02/11/05

LC050211

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

It's a disease some would rather not talk about, so how did one
group win support for an AIDS memorial?

Richard Zaldivar>> There's nothing about gay men here. There's
nothing about sex here. It's about humankind.

Val>> And then, the concept? Explore new worlds where no man
has gone before. The technique? A spacecraft powered by
sunlight.

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>> It's the first of its kind in the country, a Latino AIDS
memorial, and it's right here in East Los Angeles. But it
wasn't easy getting an AIDS monument built in a minority
community, one that's often reluctant to talk about AIDS. It
meant more than a decade of winning over the opposition and the
community.

This is Lincoln Park just east of downtown Los Angeles. For
years, this open area was just that, an open meadow encircled by
trees. But recently, this appeared. It's a memorial to people
who have died of AIDS, but this one is unique. It's in East Los
Angeles and reflects the distinctly Latino community that
surrounds it. It's the first Latino AIDS memorial in the
country.

Richard Zaldivar>> The dream finally came true.

Val>> Richard Zaldivar is Executive Director of the project.
It took eleven years to make his dream a reality. He says The
Wall, as it's called, is designed to break the silence and
denial about AIDS and homosexuality that exists in traditional
Latino neighborhoods.

Richard Zaldivar>> The most important is that it allows the
family members and loved ones to come here to remember openly
and to remove the horrific stigma that we still have about this
epidemic.

Val>> Besides the twenty-foot art panels, there is a granite
wall where the names of AIDS victims are engraved.

Richard Zaldivar>> This is a place for a public remembrance of
people who died of a disease that was never discussed. Finally
people can say, you know, I can finally admit that my child died
from a disease that, in our family, we still don't talk about.

Val>> But getting this wall approved, funded and built was a
long and at times controversial project. Last year, opposition
arose from some parents who were concerned about the location of
the memorial, people like Julie Menendez and her brother Manny.
Julie is a mother of two. She believes in AIDS education, but
not in a public park. The nearby playgrounds in Lincoln Park
are a popular place for children on weekends and after school.
Julie didn't like the idea of young kids walking through an AIDS
memorial.

Julie Menendez>> My son is going to go and play and, as
inquisitive as my children are, they're going to ask me what is
this all about. That's not appropriate. It's not appropriate
for my five year old, it's not appropriate for my eight year
old.

Richard Zaldivar>> There's nothing about gay men here. There's
nothing about sex here. It's about humankind.

Richard Zaldivar>> "And we intend to dedicate this monument
this December."

Val>> Supporters of the memorial held nighttime vigils and
gathered support from elected officials.

Richard Zaldivar>> "We don't have any opponents. We just have
ignorance."

Val>> Certain flyers put out by opponents did, in fact, refer
to AIDS as having "spread from sexual activity with apes in
Africa", but Manny and Julie say those are extreme views that
they do not share.

Julie Menendez>> For people that say that I am homophobic, I
mean, I do truly take offense to that. It has nothing to do
with being homophobic. It has to do with what is appropriate in
our community. And in a public park where children are going to
play?

Richard Zaldivar>> That's the perfect place. The problem is
that we're not talking about these issues to children. It's a
perfect place to have monuments, memorials. In foreign
countries, in Latin America, there are monuments in all the
parks.

Julie Menendez>> It's my obligation and my responsibility as a
mother to teach my child regarding sexuality, regarding diseases
and informing them. That's something that should be done at
home.

Val>> Despite the clash of values, the project went forward.
After more than a decade of fundraising challenges,
controversies, designs, permits, construction, and a last-minute
lawsuit, the memorial was finished. It was dedicated in
December on World AIDS Day.

Richard Zaldivar>> We took our time to get the community
involved and that always takes time, but you know what? I would
never replace one moment of that experience.

Val>> And how has the East Los Angeles community reacted?

Richard Zaldivar>> Nobody has complained. There were a lot of
young people that started to walk through here. A lot of
students from the local high school, Sacred Heart High School,
were involved and they came through with their cameras and it
was just an incredible scene.

Val>> Each panel was designed by a Latino artist and depicts a
different aspect of the AIDS epidemic.

