie don't know, is a really fascinating, sort of
underground man, and it shows quite a few of his art pieces.
There's a kind of Lewis Carroll quality to some of what he does.

It's also a disturbing element as well in some of the drawings
of the young girls and just the general attitude that he has
towards this whole universe that he's created, this sort of
prepubescent world that sometimes is, I think, a little more
disturbing than the movie allows for. I think that the director
is perhaps a bit too much on the side of Darger without any real
complications to make the film perhaps as fully comprehensive
and disturbing as it might have been, but it's a fascinating
film.

Larry Mantle>> And our final film this week is the Japanese
movie "Dolls" directed by Japanese favorite, Takeshi Kitano.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Peter, what did you think of Takeshi Kitano's
film?

Peter Rainer>> I liked this movie and I don't generally like
his films as much as most of my colleagues do. I find that he
doesn't really have much of an eye and his films tend to dawdle
and there's a general over-reaction to what he does. But this
is a movie which has three linked sort of tragic love stories
and the first and the second one especially, I think, are
particularly haunting.

He manages to create a kind of stillness in this movie of these
situations that I think is almost close to stasis and yet
there's a beauty to the imagery and to the deception of what
he's doing. An old man who realizes that a woman who's been
pining for him for forty years every Saturday shows up in a park
to bring lunch and he's never there. Then after fifty years,
realizes that she's still doing this. You know, these are the
kind of fantastical romantic cameos that I think really stay
with one. So I think it's quite a moving picture in many ways.

Larry Mantle>> Andy?

Andy Klein>> Yeah, I really, really liked this film. It's a
hard sell to explain why I think it works. A lot of it has to
do with the visual style, probably the most beautiful looking
Kitano film I've ever seen. But it's very, very different in
tone from either Zatoichi, the Blind Swordsman, which he did
last year or the film before that which was his one American
film, "Brother", which had a lot of, you know, shoot 'em up
stuff and swordplay stuff. This is so quiet in tone. I would
have expected that it would have bored me because it's paced
that way, but in fact I wasn't bored for a split second. I
think this is a real quality film.

Larry Mantle>> Well, thanks for joining us for another edition
of FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC
joined by critics Andy Klein of CityBEAT and ValleyBEAT, and
Peter Rainer. Please join us again next week at this same time
for another edition of FilmWeek on Life and Times.

Val>> And, of course, you can hear a full hour of FilmWeek
every Friday morning at 11:00 a.m. on KPCC public radio 89.3.
And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life
and Times, thanks for joining us. We'll see you tomorrow night.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> Next time on Life and Times --

They were trained for combat overseas, but no one ever prepared
these Iraq vets for the return home.

>> In your situation, or a civilian situation, a car pulls up
alongside on the freeway, it's just another car in another lane,
but to me it's a threat.

Val>> That's next time on Life and Times.