Richard Zaldivar>> Yolanda Gonzalez depicting life with AIDS
among women in our community. Behind us, sports and AIDS.
Further down, men with AIDS and how they're dealing with HIV. A
great art piece by Paul Botello. A spiritual family image.
Another one by Hugo Crosthwaite out of Mexico. Children and
AIDS. Baby and AIDS. So they all reflect what our community is
all about.

Val>> You might think an AIDS memorial in East Los Angeles
would be a target for gangs and graffiti. Zaldivar says there
was one incident of graffiti, but besides that, the memorial has
been respected if not embraced.

Richard Zaldivar>> People come here on Saturdays. I understand
there are lots of people here visiting, taking photos. Family
members coming and leaving flowers or candles at their loved
one's name. It's like a mini alter. Often on Saturdays for
weddings, they come and they take their group photos here.

Val>> Nationwide, the number of deaths from AIDS is twice as
high among Latinos as whites. In California, a third of all
those who are HIV positive are Latino and the number continues
to grow.

Richard Zaldivar>> We have Los Angeles police officers. We
have Father Olivares who passed away from AIDS who was a great
leader in the community. Elizabeth Taylor submitted the name of
Rock Hudson. We have softball players who were gay softball
players and two children who died to AIDS.

Val>> One note on the wall reads, "My brother, no farewell
words were spoken, no time to say goodbye. You were gone before
we knew and only God knows why."

Richard Zaldivar>> Anybody in the community is welcome to place
a name.

Val>> There's room on the wall for 7,500 names. In one sense,
Zaldivar would hope this wall goes unfilled. Then again, with
more Latinos dying of AIDS, at least there's a place where some
of them can be remembered.

If you'd like more information about the AIDS Memorial in
Lincoln Park, you can give them a call or go to their website at
thewalllasmemorias.org.

Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and
Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, transcripts
and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most
interesting features. Just go to kcet.org and click on "Life
and Times".

Val>> A Southern California group is about to launch a
spacecraft that could change the future of space exploration.
It involves an untried technology called a solar sail. The
mission is a joint venture between the Planetary Society in
Pasadena and the Russian government. Saul Gonzalez spoke with
Planetary Society Executive Director, Louis Friedman.

Saul Gonzalez>> What is a solar sail?

Louis Friedman>> A solar sail is a large reflective mirror. It
reflects sunlight and the force of the photons of sunlight that
hit the sail and bounce off. They transfer momentum to the sail
and the sail then gains velocity or subtracts velocity,
depending on which way the sail is pointing, from your orbital
speed around the sun. So it's using solar pressure. The common
misconception is that it's using solar wind, but it's not. It's
using solar pressure. Sunlight, pure energy of photons.

Saul Gonzalez>> To propel the sail.

Louis Friedman>> To propel the sail and to bounce off the sail.
If this was the sail and I hit it at an angle like this and then
bounce off this way, I'd get a force in this direction. If I'm
going this way, that slows me down and I will go in toward the
sun. If I turn the sail the other way so that I'm adding
velocity, then I will go outward from the sun. So I can either
go outward or inward and that way I can tack around the solar
system.

Saul Gonzalez>> Is it generally the same principle as a
sailboat out on the open water here on earth?

Louis Friedman>> Well, yes. I like to make sailboat analogies
because, one, I like sailing, and the other is that, instead of
the wind and the water, it's the sunlight pressure and the
orbital velocity, the two media that you're modifying or using
as you do these things. So it is analogous and you can make up
a lot of analogies about it. The caution I add, though, is that
it's not solar wind which is electrons and protons, three orders
of magnitude smaller than the force you get out of the solar
energy, the pure sunlight.

Saul Gonzalez>> Now tell me about Cosmos 1, this spacecraft
that you have engineered, and what it is supposed to do.

Louis Friedman>> Well, Cosmos 1 is attempting to be the first
solar sail flight. If you imagine the analogy with the Wright
Brothers who flew twelve seconds and went nowhere, but they
demonstrated the technology of controlled powered flight, we
want to demonstrate the technology of controlled flight with
sunlight pressure. That's never been done. There have been
large reflective surfaces in space. There have been the effect
of sunlight pressure noted on spacecraft, but it's never been
used for propulsion, so that's what we want to do first.

This is a privately-funded mission by Cosmos Studios, a venture
started by the widow of Carl Sagan. As a result, we are at
complete freedom to make the contracts and make the arrangements
that are necessary to do this. We contracted with a Russian
launch vehicle and a Russian company that will manufacture the
spacecraft and a combined American-Russian team will operate it.

Saul Gonzalez>> Walk me through the launch and the mission of
Cosmos 1.

Louis Friedman>> Well, the launch is a rather exciting and
novel idea. It's going to be launched from under the ocean in a
nuclear submarine, a Soviet era nuclear submarine. This is a
very low-cost launch from a submarine using basically a
ballistic missile from the Soviet ICBM inventory. It's a very
low-cost way to launch. It will launch from the Barents Sea
north of Murmansk above the artic circle. It will fly over
Northern Russia, inject into orbit in the North Pacific. We
will begin to track it right away from a portable station that
we will have in the Marshall Islands. Then it proceeds into
orbit, an eight hundred kilometer circular orbit around the
earth.

Saul Gonzalez>> And the solar sails will, what, unfold slowly
in orbit?

Louis Friedman>> Not yet. For the first week or so of the
mission, we'll check out the spacecraft. It will fly just like
any other satellite. After about a week, everything's going
well, we'll be ready to deploy the sail. Now the spacecraft
itself is a rather small spacecraft. It would fit on this table
actually. But it has inflatable tubes. Hydrogen gas will
inflate tubes and thirty meters, ten stories out, we'll develop
these eight blades that will form a large circular area to
reflect sunlight pressure.

These are five-micron Mylar, very thin, like the plastic that
you use for wrapping sandwiches, aluminized for reflecting the
sunlight. That will deploy over this thirty-meter diameter and
so you'll have a six hundred square meter area that will reflect
the sunlight pressure. As you then go into orbit around earth,
slowly that will add energy to the orbit and it will begin to go
outward and outward from the earth. As I said, we're only
trying to demonstrate the technology.

Saul Gonzalez>> You're sure it's a viable technology.

Louis Friedman>> Yes. If it happens to work a week, we'll be
lucky and happy.

Saul Gonzalez>> Now what might be -- if research continues and
if future spacecraft are built this way, what are the advantages
of solar sail technology and this manner of propulsion over
conventional rockets?

Louis Friedman>> Solar sailing technology is the only known
technology that can someday take us to the stars. The reason
for that is that it doesn't carry fuel. Every other form of
technology, even nuclear, nuclear fusion, nuclear electric, even
--

Saul Gonzalez>> -- you've got to take it with you.

Louis Friedman>> You've got to take it with you. Solar sail,
you just use the light. Now if you get away from the sun,
there's no sunlight, you're then going to a different form of
light propulsion. You're going to go to laser sailing and
you're going to have a laser somewhere in the solar system with
a very focused beam, a very high-powered laser that would focus
a beam over interstellar distances --

Saul Gonzalez>> -- striking the sail.

Louis Friedman>> Striking the sail in the same way and
accelerating forward.

Saul Gonzalez>> What kind of speed can you get with a solar
sail?

Louis Friedman>> Well, it's a very low thrust. You're
operating at something like about 1/1000th or even 1/10,000th of
the force of gravity. Very, very low-thrust acceleration, but
continuously acting so that after a few hundred days of flight
and after a year of flight and then two years of flight as you
go out toward the outer solar system and then beyond, you can
achieve speeds of hundreds of thousands of miles per hour.

Saul Gonzalez>> Cosmos 1, of course, is just an experiment just
to show that it can work. What might be the practical
applications of this for future space exploration, say, within
our solar system?

Louis Friedman>> Well, the novel idea, again, through a
privately funded mission, is to seed interest at the space
agencies. NASA has a solar sailing program. European Space
Agency, the Russian Space Agency and the Japanese all have
active solar sailing programs, but they never had a flight.
They've never taken the big step of trying a flight. The
advantages will be for hovering at distances between the earth
and the sun and do solar weather monitoring. You can do round
trip trajectories to the planets with enormous payloads or maybe
even supporting future human missions. Not that humans would
fly on a solar sailing necessarily --

Saul Gonzalez>> -- cargo.

Louis Friedman>> Cargo would fly back and forth. So you can
move large payloads around the solar system, you can rendezvous
with small bodies like comets and asteroids or you can hover in
particular areas for, say, halfway between the earth and the sun
to get distant early warning of a solar storm that might affect
the earth's weather and things like that.

Saul Gonzalez>> It strikes me that it's a particular elegant
way to travel through the cosmos, no? There's a beauty to it
that you don't necessarily -- that you see in the heaviness of
other ways of moving through space than using conventional
rockets.

Louis Friedman>> Yeah, my usual answer to the question of what
solar sailing is good for is I start out with the romantic idea
of unfurling your sail and just going out there. I hope someday
it will feel like that, just the way we feel when we take a
sailboat out on the ocean. The only thing that makes this
mission complicated is having to get it up from the earth and
deploy in space. If we could build the sail in space out of the
space station or even automatically with some kind of devices in
orbit, then you'd really have an elegant way of flying.

Saul Gonzalez>> Well, Louis Friedman, thank you for joining us
here on Life and Times and I wish you and your colleagues
associated with the Cosmos 1 program smooth sailing.

Louis Friedman>> Thanks. Thanks very much. Appreciate it.

Saul Gonzalez>> Thanks very much.

To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us
by mail at this address:

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or
contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val>> Most artists dream of doing two things: working on their
art and paying their rent. Well, we're about to show you an
out-of-the-way place that helps them do both. It's in Santa
Monica and, as Vicki Curry tells us, it's a community that both
shelters and nurtures budding talent.

Vicki Curry>> You probably wouldn't notice the group of
buildings at the end of 18th Street in Santa Monica, but the
colorful mural out front hints at what's inside, a collection of
studios, galleries and performance spaces known as the 18th
Street Arts Complex.

Keith Antar Mason>> You can't walk down a hall without running
into an artist that is absolutely doing something fantastic and
that you want to go see or that you want to somehow be involved
with.

Marcus Kuiland Nazario>> Being an artist is a way of life and
it's nice to be in a place where people understand the lifestyle
and what it means and the sacrifice it takes to be an artist.

Vicki Curry>> 18th Street is home to over twenty artists and
arts organizations.

Clayton Campbell>> It's kind of mirroring a Los Angeles
experience, you know, where really dispirit elements need to
come together in order to, you know, create a different entity
altogether. To do more than survive, but to really prosper.

Jan Williamson>> It brings the operating costs overall down for
everybody if everybody here had to own their building, pay
property tax, insurance, utilities, etc. instead of everybody
working together on the one place.

Vicki Curry>> It's a creative community unlike any other in Los
Angeles. Each tenant organization is carefully selected and
some individual artists live on the property as well. But what
sets this complex apart is the shared philosophy of all its
members.

Clayton Campbell>> We're here to not just service artists, but
to service artists who are really involved in crucial ideas of
the time and then make sure they get out into a larger
conversation.

Marcus Kuiland Nazario>> There's institutional support here.
It's not like you're living somewhere because it's groovy and
hip. I mean, you're here because you're committed to being here
and engaging in, you know, contemporary art practice and
engaging with the community.

>> "Every time I would drive on the freeway and see a flag or
see a bumper sticker, I would wonder what does that mean to that
person?"

Vicki Curry>> The art at 18th Street can be cutting edge,
alternative or even political, but for the artists themselves,
it's just an expression of what they see around them.

Clayton Campbell>> I think anymore where there's a bunch of
artists going on, it's kind of a barometer or thermometer of
what's happening in the rest of the world. Cutting edge can
often suggest to the public that the artists are really off to
the side and what we've tried to do is bring people into this
center who perhaps their voices had been marginalized and, when
you get something out into the public, it stops being
marginalized. So as a platform or a forum for critical ideas,
this has been a really important center for, you know, hundreds
and hundreds of artists since its founding.

[Film Clip]

Vicki Curry>> It all began in 1989 when a group of like-minded
local artists, including Linda Burnham and Tim Miller, decided
to find a place where they could all work together.

Clayton Campbell>> 18th Street was an experiment to bring the
most interesting artists together who were involved in these
issues of diversity and community and, in putting them together,
see what would happen.

Vicki Curry>> Two of the 18th Street originals are Marcus
Kuiland Nazario, a designer and performance artist, and writer-
performer, Keith Antar Mason.

[Film Clip]

Keith Antar Mason>> I don't think that many artists in the city
of Los Angeles knew about each other. The 18th Street Arts
Complex provided that first glimpse of how we all lived in the
same city and how we could all share in those experiences
together.

[Film Clip]

Marcus Kuiland Nazario>> It was a rag-tag loose collective of
like-minded folks that sort of all found their way here. You
kind of walked on campus, because it's kind of like a school,
and you'd walk into a studio and somebody would be working on a
painting and, oh, come look at my paintings, you know? Then
somebody would burst into song and there'd be a performance art
happening over there and a sculpture over there and it was just
really, really like a beehive.

Vicki Curry>> Several of the other original tenants are still
there, like Highways Performance Space and the Electronic Café,
but 18th Street Arts Complex has changed somewhat since its
early days.

Jan Williamson>> The idea of what this place was or could be
wasn't really clearly articulated early on in the beginning
because it was an experiment, so there was no way to know how
that was going to unfold.

Clayton Campbell>> Part of every institution's arc is that it
needs to become economically feasible or it's just going to go
out of business. That's happened to a lot of nonprofits in the
arts, but it hasn't happened to 18th Street.

Vicki Curry>> 18th Street is always open to the public. Its
formalized programs include exhibits, performances and other
events, a residency program for artists from other countries,
and an arts education program where the resident artists teach
in local schools.

Keith Antar Mason>> I didn't think I would like teaching poetry
to young children, to young people, and I love it. I used to
think that learning was like getting a book and having them read
it and memorize. No, creating a book, creating a poem, giving
them a sense of who they are in the world and how important they
are in the world can come through them making art.

Vicki Curry>> But the heart of 18th Street is a program that
offers artists work space at subsidized rents well below market
level.

Lita Albuquerque>> It kind of gave me a time to not be over my
head to do the kind of work that I wanted to do and I've flown
in terms of my career since I've been here.

Vicki Curry>> 18th Street also acts as a kind of incubator for
artists, offering a co-op office and professional support.

Jan Williamson>> We also really help artists develop their
skills in grant writing, their business practice skills, their
marketing skills. You know, the whole range of things that an
artist needs to have to actually be a successful business
person.

Clayton Campbell>> You'll use these benefits to really either
do a couple of things. One is professionalize yourself so, when
you go back out into the marketplace, you're able to deal with
it better and be successful in it. The other is that you use
this time and the savings to really complete a body of work or
generate new work.

Lita Albuquerque>> It gives a lot of artists the opportunity to
experiment, to do things without a lot of pressure. It gives
room for any kind of art to happen which, you know, a lot can
happen out of that.

Marcus Kuiland Nazario>> This is a great place to come and fail
because you don't -- I mean, in terms of my experience here.
You need to fail. You're not going to learn anything until you
fail.

[Film Clip]

Vicki Curry>> That's all 18th Street Arts Complex ever hoped to
be, a place where artists can be together and be themselves.

Clayton Campbell>> The forces brought to bear on creative
people are so, at times, challenging. It's really hard to make
it by yourself and most artists I know and artists we work with
really need these kinds of communal support situations.

Keith Antar Mason>> Here is a place where you can begin to do
something, no matter what age it is. You can take a risk to do
that new thing in your life that you wanted to do.

Marcus Kuiland Nazario>> Many of us wouldn't be making art
today if we didn't have this safe harbor here that kind of has
protected us. I'm like one of the plants here. My roots are
running really deep. I'm like a bamboo plant. You can't get
rid of me. They will not get me out. I love it here. I love
it here.

Val>> And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at
Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

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 --

Inside California's juvenile prisons. Critics say the way we
lock kids up is a crime.

>> Chad was called gladiator school and it's like, I mean, it's
like hardcore criminals right there and everything. And it's
like another step towards, you know what I mean, prison.

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